When the daughter of the founder of L’Oreal, Liliane Bettencourt requests that her guardianship and the management of her assets, imposed by the judge, be not placed under the control of her daughter Francoise, but rather left in the hands of only one of her two grandsons, Jean-Victor Meyers, it is not only another episode in the endless drama which tears apart one of the richest families in the world.
We will probably succeed in avoiding a disaster. After resisting for so long, to please the banking lobbies, we are going to set up, after much delay the minimal mechanisms to withstand for a time the crisis. Without solving anything in substance, because we will not address the root causes, which is the absence of a global rule of law.
The challenges ahead for France and the French people starting in 2012 are huge: a public debt equal to the GDP; 4 million unemployed people; €70 billion in external deficit, a vertiginous loss of competitiveness; an extraordinarily fast deindustrialization; uncertain energy and environmental choices; widening poverty; precariousness spreading to the middle class…
It is not in financial matters alone that this presidency of France is characterized by great unrest, followed by a long period of inaction, continually justified by the supposed complexity of the situation, perfected at the end of mandate by the rediscovery of the initial problems and an avalanche of speeches on the urgency of doing something.
We would like to take advantage of a summer post to take a break and neither talk about the comedy of public debts in Europe nor the near bankruptcy of the United States, nor the endless war in Libya, nor the horrific massacres in Syria, nor the merciless famine in Somalia, in Ethiopia and elsewhere, nor the radioactive leaks still very disturbing in the Fukushima power plant…
The terrible Norwegian massacre, may appear as a terrible incident, isolated act of a mentally ill person, with no more importance than Unabomber, the American killer that inspired him. It can, however, be interpreted as the announcement of a vast geopolitical movement expected for a long time and anticipated by many theorists.
Candidacy season for the presidential elections is open. For both left and right parties. For now, we have failed to see emerge the real reasons behind these nominations, but personal ambitions, or so-called edication to the national cause. And for the moment, we are in the midst of a school-boys’ quarrel.
For a very long time, we have known that the day would come when genomics would keep its promises. This required that computer technology advances were able to release the computing power needed to reduce drastically the cost of the genome sequencing…
