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Political scandals are not unknown in France and are well documented, but the list of well known politicians, including former presidents and prime ministers, accused in recent years of financial misdeeds or corruption is growing. In the present French political system, the president is a powerful figure: the head of state with supreme executive authority and command of the armed forces, with the ability to choose the prime minister, regarded as a symbol of the French nation. Directly elected by universal suffrage, not by an electoral college, for a term of five years, presidents cannot be voted out of office...

Rainier close to death March 28, 2005 PRINCE Rainier of Monaco was reported close to death last night and is being kept breathing by a life-support machine. He has been in intensive care for three weeks with an acute lung infection. As talk grew that Prince Rainier died on Saturday, French President Jacques Chirac was preparing to dash back from an official trip to Japan. Although Monaco is an independent principality, it forms an enclave in the south of France and its relationship with its larger neighbour is a crucial one.

The French government has been notably restrained in their criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for unleashing a pandemic upon the world.  One possible reason for their reticence is a single, highly embarrassing fact: They essentially built the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab in which the coronavirus now sweeping the world was being researched, and from which it escaped.  That the French delivered the turn-key, high-containment biolab to China has long been public knowledge, but now a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has added riveting details to the story.  The insider information comes from interviews with French...

Jacques René Chirac, a champion of Europe and fierce opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, has died. The former two-term president was 86. Chirac spent half a century in the public eye. Before he was president of France, he was the mayor of Paris, he also served two terms as prime minister and represented his rural district in the French parliament for nearly 30 years. "My countrymen, I love France passionately and have put my whole heart, energy and force into serving her and you," Chirac said when he left office in 2007. "It has been the engagement of...

NATIONAL NEWS Tuesday 11 , March Villagers flee Zanu PF terror ABOUT 10 villagers from Buhera South fled their homes following Zanu PF incited violence. They have since sought refuge at the ZimRights offices in Harare where they are seeking legal assistance. Zanu PF youths allegedly mounted attacks on the villagers from their bases. Arnold Tsunga, the ZimRights chairman, confirmed yesterday they had received victims of political violence from Buhera and Cashel Valley in Chimanimani. He said the victims had sought refuge in Harare. Tsunga said in Cashel Valley, about 53 people, 21 of them school children were displaced by...

Chicago's per capita homicide rate climbed over the last decade, and the chances of an African-American being killed in the city spiked drastically, according to a new report. From 2005 to 2015, the city went from 17.3 homicides per 100,000 residents to a rate of about 18.8, according to a report from the Injury Prevention and Research Center at the Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. But the report held particularly troubling news for African-Americans. The rate for blacks in Chicago jumped from 36.1 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2005 to 46.5 a decade later. Other studies have shown steep drops...

PARIS (Reuters) - The CIA rejected as fantasy claims in a new book that it tried to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Osama bin Laden just two months before the September 11, 2001 airliner attacks against the United States. Richard Labeviere, author of "The Corridors of Terror," released on Thursday, says the CIA's Dubai station chief approached bin Laden while the al Qaeda leader was being treated for a serious kidney complaint in the United Arab Emirates. He said the meeting took place in the American Hospital in Dubai on July 12, barely eight weeks before al Qaeda militants slammed...

Zardari took 'massive secret commissions' for securing French submarine deal: Report 2011-01-15 16:00:00 Official Pakistani documents, detailing how President Asif Ali Zardari benefited from massive, secret payments connected to the sale of French submarines to Pakistan, have been seized as evidence by a Paris magistrate investigating a suspected widespread scam surrounding the deal. The documents, published by Mediapart, show that the payments to Zardari and others took place on the fringes of the sale of three Agosta-class submarines by the French defence contractor, the DCN, to Pakistan in the 1990s. The French sale, which succeeded against rival offers by Swedish...

A French court has given former President Jacques Chirac a two-year suspended prison sentence for diverting public funds and abusing public trust. Mr Chirac, 79, was not in court to hear the verdict because of ill-health but denied wrongdoing. President from 1995 to 2007, he was put on trial on charges that dated back to his time as mayor of Paris. He was accused of paying members of his Rally for the Republic (RPR) party for municipal jobs that did not exist. The prosecution had urged the judge to acquit Mr Chirac and nine others accused in the trial. Two...

ALAIN JUPPÉ, resurrected in politics after a criminal conviction in 2004 for political chicanery, is the quiet, strong center of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s effort to secure re-election in France next year. Mr. Juppé, 66, France’s foreign minister, is serious, competent, polite, intelligent and slightly dull — just the kind of “homme sérieux” that voters suspect Mr. Sarkozy, with all his impatient flash, is not. Having been foreign minister from 1993 to 1995, and then prime minister, Mr. Juppé was brought back to the Quai d’Orsay in February this year to restore calm, order and credibility to a ministry shaken by...

Ex-French President Jacques Chirac says he is not in a fit state to attend his corruption trial, reports say. He has asked the Paris court for his lawyers be allowed to represent him, AFP news agency has reported. Mr Chirac, 78, is accused of embezzling public funds in the 1990s, when he was mayor of Paris. He denies the charges. The trial is due to start on Monday, having been adjourned in March after a co-defendant argued that some of the charges were unconstitutional. In a letter to the Paris court on Friday, the former leader wrote that he wanted...

The 77-year-old, whose presidency of France ran from 1995 until 2007, could face a ten-year prison sentence and 150,000-euro (£130,000) fine if found guilty. He will be the first modern French leader to face a corruption trial. Mr Chirac faces charges of abuse of public funds while he was mayor of Paris. It is alleged that he paid 21 allies for doing non-existent jobs as part of his drive for power in the 1990s. Last month, the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, agreed to drop the town hall's civil lawsuit against Mr Chirac in exchange for 2.2 million euros...

The 77-year-old, whose presidency of France ran from 1995 until 2007, could face a ten-year prison sentence and 150,000-euro (£130,000) fine if found guilty. He will be the first modern French leader to face a corruption trial. Mr Chirac faces charges of abuse of public funds while he was mayor of Paris. It is alleged that he paid 21 allies for doing non-existent jobs as part of his drive for power in the 1990s. Last month, the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, agreed to drop the town hall's civil lawsuit against Mr Chirac in exchange for 2.2 million euros...

MI6 hired Al Qaeda men to kill Gaddafi: ex-official By Martin Bright LONDON: The British government will this week go to unprecedented lengths to stop a renegade counter-intelligence officer, David Shayler, from making his most devastating claim yet : that the Libyan Islamic cell paid by British intelligence agents to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in February 1996 were members of Al Qaeda. The Libyan cell is believed to have included one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants, Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government's most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. Al-Liby lived in...

Startling revelations by French intelligence experts back David Shayler's alleged 'fantasy'about Gadaffi plot Martin Bright, home affairs editor Sunday November 10, 2002 The Observer British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya's fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden's trusted lieutenants, will be embarrassing to the Government, which described similar claims by renegade MI5 officer David Shayler as 'pure fantasy'. The...

Decision Brief No. 05-D 44 2005-08-31 On eve of U.N. push for global government, advocates urge Senate to approve a building block: The Law of the Sea Treaty (Washington, D.C.): As concern grows that the United Nations is intent on replacing what the National Security Guidance calls "an orderly arrangement of sovereign states" with a proto-world government - complete with the ability to impose international taxes, a new push is being made for a treaty that would advance that purpose: the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). This sovereignty-sapping agenda is at the heart of a dispute now playing...

Every child, Muslim or not, KNOWS Islam hates what America stands for. As a European, I understand why many Americans wonder why we don't give more support to the US than we do. You, indeed, supported US, even in our darkest hour; at a point in history we Europeans didn't even support our own freedom. This was just some decades ago. One sort of answer to this question is that deep somewhere in the intrinsic soul of Europe, there is true resistence to evil and enslavement, but after having experienced so much of it, we are somewhat unable of expressing...

PARIS (AFP) – Jacques Chirac will be the first former French president to be tried for corruption, officials said Friday, after charges from his years as mayor of Paris returned to taint the twilight of his long career. Chirac stands accused of giving political allies lucrative bogus jobs as city hall "ghost workers" and his trial will be the latest in a series to expose graft and dirty tricks at the highest levels of state. Judicial officials confirmed to AFP that Chirac would face trial on charges of "abuse of trust" and "misuse of public funds". A statement from the...

Just as President Jacques Chirac was vehemently arguing against invading Iraq in late 2002, General Philippe Rondot wrote that he had been given the green light to "recover" top officials including Tariq Aziz, Saddam's foreign minister. Previously unseen extracts of Gen Rondot's private diaries were reprinted in the newspaper Libération. In a passage dated Dec 3, 2002, the general refers to an "agreement in principle to 'recover' if necessary Mr Aziz and Al-Rafai" – said to be a senior Ba'ath Party politician. The two men were believed to have been considered useful to the French while Gen Rondot knew Aziz...

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God. Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their "common faith" (Christianity) and told him: "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. ... The biblical prophecies...