Free Republic

An “unforgiving, puritan Anglo-Saxon” attitude to adultery is damaging married life in Britain, driving couples to divorce rather than strengthening the family, according to an outspoken French academic. -- Dr Catherine Hakim, a sociologist and bestselling author, argues that a “sour and rigid English view” of infidelity is condemning millions of people to live frustrated “celibate” lives with their spouses. In a book bound to provoke controversy, she likens faithful husbands and wives to “caged animals” and argues that they should be free to explore their “wild side” with lovers without the threat of divorce. Meeting a secret lover for...

PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) - The City of London financial district, though diminished by scandals and job cuts, is proving irresistible to fed-up Parisian bankers fleeing France's rising taxes and the feeling that they're not best loved at home. French financial groups big and small, from advisory firms and private equity houses to big banks like Societe Generale, are looking at London as a possible shelter from a new 75 percent tax rate on top French earners, bankers say. Take Bertrand Meunier, who recently agreed to move to London to take a job at private equity firm CVC Capital Partners, leaving a...

A French Jewish mother at the centre of a high profile custody battle with a Saudi prince has died after falling from a fourth storey apartment, amid suspicions of foul play. Police are still investigating what caused the death of Candice Cohen-Ahnine, 35, who fell from her Paris apartment window on Thursday night. Investigators reportedly had been leaning towards an accident as cause of death, but by Sunday reports in the French media suggested Ms Cohen-Ahnine had slipped and fallen to her death "as if she was escaping something dangerous". Police refused to confirm the reports when contacted by The...

NEW DELHI: India's quest for a futuristic stealth fifth-generation fighter, which will see the country spend around $35 billion over the next 20 years in its biggest-ever defence project, has zoomed into the decisive phase now. India and Russia are getting all set to ink the full and final design or R&D phase contract for the 5th Gen fighter by this year-end or early-2013, say sources. It will again underline India's firm rejection of the US offer of its Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) or the F-35 'Lightning-II'. Ahead of the R&D contract, under which India wants to induct over 200...

The eurozone was shown to be on the edge of a double-dip recession today, as even the powerhouse economies faltered in the face of the three-year-old debt crisis. The combined economies of the 17-members contracted by 0.2pc in the three months from April to June, according to Eurostat, following zero growth in the first quarter. News of the contraction came amid further speculation that Greece will push for a two-year extension of its latest austerity programme. Germany managed 0.3pc growth, thanks to strong investment and domestic consumption, and the Netherlands posted an up-tick in production of 0.2pc. But the growth...

Foreign states must do more to help Syrian rebels defeat President Bashar al-Assad and spare the country an "endless civil war" and possible partition, a leading politician in neighboring Lebanon said on Tuesday. Walid Jumblatt said the battle for Syria hinged on foreign backing to the rebels, who he believes can "easily" expel Assad from Damascus if the necessary weapons are supplied to their forces in the south, not far from the capital. He said the failure to provide such weapons was hypocritical and "fishy". "The more you accelerate the downfall, the more you save Syria from a possible partition,"...

I understand the sensitivity about naming Muslims as the culprits in some serious riots that broke out in the northern city of Amiens in France last night. Blaming a group with little proof would only worsen the situation. But who lives in the area where the riots occurred? These are the suburbs of France where immigrants - many of North African origin -- live outside the mainstream of French political and cultural life. Economically depressed with little opportunity to escape, the massive number of young people with no prospects and little hope hate the police and government and can start...

Youths fired buckshot at police in clashes in the French city of Amiens overnight on Tuesday, torching cars and a nursery school in a resurgence of urban unrest that President François Hollande said he would do everything to confront. … Officials said 16 police officers were hurt in the disturbances, some struck by buckshot others hit by a hail of missiles thrown by around 100 youths who gathered in northern districts of Amiens. One officer was in a serious condition, the city's Socialist Mayor Gilles Demailly told Reuters. … As mayor of a racially mixed suburb before being appointed to...

  Francois Hollande will celebrate 100 days since his election as French president on Tuesday knowing his honeymoon with the electorate is over and that life is not going to get easier any time soon.   Record unemployment and an economy headed back into recession provide a sombre backdrop to an event Hollande will mark by interrupting his summer break to visit police officers in a village where two of their female colleagues died in a shootout in June. The village, Pierrefeu-du-Var, is located close to the Fort de Bregancon presidential retreat where Hollande has been on holiday with his glamorous journalist...

Yitschak Ben Gad: "Politics, lies, and videotape: 3,000 Questions and Answers on the Mideast Crisis," SP Books, 1991, 479 pp.p. 245 Q: What is known about the massacre of 1860? A: In 1860, the Lebanese Druze attacked the Christian Maronites. Thousands of men, women and children were murdered. The Christians sent forth a desperate plea for help to the European powers in order to save them from complete annihilation... Q: Who came to the aid of the Christians? A: Sir Moses Montefiore, the well-known British Jewish leader, astonished by the disaster that befell the Lebanese Christians, did his utmost to...

French police were yesterday breaking up gipsy camps and deporting illegal immigrants found in them. Dozens of officers in riot gear descended on a settlement near Lille shortly after dawn to oversee the evacuation of some 200 Roma living in mobile homes. One hundred people were evicted from a site in Lyon, with similar round-ups happening in other major cities including Marseille. Caravans and huts were destroyed in the Belleville area of central Paris on Wednesday, making another 100 people homeless. ‘Many of those evicted will be flown home to Romania,’ said an interior ministry source, who insisted the deportations...

French president Francois Hollande wants to set the top tax rate in France at 75%, for those who make over €1,000,000 a year. As a result "Les Riches" Have Tax Indigestion and are looking to move outside France. “We’re getting a lot of calls from high earners who are asking whether they should get out of France,” said Mr. Grandil, a partner at Altexis, which specializes in tax matters for corporations and the wealthy. “Even young, dynamic people pulling in 200,000 euros are wondering whether to remain in a country where making money is not considered a good thing.” Because...

On France’s TF1 in early May, Smith explained why he supported the idea of paying higher taxes, saying, "I have no issue with paying taxes and whatever needs to be done for my country to grow. I believe very firmly that my ability to sit here -- I'm a black man who didn't go to college, yet I get to travel around the world and sell my movies, and I believe very firmly that America is the only place on Earth that I could exist. So I will pay anything that I need to pay to keep my country growing."...

The French Catholic Church will revive a centuries-old custom next week with an updated national "prayer for France" opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage and other "grave social" reforms planned by the new government. "Nobody should be surprised that we Catholics think the first page of the Bible is right, even more so than a parliament," said Lyon Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, referring to the union between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eve in the Book of Genesis. The Vatican and Catholic churches across the world have been speaking against the growing acceptance of homosexuality, which they say is...

PARIS — The call to Vincent Grandil’s Paris law firm began like many others that have rolled in recently. On the line was the well-paid chief executive of one of France’s most profitable companies, and he was feeling nervous. President François Hollande is vowing to impose a 75 percent tax on the portion of anyone’s income above a million euros ($1.24 million) a year. “Should I be preparing to leave the country?” the executive asked Mr. Grandil. The lawyer’s counsel: Wait and see. For now, at least. “We’re getting a lot of calls from high earners who are asking whether...

A wide-ranging US State Department report has criticised France and Belgium for passing controversial laws that prevent women from wearing full Islamic veils. The US on Monday criticised France and Belgium for banning women from wearing face-covering Islamic veils in public, while warning of growing anti-Semitism and hostility towards Muslims in Europe. The US State Department’s report on religious freedoms, researched in 2011 but released on July 30, 2012, warned that freedom of worship was being undermined across the globe -- particularly in China and Pakistan. Commenting on the report, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that more than...

President François Hollande has proposed a 75 percent tax on income over 1 million euros. Under current tax laws, two hypothetical couples with two children each and comparable annual incomes, as expressed in euros, would have more take-home pay in New York City than in France. Under the Hollande proposal, the French couple’s take-home pay would be considerably lower.

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons. Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one...

Video Interviewer: "Do you agree that both the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt worked without foreign intervention?" Bernard-Henri Lévy: "Absolutely, but Mubarak was not Qadhafi. It was not the same. It was not the same sort of dictatorship. It was not the same sort of brutality. If somebody today looks like Qadhafi, it is Bashar Al-Assad, who is really a butcher of his own people. Mubarak and Ben Ali were bad guys – corrupted, thieves, tyrants, of course – but they were not of the same sort." [...] Interviewer: "Do you think President Hollande will be as active in Syria...

“Show me what a man remembers of his past,” the late Fritz Wilhelmsen once said, “and I will tell you what kind of man he is.” Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelmsen was inclined to bold affirmation and even bolder denial, and was wont to frame his statements in the irrefragable terminology of metaphysics. The gallant Thomist even shared a certain existentialism with the grim nihilist, as on this very point: “We remember what is of use to the intentional thrust of our existence . . . everything else from our past we tend to forget.” Herein lies the essential problem for...