Eideard

A French health minister tried to tweet her way out of embarrassing blog advice that homeless people should not go outdoors during the ice-cold snap in Europe.

Junior minister Nora Berra was ridiculed on the Internet for writing a blog at the weekend saying toddlers, old people, the sick and homeless were particularly vulnerable in times of extreme cold and should “avoid going outdoors.”

Her note sparked a flurry of Twitter messages and media reports that she was suggesting the homeless not leave home…

Hundreds of people, many of them homeless, have been killed in recent days as bitterly cold weather sweeps Europe, with temperatures dropping to minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) in parts of France.

The suggestion has been edited out. Of course, she won’t be too directly embarrassed because most homeless don’t have computers at hand to read her blog either. Or electricity.

There are many reasons to stay properly hydrated, but only recently have scientists begun to consider diabetes prevention one of them. The amount of water you drink can play a role in how your body regulates blood sugar…

The reason: a hormone called vasopressin, which helps regulate water retention.

When the body is dehydrated, vasopressin levels rise, prompting the kidneys to hold onto water. At the same time, the hormone pushes the liver to produce blood sugar, which over time may strain the ability to produce or respond to insulin.

In one of the largest studies to look at the consequences…published last year in Diabetes Care…French scientists tracked more than 3,000 healthy men and women ages 30 to 65 for nearly a decade. All had normal blood sugar levels at the start of the research.

After nine years, about 800 had developed Type 2 diabetes or high blood sugar. But those who consumed the most water, 17 to 34 ounces a day, had a risk roughly 30 percent lower than that of those who drank the least. The researchers controlled for the subjects’ intake of other liquids that could have affected the results, mainly sugary and alcoholic drinks, as well as exercise, weight and other factors affecting health. The researchers did not look at eating habits, something future studies may take into account.

Another study worth expanding. We already have sufficient evidence of the need for controlled, healthy nutrition. Coupled with exercise, folks have a better chance of avoiding this disease. Sufficient water consumption may be one relatively easy victim of our hectic culture to restore to something more appropriate to our evolution.

One of PIP’s defective implants after removal

France’s health minister called on Saturday for the head of the breast implant maker accused of selling faulty prostheses to tens of thousands of women around the world to be found, calling the growing scandal a “shady business.”

Jean-Claude Mas, 72, the founder and CEO of French company Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) has not been seen or heard of in public since the scandal broke, potentially affecting 300,000 women around the world. His company is accused of using sub-standard industrial silicone in some of its implants, which were sold globally before being taken off the market in 2010.

…French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand told Europe 1 radio on Saturday. “They have to answer for their actions…”

Mas was briefly questioned by police in November 2010 but has never been summoned to court. A judicial source has told Reuters, however, that between four and six executives could be charged by a Marseilles criminal court for aggravated fraud.

Also on Saturday, France’s national health insurance agency said it planned to sue over the PIP affair, alleging dishonest practices and fraud. Defendants will be listed as “persons unknown,” a routine practice in France when the identity of an opposing party or parties is not yet determined…

France’s health ministry urged removal on Friday of the 30,000 PIP implants purchased by French women and said public health funds will be used to finance those extractions…

French health officials discovered last year that PIP was using a home-made brew of silicone, an industrial variety not approved by health authorities…

PIP was able to continue its ruse because periodic checks by regulators were pre-announced and even suppliers of the industrial oil used to make the silicone were lied to, according to the former executive.

Sounds like safety checks in France don’t vary especially from American standards. Even if distributors weren’t among the in-crowd which knew enough to specify “good ones or bad ones” the quality of the gel in the implants should have been apparent to the most basic of quality checks in the receiving departments of those supplying physicians. These were, after all, products for surgical procedures.

The motives of PIP’s corporate barons was the usual – greed. Idiots who prattle about this being a guiding light of capitalism and therefore forgivable should be required to pick up the tab for women who are faced with procedures to remove and replace the PIP implants. Maybe they should be implanted into the testicles of the management staff and compliant inspectors, distributors and physicians, who managed to rationalize away any responsibility for medical safety.

Governments worldwide must boost internet accessibility in order to nurture democracy and economic development, entrepreneur Loic Le Meur said at the prestigious LeWeb technology conference in Paris which he founded.

The conference brought together some 3,500 of the world’s top digital experts and entrepreneurs from 60 countries to discuss the state of the technology industry and its relationship with economic growth.

“Stage one is to help provide those tools to help people express themselves and get more democracy,” Le Meur told AlertNet, the global humanitarian news service run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“The next stage is economic development…”

But, while delegates focused attention on how to develop internet technology and smart phones, others outside the conference have pointed to how the more accessible, standard mobile phone can aid social and economic development.

Millennium Development Goal 8 – one among a framework of global targets set in 2000 by the United Nations to be met by 2015 to try and alleviate poverty – stipulates that new technologies, especially information and communications technologies, should be made available to all, in cooperation with the private sector.

Currently, at least 5.4 billion of the planet’s seven billion people have access to mobiles, which means the MDG 8 target is achievable…

Further development of the existing technology used for text messaging known as SMS (short message service) on basic mobile phones could help African farmers get their products to market in Europe for example, said Raul Zambrano, an ICT policy advisor…in New York.

“Most people have a simple, basic SMS voice phone – there are only about 15 percent of people in Africa who can use the Internet,” Zambrano added. “Most of those people are in Egypt and South Africa, the big countries, but in the smaller, poorer countries like Malawi and Mozambique there are very low penetration rates,” he told AlertNet…adding that by 2015 about 80 percent of people will have a device which can connect to the Internet.

Developing countries also need Internet service centers where people can undertake basic business transactions and access basic documents such as birth certificates, land titles and passports to help achieve other MDG targets, he added.

RTFA for details and differences. The Millennium Development Goal is something the best geek journalists [like Om Malik] have been covering for a spell. I expect there will be more coming as the swell of discussion and decision resulting from the conference gets out online.

Much of the developing world is skipping the landline infrastructure and going straight to cellular communications. Software developers already have systems in place in much of South Asia for online banking using SMS. Developments in agriculture marketing and sales can be accomplished without smartphones. That doesn’t mean they are better – but, adequate also often means sufficient.

France’s metal thieves, renowned for targeting motorways and football stadiums and causing mayhem on railways for copper, bronze or brass have turned their attentions to a new prey: cemeteries.

In the early hours of Monday morning, an “organised group” of criminals pillaged the cemetery of an eastern French village, ripping metal crosses, ornaments and even the doors of funereal vaults in the worst such case in France.

Residents of Hoerdt, population 4,500, in Alsace were appalled to discover 375 tombs had been stripped of all their metal objects when they came to pay their respects to departed loved ones on Monday. “I think it’s horrible,” said Agnès, whose father was buried in the cemetery last week and whose tomb was targeted. “It’s deplorable, there’s no more respect. If it’s for money than My God where are we heading?,” she asked.

“Crosses, metal palm fronds, vases, steles – a third of our cemetery’s 900 tombs have been plundered,” mayor Denis Riedinger told The Daily Telegraph…

The mayor was personally affected as robbers had ripped off the metal cross from his father’s tomb in the site a couple of hundred yards from the town’s edge. “This is plain metal theft, there is no ideological connotation,” he said. My disgust has now given way to anger that a few individuals in search of a quick profit are capable of plunging an entire village into shock…”

Metal theft is nothing new in France, but, as elsewhere, soaring metal prices have led to a steep rise in reported robberies – up 123 per cent in the past three years…”At first it was the work of itinerant delinquents, teams who roamed the country. Now, in fifty per cent of cases it is the work of sedentary inhabitants who steal from their own region,” said Colonel Stéphane Ottavi of the OCLDI police unit in charge of tracking such crimes…

Thousands of bronze vases have been stolen from cemeteries across the US in recent months, including the theft of a three-foot copper sword from Abraham Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield.

In the UK, a recent outbreak of metal thefts has seen brass band instruments, door numbers from houses, manholes and the railings from a baby’s grave been swiped.

When you catch the creeps – throw away the key. Cells are exactly the right place for criminals engaged in theft like this – stealing from families, from the public, from history. Put them to work at appropriate, menial tasks.

I don’t know about the rest of you – I’m going shopping
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that EU treaty changes rather than eurobonds will help solve the eurozone debt crisis.

Ahead of European Commission proposals for bonds backed by all 17 eurozone states, she said what was really needed was a political response. Mrs Merkel argued if there was to be a debate on eurobonds, it should be at the end, not the middle of the crisis…

The eurobond plans, due to be presented by the commission on Wednesday, are attracting increasing support, despite Germany’s opposition. Greece’s new Prime Minister, Lucas Papademos, said on Tuesday that eurobonds “or similar tools could provide the means to overcome the crisis”.

Addressing Germany’s confederation of employers in Berlin on Tuesday, the German chancellor said that if changing treaties proved too difficult on an EU level, they would be dealt with instead by the 17 members of the eurozone.

“We have to change the construction of the euro area,” she said. “Treaty changes are for me an immediate part of solving the crisis, the political response to a politically derived confidence crisis.”

Reports on Monday suggested that Britain would accept a “narrow” amendment of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty covering the eurozone in return for a deal on the EU’s working time directive.

Although full details of the commission’s proposals are not yet known, a leaked draft document indicates they would involve three options

An extensive scheme that would completely replace national bonds and would require each eurozone government to guarantee the debt of other countries

A lesser scheme that would see national bonds partially replaced with eurobonds up to a limit that could relate to how closely a country adhered to strict rules.

The replacement of some national bond issues with a limit on guarantees

Flip-flopping hardly describes the way this crisis is going down to the wire. And maybe beyond.

Now, the lies accepted to justify sleazy economic practices is haunting the politicians who hoped to benefit. Except an increase in risk supersedes an increase in power. It’s looks more likely to me they will have to shrink the European Union back to the nations which can deal responsibly with each other on debt and currency. That’s a single-digit number.

“Don’t eat the knishes!”
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

French President Nicolas Sarkozy branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a liar” in a private conversation with President Barack Obama that was accidentally broadcast to journalists during last week’s G20 summit in Cannes.

“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on, enabling reporters in a separate location to listen in to a simultaneous translation.

“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama replied, according to the French interpreter…

The conversation was not initially reported by the small group of journalists who overheard it because it was considered private and off-the-record. But the comments have since emerged on French websites and can be confirmed by Reuters…

Obama and Netanyahu have had a rocky relationship as U.S. efforts to broker a Middle East peace deal have foundered, with the U.S. president openly criticizing Jewish settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories.

It was unclear why exactly Sarkozy had criticized Netanyahu. However, European diplomats have largely blamed Israel for the breakdown in peace talks and have expressed anger over Netanyahu’s approval of large-scale settlement building.

During their bilateral meeting on November 3, on the sidelines of the Cannes summit, Obama criticized Sarkozy’s surprise decision to vote in favor of a Palestinian request for membership of the U.N. cultural heritage agency UNESCO…

The October 31 UNESCO vote marked a success for the Palestinians in their broader thrust for recognition as a sovereign state in the U.N. system — a unilateral initiative fiercely opposed by Israel and the United States.

Don’t let democracy, sovereignty, history get in the way of the relationship between a global imperial power and a regional hitman. Power, greed, are still the signal deciders in American foreign power. Choosing to work closely with a liar like Netanyahu is not a new choice.

Leave it up to Fibber McGee and Molly
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

President Hu Jintao of China will arrive in Cannes, France, this week pondering a plea from Europe for tens of billions of dollars to help the continent get out of its debt crisis. And President Obama will arrive with a smile, some hearty handshakes, and his own plea: that Greece get its act together and that Europe fix its economic ills, which he has called one of the biggest drags on the United States’ own ailing economy…

The last few months may well end up being an inflection point, in which the United States, though easily still the world’s leading power, no longer has quite the responsibility or the burden it once did. The pattern has been evident in the Arab Spring, with the American military playing mostly a supporting role in Libya, and now in the European financial crisis, with Asian money coming to aid the Europeans…A significant difference in policy between Obama and traditional Cold Warriors in both of the TweedleDeeDum parties.

In many ways, the situation is a natural evolution of the campaign promises made by Mr. Obama in 2008, when he vowed to turn away from the Bush administration’s more unilateral approach.

As president, Mr. Obama is now overseeing the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and has emphasized multilateral diplomacy in all its messy forms. He refused to consider American intervention in Libya until the United Nations approved a resolution supporting it, and then he stepped back and allowed France and Britain to take the lead though American military help remained essential…We only have about 174 countries to go to withdraw from the rest of our foreign military bases.

Mr. Obama’s backers say that he is simply acknowledging reality and developing a clear-eyed strategy for what the United States can and cannot do and that he ultimately may prove right in diagnosing Europe’s economic problems and its need to take difficult steps to fix them…

Arriving in Cannes on Thursday, Mr. Obama will be trying to balance providing that leadership while not taking on any of the additional burden — particularly financial — that such leadership often requires…

But for all the acceptance that the United States will no longer be the world’s policeman and financier, the emerging strategy carries risks…

The American military remains the world’s most formidable, and the most likely to be called on to back American allies like Israel, Japan and South Korea.

Of course, no one expects South Korea or Japan to invade one of their neighbors – and start a war.

A Frenchwoman found proof of the maxim that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes, when she received a bill in the name of a grandfather who died in 1949.

“I didn’t think I’d hear any more about my grandfather, whom I never knew,” Martine Courtois told AFP, after reading the 13-euro land inheritance tax bill addressed to her grandfather, Pierre Barotte.

“Everything was done legally at the time, we didn’t get any demands from the tax office,” said Courtois, who lives in the small eastern town of Bruyeres.

The local tax office said the situation was entirely normal and “happens all the time” when an unpaid tax debt, through interest or late payment fees, goes beyond 12 euros. “The day the money due goes over this threshold, the machine gets going,” a tax spokesman told AFP, asking not to be named…

Courtois has not paid the bill and instead sent a letter to the tax office: “My grandfather died in 1949, please do what’s necessary.”

I was looking around to see if there was a more detailed version of this tale. Ended up returning to this publication of the AFP release in the Telegraph. I thought about explaining what happened – and then read the comments from typical Kool Aid Party-types whose presumption always is that someone in government bears individual responsibility.

Though it does seem to give patent-leather-libertarians an opportunity to vent their spleen. A recurrent image in a world containing politicians like Ron Paul.

Wow – we could sell these to FEMA

The French army top-brass were left red-faced when after a mobile command post worth 600,000 euros complete with military computers, was stolen…

The modular command post system, which resembles a cargo container, was discovered during the search of a warehouse in Bobigny, northeast of Paris, that had been rented by a man suspected of fraud…

The army noticed the command post was missing from its Montlhery barracks south of Paris during an inventory on July 18. Investigators suspect someone inside the barracks of involvement with the theft as the command unit can only be moved by a flatbed truck.

The Le Parisien newspaper reported the command post was supposed to have been sent to the Ivory Coast, where former colonial ruler France has a large military presence supporting a United Nations peacekeeping mission.

A 46-year-old Ivorian national and another suspect have been arrested and another two other suspects are being investigated, the local magistrate said.

Heartwarming to learn that military services outside the United States have traditions comparable to Sergeant Bilko. And it’s just as easy to steal from the French Army as it is from Uncle Sugar.