Infowars: France’s Socialist Government Moves to Impose Smartphone Tax
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 13, 2013
Tax targets Google, Apple, Amazon and other companies.
France’s recently elected socialist government has announced it plans to further stifle innovation and wealth creation by imposing a tax on smartphones and tablets.
The new tax will mirror a fee scheme imposed on French television and radio producers and internet service providers to fund art, cinema and music approved by the state.
The one percent tax targets Google, Apple, Amazon and other companies. The government of Francois Hollande estimates the taxation scheme will expropriate around 86 million euros per year. It plans to transfer the wealth to cultural industries producing French music and video content.
“Companies that make these tablets must, in a minor way, be made to contribute part of the revenue from their sales to help [French-only] creators,” Culture Minister Aurelie Filipetti told Reuters.
The scheme is part of France’s “cultural exception” – l’exception culturelle française – a protectionist policy designed to shelter French music and cinema industries from foreign competition. Previous legislation enacted in France has imposed mandatory quotas on non-French movies, books and music.
The move is certain to further stultify French culture. Critics argue that the country no longer produces notable artists such as the writer Jean-Paul Sartre or the singer Edith Piaf. This is due largely to the meddling of the state, which invariably throws its weight behind mediocre artists. Instead of fostering artistic independence and innovation, the French state is more interest in pursuing a leftist ideological agenda: Haute Autorité de Lutte contre les Discriminations et pour l’Egalité, or “high authority against discriminations and for equality.” In other words, a politically correct agenda focused on racism, homophobia, sexism, etc., and the expense of artistic creativity and innovation.
The French government plans to enlist leading figures in the cultural sector to push its latest redistribution of wealth plan, according to the Associated Press.
France also wants to exempt its cultural industries from free trade rules during upcoming talks between the European Union and the United States.
In 2012, the newly elected French government led by socialist Francois Hollande proposed a staggering 75% tax on the country’s wealthiest citizens. The move resulted in a number of wealthy people fleeing the country, including the actor the Gérard Depardieu. In December, France’s constitutional watchdog,Conseil Constitutionnel, ruled the new tax scheme unconstitutional.
UN approves peacekeeping force for Mali
About 11,000 troops, including 6,000 African soldiers already in Mali, to begin mission in July if situation secure.The UN Security Council has unanimously voted to authorise about 12,600 international troops and police to undertake a peacekeeping mission in Mali.
The UN’s Multi-dimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali, to be known by its French acronym MINUSMA, would have a maximum of 11,200 soldiers and 1,440 police.
The core of the force will come from approximately 6,300 troops from 10 African nations already in Mali.
The UN is aiming for a July start by the new force, but the 15-nation council will decide later whether the conflict has eased enough for the handover.
France will begin a phased withdrawal of its 4,500-strong contingency which will see 1,000 troops left in the country by the end of the year.
The remaining French troops will maintain responsibility for military strikes against those groups who are now waging an armed campaign.
BREAKING: Russia threatens US with Nuclear attack
Russia Warning in St Petersburg against interference in third-party global conflicts, Medvedev said: “At some moment such actions, which undermine sovereignty Syria, Iran, North Korea, can end with a full-fledged regional war, or even, and I don’t want to scare anybody, the use of nuclear weapons
NATO Missile Defense Forcing Russia To Take Countermeasures
February 2013 The lack of agreement on missile defense may negatively affect Russia-NATO cooperation in other areas, too, because Russian relations to the Western alliance rely on strategic stability, Russian Ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko said in Brussels yesterday. As reported on Voice of Russia radio this morning, Grushko warned that if the nuclear balance is upset by the realization of NATO-supported U.S. plans for a stage-by-stage deployment of a missile defense system, this would strongly affect the entire range of cooperation in the framework of the Russia-NATO Council.Russia”s probable retaliation measures to the missile defense system also were on the agenda of talks which Speaker of the State Duma Sergey Naryshkin had with French members of parliament in Paris Naryshkin stressed that Russia needs “guarantees backed by objective technical parameters that this system will not be targeted against Russia…. When someone tells us in words that this system is not targeted against Russia but refuses to sign a legally binding agreement in deeds, this certainly raises doubts in us,” he said, insisting that security should be equal for all countries and indivisible. Naryshkin warned that Moscow “cannot twiddle its thumbs while its U.S. partners make decisions on deploying missile defense elements in Europe and putting them into practice…. But this is surely not our choice.” Naryshkin said Russia will have to take measures in response to the missile defense system’s deployment.
The plans differ; the planners are all alike…
Bastiat (via scottishmarketanarchist)
Frédéric Bastiat (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
France: ‘Our goal is the total reconquest of Mali’
BYRON TAU
commondreams.org
January 21, 2013Cite terrorism, bomb, fuel terrorism, repeat.
While blowback from Libya is felt in Mali, and from Mali in Algeria, recent comments from British and French leaders lay bare western powers’ perception of conflict in Islamic lands through the lense of the war on terror that sees “terrorists” that must be stopped through military force with little thought given to the price that will be paid for the involvement.
As France continues to drop bombs on its former colony of Mali, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian left no doubt of his country’s goal there.
“The goal is the total reconquest of Mali. We will not leave any pockets” of resistance, Le Drian said Sunday on France 5 television.
France in Direct Combat in Mali ‘Within Hours’
LORI HINNANT and RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
usnews.com
January 16, 2013French troops pressed northward in Mali toward territory occupied by radical Islamists on Wednesday, military officials said, announcing the start of a land assault that will put soldiers in direct combat “within hours.”
French ground operations began overnight in Mali, Adm. Edouard Guillaud, the French military chief of staff, said on Europe 1 television. France’s Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on RTL radio that soldiers were headed away from the relative safety of the capital toward the rebel strongholds in the north.
Hollande defends French exit in Afghanistan
President Francois Hollande visited Afghanistan on Friday to defend France’s imminent departure from the war, telling troops that it would be coordinated closely with Afghan and NATO allies.
Hollande met French soldiers deployed in the volatile province of Kapisa and held talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on his first visit to the country where French troops have been fighting the Taliban since the 2001 US-led invasion.
He explained his decision to recall French combat troops by the end of 2012, a year earlier than Paris initially planned, and two years before NATO allies.
“It’s a sovereign decision. Only France can decide what France does,” he told soldiers at Nijrab Base in eastern province Kapisa, where most of France’s 3,550 troops in the country are based.
“It will be conducted in good understanding with our allies, especially President (Barack) Obama, who understands the reasons, and in close consultation with Afghan authorities,” Hollande said.
Kapisa, which commands part of the access to Kabul from Taliban flashpoints on the Pakistani border, has proved a tough fight for the French, troubled by turf wars between the Islamist insurgents and drug dealers.
Hollande conceded that the threat posed by terrorists in Afghanistan had been not been eradicated since the 2001 invasion toppled the Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks.
“Without having totally disappeared, the terrorist threat from Afghanistan to our and our allies’ territory has been partially curbed,” he said.
Hollande said 2,000 French soldiers would leave by the end of the year, but added that France would continue development projects. He has also indicated that French troops will continue to train Afghan police and soldiers.
French tourists among world’s worst: survey
An international survey asking people to rank the world’s worst tourists has placed the French just behind Americans and Chinese.
The survey, conducted by American travel website Living Social, asked 5,600 people their views about the behaviour of tourists from around the world.
Americans finished top of the survey, even among the Americans who were taking part.
20 percent of those surveyed ranked tourists from the US as the worst.
Chinese tourists were named by 15 percent of those asked and the French were just behind at 14 percent.
The tourists likely to be most welcome were from Australia, Switzerland and Ireland, all being named by just 2 percent of people. (via The Local)
French Senate disapproves of new rules on foreign graduate jobseekers
The French government recently announced it would modify rules on work visas for foreign graduates after uproar over a controversial memo in May which meant hundreds of highly-qualified non-EU students faced deportation. But critics say under the new rules power to grant work permits lies entirely in the hands of police authorities. This week the Senate backed a Socialist resolution to get the memo withdrawn. (via RFI)
Europe threatens crackdown on French battery hen farmers
The European Commission is to crack down on French farmers found guilty of mistreating battery hens. Legal action will be launched against France and 13 other countries in the next few days, according to health commissioner John Dalli.
“We will have zero tolerance for those who do not respect the law,” Dalli declared at a press conference in Brussels.
France’s name has been added to an already existing list of 13 European Union member states who have failed to enforce a 1999 ban on detaining hens in battery cages, which are often no larger than a piece of A4 paper.
The deadline for compliance expired on 1 January 2012 and Dalli has promised to get tough on countries that have failed to enforce the law. (via RFI)
Iranian regime bans actress(Golshifteh Farahani) from entering Iran after posing nude
The nude photo of Golshifteh Farahani has been published by Madame Le Figaro magazine. The publication has attracted a wave of visitors to her Facebook page from Iran and the Middle East.
The Paris-based actress left Iran last year in protest against restrictive Islamic codes that the Iranian cinema industry has to follow under Ahmadinejad’s conservative cultural policies.
Now she said the government has sent a communication telling her not to travel back to her homeland.
“I was told by a Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guide official that Iran does not need any actors or artists. You may offer your artistic services somewhere else”, Farahani said.
Farahani appeared along Leonardo Di Caprio in the Hollywood film Body of Lies as a nurse who helps an injured American secret agent to recover to carry out his mission in a Muslim country.
Amnesty International activists, dressed in orange jumpsuits similar to those worn by prisoners at the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, demonstrate next to a scale model of the Statue of Liberty. The protest was held on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison, which US President Barack Obama vowed to shut down in one of his first acts in office. (via Telegraph)
Valerie Trierweiler and Francois Hollande, France’s Socialist Party candidate for the 2012 French presidential election, walk along a street during a ceremony marking the 16th death anniversary of former French President Francois Mitterrand (via Editor’s choice)
Anti-G20 demonstrators wearing masks portraying Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy take part in an action against globalisation as G20 leaders are gathered in Cannes for the final summit of France’s presidency (via Telegraph)
