I love the fact that this is a Ferrari from Corsica - I can tell with the plate.

I'd swear this car belonged to some local mafiosi before getting there - which probably means it was seized by the French police inbetween, and then crushed. Maybe they don't sell afterwards cars of people who were implied in organized crime ?

I am glad to present you... Whiscash !

In Onkalo (Finland) where there is another nuclear waste dump being built, experts have yet taken a decision : they will try to spread myths about the place, trying to convince future generations that this is not a place to enter.

If you want to learn more, a MOVIE has been done about that place : google "Into Eternity".

Just one remark : by "Westerners", you mean here American, or, well, err, Unitedstatian. (though it might be quite the same in English-speaking Canada)

I am not sure at all that here in France or there in Germany it works the same way. Parents can get much more exigent, depending on how they were raised.

Sorry, but I did a comment that was I think interesting given the topic, and because I unfortunately double-posted it, I think both versions were cut off. Is it possible to retrieve it, since I lost my text ?
Thanks,

As a Frenchman, I feel the right to react to that article.

There are some interesting points and some problems in that paper. It is right for example that strikes tend not to happen during school vacations : for instance, the last massive wave of protests and strikes came to an end two weeks ago, mainly due to the All Saints holiday (and also because of the change in the minds of union leaders in the CFDT, the moderate union).

However, this paper presents a really idealized image of the French way of life. The number of Frenchmen going on vacations is decreasing due to the economic conditions : now it's more than 50% of them that didn't went on vacations last Summer ( http://www.france24.com/fr/20090521-tourisme-francais-vacances-crise-financiere-social-pouvoir-achat?pop=TRUE ). And you can think the number of people going on winter vacations is even lower.
Also, students generally don't go on strike on June : the final exams start in May, and I don't know any big student strike that lasted after April - the last big one, in 2006, came to an end at the beginning of April, when the government ditched its plan.

People have less and less time to allocate to this kind of demonstration, that only a few portion of the workforce can undertake : people working for private companies may support strike waves, as polls show, but it is very hard for them to enter the movement, especially since new laws of the Sarkozy era made it harder to strike and easier for the company to fire their employees. (there is a lot of part-time workers and contracts with defined deadline, and renewal of the contract is never ensured)

However, it is right that people tend to go easily on strike in November / December, as they maybe feel more grumpy because of the weather, and during the winter.

(oh, and that second picture with that "stop la grève" motto is actually against strikes ; it comes from small student groups satellized by the incumbent UMP party)

1) 200 000 persons worked on the site of the Chernobyl blast, as "liquidators". Half of them have yet died because of irradiation-linked illnesses, the other will do in the near future.

2) Chernobyl would have ended in a 15-megatons explosion (the equivalent of the Castle Bravo nuclear test, the bigger ever performed by the US), weren't the courage of miners the Soviet authorities had sent to dig a tunnel under the plant in order to stop the melt fuel from falling into a water-table that was under the reactor. Everything as far as Minsk (the Bielorussian capital) would have been vitrified.
All those hundreds of miners are now dead.

3) Even in countries were the nuclear industry appears as "safe", it is not.
In France, there are big accidents every year, but nobody speaks about it, except the workers' unions. ( http://www.dissident-media.org/infonucleaire/news_0_1.html in French, it says that there have been 3 accidents in the last 3 months of 2009)
In the US, it is only because of luck that a major accident was avoided at the beginning of 2002: a hole was discovered in the head of the David-Besse nuclear reactor, and it wouldn't have been found if the inspector hadn't been zealed enough.

The nuclear industry might be safe, but it would be more reassuring if they were telling us more about what they're doing.

About the 35-hours week: the thing is, the first project of law planned that employers would be able to "sum up the amount of hours made" only over, like, one month. The chosen plan (under the pressure of employers' unions) extended this to one year: somebody would even be able to work like 70 hours a week during 6 months, and never during the over 6 months.

The obvious consequence: this diminished highly the effect of the law over unemployment. After this, right-wing governments came and said, "look, this isn't working" ; they weakened considerably the application of the law, and now, the average worked time per week in France is, like, 37 hours a week.

However, the Jospin government (those who made the 35-hours law) claimed that it prompted the creation of more than 300 000 jobs.

Concerning what Joe Jackson said: unfortunately, it's deeply encrusted in the Protestant mind that working hard is a way to prove yourself that you are one of the "elected". The US government has to overcome cultural difficulties if it wants to share working hours, but given the political superiority of capital over labour since the 1970s, I don't think that they are even going to try.
This is too bad, because productivity decreases with working hours: the more you work, the less your work is productive. This is why France has the second productivity per hour in the world, after Luxembourg.
(But this is also a consequence of employers choosing more machines over more workers, indeed)

You play it with a ball using your foots, so it's called "football", you unevolved American.

Failed to insert the pic, so here's the link: http://www.tangolab.net/lebloglab/images/2007/Marzo/Fraudeur_RATP.jpg

(for those who don't know: pictured here is Jacques Chirac, former French president, probably when he was mayor of Paris)