French press review 25 October 2010

Strikes, leaks and death dominate this morning's front pages. The weather's not great either. 

Right-wing Le Figaro's main headline reads: "Economy threatened by on-going strikes".

On the basis of between 200 and 400 million euros lost every time there's a national day of inaction, the eight protests so far against changes in the retirement law may have cost France as much as three billion euros.

To which the Finance Minister adds the incalculable loss of French prestige as an international competitor. 

Rubbish, says communist l'Humanité. The strikes have shown how trade union solidarity can still put the fear of God in the ruling classes. According to the communist paper, President Sarkozy is not trying to save the French economy from going bankrupt, he's trying to save his rich mates. And said mates are doing quite nicely, thank you, with 146 billion euros in cash reserves held by a handful of French companies, and a further 173 billion saved each year by the same companies because of tax concessions.

More strikes are planned for this month and next, despite the fact that the disputed changes are likely to be voted into law this Wednesday.

The day's other big story concerns the latest revelations from the internet site WikiLeaks. They have published hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon documents concerning the war in Iraq. The leaks confirm the murder of civilians by US troops, suggest a whole series of war crimes, and indicate that the Americans either tortured suspects themselves or handed prisoners over to others to have them tortured.

Libération says America is, once again, confronted with its misdeeds on the field of battle. Le Monde says the civilian population of Iraq paid the highest price, and made the failure of the US intervention inevitable. None of this will make the blindest bit of difference to anything. Most commentators say most of us should have guessed most of the revelations simply by reading the daily newspapers over the past nine years. Libé's editorial hopes that this latest episode will wake America up to the impossibility of enforcing democracy by undemocratic means. It won't.

The French political figure Georges Frêche died at the weekend. Frêche was famously expelled from the Socialist Party for saying there were too many black players in the national football team. He also said he wouldn't be surprised to learn that the police were themselves setting fire to cars during the 2005 urban riots. And he dismissed president Nicolas Sarkozy as "a little pansy wearing high heels".

Socialist leader Martine Aubry says Frêche was a "visionary". Nicolas Sarkozy has said nothing at all.

There's bad news in Le Figaro's health supplement. Apparently, mice who are kept in a lighted room 24 hours every day get fatter, quicker than mice who are allowed follow a normal day-night sequence. Being awake in the middle of the night makes you hungry. Eating in the middle of the night makes you fat. Which explains why there are no thin mice working here at RFI's early morning service.