Agence France-Presse ("AFP") could not wait to begin the new year with upbeat reports on France.
POLICE RELIEVED BY CALM NEW YEAR'S CELEBRATIONS*
PARIS January 1, 2006 (AFP) - Hundreds of thousands of revellers thronged the famous Champs-Elysees in Paris to greet the New Year overnight, while sporadic arson attacks elsewhere left nervous French authorities hoping to avoid a repeat of last month's full-blown riots.
FRANCE TURNS THE PAGE ON 'ANNUS HORRIBILIS' OF 2005*
PARIS January 1, 2006 (AFP) - France welcomed in the New Year against a backdrop of burning cars, but was spared the explosion of violence feared by authorities as the country said farewell on Sunday to a year of crisis and setbacks.
As Pave regulars know, the above happy headlines didn't pan out.
ANOTHER GREAT YEAR AHEAD!
Photo Caption: (Reuters) Rioters challenge police under the Eiffel tower during clashes following New Year celebrations in Paris January 1, 2006. [Photo Credits: Reuters/Philippe Wojazer | Hat tip: Carine]
A state of emergency, an extraordinary police deployment, and a limited ban on petrol sales did not prevent record holiday torchings and detentions (+28% and +33%, respectively, above last year). Today's sign of French normalcy: the observance by youths** of French New Year traditions.
AFP, obviously twice-shy, waited four days before reporting the below New Year's story. Just to be sure all the swimmy facts had settled. [Hat tip: Andy]
GANG TERRORIZES TRAIN IN FRANCE*
PARIS January 5, 2006 (AFP) - A gang of more than 20 youths -- thought to be North African immigrants† -- terrorized hundreds of train passengers in a rampage of violence, robbery and sexual assault on New Year's Day, French officials said yesterday.The five-hour-long criminal frenzy was "totally unacceptable," French President Jacques Chirac told reporters. "Those guilty will be found and punished, as they deserve."
The gang of between 20 and 30 youths boarded the train, heading from Nice on the French Riviera to Lyon, in eastern France, early on Jan. 1, as it carried 600 passengers home from New Year's Eve partying overnight. Police in Nice, meanwhile, said they had escorted the group of drunken youths and put them on the train Sunday to ensure they did not cause trouble in the city.
Brillant police work. Unlike "dark America" where criminals are put in prison, enlightened France abhors criminal incarceration. Instead the French police simply ship criminals around to different jurisdictions.
Police said they thought the gang was part of a bigger group of 100 youths from the Marseille area who had gone to Nice and nearby seaside resorts for New Year's Eve, taking advantage of a special $1 New Year's Day train fare.News of the violence shocked France... The opposition Socialist Party said it viewed the incident with "astonishment." It said "such acts show a worrying lack of security" and questioned why it took so long for police to rescue the passengers and why so few arrests were made.
Les socialistes français, masters of comic litotes.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has championed hard-line security policies in France, partly blamed the state rail company SNCF for not communicating better with the police. "The problem is that law-enforcement services didn't know that there was a promotional fare going," he said.
That "very special movement" has moved onto the SNCF. [Hat tips: ¡No Pasarán! and E-Nough!]
PASSENGERS ROBBED ON THE RER D*
January 8, 2006 (TF1) - Police questioned 13 youths, from among a gang of 20, who had robbed commuters on the RER of MP3 players and cell phones. The gang of 20 "jeunes de type africain", according to police, boarded the train [scil., RER D Melun-Paris] at Savigny-the-Temple (Seine-et-Marne).
That evening, E-Nough! reports: "a bus has also been attacked in Vigneux-sur-Seine (Essone - suburbs of Paris again) by about ten, hooded people who threw stones at the bus. Nobody was hurt."
And more recently this:
GRADUAL RETURN TO NORMAL ON THE RER E*
January 17, 2006 (TF1) - The E line of the RER, as well as the entire East Transilien network, were disrupted Monday morning, when some conducters exercised their right to withdraw [scil., refuse to work] because of incidents the day before at Chénay-Gagny station (Seine-Saint-Denis). Youths "in significant numbers" immobilized an RER E train by pulling the alarm repeatedly. Some stoning occurred and a window broken. While the train was stopped at the platform the police intervened to dislodge the group using tear gas. Eight persons were questioned.
Bonne et heureuse année !
* Absolutely no Muslims sighted during the writing of this report.
** Dom: "We have to say that, and it is important to also understand the real nature of these movements, there is no ethnic or religious basis of this movement, as we can see in some other parts of the world. But it is true that the feeling of discrimination, the feeling of maybe not having the same equal chance... but what is interesting, is that most of these young people, they want to be 100 percent French."
† This is the sort of reportorial fact that is almost impossible to nail down without a blood work-up -- or a casual glimpse of prosopographic detail -- or interviewing a few of the assaulted passengers.
PFFT (What is this?): La France normale 4 | Rayonnement français 0
Bonjour,
On peut jaser sur la situation en France dans les banlieues.
Mais les yankees peuvent-ils donner des leçons ?
Un exemple:
Il y a peu un article dans "le Figaro" sur la MS 13.Et ce n'est pas triste.
Mais laissons les yankees en parler eux-mêmes:
[M. AB/AY here cuts and pastes half a lengthy Newsweek article on the Mara Salvatrucha gang in America. If you'd like to read the article in its entirety, it can be found here. Providing the whole article was too much work for M. AB/AY, as it required clicking to a second page. But then M. AB/AY has nothing really to say, just a lengthy cut-and-paste to hog the thread's real estate.
The Management]
Et cela continue....the
Good luck for your country with MS-13 !
AB/AY, go to this site to see how to use html tags. Use the "A href" (anchor) to link to an article, then you don’t have to cut and paste it. You can also use tags for bold and italics. (I can't show you here, as the tags mess up the post if not used correctly)
The linked article here lists these figures:
Nicolas Sarkozy avait annoncé mercredi que 1.000 à 1.500 policiers seraient affectés dès 2006 à "un service national de la police ferroviaire", généralisant ainsi un service créé en Ile-de-France en 2003 et étendu en septembre à Marseille, Lyon et Lille.
In Washington Times this morning, this article lists
Travelling on the same Nice-Lyon service yesterday, Mr. Sarkozy said the new force would comprise 2,540 officers, of whom 700 would be newly recruited into the police.
"What it will mean is 250 patrols every day on trains in France. The idea is to get it through to certain [violent gangs] that impunity on our regional trains is a thing of the past," he said.
Mais laissons les yankees en parler eux-mêmes:
I instead will let the French speak….(from the article linked above) In a recent poll for Ouest-France newspaper, 32 percent of those questioned said they felt unsafe on French trains, either often or occasionally.
I ride the Metro in DC (where the MS 13 article linked above takes place). I would bet that the number of riders who feel unsafe is much lower than your 32 percent. But it is a different kind of violence you experience. MS 13 is a drug/crime gang, and a lot of their violence is gang on gang. So comparing French hoodlums on trains and MS 13 is like comparing apples and oranges. Both are bad, however.
Rosbif fiddlers face the music
By Charles Bremner and Marie Tourres
[M. x cannot manage more than cut-and-pasting an article in its entirety in this thread. He has nothing original to contribute, just chewing up Pave real estate and Pave bandwidth.
If you would like to read the off-topic article Mr. x shoveled into this thread, it can be found here.
The Management]
