PARIS, Wednesday, March 1, 2006 - In a rare radio moment, Radio France-Info broadcast remarks made by GW Bush, somewhere in the world today, talking about IE-ran. Unfortunately Radio France chose to overspeak the free world's supremo in French, thus hindering us from hearing his remarks in total VO. How does he say 'nuclear?'

Apparently, it will be okay for Russia to treat Iran's nuclear waste and return it to them as weapons-grade plutonium. The worst would be for the Iranians to do it themselves. In addition, GW Bush said that it was a major non-non to spread the knowledge of making A-bombs, and Iranians must be prevented from looking it up on Google at all costs.

Meanwhile, India is eagerly awaiting the American supremo's arrival so they can tell him how many Boeings they intend to purchase, eternally hoping to get a better deal than they got from Chirac for the Airbuses last week.

Chirac is back in France, bravely eating chicken at the featherless Salon d'Agriculture, which is moaning about low attendance numbers. The president always gets to go the first day, last Saturday, and the presidential candidates have been hitting it this week. De Villepin, popularity slumping over his crummy employment 'contact' for unemployed kids, gobbled up some chicken, heaved a lamb, and kissed the best-looking of the Blondes d'Aquitaine on Tuesday.

More meanwhile, France has locked up its edible fine-feathered friends, while the whole world lays on boycotts on birdstuff from France. Bird hunters, usually whining about this and that, are out in force with their telescope glasses, eyeballing the birds returning from Africa, doing something useful for a change. One comment - with TV showing some kind of heron - "This bird is a bit tuckered out after a 4000 km flight from Africa." The bird looked like one of its legs had a cramp, from a too-short seat I suppose.

Another meanwhile, up on the Baltic some poor pussycat has turned up dead from this bird fever and the whole world is going gaga about keeping Miou-Miou locked up inside. Then somebody says, "Hey! What about my Fido? We're locking him up too." This is getting serious when the dogs and cats of this world can't run around outside as free as birds.

There's a bunch of judicial news too - major terrorist on trial - innocence iffy, but he's been locked up 10 years already, before the trial, which has just begun. Another guy is charged with poisoning competitors of his tennis-playing kid, to kind of improve his game chances. Some gang kidnapped a dude, tortured him and then bumped him off, and now it has become a 'hate' crime because the victim was Jewish, and the whole country is out marching to protest. Now the cops tell us about similar crimes, kidnapping with ransom demands - but unrelated to the 'gang' job. The so-called 'brain' of the outfit escaped to the Cote d'Ivoire but the cops down there busted him. French prosecutors are still sore with all the perps who won't confess to their crimes. They say it places a heavy burden on the judicial process, having to have proof of guilt. Along this line a parliamentary commission has just finished investigating an investigating prosecutor about the overturned convictions of a whole slew of folks who were convicted of heavy pedophile crimes, who all served long terms in custody. But I digress.

Monday night's dreaded 'Orange Alert' for Tuesday snow for the Paris area turned out to be a false alarm for the city unless it happened while I was asleep, but the weather is keeping to its winter mode with temperatures lower than normal, skies grayer than usual, and it's rotten cold. Nothing to write home about.

- Goodblognight from Paris

Copyright © 2006 - Ric Erickson, MetropoleParis

Editor's Note:

What's he talking about? You could look it up.

Yahoo! newswire indexed on France
The Tocqueville Connection (AFP wire items)
Les revues de presse de RFI (daily summary of French press in English)