Tag: france

Now You Say! German Chancellor Admits Immigration and Failed Assimilation Caused French Riots

More than a decade after Berlin opened the gates of Europe to mass migration, a German Chancellor has publicly admitted that importing millions of foreigners and the failure to integrate them is causing carnage in Europe.

On the sidelines of the Invest in Germany Summit in Berlin this week, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he is concerned that riots in France and Italy could spill over into other European Union nations.

When pressed in an interview with Bloomberg as to the reasons for the unrest seen in cities like Paris and Milan, which have seen thousands of arrests, widespread looting, and arson attacks, Chancellor Merz admitted that it is “most likely” the result of “non-integrated people” due to “migration”.

He said this was leading citizens to vote in larger numbers for “extremely right and extremely left” political parties, creating “tensions and obviously riots in some countries, including France.”

The admission that mass migration and the failed attempts at assimilation are not only radicalising the host populations, but also responsible for violent civil unrest is quite striking from Merz, who leads the same Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party which sparked the European Migrant Crisis of 2015 under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, resulting in one of the largest demographic shifts in modern history.

While Merz campaigned on clamping down on immigration, he largely abandoned this position after forming a coalition with the left-wing, pro-open-borders Social Democrats (SPD) rather than partnering with the anti-mass-migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which he has claimed is outside the bounds of political acceptability.

During his 17-month tenure in office, Merz has frequently defended the need for continued mass migration into Germany and Europe as a whole, claiming that more waves of foreigners are required due to supposed shortages in the labour market and to mitigate the demographic impacts of an ageing population.

“Germany is a country of immigration. It has always been so; it is so now; and it will remain so,” he declared just last May.

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France Slaps 8PM Curfews On Cities As Interior Minister Admits Police ‘Lost Control’; Macron Flees To The Gulf

France moved Monday to put riot-hit cities under curfew after Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez admitted that authorities had lost control of the streets in several major cities over the weekend. President Emmanuel Macron refused Nuñez’s offer to resign and then left for a Gulf tour to secure fuel supplies.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told prefects to impose “very limited” and “localized” curfews. According to France 24’s live coverage, Lecornu ruled out a full curfew for Paris. He said a state of emergency could be declared “if necessary,” but that curfews seemed better suited, adding: “I am absolutely determined to restore order.” Marseille’s prefect banned protests and gatherings from noon to 8 p.m.

By Monday evening, Lecornu’s office had named the first towns, all in the northern Nord department. Lille, Douai, Wattignies and Denain will be under curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. on Monday and Tuesday nights, with each mayor’s agreement, according to Franceinfo. Lille is where Nuñez said rioters broke into city hall, and Wattignies is one of its suburbs. Lille’s Socialist mayor, Arnaud Deslandes, had refused earlier in the day to sign a curfew order, arguing that a late-evening curfew wouldn’t match the hours the trouble broke out. Denain was already under curfew: its mayor ordered a weeklong curfew from 9 p.m. starting Sunday, after what the town said were fires, mortar fireworks and paving stones thrown at police by hooded rioters on Saturday.

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Macron Addresses Nation: Refuses Blame, Ignores Immigration Impact on Riots, ‘How Can French People Do This?’

In an address to the nation on Sunday evening, French President Emmanuel Macron refused to take any accountability for the national riots that erupted on Saturday, as he sought to shift the blame onto the far-left and even external forces like the Iran conflict while failing to acknowledge the role mass migration played in creating a groundswell of support for the unrest.

President Macron, who has become little more than a lame duck in the Élysée with six months left in his term in office, addressed the country for the first time since the youth revolt began nearly a month ago.

Rather than taking a ‘the buck stops here’ approach, Mr Macron did not admit to any personal failings after his government failed to foresee or prevent some of the most destructive riots in recent memory, resulting in historic buildings being torched, thousands of shops being looted, and hundreds of police officers, gendarmes, and firefighters being injured on Saturday.

Instead, the outgoing leader pointed to “extremists from far-left groups” and “criminals” as being solely responsible for the “unrestrained violence” witnessed across France.

Meanwhile, Macron appeared to completely ignore the role that the importation of millions of foreigners into the country has had on the social framework, with many of the rioters being suspected of hailing from the multicultural suburban enclaves like Saint-Denis. Instead, the president questioned, “How can French people do this to France?”

“Why burn down the town hall in Limoges, the tourist office in Lyon, storm the town hall in Marseille, or attack the prefect’s residence in Bordeaux? How can they go so far? Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it. We all feel anger and shame tonight. Seeing the streets of our cities so ransacked is unbearable,” he questioned.

The neo-liberal president went on to claim that a distinction should be made between the “several hundred thousand of our fellow citizens [who] demonstrated with the intention of making legitimate demands” and “those who destroyed, vandalised, and looted.”

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Hackers Target French Grocers

Hackers have demonstrated that you do not need to destroy a farm or stop a delivery truck to destroy food. There was recently an overnight attack on supermarket refrigeration systems in France that forced temperatures as high as 50 C or 122 F across 150 stores. Food had to be discarded after six hours in high temperatures. Every aspect of life that operates online is fair game in cyberwarfare.

Updated Reuters reporting says Carrefour identified 80 affected supermarkets, while Monoprix said roughly 5% of its approximately 490 stores were hit. Intermarché’s chief executive estimated nationwide losses in the tens of millions of euros in a single day, although a verified industry-wide total was not yet available. Danfoss, the refrigeration supplier, said affected equipment was running outdated firmware and that customers had previously been advised to update supported systems or replace older ones.

We have developed an absurd assumption that connecting something automatically improves it. Remote access is convenient, so we count the convenience as a benefit while treating the ongoing obligation to secure it as overhead. Yet monitoring a refrigerator and allowing someone elsewhere to change its operation are different powers.

This obsession with connecting everything deserves a harder examination. Remote monitoring can save money and identify equipment failures, but remote control also creates something an attacker can exploit. The issue here is network access to essential controls. Once someone unauthorized can change how the machinery operates, a computer intrusion can produce physical destruction.

People still imagine war requires an army crossing a border. Why invade when you can interfere with the systems that keep the population supplied? If an attacker gained access to refrigeration controls shared across a large chain, food could be destroyed in hundreds of locations before the morning shift arrived. For scale, 1,000 stores losing 10 metric tons each would mean 10,000 tons gone. Extend the disruption into refrigerated warehouses and you threaten supplies destined for many more stores. The food has already been produced and paid for. Restoring a computer does not bring it back, and replacement shipments cannot appear simply because a politician promises that everything is under control. The economic consequences would spread through lost sales, interrupted wages, replacement costs, and potentially higher prices, while frightened customers rushed to buy what remained.

Being on the electrical grid is not the same as being accessible over the internet. This attack is disturbing precisely because it did not require a blackout. Dependence on power creates one vulnerability; insecure network controls create another. Add dependence on digital ordering, communications, and deliveries, and a business can discover that several supposedly separate functions rely on the same fragile chain of services. The question should be how much can continue working when one link fails, rather than how many functions can be managed remotely.

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France Street Violence Hits Record Levels Amid Multicultural Youth Revolts

The French Ministry of the Interior states that street violence has reached record levels fuelled in part by the violent student uprisings seen in multicultural hubs across the country in recent weeks.

Following another day of mass mobilisation of students in concert with far-left political parties and radical trade unions apparently intent on sparking more chaos, the Ministry of the Interior released statistics showing an unprecedented level of violence in public spaces.

According to government data, public violence incidents outside the home hit a record high of 20,000 per month in September, or nearly 700 per day, Le Figaro reported.

This represented a seven per cent increase over August, suggesting a significant role for the youth riots that began in the middle of last month and have featured high levels of violent attacks on police, other students, teachers and school administrators, and other innocent bystanders.

Prominent French criminologist Professor Alain Bauer lamented that society is becoming “TikTok-ized”, in which “nothing ever has consequences anymore”, and young people are increasingly becoming “uninhibited, sometimes nihilistic”.

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Violent student protests spread from France to Belgium

Student protests have spread from France to Belgium, with demonstrations over education conditions marred by vandalism, fires, and arrests in the Liege region on Monday.

The unrest follows weeks of violent school protests across France, where students began protesting in mid-September over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings, and long school days. Belgian students have raised similar grievances while also opposing local education reforms, higher public transportation costs, and rising tuition fees.

Hundreds gathered outside schools across Liege, blocking entrances and marching through the city. Shops in the center closed as a precaution, while protesters attempted to damage shutters at the Saint-Michel Institute. Firefighters also reported scooter fires in nearby Herstal and Chenee.

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French Feminist Convicted Of The Crime Of “Public Insult” For Refusing To Call Transgender Mayor A “Woman”

Dora Moutot is a feminist who has dedicated much of her life to fighting for women’s rights and has built a following on social media. Like other feminists, Moutot does not view transgender women the same as biological women. She has now joined others who are facing criminal charges for expressing those views. Transgender advocates have demanded that she be punished for her views in France.

Moutot recounted how transgender activists demanded that she be more “inclusive” in how she referred to “women.” She refused, and explained that “being a woman is a biological fact and that I didn’t think saying so should be controversial.” She was immediately denounced as a “transphobe and a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), a term I’d never even heard before.”

What followed was all too familiar. A cancel campaign led to her brand partnerships being canceled. In 2022, she was invited on a French TV program to discuss transgender issues with Marie Cau, France’s first transgender mayor. On the program, she was asked if she thought Cau was a woman. Moutot responded, Cau “is a man, a transfeminine man.”

That was all it took. Transgender advocates had their case and filed charges for “public insult,” which is a crime in France with a maximum punishment of one year in prison and a fine of up to €45,000 for insults committed against a person because of their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Free speech has long been in a free fall in France. Many disagree with Moutot and they are accorded free speech to denounce her views. However, Moutot is not extended the same protection based on the content of her views.

These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.

In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”

This is a nation that still echoes the cry of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (“liberté, égalité, fraternité”). However, in today’s France, “liberté” is no longer valued. Individual rights of religion and speech are routinely sacrificed in the name of “equity” and “fraternity.”

In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss the decline of free speech in France and other nations. As we face our own growing anti-free speech movement, citizens need to take a long look at countries like France to see what awaits us down this path. Europe went down this slippery slope of censorship decades ago, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.

As in this case, activists spend more time silencing opposing views than responding to them. For transgender activists, it is intolerable for feminists like Moutot to hold contrary views. Instead of addressing her viewpoints in public, they want her declared a criminal. Censorship then becomes an insatiable appetite for groups to silence their own critics.

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Far-left French mayor says ‘violence can be legitimate’ as schools burn

At Lycée Léonard de Vinci, a high school in Roubaix, the front door burned while teenagers filmed on their phones. In Nantes, the entrance hall of Lycée Nelson-Mandela was gutted. In Lille, masked men in black kicked a chemistry teacher in the back and chased him down the street. In Marseille, Reuters reported, the principal of Victor Hugo high school was doused in petrol.

On Wednesday, Sept. 30, alone, 356 high schools were blockaded. Police made 625 arrests, about two-thirds of them minors. Eighty-three police officers and gendarmes were hurt, along with 119 students and staff. Île-de-France put school damage near €1 million, including more than €100,000 at Lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis.

There are real grievances about schools in the region. In the Créteil school district, classes have 32 to 35 students, and teachers go missing. But overcrowded classrooms do not explain masked operators moving from school to school. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described troublemakers travelling between campuses to incite violence. And yet Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left La France Insoumise party, called the students “harmless.”`

The unmasked face of the week was Bally Bagayoko, 53, mayor of Saint-Denis, elected in March with 50.77 percent for La France Insoumise. He showed up at the gate of the blockaded Lycée Paul-Éluard beside a burning dumpster, laughing and handing out high-fives as teenagers cheered. Since then, he has denied lighting anything and calls the viral framing “fake news.”

What he said on camera the next day is not in dispute, and prosecutors are now investigating it: “Violence can be legitimate, but whenever you can avoid it, that is better.” He called the students children with a right to make mistakes, then told a reporter, “If I slap you, you’re going to react.”

The same day, students surrounded a BFMTV crew, roughed up two journalists and forced the crew out under escort. A girl on camera called BFM a “racist” outlet. The mayor posted three words: “Elle a raison !” She’s right.

Paris police prefect Patrice Faure referred Bagayoko to prosecutors under Article 40 for incitement to commit a crime. Emmanuel Macron said no politician may legitimize violence. Nuñez said violence is never legitimate. Valérie Pécresse said she would send Paul-Éluard’s repair bill to the mayor’s city.

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Napoleon’s secret code deciphered after 217 years using AI to read emperor’s mysterious letter

After more than 200 years, a coded letter written by the wee warlord Napoleon Bonaparte has been deciphered.

Napoleon’s stepson, Eugene, the Viceroy of Italy, sent the original letter to French general Auguste de Marmont in March of 1809 amid France’s ongoing conflict with Austria.

At the time, Marmont, a close companion of the emperor, was positioned with his troops in Dalmatia, on the far side of the Adriatic, where he was totally isolated from other French forces and their allies.

While the opening line of Napoleon’ correspondence is in his native French, the next 24 are an incomprehensible mix of symbols, letters, and numbers.

Experts believe the OG correspondence would have come with a deciphering key, but that key has been lost to the mists of time, until now.

Carter Church, an engineer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, has cracked the centuries-old code with the aid of AI. 

‘I used GPT–6 Astra to break an unsolved cipher to one of Napoleon’s generals that had gone unread for 217 years. What makes this impressive isn’t actually the codebreaking, but that Astra completed the entire multi-modal workflow in six hours from a single image and goal,’ he explained on X. 

The first line reads: ‘Vous avez dû recevoir, Monsieur le Général Marmont, mes lettres des 8, 14 et 20 courant,’ which translates to: ‘You must have received, General Marmont, my letters of the 8th, 14th, and 20th of this month.’

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Protests Explode As France Arrests 625 Schoolchildren

As high-school students all over France are protesting the lack of teachers, crowded classes, long school days and wretched conditions in their schools, the French authorities have detained 625 people. Most of them were minors and were detained the day before in 356 schools throughout France.

The protests, which began last week in Paris, have been characterized by “an escalation of violence” including “projectiles, attempted arson and other forms of urban violence” against police, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on Wednesday. In total, 83 police officers and gendarmes were injured, said the minister. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said that 119 students and staff members were injured by protesters since the start of the unrest, reported Reuters.

According to the education minister,Édouard Geffray, most of the injured staff were principals or teachers who were attacked as they tried to put a stop to the disturbances at their schools. Geffray claimed that “agitators” were “moving from school to school”. The students’ union, Unity for High School Students, a union of high school students, said that the disturbances were caused by a lack of teachers and other staff at schools, as well as by the poor conditions at many of them, including dilapidated buildings and overcrowded classes. A 16-year-old student in Paris told AFP that the education system was “completely broken” and that he and his friends were fed up with being forced to attend classes of 34 or more and with the overworked teachers who tried to teach them, added BBC.

In Marseille this morning a headteacher was attacked with petrol at Victor Hugo high school and seriously injured, the regional authorities said. Seven others including the school’s deputy head, its head of administration and four other managers were also attacked inside the school with petrol. At Saint-Exupéry high school hundreds of young people surrounded a fire truck called to the scene of a blaze and drove the firefighters out. Later a school fire was reported in Nantes. Meanwhile school and public transport have been attacked in Marseille with bus, tram and metro services suspended throughout the city because of damage to vehicles and attacks on drivers. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has called an interministerial crisis meeting at Matignon this evening to deal with the crisis. All ministers will be expected to cancel their travel plans for the night so that they can be with their regional prefects.

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