Flight carrying badly injured soldiers out of Iraq.

BY SHAYNE NELSON

The Iraq War’s “hidden casualties” is yet another scandalous instance of media malfunction which somehow favors the warmongers amongst us. This post challenges the accuracy of the official tallies. What would the world do without citizens’ journalism?

Back in the Seventies a French journalist told me a not-so-hard-to-believe tale of the Vietnam war, from his days as a war correspondent in Vietnam for the French newspaper Le Monde. He said that every evening during that conflict, a huge jet full of dying soldiers took off from Saigon, headed to Japan. He said that war correspondents in Saigon called it ‘The Flying Coffin,’ since most of the soldiers aboard the plane, though still alive, were so badly injured that most of them would soon be dead. Read the rest of this entry »

BY SHAYNE NELSON

Le Scoop: Cécilia Sarkozy (born as Cecilia María Sara Isabel Ciganer, later Ciganer-Albéniz, born November 12, 1957 in Boulogne-Billancourt) is the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy.//PARIS (AFP)—Cecilia Sarkozy is a fiercely independent former model and PR executive unlikely to fit easily into the discreet role of first lady. // Of Jewish-Spanish ancestry, Cecilia’s foreign roots match those of Sarkozy, whose father is a Hungarian immigrant and his mother of Greek Jewish origin.//

After one hundred days on the job, Sarko is being rated by the French press. He gets kudos for putting some leftist bigwigs into his government, and A for energy, but now his spouse, Cecilia, is crowding the headlines. Read the rest of this entry »

BY SHAYNE NELSON

One of those sonorous buses, referred to by the author.

Paris the way it really is these days—the good, the bad, the ugly, and the plain annoying. The city has changed, warns the author. It’s no longer a Vincent Minelli “American in Paris” backdrop, and probably never was.

[CLICK HERE TO WATCH ONE OF THESE BUSES IN ACTUAL ACTION, AS RECORDED BY THE AUTHOR.]
In Paris of the Fifties, cars and trucks were already a nuisance, but at least they were silent. Because honking was illegal, and drivers universally respected the law. I realize that this is difficult to believe in this day and age, but it was so. Proof of the fact was shown in an article in Life magazine in 1957. The editors asked the Paris police for permission to drive around Paris honking for an hour or two, in order to photograph peoples’ reactions in the Paris streets. They got the permission, and got the photos of shocked anger by the Parisians, and thus provided proof of how the no-honking law was generally respected in those days. It was one of the things about Paris that made living there wonderful. Read the rest of this entry »

BY SHAYNE NELSON

Sarkozy gives the victory sign

A LITTLE PREAMBLE
Many Americans are disgusted with the situation in the US under Bush, and I entirely sympathize with those who think the solution is simply to leave the US, something I did about fifty years ago, but that solution doesn’t work any more. Read the rest of this entry »

BY SHAYNE NELSON
DISPATCH FROM PARIS ///•\ Dateline: 28 June 2007

Very few people today connect the brilliant strategies of Charles de Gaulle with today’s situation in France, but unless I’m mistaken, there’s a direct link. Not only does the major Paris airport bear the General’s name, but the political climate still suffers, I believe, from one of his major coups.

Back in the early Sixties, (I believe it was ‘61) the powers that be approached de Gaulle asking him to take the reins of the sovereign nation of France. The general hedged, and hesitated, and played hard to get, then finally said he’d only do so on three conditions. Read the rest of this entry »