French press review 24 May 2011

There's bad news, indignation, and total chaos on this morning's front pages. And the insides of the papers aren't great either.

"Debt, China, Volcano," reads the main headline at business daily Les Echos, "Markets going down the tubes!" Traders are nervous.

The Paris Stock Exchange saw prices fall by more than two per cent yesterday while Milan is down more than three per cent. The euro is below the one dollar 40 cents mark for the first time in eight weeks.

Italy is the latest eurozone economy to have its rating downgraded by the people at Standard and Poor's, and an analyst interviewed by Les Echos says that the sovereign debt crisis is threatening the stability of the single currency.

Le Monde looks at another disaster zone . . . the French Socialist Party, where Martine Aubry is shaping up to do battle with François Holland in a limp-wristed attempt to find a socialist big and bad enough to send in against nasty Nick Sarkozy in next year's presidential election. Yawn!

Right-wing Le Figaro's main headline reads "Anne Sinclair's struggle to save DSK".

Anne Sinclair is, you will understand, Mrs DSK, an unenviable task at the best of times, a real nightmare since he-indoors is confined to his residence, and she has to do the shopping, walk the dog and find a new place for the world's most famous house-husband to live while awaiting trial.

As Robert Badinter said recently on French TV, DSK is very lucky to have her.

The indignation comes from Spain, and is all over the front pages of communist L'Humanité and left-leaning Libération.

Spanish youth is fed up with government, any government, and is staging a popular revolt, more than vaguely reminiscent of this spring's wave of unrest in the Arab world.

The Libé editorial opens with the highly questionable assertion that "democracy is born in public squares."

It was not so in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The occupation of Madrid's Puerta del Sol has more to do with Spain's economic crisis, with 45 per cent of those under the age of 25 unemployed and negative gross domestic product for the past two years.

If you wonder how gross domestic product can be negative, I'm assured that it means that the country spends more on imported goods and services than it actually produces at home. The obvious rersult is an increase in the national debt and, sure enough, Spain's debt has doubled in the past four years.

Communist L'Humanité says most Europeans have rejected the austerity budgets imposed on their governments by the European money masters. It will all end badly.

There was a major alert in the countryside around the southern English city of Southampton at the weekend, when a huge white tiger was spotted in a field.

The army was called in, traffic was diverted, play was stopped at a nearby golfcourse.

Then marksmen shot the savage beast with tranquiliser darts, and the authorities moved in only to discover that it was nothing more dangerous than a stuffed toy.

The white tiger, with a few additional puncture marks in his butt from the tranquilising darts, is now awaiting collection by his owner in the Southampton lost and found.