Free Republic

France’s campaign in Mali exposes Europe’s unpreparedness for 21st-century war. WITH WELL-ARMED radical Islamist insurgents closing in last winter on Mali’s capital, Bamako, French President François Hollande suddenly decided to defend Western civilization. Plunging in the polls as the most unpopular French president since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958, he just might have had ulterior motives; diverting hostile public opinion at home with a military escapade abroad is a tried and true tactic for floundering chiefs of state. Be that as it may, French troops, mainly Foreign Legion, began deploying to Mali in Operation Serval on January 11....

Chinese authorities have launched an investigation against French drugmaker Sanofi following a news report that accused the company of bribing hundreds of Chinese doctors in 2007. An unnamed whistleblower told the Guangzhou-based, state-owned 21st Century Business Herald that the French company had paid 503 doctors a total of $274,000 to prescribe Sanofi products, disguising the payments as grants for research programs. China’s official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday that the Beijing municipal health bureau was teaming up with disciplinary authorities to look into the research programs and determine whether the payments were actually bribes. …

The two most ardent boosters of the Normandy invasion were Stalin and Harry Hopkins ... Churchill famously urged that the advance on Germany continue from already-won bases in Italy and elsewhere in south-central Europe. Stalin’s demand for the big U.S.-British push in northern France, however, prevailed. According to the tally of one peeved letter to the editor in the New York Times, this would put the Allies on track to open their ninth front. Of course, in order to gather sufficient forces for the June 1944 D-Day invasion, men and equipment, particularly landing craft, had to be withdrawn from the...

Israel will not enter into any new agreements with the EU under the terms of the recently published settlement guidelines, diplomatic sources said Thursday following a meeting on the matter chaired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Under the guidelines, Israel would have to sign a territorial clause reneging claims to the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan before entering in any future agreement with the EU. The guidelines also forbid any dealings with Israeli entities over the Green Line. The sources said that Israel would ask for further clarifications about the guidelines. It was not immediately clear whether Israel...

Forth In A Series Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Unlike any leader before him, Napoleon Bonaparte engineered his rise to power, almost out of nowhere, not only through military prowess — but also through his mastery of propaganda to stir the public. "What strikes one almost immediately is the depth to which Bonaparte understood the art of propaganda and the degree to which he was personally involved in its creation," wrote historian Wayne Hanley in "The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda, 1796-1799." That's what led to Napoleon — almost a foreigner — to reach the heights of power and secure...

A French government agency responsible for maintaining the country’s secular values has recommended banning university students from wearing religious symbols such as crucifixes, Jewish skullcaps and Muslim headscarves. In a report seen by French daily Le Monde on Monday, the High Council for Integration (HCI) said it was alarmed by “growing tensions in all sectors of university life” that were undermining the country’s secular values.

As I reported in last night’s news feed, the new French Counterjihad celebrity, known everywhere only by her soubriquet “The Blonde”, was suppressed by YouTube: Google’s behemoth took all three of her videos down.