4 Dec, 2024 19:42

French parliament votes no confidence in Macron’s PM

Michel Barnier is the first prime minister since 1962 to lose a no-confidence vote

French Prime Minister Michel Barnier has lost a vote of no-confidence vote in parliament, aslawmakers on both the left and the right united to oust him.

A no-confidence motion requires 288 votesin the National Assembly. Wednesday evening’smotion received 331 votes, with the left-wing New Popular Front (NPF) and the right-wing National Rally (RN) uniting in opposition to the minority cabinet imposed by President Emmanuel Macron.

“I don’t consider it a victory,”RN’s Marine Le Pen told TF1 after the vote.“We made the choice we made to protect the French people.”

“It was not done lightly,” Le Pen added. “There was no other solution.”

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of NPF’s largest party, said thatthe outcome was “inevitable”and called for Macron’s resignation.

“Even with a Barnier every three months, Macron will not last three years,”he said on X. The French president has ruled out resigning, however.

Macron appointed Barnier in September, drawing the ire of NPF. The left-wing coalition had won the most seats in the parliament in this summer’s snap elections, as part of a pact with the president to sideline RN.But Macron then turned around and snubbed NPF in favor of a minority cabinet that relied on the tacit support of RN.

Things came to a head over the social security budget proposal, in which Barnier tried to cut spending by €40 billion ($41.87 billion) and to raise €20 billion in taxes to deal with a massive deficit. RN threatened a no-confidence vote unless the cabinet made a number of concessions to its “red lines.”

Le Pen accused the prime minister of being “extremely closed-minded and sectarian” in the budget talks and gave Barnier a deadline to meet RN’s demands, which Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin rejected.

There have been almost 150 no-confidence motions since the Fifth Republic was established in 1958. Prior to Wednesday, only one government had ever been ousted – Georges Pompidou’s, in October 1962.

Barnier is likely to stay on as a caretaker PM until Macron can appoint a replacement. It took the French president nearly two months to do so after July’s parliamentary election.Another vote is not an option, because the French constitution forbids it until at least a year has passed.

https://www.rt.com/news/608739-france-confidence-vote-barnier/

(Just before Trump was going to France, to boost Macron up, Macron only invited him to try to stop the No Confidence vote, too badMacron is a “wise guy”, a mafia term. He screwed all the parties when he lost and sided with the lefties, then he betrayed the lefties. He's lost his sparkle.)

4 Dec, 2024 20:41

British Army would last ‘six months’ in war – official

The UK is not prepared for Ukraine-level casualty rates, Alistair Carns has said

In case of an actual conflict, the UK would run out of soldiers in six months to a year, the British Ministry of Defence official in charge of personnel, Alistair Carns, has said. Carns is the under-secretary of State for veterans and people in the country’s defense ministry.He raised concerns about the size of the British Armyduring an event at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank on Wednesday.

“In a war of scale – not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine — our army, for example, on the current casualty rates would be expended — as part of a broader multinational coalition — in six months to a year,” Carns said.

He based this calculation on questionable Ukrainian claims that Russia was taking 1,500 casualties every day, which Moscow has described as closer to Kiev’s actual losses.

While this doesn’t mean the UK needs a bigger army,“it does mean you need to generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis,” he added. “The reserves are critical, absolutely central, to that process.”

Publicly available information has put the size of the British Army at 109,245 people as of October 1, which includes 25,814 volunteer reservists. Carns argued thatthe UK has a lot of catching up to do with other NATO members when it came to reserves.

His comments come just days after Britain’s Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff Rob Magowan insisted that the army would “fight tonight” if ordered.

In late October, however, British secretary of defense John Healey told Politico that the army, navy and the air force had been “hollowed out” and “underfunded”during the 14 years of Conservative Party rule. Labour had expected things to be bad, “but the state of the finances, the state of the forces, was far worse than we thought,” he added.

“The UK, in keeping with many other nations, has essentially become very skilled and ready to conduct military operations.What we have not been ready to do is to fight,” Healey said at the time.

Earlier this week, the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty claimed,citing anonymous sources, that the UK and France were discussing deploying their troops to Ukraine.

As of July, the British Army had just over 73,000 active-duty soldiers, the lowest number since 1823. The UK’s overall population was around 20 million then, and has since grown to 67 million.

The British Army was established in 1707 and is part of the UK’s armed forces along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (RAF). It is not called “royal” because a standing army is based on the parliamentary forces that fought a civil war against the crown in the 1600s.

https://www.rt.com/news/608736-british-army-six-months-war/

(Finally someone in the UK spoke the truth, instead of those blowhards, trying to initiate direct war with Russia or WWIII. The UK is in bad shape, and has been for a long time.)

(Why all of a sudden are these nutjobs Men Leaders, getting emotionally and mentally stable? Who talked to them?)

4 Dec, 2024 21:25

Scholz rules out sending German troops to Ukraine

It would be “inappropriate” to speculate on the idea before the hostilities end, the German Chancellor has said

Deployment of German troops to Ukraine is “out of the question” and it would be “inappropriate” to speculate about the proposition without peace talks starting, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said.

Scholz made the remarks on Wednesday while addressing the German parliament about remarks made earlier this week by the country’s Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock.

Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO’s top diplomats on Tuesday,Baerbock signaled that Berlin was open to the idea of sending a peacekeeping force into Ukraine. (This woman is a nutjob, why is it most always the women in Europe that want to fight wars?)

“The German side will support everything that serves peace in the future,” she said, adding that the country’s soldiers “could be deployed only under the condition of a real ceasefire.”

The remarks prompted widespread speculationon how exactly such a deployment could flesh out, yet Scholz cautioned against drawing any conclusions from Baerbock’s statement, insisting she had worded it in extremely vague terms on purpose.

“She was asked what could happen in a peace phase, and actually she tried to answer this without saying yes or no. Because it’s quite inappropriate to speculate now about what would happen later in the event of a negotiated cease-fire,” Scholz told the parliament.

The chancellor ruled out any possibility of sending troops to Ukraine before a lasting ceasefire between Moscow and Kiev was established.

“We are in agreement with the minister of defense and the foreign minister that we must do everything to ensure that this war does not become a war between Russia and NATO. And that is why sending ground troops is out of the question for me in this war situation,” he explained.

The mixed messages from German leadership come amid a string of media reports that suggested France and the UK have been considering deploying their troops to the front line in Ukraine as a peacekeeping force to observe a ceasefire in the event of Russia and Ukraine actually engaging in negotiations.

An unnamed high-ranking NATO official, who spoke to state-funded news outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (CIA cutout), suggested the true goal of the potential deployment was ensuring that European NATO members still have a say in the conflict’s resolution after US President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has reported that Western nations are considering sending as many as 100,000 “so-called peacekeepers” to Ukraine. That sizable force would effectively amount to an occupation and would only serve the purpose of buying time for Kiev to rebuild its military strength before renewing hostilities with Moscow, it warned.

https://www.rt.com/news/608740-scholz-ukraine-german-troops/

Citizen Free Press

@CitizenFreePres

==PBS AND PLANNED PARENTHOOD ARE ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK

From Breaking911==

5:10 PM · Dec 4, 2024

·17.1K Views

https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1864432183093473512

Archaeological dig at Notre-Dame unearths 2,000 years of history

ANALYSIS CULTURE1/2

The tragic 2019 fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral led to major discoveries during restoration work. Archaeologists unearthed treasures dating back from antiquity to the 19th century.Busts of the crucified face of Christ, the torso of a man wearing a tunic are some of the artifacts on display at the Musée de Cluny, a museum of medieval art in Paris, where visitors can contemplate nearly ten centuries of history. Around 30 fragments from Notre-Dame Cathedral's rood screen, a stone tribune adorned with statues, are being exhibited for the first time. The tribune formed an enclosure between the choir and the nave where the faithful were seated.

“We thought these elements had been lost forever,” said museum's director Séverine Lepape, as she revealed the sculptures, which were made in 1230.

‘It's unbelievable’: The remains were unearthed during excavations carried out prior to the reconstruction of the cathedral, after the April 2019 fire.Around 15 of the medieval sculptures were unearthed during renovation work in the 19th centuryled by French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879)

Recent excavations following the 2019 fire uncovered around thousand pieces, including 700 fragments, some of which display polychrome traces that are well preserved. "Polychromy is the coloured adornment on the surface. It tells us what people saw when they were confronted with these sculptures before the application of colours disappeared,” said Damien Berné, the curator of the exhibition Making Stones Speak. Notre Dame’s Medieval Sculptures, which ends March 16, 2025.

Delicate slivers of colour adorn these fragile artifacts: reds, blues, ochres and golds. “The rood screen is an exceptional discovery; the likes of which you only get once every hundred years. When we find a 13th-century sculpture, we're happy, but when we find 1,000, it's unbelievable," said archaeologist Christophe Besnier of the French National Institute for Preventative Archaeological Research (INRAP). "I feel privileged," added the lead archeologist for the February 2022 excavation of Notre-Dame’s transept crossing.

Few opportunities existed before the fire to study the prestigious religious building so closely. During radical restoration work overseen by Viollet-le-Duc beginning in 1843, the architect recorded observations in his journal. But it was not until 1847 that an initial excavation campaign was carried out by Théodore Vacquer on the eastern edge beneath the square in front of Notre-Dame. The construction of a car park under the square in the 1960s also allowed for the discovery of architectural ruins, and for the creation of a crypt that would display the remains.

"From an archaeological point of view, the area was relatively unknown, except for the square. Notre-Dame was considered as a historical monument, not an archaeological site," said Dorothée Chaoui-Derieux, the chief heritage curator who has coordinated all the archaeological operations at Notre-Dame decreed by the State since 2019. "We have carried out around 20 diagnostic or excavation operations as part of this project, which have uncovered nearly 2,000 years of history," she added.

Rebuilding 2000 years of history

For centuries, different occupations were superimposed on one another. The oldest levels date back to the early antiquity period. A dwelling from the very beginning of the 1st century was unearthed at a depth of 3.50 metres in the Soufflot cellar, in the heart of the cathedral. Remains related to housing and crafts from the Low Roman Empire were discovered under the cathedral’s square.

The excavations also made it possible to identify remains from the Middle Ages prior to the construction of the cathedral, including a large Carolingian building, dating back to the period when the Carolingian family of aristocrats ruled much of western Europe from 750 to 887.

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20241204-archeological-dig-at-notre-dame-paris-unearths-2-000-years-of-history

>>22108631

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The foundations of the cathedral were also uncovered for the first time. "This really illustrates the level of activity on the site dating from the very first century up until our era," said Christophe Besnier. "We have collected clues from almost every period. We will be able to reconstruct more than 2,000 years of history on this part of the Île de la Cité," he said, referring to the island on the River Seine where the cathedral is built.

For Besnier, each excavation is unique. Even if the discovery of the rood screen was an exceptional find, he refused to rate the discoveries. "Finding Gallic coins from the end of the 1st century BC in the Soufflot cellar was just as moving," said Besnier.

Chaoui-Derieux agreed. "Maybe they are less spectacular, but the discoveries of Merovingian layers on the south side of the cathedral and the 30-metre-long Carolingian building are just as important from a scientific point of view," he said.’

A ‘data mine’

The 2022 discovery of two coffins beneath the nave of Notre-Dame were particularly publicised in French media reports.While the identification of Canon Antoine de La Porte was made possible by the epitaph on his coffin, the identity of the other occupant remained shrouded in mystery.

In September, archaeologist Éric Crubézy finally announced that it could be the poet Joachim du Bellay, who was buried in the cathedral in the 16th century, according to analyses carried out at the Forensic Institute of the Toulouse University Hospital.

Yet doubts remain, according to Chaoui-Derieux. "The studies are still far from over. There are other signs suggesting this isn’t Joachim du Bellay but another individual."

Notre-Dame hasn't finished revealing its secrets. Despite the completion of the restoration project, teams of archaeologists are still busy. "The work is not over. There are still important analyses to be carried out over the next two or three years," said Besnier. A year-long effort to stabilise all the fragments of

the rood screen and its polychromy is currently underway. The discovery will also lead to a 3D reconstruction.

During the work, the rubble left after the fire was also carefully collected and inventoried. "This is considered as archaeological remains which are now accessible to the scientific community," said Chaoui-Derieux. "There are specialists in wood, stone and metal who come to our reserves to take samples of these materials. They will be able to tell us more, especially about the construction of the framework, or about the different phases of restoration.

It is a real source of data."

The fire that ravaged the cathedral and moved the entire world will have indirectly helped advance research, said Chaoui-Derieux. "It is obvious that no one would have wanted this disaster, but once it happened, we tried to find the silver lining. This is a tragedy which helped us enrich our knowledge."

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20241204-archeological-dig-at-notre-dame-paris-unearths-2-000-years-of-history