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A new French report says the government should tax the online ad revenue of Google (GOOG) , Facebook and other Internet portals to support the arts: The report, handed to Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand on Wednesday, says Google and other Internet portals should be slapped with a new tax on their online ad revenues in France to fund the development of legal outlets for buying books, movies and especially music on the Internet.

ATTENTION: IMAGES ARE SHOCKING . http://www.fdesouche.com/articles/70467#/ (SHORT SUBJECT :: MY PAL RACHID) Court métrage – 1995 – Mon copain Rachid - Réalisé par Philippe Barassat – Avec Jonathan Reyes, Nordine Mezaache, Mathieu Demy et avec la participation de Frédéric Mitterrand (SHORT SUBJECT :: MY PAL RACHID) This video, with intro and voice over by Frederic Mitterrand has surfaced. Frederic Mitterrand, already in hot water in France for his impassioned defense of child rapist Roman Polanski, and his autobiographical "confessions" of participating in "sex tourism" to poor, impoverished third world countries to patronize brothels for sex with young boys. French Minister...

When he took the post of culture minister of France last June, Frédéric Mitterrand probably did not think that a four-year-old tell-all book could come back to haunt him. But this week his admission in a 2005 autobiography that he paid for sex with “boys” in Thailand became the subject of a campaign to oust him from the cabinet of President Nicolas Sarkozy. The reason for the sudden interest in Mr. Mitterrand’s prose was his quick and energetic defense last month of the film director Roman Polanski, who is fighting extradition to the United States from Switzerland over a charge...

French minister in 'boy sex' row Frederic Mitterrand has rejected criticism from the far right France's Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand is facing intense pressure over a book he wrote that described paying for "young boys" in Thailand. The book was written four years ago, before he joined the government, but is back in the headlines following his impassioned support for Roman Polanski. Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland on child sex charges. Mr Mitterrand, nephew of late President Francois Mitterrand, is expected to defend himself on TV later on Thursday. Mr Mitterrand has come under attack from right and left....

France’s new culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, who has defended the filmmaker Roman Polanski against extradition charges for statutory rape, was attacked on Wednesday for his admission in a 2005 autobiography, “The Bad Life,” that he “got into the habit” of paying “young boys” for sex in Southeast Asia despite “the sordid details of this traffic.” Mr. Mitterrand, who is a nephew of former President François Mitterrand, faced calls for his resignation from the far-right National Front. Later, the Socialist Party spokesman, Benoît Hamon, told Reuters: “As a minister of culture he has drawn attention to himself by defending a filmmaker...

Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s culture minister, was under pressure to resign after it emerged that he had admitted to paying “young boys” for sexual acts while on holiday in Thailand. The revelations in his 2005 autobiography “The Bad Life” have come back to haunt Mr Mitterrand after he emerged as one of the most vociferous defenders of Roman Polanski, the film director currently detained in Switzerland in connection with an outstanding conviction for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in the US in 1977. In his book, Mr Mitterrand, the nephew of the late Socialist president François Mitterrand, wrote: “I...

Ex-president's nephew named as culture minister Link with idol of the left seen as ultimate prize He's a TV personality with a trademark booming voice, a writer, film-maker and gay activist who is not only an expert on world monarchy but part of the closest thing the French republic has to a royal family: the Mitterrand clan. Frédéric Mitterrand, the nephew of the late socialist president François Mitterrand, has been appointed France's culture minister in a highly symbolic move by Nicolas Sarkozy. The unashamedly rightwing French president has a deliberate strategy of poaching high-profile personalities from the left. Sarkozy's "rainbow...

France labeled as unacceptable a Rwandan report accusing French leaders of being involved in the 1994 genocide in which as many as 800,000 Rwandans died. The 500-page report released by the Rwandan Justice Ministry accused 13 senior French politicians, including President Francois Mitterrand and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, of supporting the preparation and execution of the genocide, The New York Times reported Thursday. The report, issued Tuesday, said French soldiers in Rwanda joined in with genocidal forces in the systematic killing and rape of minority Tutsi refugees by the Hutu majority. France supported the Hutu government in a...

Rwanda said top French politicians should "answer for their actions" as it named them in a report accusing France of arming and advising extremists in the 1994 genocide. The two-year investigation said France helped the extremists who carried out the genocide and even took part in some of the killings. It named François Mitterand, France's late former president, and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin among 33 military and political leaders.

March 24, 2008, 5:00 a.m. Chilling ConfirmationYes, Saddam Hussein was an Islamofascist threat. By Deroy Murdock As Operation Iraqi Freedom is now five years old, a new study confirms that ousting Saddam Hussein was justified and vital to U.S. national security. Though war critics hate to admit it, the Baathist dictator was up to his mustache in aid for Islamofascist terrorism. As a report from the Institute for Defense Analyses explains, “captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism.” IDA’s review of some 600,000 documents discovered in Iraq since...

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, Nov 10 (AFP) - A member of France's ruling party on Wednesday demanded the withdrawal of an advertisement for a new gay television channel which uses a famous photograph of former French and German leaders Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl holding hands at a war cemetery. The poster for Pink TV bears the slogan, "There's more to life than sex." "The memories of thousands of victims who disappeared in the fire of combat in World War One ...deserve universal respect. I am indignant at this outrageous abuse," Jean-Marc Nesme said in a letter to the veteran affairs minister. The...

François Mitterrand took many secrets with him when he died 10 years ago, but now his most startling claim is revealed. John Follain reports It is May 7, 1982, shortly after 3.30pm. Ali Magoudi, a Parisian psychoanalyst, paces back and forth awaiting the secret arrival of his next patient — whose identity, if revealed, would set off an earthquake in French politics. The figure who enters, 45 minutes late, is François Mitterrand, no less — the president of France. Magoudi discovers that his patient does not want to talk about his childhood or his dreams, but about Margaret Thatcher and...

Chatham House, the London foreign-affairs think tank, has given its seal of respectability to the claim that Britain's participation in the liberation of Iraq allowed al Qaeda to transform a bunch of ordinary Muslim youths into the suicide-killers of July 7. ...[I]t is not clear how anyone could know that the suicide-killers were solely motivated by Britain's role in Iraq. The two claims of responsibility for the operation cite a variety of reasons, making it clear that the attack on Britain was part of a broader campaign against the "infidel" West. And how could Islamist suicide-bombers be concerned only about...

PARIS, July 9 - Twenty years ago, two French secret service frogmen attached mines to the hull of a ship owned by the environmentalist group Greenpeace as it lay anchored in a New Zealand harbor, and the explosions ripped large holes in it. The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior before it could set off to protest French nuclear tests in the Pacific killed a Greenpeace photographer on board, provoking much embarrassment in Paris and the resignation of top officials. Much has become known about the government's deliberate sabotage of the vessel thanks to the tenacious pursuit of the case by...

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,...

Paris – It promises to be a big year here. The Queen is coming for the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, a murky little moment in cross-Channel diplomacy now being cast in an epic light by political celebration-seekers, and George W Bush will be over for the 60th anniversary of D-Day. I saw Bush the last time he visited the Elysée and his manners were fraying at the end of a long sweep through Europe. He referred to Jacques Chirac as "Jack" and mocked an American reporter who asked a question in French, as if he were the class jock...

France’s longest-running political and corporate corruption scandal ended yesterday with prison sentences and fines for 23 former executives at the Elf oil company and their associates.Loik le Floch-Prigent, 57, Elf’s chief executive between 1989 and 1993, authorised the embezzlement of £210 million while Elf was state-owned. The money went on bribes for politicians and middlemen and lavish lifestyles for senior Elf executives.He was jailed for five years and fined £260,000.Nadhmi Auchi, a British billionaire, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence and fined £1.4 million. Auchi, who fled his native Iraq under Saddam Hussein, was found guilty of accepting illegal...