Free Republic

PARIS -- "If I could get my hands on Sarkozy, I'd kill him." Thus begins author David Rieff's article in the New York Times Magazine last month on Nicolas Sarkozy's relation to the French "banlieues." Needless to say, it is not David Rieff himself, a fellow of the World Policy Institute in New York, who is proffering the threat. Rather he is quoting one "Mamadou", a young resident of the Les Bousquets housing project outside Paris. Evidently having succeeded in making an impression on the American visitor, Mamadou continued, "Then I'd go to prison. And when I got out, I'd...

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...

AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France, Oct 25, 2006 (AFP) - A year after one of the most traumatic episodes in modern France, the conditions that touched off three weeks of suburban rioting remain firmly in place and there is widespread fear that a new outburst is only a question of time. In the seedy "Cite des 3,000" estate in Aulnay-sous-Bois in the northeastern outskirts of Paris -- not far from the starting-point of the riots -- the same idle young men slouch against the walls, smoking cannabis, watching motorbikes make wheelies and eyeing passing cars for police. Across the dual-carriageway a Renault garage...

PARIS, Oct 18, 2006 (AFP) - Nearly a year after riots erupted in France's impoverished suburbs, an old-fashioned idea has re-emerged in the fight to integrate at-risk children into the social mainstream: the boarding school. A far cry from the traditional Catholic institutions for the rich or discipline camps for delinquents, the new breed of public boarding school -- called a "school of success" -- is seen as key in combatting crime and unemployment in the "banlieues" by giving a small band of pupils a chance to get ahead. Spearheaded by Nicolas Sarkozy, France's tough-talking interior minister and a top...