Tag: france

French digital minister tells Big Tech platforms to scale up “fact-checking capabilities”

Telecom ministers from European countries have asked the major online platforms to ensure they have the adequate capacity to handle “misinformation” in Central and Eastern Europe, which they say are the major targets of Russian propaganda.

On March 8, officials from EU governments and representatives from the major online platforms met in France to discuss how to fight disinformation being spread by the Russian government. Initially, the agenda of the informal meeting was the Metaverse, how to bring more women to the technology sector, and environment. The agenda was changed in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In a joint statement, the ministers said: “The battles initiated by Russia in the current conflict are raging not only on the ground but also on the internet.”

France’s digital minister Cédric O said that online platforms had made some efforts to fight Russian propaganda, adding that the accounts of Russian state-controlled media outlets Sputnik and RT have been removed on the major platforms. However, O said it was important to put “pressure on the platforms to do even more.”

During the meeting, the ministers made two requests, according to a report by EURACTIV. They asked the platforms to respond to take down requests from governments more quickly. And, they asked them to increase their content moderation teams in the languages spoken in Central and Eastern Europe.

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France’s Macron Stuns As He Declares Un-Vaxxed ‘Not Citizens’.

In a wildly authoritarian move, French President Emmanuel Macron has declared the nation’s unvaccinated public to be “not citizens” of France, and claims he is intentionally just trying to “piss them off.”

The bizarre and unlawful declaration comes as the French parliament debates new legislation that would eliminate unvaccinated people from public life entirely, even if they test negative for COVID-19.

The moves belie the oft-repeated claim that COVID-19 vaccines are purely a health measure, especially in the face of new data from surrounding countries that proves the vaccinated are now more likely to contract, and therefore spread, the virus.

Speaking to Le Parisien, Macron furiously ranted:

“I am not about pissing off the French people… But as for the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy.

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French Prankster Admits to Hoaxing Mass UFO Sighting

A notorious French prankster has reportedly revealed that he was behind last week’s incident wherein multiple people throughout the southern part of the country spotted a glowing cigar-shaped UFO. The mass sighting, which occurred on Tuesday evening, sparked worldwide headlines and a considerable amount of coverage from national media outlets in France. However, the mystery of the eerie object was short-lived as YouTube personality and prominent French practical joker Remi Gaillard came forward over the weekend to take credit for the ‘extraterrestrial affair’ and explained how he pulled off the elaborate hoax.

In a video posted to his YouTube channel, Gaillard proudly introduced Marie, a horse breeder, and Loic, a meteorologist. “Thanks to them,” he boasted, “we succeeded in pranking all of you.” The video then shows how the two accomplices posed as bewildered witnesses who were interviewed by credulous news organizations in France. Looking back on her role in the stunt, which saw her leading a TV program out to a field where she ‘saw the UFO,’ Marie marveled that “I had to tell probably the biggest lie of my life.” Gaillard went on to indicate that the prank was weeks in the making and marveled at how quickly the videos of the odd object wound up becoming something of a media sensation last week in France.

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Armed police drag passenger off Eurostar train after staff member accused him of wearing the ‘wrong type of mask’

Eight armed, uniformed French police boarded a Eurostar train on Thursday afternoon, after it made an emergency stop in Lille, to forcibly remove a passenger who was accused of “not wearing the right type of mask.” 

The incident occurred on a Eurostar service that was traveling from Paris Gare du Nord to St. Pancras on Thursday afternoon but was halted in Lille after a train manager reportedly got into an aggressive argument with a man over his face mask, according to passengers.

Following the confrontation, the manager stated that they would be informing the police at Lille for his failure to follow Covid regulations, with the train making an emergency, unscheduled stop at the station where eight officers forcibly removed the passenger. As he left the train, the passenger, thought to be in his 40s, claimed he had been accused of “not wearing the right type of mask” and would now “be left alone in France,” calling it “very cruel treatment.”

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Nuns used crucifixes to rape girls during decades of abuse carried out by clergy in France’s Catholic Church that saw attacks on 330,000 children covered up ‘by a veil of silence’, damning report finds

Nuns used crucifixes to rape girls during decades of abuse carried out by clergy in France’s Catholic Church that saw attacks on 330,000 children covered up ‘by a veil of silence’, a damning report has found. 

The 2,500-page landmark report was released Tuesday after more than two years of investigations by an independent commission, in France’s first major reckoning with the devastating phenomenon.

A victim named ‘Marie’ testified that she was abused as an 11-year-old and that when she complained about the abuse to her parents they refused to believe a nun could do such a thing. The abuse continued for another year.

‘I was truly [a gift] for this nun… because she knew full well that she did not risk anything,’ Marie said. 

Eighty per cent of victims were young boys between the ages of 10 and 13, however many girls also suffered abuse, not only by priests but also by nuns.

Nuns used crucifixes to rape little girls or forced boys to have sex with them, according to the report.

Pope Francis today expressed to the victims his ‘great sorrow, for their wounds’, adding that he was grateful for the courage they had shown in denouncing what they had been through.  

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Macron Says Showing Police Your Papers to Visit a Cafe is About “Freedom”

After video emerged of Parisians having to show their vaccine passport papers to police in order to sit outside a cafe, President Macron asserted that the system protected people’s “freedom.”

Yes, really.

As we highlighted yesterday, footage showed uniformed French police patrolling cafes and restaurants demanding proof of vaccination.

Those unable or unwilling to show their papers face massive fines, while business owners could even go to prison if they refuse to enforce the system.

However, the new program may end up putting a lot of people out of business given the multitude of images that showed normally busy cafes and restaurants all but empty.

Ignoring the threat of legal action, half of the establishments canvassed by Reuters said they were refusing to enforce the checks.

Despite the fact that the French haven’t experienced such an intense ‘papers please’ society since the Nazi occupation, President Macron insisted that vaccine passports were about protecting people’s “freedom”.

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The latest example of ‘white privilege’: Eating French food

White privilege. White supremacy. White fragility. Whiteness. For the academic left, there’s no aspect of life which cannot be shoehorned into a relationship with these terms.

Law (yes, law) professor Mathilde Cohen of the University of Connecticut recently gave a talk at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Nanterre in which, according to The Times, she argued “French eating habits reinforced the ‘dominance’ of white people over ethnic minorities.”

“By this,” Cohen says in the clip below, “I mean the use of food to reinforce whiteness as a dominant racial identity.

“The French meal is often presented as the national ritual to which every citizen can participate equally. But French food ways are shaped by white middle- and upper-class norms … and the boundaries of whiteness are policed through daily food encounters.”

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French judge fired for trying to offer 12-year-old daughter up for sex

Olivier Bailly was in charge of the family law division of the Dijon court system. But he has been removed after a debacle involving his 12-year-old daughter for sex online became known.

A rundown of the basics was described by The Times. Bailly is a 55-year-old French judge who was the vice-president of the law courts in the capital of Burgundy. He was removed from his position for “conduct causing serious damage” to the judiciary’s image.

It was last month that Olivier Bailly told the courts that “post-traumatic stress” caused him to engage in these sorts of behaviors. Of course in doing so he admitted to the deed itself.

According to the Daily Mail, Bailly presented this argument in a bid to keep his job. “I do not feel really unworthy of this profession, which I love. I think I have been useful and that I can still be useful one day.”

Outlets cite the 2007 trial of murder and rapist Pierre Bodein (which Bailly was lead prosecutor on) as the reason for the French Judge’s mental health trauma.

Olivier’s wife, Sophie Véjux-Bailly, is also a judge, and the pair of them were “active in partner-swapping circles,” according to France 3 television. She was cleared by police as not posting an image of their youngest child in a swimsuit onto the “partner swapping” website.

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French food is now racist, according to professor who studies ‘food whiteness’ and ‘food privileges’

The Times U.K. reported that a video of Mathilde Cohen discussing the issue for a seminar outside Paris is upsetting folks in France, as the paper noted that the country’s cuisine is “seen as a cornerstone of the national identity.”

Cohen, who hails from the University of Connecticut School of Law, suggested that French eating habits reinforce the “dominance” of white people over ethnic minorities, the Times U.K. said.

An academic paper that was part of Cohen’s seminar asserts that France’s “eating culture … has been the central means of racial and ethnic identity formation through slavery, colonialism, and immigration. The whiteness of French food is all the more powerful in that it is unnamed, enabling the racial majority to benefit from food privileges without having to acknowledge their racial origin,” the Times U.K. added.

Here’s Cohen on video discussing “food whiteness in French culture,” which she said also can be defined as “the use of food to reinforce whiteness as a dominant racial identity.”

In the clip, Cohen says “the French meal is often presented as a national ritual to which every citizen can participate equally. But French food ways are shaped by white middle- and upper-class norms … the boundaries of whiteness are policed through daily food encounters.”

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French drug assessment center demands removal of all four widely used COVID vaccines

A regional independent drug assessment center, the CTIAP (Centre territorial d’Information indépendante et d’Avis pharmaceutiques), which is linked to the Cholet public hospital in the west of France, recently published a report showing that the vaccines used against COVID were not only submitted to insufficient clinical testing, but that the quality of the active substances, their “excipients, some of which are new,” and the manufacturing processes are problematic. “These new excipients should be considered as new active substances,” the Cholet hospital team stated, in a study that according to them raises issues that have not been commented to date.

The team led by Dr. Catherine Frade, a pharmacist, worked on public data released by the EMA with relation to the Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) shots, and its first caveat was that all these products only have temporary marketing authorizations. They are all subject to further studies that reach as far as 2024 and even beyond, and these will be almost impossible to be completed because of the way the vaccines are now being distributed, said the CTIAP report.

These studies even include the stability and comparability of the vaccine batches put on the market and the quality and safety of excipients — substances formulated alongside the active ingredient of a medication to facilitate or enhance their absorption.

According to the CTIAP, all of the vaccines were put on the market and actively used on human beings before “proof of quality for the active substance and the finished product” was produced: all the manufacturing labs obtained future deadlines to submit their studies in this regard.

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