Free Republic

The Last Youth Standing - What the West and Islam share are elites detached from their own demographic realities Mark Steyn - November 20, 2006 I was watching Mansbridge One on One the other day. Don't ask me why. May have been an "encore presentation." Or more likely an encore presentation of an encore presentation. For a 24/7 news network, there's an eerie timelessness about CBC Newsworld: one would be only mildly surprised to switch on and find Mansbridge One on One with Lester B. Pearson or Sir Charles Tupper. Anyway, this week, the one he was on was the...

"It’s the revolution!” one of my good friends said when I phoned him from the Paris airport yesterday morning. Students around the country are continuing their “strike” to protest proposed new legislation that would allow employers to fire young people under the age of 26 during the first two years they are on the job. In Aix-en-Provence, hundreds of young people trekked from their trendy provencal campus to the main autoroute on the outskirts of town and shut down traffic this morning. On Tuesday, an estimated two million people took to the streets in dozens of cities across France. The...

France's public debt is spiralling out of control, according to a report commissioned by the French government... The debt stands at €1,117 billion, representing 66 per cent of France's GDP ... The staggering figure encompasses the debt accumulated by the state and local authorities, as well as social and health insurance bodies, over the past few decades. However, it does not include the upcoming time bomb of civil servants' pensions. Over the past ten years, the French debt has increased its claim against GDP by over 10 percentage points. France saw the worst debt evolution among the then 15 EU...

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Despite France's staunch refusal to support the United States in its plans for a possible war against Iraq, there is "no anti-Americanism" in France, the French foreign minister said Sunday.</p> <p>The two nations merely have a difference of opinion over how to handle Iraq's failures to rid itself of any weapons of mass destruction banned by the United Nations, Dominique de Villepin told ABC's "This Week."</p>