Two a penny

.World road cycling champion Cadel Evans is confident a combination of his rainbow jersey and several high-profile team-mates will be enough to earn his new BMC Racing Team a wildcard to next year’s Tour de France.
Evans, who today confirmed he will compete at next January’s Tour Down Under, shocked the racing fraternity earlier this week when he quit powerhouse Belgian outfit Silence-Lotto to join second-tier US team BMC.
But the 32-year-old says the move will better his chances of future success on the Tour and says Tour de France organisers should give his team a wildcard to next year’s race.

.The Church of Scientology has been convicted of organised fraud in France and fined almost $1 million.
A Paris court fined the church $980,000 but stopped short of taking up the prosecutor’s suggestion that the group’s activities be banned.
Four leading French Scientologists were also given suspended sentences.
The Church of Scientology is not recognised as a church in France, it is classified as a cult, and for the past 14 years the French government has kept it under strict surveillance.
The case centred on the claims of former Scientologists who say they were cajoled into spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on personality tests, vitamin cures, sauna sessions and counselling.
Four leaders of the church were found guilty and given suspended sentences of between 10 months and two years.
When a Paris court was asked to investigate claims of fraud among prominent French Scientologists, prosecutors took the opportunity to demand a ban on the group’s activities in France.
The group as a whole was fined but a loop hole in the law prevented the judge from shutting their operations down.
“This is the first time in France that Scientology has been condemned for organised fraud and we are extremely satisfied with this decision,” he said.
Lawyer Olivier Morice, who represented one of the victims in the trial, says it is an historic decision.
Catherine Picard is the president of the national union of associations in defence of families and individual victims of cults.
The investigating judge criticised what he called Scientologists’ obsession with financial gain.
On its website, scientology justifies the cost of its sessions by saying they could be compared to courses in a school or university.
“Once again, I think justice has delivered a blow to this organisation of crooks,” she said.
So-called auditing sessions are said to help members literally seek immortality, which they say is priceless.
So-called auditing sessions are said to help members literally seek immortality, which they say is priceless.
“We will win in appeal or we will win in the European Human Rights Court for sure.
“There has been a lot of political pressure and for sure we will go to appeal because we don’t agree at all with that,” he said. .”
The Church of Scientology was founded in 1954 by science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard.

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Oscar-winning Canadian film maker Paul Haggis quit the Church of Scientology overnight citing what he called the organisations tolerance of gay bashing

.French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand has won the backing of fellow politicians amid calls for his resignation for having written about having sex with young male prostitutes in Thailand.
Government spokesperson Luc Chatel, immigration minister Eric Besson and Left Party founder Jean-Luc Melenchon spoke out in support of the nephew of former president Francois Mitterrand, who has threatened legal action to protect his reputation..
“Enough of this man-hunt. The private life of Frederic Mitterrand is none of my business,” Mr Chatel told BFM TV..
Mr Mitterrand was compelled to defend himself on television last week, saying he had only been with consenting adults and had committed no crime.
Revelations that Mr Mitterrand made in a 2005 book re-surfaced when he strongly defended Roman Polanski, who was arrested in Switzerland the previous month and faces extradition to the United States for having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.
The row was further stoked on Friday when the Quotidien de la Reunion newspaper published a letter sent by Mr Mitterrand, when he was director of the French Academy in Rome, in support of the family of two boys accused, and later convicted, of rape. He added that he condemned both sex tourism and paedophilia. It’s vile.
“I no longer tolerate these attacks.
“I bore witness to the morality of a family, that of my former make-up artist on France 2 [TV]. It’s a simple thing that I can very easily explain,” Mr Mitterrand told Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper in response.”
Mr Melenchon told Europe 1 that the continuing attacks on Mr Mitterrand were “unacceptable” and criticised those who would “cast stones” at the minister. .
“In no way is it an apology of sex tourism.
In the television interview, Mr Mitterrand described the book as “not totally autobiographical” and was evasive about the precise nature of his experiences in Thailand…
Throughout the TF1 interview, he referred to his partners as ‘boys’. even if one of the chapters is a journey through that hell, with the fascination that hell can provoke,” said Mr Mitterrand.
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The affair appears to have provoked a split in the government, with Labour Minister Xavier Darcos saying Mr Mitterrand needed to explain his behaviour, and Mr Sarkozy’s adviser Henri Guaino defending him

.Adelaide 18-year-old Sam Willoughby has been crowned this year’s overall season winner in BMX Supercross racing.
Willoughby became the youngest ever person, and the first Australian, to win a BMX Supercross World Cup series overnight in France.
“I don’t know what to say, I’m over the moon,” he said.
He said the win left him speechless.”
He lauded his competition and said it was a tough ride for the finish.
“It was a bit of a rough start to the day but I dug deep and I learnt a lot about myself today, to come back and get that.
“I learnt a lot today.
“The pressure was on but I managed to pull my head back in and refocus on the job at hand,” he said.
“For the final I wanted the inside lane and used that to my advantage. Our approach for this year was to focus on the World Cup events and the World Championships and that worked out.
“It is a privilege to race against such formidable competition. I fought it out on the first straight and it was a drag race to the finish.”
Willoughby’s father Colin says his son fought valiantly for the title. [It was] great to win here and to be the 2009 overall season winner.
“To the point that it’s determination that if something goes wrong, he just grits his teeth and fights back to make sure he atones for it.
“He’s just got that bit of attitude but it’s a good attitude,” he said. .”
Fellow Australian Khalen Young finished seventh.

.Italy scraped a draw against the Republic of Ireland to join Germany, Denmark and Serbia as the latest teams to secure 2010 World Cup places in a drama-laden penultimate batch of qualifiers earlier today (Australian time).
This quartet join already-qualified England, Spain and the Netherlands, leaving two automatic berths from the continent still up for grabs heading into Wednesday’s last throw of the South Africa dice.
Russia, beaten 1-0 by ten-man Germany in Moscow, and the Republic of Ireland, is among the teams assured of places in November’s two-leg play-offs.
The Irish came desperately close to pulling off a major upset in Dublin as Sean St Ledger headed them into a 2-1 lead with only three minutes to go, only for Alberto Gilardino to level on the whistle.
France, beaten on penalties in the 2006 final by Italy, are also in the play-offs after routing part-timers the Faroe Islands 5-0 to book second place in Group Seven behind Serbia, who trounced Romania by the same scoreline.
Italy coach Marcello Lippi praised the Azzurri’s “great performance”.
That put the world champions into an unassailable lead in Group Eight with Ireland as runners-up.
“If we had lost it would have been a big injustice because we played with passion, character and enthusiasm,” he added.
“We struggled but the result is even better for that.
Gilardino predicted Italy could go all the way again in 2010.
“We can hope to go all the way, the basis of this squad is the same as the one that won in 2006 but we’ve added some young players and some good players. At the end we deserved the draw,” the Fiorentina striker said.”
– Germany through –
Earlier, three-time world champion Germany ensured its participation in next year’s World Cup with a game to spare after a gritty defeat of Guus Hiddink’s Russia.
“Now we’ll go to South Africa in good spirits and with hope to win it again.
Miroslav Klose’s first-half goal booked Germany’s ticket with Joachim Loew’s team reduced to 10 men when Jerome Boateng was sent packing after receiving a second yellow card with 20 minutes remaining.
Miroslav Klose’s first-half goal booked Germany’s ticket with Joachim Loew’s team reduced to 10 men when Jerome Boateng was sent packing after receiving a second yellow card with 20 minutes remaining. We needed a bit of luck, but we have made sure of qualifying for the World Cup and you can’t ask for more,” Loew reflected.
“The team did well.”
Hiddink said his team can not be happy with the result. .
“We were not good enough at finishing our chances or on the counter-attack.
“But the team showed character in the second half,” he said.”
Denmark got the better of neighbour Sweden 1-0 to book its ticket as winners of Group One.
“But we still have a chance to qualify for the finals in November’s play-off.
Fabio Capello’s Group Six winners were reduced to ten men in the first quarter of an hour when goalkeeper Robert Green was sent off for a professional foul following a mistake by Rio Ferdinand.
– England’s streak ended –
Already-qualified England’s run of eight straight qualifying wins came to a sticky end in Dnipropetrovsk with Serhiy Nazarenko earning Ukraine a 1-0 win.
Spain, which had already guaranteed its place in South Africa as winners of Group Five, came through their trip to Armenia with a 2-1 win to extend their unbeaten run to nine from nine qualifiers.
Spain, which had already guaranteed its place in South Africa as winners of Group Five, came through their trip to Armenia with a 2-1 win to extend their unbeaten run to nine from nine qualifiers.
Bosnia-Herzegovina secured a play-off berth with a 2-0 win in Estonia to make sure of their position as runners-up to the Euro 2008 champions.
In other action, Switzerland boosted its prospects of making it to the finals with a 3-0 defeat of Luxembourg.
Ottmar Hitzfeld’s side are in pole position to qualify as Group Two winners, going into Wednesday three points clear of former European champions Greece.
Group Three is too close to call with Slovakia on 19 points, two ahead of Slovenia, with the same gap back to the Czech Republic.
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AFP – French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand was in the spotlight Saturday for standing as character reference for two rapists after a row over his admission of paying boys for sex.

Mitterrand, an urbane television personality and a nephew of former Socialist president Francois Mitterrand adopted a pugnacious tone and threatened legal action over what he said was a new orchestrated campaign of insensitive calumny.

The latest scandal emerged just after Mitterrand managed to retain his job following a fresh furore over his 2005 autobiographical novel La Mauvaise Vie (The Bad Life) in which the hero describes paying Asian boys for sex.

The minister will launch legal action against those who are complicit in the latest ignominy he has suffered, a statement read out at a news conference in the southwestern town of Bordeaux quoted Mitterrand as saying.

I absolutely condemn sexual tourism (and) I condemn paedophilia in which I have never in any way participated, and all the people who accuse me of that type of thing should be ashamed, the 62 year old told TF1 television.

Mitterrand had angrily denied having ever engaged in paedophile acts or condoning sex tourism.

The minister on Saturday said he was godfather to one of the youths, whose mother is a former make-up artist, and underlined that his letter attesting to their good moral character was a gesture of compassion and generosity to a modest family in great distress.

The latest controversy emerged after a French newspaper said Mitterrand had testified to the good character of two youths in the French overseas territory of La Reunion charged with the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl.

Is it not a shame that this letter has found its way in all the Internet networks? he said, calling it an ignominy, a shame, and manipulation.

He underlined that he had met one of the youths three times in (my) life.

The three youths were charged with rape and sentenced to between eight and 15 years in prison.

Le Quotidien de la Reunion newspaper on Friday published a letter that Mitterrand, who was then director of the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, had written to the court.

The controversy over Mitterrand’s book erupted this week after his staunch defence of fugitive film-maker Roman Polanski, arrested in Switzerland on a US warrant on child sex charges.

Said Larifou, one of the lawyers for the boys’ families, told he was filing a suit against the leaking of the letter, saying it should never have appeared in the public domain.

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AFP – French agents have arrested an engineer working at the CERN nuclear research lab on suspicion of being in contact with the Al-Qaeda militant network and planning attacks, officials said Friday.

Perhaps we have avoided the worst, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told journalists, adding that investigators were trying to establish which targets in France or elsewhere the suspect was hoping to strike. .

Security sources in Paris said the suspected Islamist, one of a pair of brothers detained on Thursday, worked at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research on the Franco-Swiss border just outside Geneva.

He had expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but had not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation, one said.

According to officials, the engineer had made contact over the Internet with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a North African offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s loosely organised global Islamist militant movement.

He was not a CERN employee and performed his research under a contract with an outside institute.

CERN confirmed a physicist working at the site had been arrested under suspicion of links to terrorist organisations, and said it was helping the French police with their investigation.

According to a report on the newspaper Le Figaro’s website, the suspects are a 32-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin who has been the subject of a police inquiry for a year-and-a-half and his 25-year-old brother. His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism, it added in a statement.

Judicial sources told that investigators had come upon the pair while monitoring the Internet as part of a separate inquiry into the recruitment of would-be jihadists to send to Afghanistan as guerrillas.

The report, citing sources close to the inquiry, said the elder brother had had several Internet exchanges with figures considered close to Al-Qaeda and had provided a list of suggested French targets for attack. Two laptops, three hard drives and several USD memory sticks were seized from their home, they said.

Intelligence agents recorded several incriminating exchanges between the brothers and suspected Al-Qaeda contacts. We follow statements made by the leaders of certain organisations day by day.

We are in a situation of permanent alert. The danger is permanent, Hortefeux said. We never let our guard down.

Intelligence officials consider it one of the most serious threats to France, which has a large North African diaspora population.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was born in 2007 when a largely-Algerian militant group, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, swore allegiance to Bin Laden and rebranded itself as his organisation’s local franchise. It operates particle accelerators to study the behaviour of atoms at high speed and learn about the basic laws of nature.

CERN is Europe’s leading laboratory for the study of the fundamentals of sub-atomic physics.

The lab said the suspect had been working on the LHCb experiment which its website says will help us to understand why we live in a universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter.

It is a civilian organisation, backed by 20 member states, and is not connected to nuclear weapons technology.

al Qaeda – France – terrorism

.Irish champion Sea The Stars won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp overnight to complete a unique treble of the English 2000 Guineas, Epsom Derby and the Arc.
Ridden by Mick Kinane and trained by John Oxx – owned by Hong Kong club owner Christopher Tsui – he beat home Youmzain, ridden by Kieren Fallon while seven-time Arc winning trainer Andre Fabre’s Cavalryman, under Frankie Dettori, was third.
Youmzain created his own piece of history in becoming the first horse to finish second in three successive Arcs.
Seamus Levey’s Set Sail headed for home with a 15 length advantage entering the final straight but the wind was taken out of his sails as the more fancied runners swamped him.
Sea The Stars, who had been applauded into the ring prior to the race which is a rare occurrence in French racing, had come here as the 4/6 favourite but early on he had several problems settling down as the Aidan O’Brien-trained pacemakers Set Sail and Grand Ducal set a searing gallop.
Kinane found the gap he needed and once it was seized Sea The Stars seamlessly sauntered to the lead and although the gallant Youmzain and Calvaryman along with Breeders Cup Turf champion Conduit reduced the gap in the final furlong, there was to be no stopping the Irish horse from his moment of destiny.
Unbeaten French filly Stacelita hit the front but all eyes were trained on 50-year-old Kinane and Sea The Stars, and the old stager and his superstar horse did not fail.

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AFP – Japan clothes giant Uniqlo, which opens a flagship store in the heart of Paris on Thursday, is aiming for up to 10 more in the world’s fashion capital as it takes on competitors such as Gap, H &amp M and Zara.

Tadashi Yanai, the billionaire president of Fast Retailing, which owns Uniqlo, told he aimed to open five to 10 big shops in Paris, where he had originally planned to launch as far back as 2007 or 2008 but it takes a long time to get authorisation. .

The cheap chic brand popular with designer-conscious Japanese youth currently has a store in an office district on the fringes of the capital, and Yanai set no date for the opening of new stores. The next high-profile launch is Moscow in spring 2010.

Similar stores have already opened in New York and London.

No cost seemed to be spared in the run-up to the Paris launch, with ads on city buses and the underground and even Paris bakers selling the traditional baguette in paper bags announcing the Tokyo to Paris launch. There are currently 875 Uniqlo stores worldwide, 761 of them in Japan.

H &amp M and Zara just sell fashion.

Referring to its European competitors H &amp M from Sweden and and Zara from Spain, whose lines sell like hot cakes and whose stores too are close to the new 2,000-square-metre (-yard) shop, Yanai said I think there is a lot of room for Uniqlo to muscle into the market.

Our philosophy, he said, is that a shirt, jacket or sweater are just spare parts which an individual combines to express their personality. We are different, we are offering high quality clothing, added Yanai, who according to Forbes magazine is Japan’s richest man.

He added: It is up to us to offer products that are sufficiently attractive to seduce customers, citing high-tech items such as clothes made of a fine fabric that gives off heat or a feather-light coat weighing 270 grams (about 10 ounces). That is why we seek to sell very basic but very high quality clothes.

For the Paris launch, customers are being offered cashmeres at less than 40 euros and men’s jeans under 10 euros.

Uniqlo, known for high-quality basics such as affordable cashmeres with quintessentially Japanese craftsmanship, manufactures its clothes mostly in Asia, in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

consumers – fashion – France – Paris
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We are the only company in the world able to offer products of this quality at low cost, Yanai said

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AFP – France’s public deficit will grow to a record 8.2 percent of GDP this year and 8.75 percent next year.5 in 2010, according to the government’s budget on Wednesday, based on expected growth of 0.

Under the eurozone stability pact, member states are supposed to keep their deficits under three percent, but most are far above this as public spending explodes and tax revenue falls during the crisis.

France is edging out of a recession caused by last year’s global financial collapse, but the government vowed to continue stimulus spending, and warned that deficit levels will not begin to fall until 2011.

Among the fiscal measures announced in the budget were a green carbon tax on households and businesses, and cuts in local business taxes.

France’s public debt will soar to 84 percent of national output in 2010, up from 68 percent at the end of 2008 and well above the theoretical 60 percent limit set when France and its partners launched the single currency.