French press review 5 May 2011
There's plenty of variety on this morning's front pages, but not an awful lot of good news. Border controls may return to Europe, France's social security lost millions on a dodgy drug, fighting continues in Côte d'Ivoire and are France's Socialist just going through the motions in choosing their presidential candidate?
Business daily Les Echos informs us that we're likely to see the return of border controls here in Europe, this backward step the result of French pressure to stem the flood of Tunisians streaming through Lampedusa.
Le Figaro returns to the scandal surrounding the anti-diabetes drug, Mediator, recently much in the news
because it turned out to be killing some of the people it was supposed to cure.
The French social security system people paid out 1.2 billion euros for the dubious drug between 1983 and 2005, when Mediator was finally taken off the pharmacy shelves.
They have yet to calculate how much the state then paid in sick leave for people who were being killed by Mediator, or how much they shelled out to pay people who had to stop working permanently as a result of taking the pills.
Catholic La Croix's main story looks to Côte d'Ivoire, with the bad news that, despite the establishment of a president in Abidjan, inter-ethnic fighting continues in Duékoué, in the west.
There are at least 30,000 refugees living inside the walls of Duékoué's Catholic mission.
Communist l'Humanité warns that Nicolas Sarkozy is planning to make life even more difficult for the struggling average Frenchperson.
The papers accuses the president of forcing the parliament to accept a finance law which will effectively hand control of the national budget and social security spending to the Eurocrats in Brussels.
Popular Le Parisien wonders if the Socialist Party is pulling the wool over voters' eyes. The very democratic socialists organise primary elections, to allow the party faithful chose who will represent them in next year's presidential bunfight.
There are dozens of contenders at the moment, from the sublime to the ridiculous. But everybody knows that Dominique Staruss-Kahn is going to be the main left-wing hope in 2012, so why are they bothering to go through the motions?
The ranks of the right are chortling with delight: "a bloody mess," "a massacre," "devastating," are some of the expressions of right-wing pleasure.
Says another UMP figure, "primary elections are like civil wars. They leave a lot of dead bodies and unhappy survivors in their wake. It's great!"
And speaking of presidential elections, the current main man, Nicolas Sarkozy, is given a 23 per cent popularity rating in an opinion poll published by Le Monde, down from 65 per cent back in 2007.
Libération looks at Barack Obama's attempts to get himself re-elected, an effort which the weekend killing of terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden has certainly helped. Barack is back to 50 per cent popularity, from a low of 43 per cent last month.
Not everyone is entirely happy about Obama's weekend coup against Osama. Libé reports that a joke
currently going the rounds from Peshawar to Karachi says something like "Pakistan is a very dangerous place. Not even Osama Bin Laden was safe there!"
The more serious question is how the world's most wanted man could live just down the road from Islamabad for four years without anyone in high places knowing he was on Pakistani soil.
And, by the way, in case you are still wondering about the legality of Sunday night's commando action by the US special forces, Eric Holder, the American justice minister, said yesterday that the murder of bin Laden was "completely legal and in line with our values".
"It was an act of legitimate national defence," he claims. Democracy is clearly in safe hands.
Le Figaro returns to the scandal surrounding the anti-diabetes drug, Mediator, recently much in the news
because it turned out to be killing some of the people it was supposed to cure.
The French social security system people paid out 1.2 billion euros for the dubious drug between 1983 and 2005, when Mediator was finally taken off the pharmacy shelves.
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They have yet to calculate how much the state then paid in sick leave for people who were being killed by Mediator, or how much they shelled out to pay people who had to stop working permanently as a result of taking the pills.
Catholic La Croix's main story looks to Côte d'Ivoire, with the bad news that, despite the establishment of a president in Abidjan, inter-ethnic fighting continues in Duékoué, in the west.
There are at least 30,000 refugees living inside the walls of Duékoué's Catholic mission.
Communist l'Humanité warns that Nicolas Sarkozy is planning to make life even more difficult for the struggling average Frenchperson.
The papers accuses the president of forcing the parliament to accept a finance law which will effectively hand control of the national budget and social security spending to the Eurocrats in Brussels.
Popular Le Parisien wonders if the Socialist Party is pulling the wool over voters' eyes. The very democratic socialists organise primary elections, to allow the party faithful chose who will represent them in next year's presidential bunfight.
There are dozens of contenders at the moment, from the sublime to the ridiculous. But everybody knows that Dominique Staruss-Kahn is going to be the main left-wing hope in 2012, so why are they bothering to go through the motions?
The ranks of the right are chortling with delight: "a bloody mess," "a massacre," "devastating," are some of the expressions of right-wing pleasure.
Says another UMP figure, "primary elections are like civil wars. They leave a lot of dead bodies and unhappy survivors in their wake. It's great!"
And speaking of presidential elections, the current main man, Nicolas Sarkozy, is given a 23 per cent popularity rating in an opinion poll published by Le Monde, down from 65 per cent back in 2007.
Libération looks at Barack Obama's attempts to get himself re-elected, an effort which the weekend killing of terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden has certainly helped. Barack is back to 50 per cent popularity, from a low of 43 per cent last month.
Not everyone is entirely happy about Obama's weekend coup against Osama. Libé reports that a joke
currently going the rounds from Peshawar to Karachi says something like "Pakistan is a very dangerous place. Not even Osama Bin Laden was safe there!"
The more serious question is how the world's most wanted man could live just down the road from Islamabad for four years without anyone in high places knowing he was on Pakistani soil.
And, by the way, in case you are still wondering about the legality of Sunday night's commando action by the US special forces, Eric Holder, the American justice minister, said yesterday that the murder of bin Laden was "completely legal and in line with our values".
"It was an act of legitimate national defence," he claims. Democracy is clearly in safe hands.
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