French press review 14 June 2016

"Mourning and anger", "A shockwave", "The new terrorist threat" ... the killings at the Pulse gay nightchlub in Orlando, Florida, continue to dominate the French front pages.

DR

Le Monde's main headline reads "Mourning and anger".

Le Figaro speaks of "A shockwave" as America comes to terms with the worst such incident in its history, against the background of a presidential election campaign where the camps are sharply divided on both gun law and the attitude to adopt to Islamic fundamentalism.

La Croix's main story is headlined "The new terrorist threat," a reference to the fact that, according to the Catholic paper, Sunday's events prove that the Islamic State armed group is capable of profiting from the isolated acts of individuals whose radicalisation escapes the notice of the security services.

La Croix suggests that this massacre will have little impact on the firearms debate and even less on established attitudes to homosexuals. But there is a risk of a real rift between those calling for religious tolerance and the Islamophobes.

Libération says the target was the rainbow community of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender.

Communist daily L'Humanité is on strike but its online edition gives pride of place to the ongoing struggle against French labour law reform.

Terrorism or homophobia: what difference does it make?

You might think that it makes little difference to the families and friends of those who died or were injured in the Orlando massacre whether their loved ones were the victims of "a terrorist attack" or a "mass shooting". In fact, as Le Monde goes to some lengths to demonstrate, the words we use to describe what happened on Sunday morning in Florida carry a huge significance, as do the terms we use to describe the victims.

Yesterday in a press review broadcast on our sister channel France Culture, the journalist Nicolas Martin said he was shocked by the way most French reports on the Florida killings relegated the homophobic nature of the attack to second place, stressing instead the probable terrorist motivation of the suspect.

Lamenting the media invisibility of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer community or communities in France, Martin says the choice of target was far from incidental.

The debate is crucial for LGBTQ activists, who point to a long sequence of hate crimes against clubs and bars where they congregate, going back to at least 1973, when 32 people were burned to death in an attack on the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans. They don't want to be robbed of their dead.

Finally, says Le Monde, the Orlando killings can equally well be qualified as a terrorist act or as a homophobic attack. But which term we choose to put first says a lot about our current fears and prejudices.

Cancer campaign axed by advertisers

L'Humanité notes that the humanitarian organisation Médecins du Monde today launches a campaign against the excessive price of some treatments.

The doctors want people to sign a petition and they have organised a poster campaign, even if most of the big advertisers have refused to carry such shock slogans as "Breast cancer gets more profitable as it gets worse," "Sickness, property and petrol lead to big profits," or "French cancers earn 2.4 billion euros every year."

The ad companies say they don't want to shock the public; Médecins du monde suspect they don't want to shock the big-spending pharmaceutical companies.

Artificial light knocks the stars into the gutter

Le Monde also reports that the spread of artificial lighting has had the side effect of depriving 60 percent of Europeans and 80 percent of north Americans of a view of the Milky Way, the swathe of stars that surrounds us on our headlong rush across the cosmos.

If you live in Singapore, Kuwait or Qatar, don't even bother getting out of bed! Your region is so light polluted that you'll be lucky to see the full moon. If you want stars, go to Chad, the Central African Republic or Madagasgcar.

And don't underestimate the importance of a clear night sky.

As Le Monde reminds us, this is the first time in the history of humanity that we have been cut off from the surrounding universe, the contemplation of which has given rise to virtually all our images of the world and of our place in it.

As Oscar Wilde famously replied to a man who scorned him for the impoverished circumstances in which Wilde ended his life, "I may be living in the gutter but my eyes are fixed on the stars."