New Year cheer is in short supply judging by the latest statements from European leaders. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel, France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy and Italy’s president Giorgio Napolitano all began the year by warning of more pain to come.
Jacques Chirac was elected president of France in 1995 and promised to mend France’s "social fracture". Alain Juppé, his new prime minister, said it was time to deal with the county’s debt problem.
The Eurozone’s political leaders are battling to prevent the collapse of their economies. This week Standard and Poor’s, the US credit rating agency, warned that all eurozone countries—including France and Germany—could lose their credit ratings.
There is huge uncertainty across Europe. Bank shares are plunging, France is facing a possible credit rating downgrade and the markets are falling sharply in France, Spain, Italy and Germany.
"Utter filth and depravity" shouted the Daily Mail. This brilliant play, in which the Marquis de Sade stages scenes from the French Revolution in an insane asylum, has seen people walking out of performances.
Legacy of fascism still poisons French politics
I read with interest your story on the 1961 mass killing of Algerian protesters by French police (Socialist Worker, 8 October).
Fifty years ago police in Paris killed over 200 Algerian protesters and threw their bodies into the River Seine. Historian Jean-Luc Einaudi exposed the murders in his book The Battle of Paris. He spoke to Sellouma from France’s New Anticapitalist Party
Hadj Abdel Aziz
A senior steward hurried to give me a green armband as I arrived. I effectively became a traffic warden, except that I was directing Algerians—women and men, old people and children.
