Two a penny

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On Tuesday, Parisian universities, including the emblematic Sorbonne, voted to re-open all classes on May 25.0pt”Times New Roman”}

After nearly four months of highly disruptive protests, France university strike movement is slowly winding down.

Classes here went on all semester despite the strike, including extra online classes, for students to be ready to take exams and earn a diploma that means something, explains one student in Dijon. In some universities, for example in the Burgundy city of Dijon, students have begun taking their exams.

Many students fear their exams will be cancelled and their diploma not given any credit in France or elsewhere.

However, some other universities remain paralysed with more radical protesters barring teachers, students and staff from accessing the premises &ndash six universities in Nancy, Toulouse, Aix, Marseilles, Amiens and Reims remain closed, despite the approaching exam period The protests have primarily affected universities specialised in humanities, while business and science faculties remained largely untouched.

There are ingrained cultural factors.

For thousands of foreign students who come to study in France each year, the strikes offered an unexpected &ndash if not always welcome - glimpse into France protest culture. Selfishly, in terms of me going to Paris and not being able to attend the classes I wanted to attend, it was frustrating, he added. The French have a propensity towards social activism, American student Jasper Lipton told Reuters. It was definitely a learning experience, she told Reuters, saying though she would have preferred a normal art history course.

American Lindsay Cook, a French and art history student from Vassar College in New York state, attended strikers’ assemblies at the Sorbonne and attempted to follow the heated debates.

France - protests - university
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.Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar has recalled how he once performed oral sex on an actress to show how he wanted it done.
“I play all the roles on set,” Almodovar told a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival..
“In a film I made a long time ago . I even performed cunnilingus on an actress to show the actor how to do it,” he said..
It recounts the tragic love affair between a young actress and a director and stars Oscar winner Penelope Cruz.
Almodovar is at Cannes to attend the premiere of his latest oeuvre Broken Embraces.
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Cinema! Montage! Photoshopped picture, fake corpse, Sri Lankan government propaganda.. These are the reactions of the Tamil diaspora in France, who refuse to believe that the Tamil Tiger leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran is dead.. But for the Tamil diaspora, these images are manipulated or fake.

&raquo Profile: the Tigers&#039 fallen leader
&raquo Ethnic strife in Sri Lanka - a timeline
&raquo Shock and outrage among Tamil Diaspora

On Tuesday, Sri Lankan television showed images of the corpse of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the chief of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Rejecting government declarations, a large majority of the Tamil population in France has been relying on information on the separatist group website.

Nadesan, a Sri Lankan who feels the images are good news, because Prabhakaran is behind much violence, is among the very few in the Tamil diaspora to celebrate Prabhakaran’s death.

Prabhakaran, I know him well. A communique from the LTTE international relations head Selvarajah Pathmanathan re-affirmed on Tuesday morning that the rebel chief is alive and safe. This is false information meant to discourage the Tamil people, said a client at Nissan Exotique Market, a grocery store at the corner of Rue Louis-Blanc and Rue Perdonnet. . Many shop-owners in the area placed his effigy at the entrance.

An honest man

In the neighbourhood crammed with Sri Lankan shops and restaurants, the number one Tiger is a highly regarded political personality. Our leader of the Tamil people and of our land, the Tamil Eelam, is very precious. Written roughly in French, the inscription leaves no room for ambiguity. He is not like other politicians, who send their children to study in Europe and in the US.

Others took it a step further by putting a portrait of Prabha as their mobile phone wallpaper. He an honest man, says Regaan, while getting a haircut in a salon. He has never kept a cent for himself. The classification of the Tigers on the list of terrorist organisations is unfair, says Vithuran, who has been living in France since 1987.

Most Tamils fail to understand why the West compares their hero Prabhakaran to Osama Bin Laden or a godfather of a new mafia. No-one forces us to pay a claimed revolutionary tax. Their targets were never anything but military. In France, during the Second World War, was General de Gaulle a terrorist or a resistance hero? he argues. In France, during the Second World War, was General de Gaulle a terrorist or a resistance hero? he argues.

For Vithuran, Tamils have lost their land, but not their courage. We will soon recover our territory, he says.

France - Sri Lanka - Tamil Tigers - Vellupillai Prabhakaran

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AFP - A Russian woman accused of abducting her three-year-old daughter will be handed over to the French authorities next week after losing her appeal against an extradition order, police said Tuesday.

Irina Belenkaya, who was detained by Hungarian police as she tried to cross the Ukrainian border with her daughter Elise the previous month, lost her appeal against an order to extradite her to France, her lawyer Robert Fridman said.

Police confirmed to that they would hand over (Belenkaya) to the French authorities in the next 10 days.

The extradition will take place between now and May 28, according to a ruling by the court of appeal, Fridman told the Hungarian news agency MTI. .

The three-year-old, who has been the centre of a bitter custody battle between her French father Jean-Michel Andre and her Russian mother since they split in 2007, was abducted on March 20 by two men and a woman in the southern French city of Arles, where she lived with her father.

She faces charges of kidnapping and complicity in assault in France.

But after Belenkaya was stopped on the Hungarian-Ukrainian border on April 12, Elise was taken back to France by her father, while Belenkaya remained in custody in Hungary awaiting a French extradition order.

divorce - France - kidnapping - Russia

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AFP - French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy on Monday appealed for the release of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi who has been jailed and put on trial at a notorious Yangon prison.

The wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the Myanmar government to free the 63-year-old pro-democracy activist in an open letter made public by the Elysee presidential palace.

We now know that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate, once again risks being sentenced to a prison term which, given her state of health, would be life-threatening for her, wrote the first lady. .

The 41-year-old model-turned-singer said she wanted to be the voice of all those in my country who find the fate awaiting this woman to be intolerable.

The man, John Yettaw, earlier this month swam across a lake to her residence where she has been kept in virtual isolation for most of the last 19 years.

Aung San Suu Kyi is facing a five-year jail sentence on charges of harbouring an American at her home in violation of the terms of her house arrest.

The trial of Aung San Suu Kyi comes just days after she was taken from her lakeside property and imprisoned at a guest house inside the Insein prison compound.

This decision is all the more unacceptable given the Nobel Peace laureate’s state of health which has deteriorated over the past several days, they said.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and human rights minister Rama Yade last week issued a joint statement saying they condemned in the strongest terms Aung San Suu Kyi’s arrest.

Aung San Suu Kyi - Carla Bruni-Sarkozy

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The report also denounces a huge increase in unqualified therapists, warning that sects are using the personality coaching and self-help trends to target impressionable people.0pt”Times New Roman”}

A government report warns that religious sects are on the increase in France, tripling in the last 15 years to reach at least 600 different movements across the country. Some are charlatans, who use their practices to recruit the vulnerable.

25 to 30 percent of psychotherapists in France are not certified practitioners.

The Miviludes, a French religious sect watchdog, recommends setting tougher standards to control therapy practices, as well as drawing up an exhaustive list of all sect-like activity in France. The Internet has also become a frequent tool for sect recruitment.

France - sects

.Warwick Thornton - the Alice Springs-born director of a film being shown at the Cannes Film Festival - says the experience of meeting movie stars is “bizarre”.
Samson And Delilah is Thornton’s debut feature.
Thornton says the film got a standing ovation at its Saturday Cannes screening.
Through the eyes of two central Australian Aboriginal teenagers, it gives audiences a no holds barred look at the problems facing remote Indigenous communities - violence, substance abuse and poverty.
“This is where .
Ever since, he’s been surrounded by Lamborghinis, rubbing shoulders with superstars and dining in $10,000 a night hotels… And I’m here, and I just met Quentin Tarantino and I just met bloody Francis Ford Coppola. they have a dinner for all the directors. .”

.Canadian musician Gonzales broke the world record for the longest-ever solo concert after he succeeded in playing the piano for a gruelling 27 hours, three minutes and 44 seconds.
The 37-year-old musician stole the title from Guinness record-holder Prasanna Gudi of India who made history by playing raga for 26 hours and 12 minutes in December.
Gonzales took the stage at midnight on Sunday (local time) at a small theatre in Paris’ trendy Montmartre, seated at his upright piano next to a large digital clock tracking his marathon performance.
Under Guinness rules, he was allowed a 15-minute break after each three-hour set and a 30-second pause in between songs. .
Born Jason Beck in Montreal, Gonzales lives in Paris and co-produced Feist’s 2007 hit album The Reminder.
There were also a few costume changes during the performance - from jeans and a t-shirt to blue-and-white striped pyjamas.
His sixth album, Soft Power, was released last year.
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AFP - French security reinforcements were dispatched to a Paris suburb on Sunday after gunmen armed with a military weapon opened fire on police officers escorting detaineees. .

Four police officers were escorting the detainees from a hospital, where they had undergone a routine medical checkup around 3:00 am (0100 GMT) Sunday in a rundown area north of Paris, when the gunmen opened fire.

The Paris suburbs have seen a spate of clashes with police, but gun violence involving the use of military weapons is rare.

The assailants blocked the police vehicle with two cars at La Courneuve and opened fire with a heavy-calibre weapon, probably a Kalashnikov, said a police official.

Herdhuin suggested that the gunmen may have been drug traffickers and announced that police reinforcements had been sent to La Courneuve, a collection of public housing estates that have been plagued with high crime.

It’s the first time that I have seen a military weapon being used in this context, said Jean-Francois Herdhuin, head of security for the Seine-Saint-Denis department.

Police union official Thierry Maze said the police officers were ambushed by individuals armed with military weapons, because they had just arrested a gang leader.

At least one detainee managed to flee during the exchange of fire but was later caught, police said.

Our colleagues are worried about the excesses and mounting violence in Seine-Saint-Denis, he said.

Following the attack, the UNSA-police union urged French authorities to take action to defuse tension in the high-immigrant suburbs, saying a catastrophe was averted, but what about next time?

France - police

.Danish director Lars von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday (local time) as the credits rolled on his drama Antichrist at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the the most talked-about at this year’s festival, which ends on May 24.
Cannes’ notoriously picky critics and press often react audibly to films during screenings, but Sunday evening’s viewing was unusually demonstrative.
Many viewers in the large Debussy cinema also appeared to take objection to von Trier’s decision to dedicate his film to the revered Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky.
Jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation.
Antichrist opens with a heavily stylised, black-and-white, slow-motion portrayal of the child’s accidental death set to soaring music by Handel.
Applause from a handful of viewers was drowned out by booing at the end.
Dafoe’s character, who is a therapist, tries to help his wife deal with her grief and encourages her to come off heavy medication that sedates her for weeks after the death.
The abuse she submits herself and her husband to drew shocked gasps from the audience.
They decide to go to an isolated wooden cabin in an unspecified forest to recover, but the woman Gainsbourg portrays loses control of her senses.
One US critic said he and others found the film “offensive”, and questioned why it was included in the main competition of 20 films in Cannes. .
“I can offer no excuse for Antichrist .
In production notes for Antichrist, the 53-year-old director said that the movie was a “kind of therapy” for depression he was suffering from two years ago… other than my absolute belief in the film - the most important film of my entire career!”
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