Free Republic

BACKSTORY 11-08-2002 Dateline: PARIS American billionaire investor George Soros, on trial in a 14-year-old insider trading case, told a court Friday that he didn't have privileged information when he bought shares in French bank Societe Generale. Soros and two other businessmen are on trial at the Paris Criminal Court, accused of benefiting from insider knowledge when they bought the bank's stock in 1988 before a failed takeover that pushed up the price. "I have been in business all my life and I think I know what is insider trading and what isn't," said the president of Soros Fund Management, in...

PARIS (Reuters) - Challenging one of the great taboos of French politics, a new book has laid bare the love life of the country's amorous leaders. Sexus Politicus, published on Thursday, reveals decades of philandering, adultery and seduction at the heart of the French state, with politicians of all colours apparently sharing the same passion for extra-marital sex. According to the book, President Jacques Chirac and his predecessors Francois Mitterrand and Valery Giscard D'Estaing have juggled the fate of France, their families and a bevy of lovers with great ease, helped partly by an acquiescent media.

Italy goes after its lost terrorists 26.08.2004 By PETER POPHAM in Rome Incensed by the disappearance last weekend from Paris of convicted terrorist Cesari Battisti, Italy says it will press France and Nicaragua to return 12 other convicted left-wing terrorists who have evaded justice by living in exile. They include Alessio Casimirri, the only member of the Red Brigade gang that kidnapped and killed former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro still at liberty. He is living in Nicaragua. All the others are believed to be in France. France agreed in 2002 to return Italians who are wanted for serious crimes,...

WASHINGTON - Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a CIA campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia -- all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss -- helped us win the Cold War. Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president -- detente notwithstanding -- to place restrictions on the export of computers...