Category Archives: A Few Euros More

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Villepin denies allegations

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Reuters report.

Villepin, crippled by a bruising defeat over a youth job law last month, issued the latest of his almost daily denials of guilt as the murky scandal rekindled speculation about his ability to stay in office.

The so-called Clearstream affair has derailed Villepin’s efforts to press on with reforms and fuelled a resurgence of the far-right ahead of 2007 presidential elections.

Le Monde on Wednesday published extracts from a leaked document the daily said proved Villepin knew more than he had acknowledged about an alleged dirty tricks campaign to smear Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, his rival for the presidency.

Le Monde’s article

Via Jerome, who says they ” blows open Villepin’s defense”.

Jyllands-posten Files Defamation Suit

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The Comics Reporter

The Jyllands-Posten has sued attorney Michael Christiani Havemann for defamation, claiming Havemann said the paper ordered a staff cartoonist to make a more distorted drawing of the Prophet Muhammed because the cartoons they had solicited from freelancers weren’t quite provocative enough. The publication of those cartoons last September led to weeks of international rioting in the first few months of this year. Havemann represents 27 Muslim organizations in a defmation lawsuit against the paper, seeking $16,800 damages.

The newspaper is seeking $16,800 in damages and a court ruling that the statement was false.

De Villepin tried to frame Sarkozy?

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Major political scandal underway in France says Jerome.

A first scandal was started in early 2004 when a number of politicians (including Nicolas Sarkozy) and top businessmen were accused to have hidden bank accounts with Clearstream in Luxembourg. These accusations were proven to be false in early 2005 by the investigating judge, and new judicial procedures were started, by Sarkozy and others, for slander (“dénonciation calomnieuse”), to try to find out the mysterious source of the fake documents that triggered the first scandal.

Sarkozy has long suspected Chirac and Villepin to have been behind this attack on him, and today’s revelations would seem to bear this out. Villepin has already denied categorically the substance of what Le Monde prints today, but this could trigger his resignation and a government reshuffle, especially coming just after the CPE episode which has gravely weakened his authority and credibility.

The Life of Leo Africanus

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TNR reviews a new biography

Now Davis brings this project of twentieth-century historiography full circle: not writing the life of someone unknown who did not write, but writing the life of someone famous who wrote a great deal but not much about his own life. The challenge here is to coax biographical details out of a non-biographical text. Few are better at this than Davis. And in pursuing this project, in tackling a well-known figure about whom little is known, Davis has poured new life into an old-fashioned genre: the “Life and Work” biography re-interpreted as the “History of the Book.”

Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan was born in Granada around 1486-1488. He died, perhaps in Tunis, sometime after 1532. Between 1518 and 1527, this same person lived in Rome and went by the names Joannes Leo (Latin), Giovanni Leone (Italian), and Yuhanna al-Asad (Arabic). Posterity knows him by still another name, given posthumously: Leo Africanus, his nom de plume. But who was he? This is the puzzle facing Davis. Unlike Martin Guerre, whose story lay buried in an archive, but buried whole, the man formerly known as Leo Africanus hides in plain sight.

Sego On The Up And UP?

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Ségolène Royal’s ratings in the opinion polls are certainly on the up-and-up. According to a poll, published in Le Figaro yesterday she won the backing of 34 per cent of respondents (against 30% for Sarkozy). It seems like there will be a battle for the Presidency in 2007 after all, and that Emmanuel may have been unduly pessimistic about her chances. The FT has the story here. However:

In spite of her popularity, Ms Royal faces ferocious opposition from rival Socialist candidates – possibly including her partner, François Hollande, the party secretary – to clinch her party’s nomination.

Ms Royal’s popularity appears partly due to her novelty as a serious female candidate – the former environment minister appeared on the cover of five magazines last week – as well as her maverick campaigning style. Ms Royal has launched a website called desirsdavenir.org (desires for the future), encouraging the public to contribute to a “participative forum” and promising to adopt the best ideas.

Her critics have argued that her “wiki-programme” has only exposed the hollowness of her ideology but it has certainly aroused the interest of France’s internet users.

Irritations Over Holocaust Records

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By Craig Whitlock, of the Washington Post

Boxed away in a former Nazi SS barracks in this central German town is the core of one of the largest collections of historical documents from World War II. All told, the archive contains 50 million records that list the names of 17.5 million people, including concentration camp prisoners, forced laborers and other victims of the Third Reich.

For 60 years, the International Committee of the Red Cross has used the documents to trace the missing and the dead, especially those of the Holocaust. But the archive has remained off-limits to historians and the public, fueling an increasingly bitter dispute among Holocaust researchers, Jewish groups and the 11 nations that oversee the collection.