Two a penny

.A French parliament report called for a ban on the full Islamic veil in all schools, hospitals, public transport and government offices, saying the burqa was an affront to French values.
“The wearing of the full veil is a challenge to our republic. “We must condemn this excess. .
The commission called on parliament to adopt a formal resolution stating that the burqa was “contrary to the values of the republic” and proclaiming that “all of France is saying ‘no’ to the full veil.”
After six months of hearings, the panel of 32 lawmakers recommended a ban on the face-covering veil in all state-run institutions and offices, the broadest move yet to restrict Muslim dress in France.
The panel however stopped short of proposing broad legislation to outlaw the burqa on the streets or in shopping centres after cautioning that such a move would have to be reviewed by the courts to establish its legality.”
Women who turn up at government offices wearing the full veil should be denied services such as a work visa, residency papers or French citizenship, the report recommended.
“There are scandalous practices hidden behind this veil,” said Mr Gerin who vowed to fight the “gurus” seeking to export a racial brand of fundamentalism and sectarianism to France.
“The wearing of the full veil is the tip of the iceberg,” said communist lawmaker Andre Gerin, the chair of the commission.
President Nicolas Sarkozy set the tone for the debate in June when he declared the burqa “not welcome” in France and described it as a symbol of women’s “subservience” that cannot be tolerated in a country that considers itself a human rights leader.
Home to Europe’s biggest Muslim minority, estimated at about six million, France is being closely watched at a time of particular unease over Islam, three months after Swiss voters approved a ban on minarets.
-

.Leonardo Da Vinci’s remains are to be exhumed to allow scientists to establish whether the Mona Lisa is a disguised self-portrait.
Scientists and historians from Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage have sought permission to open the artist’s tomb in France’s Loire Valley.
They hope to find his skull which they can use to reconstruct his face to discover whether his famed masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, is in fact a self-portrait in disguise.
Scholars have suggested Da Vinci’s presumed homosexuality and love of riddles led him to paint himself as a woman.
Mystery has surrounded the identity of the Mona Lisa for centuries.

.
Speculation on the sitter has also ranged from Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant, to Da Vinci’s mother

.New Manchester City recruit Patrick Vieira says he has a “100 per cent chance” of playing for France at next summer’s World Cup finals, despite having not represented his country since June 2009.
“As I’m an optimist, I’m going to say 100 per cent,” he said in response to a question about his chances of playing in South Africa on the Canal Football Club television show overnight.
“The desire is there, it’s my goal.”
Vieira, who has yet to play for his new club, admitted that he had received “no guarantees” from France coach Raymond Domenech, who he met shortly before Christmas, and conceded that the situation “is not as simple as that”. In my head, I don’t see myself missing the World Cup.
“You have to play, which is the important thing for me.
“But he said that as soon as I’m playing, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be selected,” said Vieira, whose last France appearance saw him captain Les Bleus to a 1-0 defeat against Nigeria in Saint-Etienne last June. I have five months.
He joined City from reigning Italian champion Inter Milan on January 8.”
Vieira, 33, was a member of the France team that won the 1998 World Cup and the 2000 European Championship and has 107 caps.
-

.France coach Marc Lievremont has forgiven Mathieu Bastareaud for lying about being attacked after a loss to New Zealand last year and named him in a 30-man squad for the Six Nations championship.
The 21-year-old centre had said he was attacked by up to five people as he returned to the team hotel following a 14-10 defeat by the All Blacks in Wellington last June. .
Back in France, after being told CCTV footage showed him entering the hotel uninjured, he admitted lying and said he had fallen in his bedroom because he was drunk.
“Bastareaud deserves to be back because he is performing well with his Stade Francais club and because he has started to do the community service he has been sentenced to.
“The unhappy episode of this summer is forgotten,” Lievremont said.
Half-back Frederic Michalak, winger Cedric Heymans, centre Florian Fritz and full-back Maxime Medard were left out of a squad already without suspended scrum-half Julien Dupuy plus prop Fabien Barcella and centre Damien Traille, who are both injured.”
The France coach also recalled 32-year-old scrum-half Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, fly half Benjamin Boyet, wings Aurelien Rougerie and Julien Malzieu and full-back Clement Poitrenaud. It doesn’t mean they are too old or forgotten or rejected,” Lievremont said.
“There are some players we rely on, we appreciate but who have not performed as well in recent weeks.
France will start its Six Nations campaign against Scotland at Murrayfield on February 7.
Another surprise was the call-up of newcomer Fabrice Estebanez, a 29-year-old former rugby league international, who plays either at centre or fly half with Brive.
Backs: Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, Morgan Parra, Benjamin Boyet, Francois Trinh-Duc, Mathieu Bastareaud, Fabrice Estebanez, David Marty, Yannick Jauzion, Vincent Clerc, Benjamin Fall, Julien Malzieu, Aurelien Rougerie, Alexis Palisson, Clement Poitrenaud.
Forwards: Thomas Domingo, Luc Ducalcon, Sylvain Marconnet, Nicolas Mas, William Servat, Dimitri Szarzewski, Sebastien Chabal, Romain Millo-Chluski, Lionel Nallet, Pascal Pape, Julien Bonnaire, Thierry Dusautoir (c), Imanol Harinordoquy, Alexandre Lapandry, Fulgence Ouedraogo, Louis Picamoles.
-

.Filmmaker Roman Polanski won more damages on Tuesday (local time) from French publications that printed photographs of him at his Swiss home where he is confined pending extradition proceedings in a child sex case.
A Paris court convicted the magazines VSD and Voici and the weekly newspaper Journal de Dimanche of breaching Polanski’s privacy by publishing zoom-lens pictures of him and his children without permission.
Polanski is under house arrest while Swiss authorities consider a demand by the United States to deport him to face charges of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in California in 1977.
It ordered them to pay a total of 16,000 euros ($24,700) in fines, costs and compensation to him and his wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.

.The International Automobile Federation (FIA) is to appeal a French court’s decision to overturn the lifetime ban on former Renault boss Flavio Briatore.
Briatore was let off the hook last week by the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris which found that the FIA sanction, imposed in September for allegedly ordering Nelson Piquet junior to crash at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, was illegal.
New FIA president Jean Todt, however, believes the world governing body has a case against the 59-year-old Italian and that an appeal is in order.
The scandal centred on driver Piquet junior’s claims that the team had ordered him to crash deliberately at Singapore to enable team-mate Fernando Alonso to go on and win.
The decision to appeal means the suspension against Briatore, and the five-year ban handed to the team’s former director of engineering Pat Symonds, remain in force.
He said that the French court’s decision “gives me back my dignity and the freedom which they arbitrarily tried to take away from me.
Briatore has denied all the accusations levelled against him and vowed to fight to clear his name.”
-

.A French software engineer said on Friday he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.
Fabrice Bellard said he used an inexpensive desktop computer - and not a supercomputer used in past records - to calculate Pi to close toly 2.
That is around 123 billion digits more than the previous record set last August by Japanese professor Daisuke Takahashi, he said.7 trillion decimal places.577 billion digits.
Professor Takahashi, using a T2K Open Supercomputer, took 29 hours to crunch Pi to 2.
The gear cost “a bit less than 2,000 euros” ($3,123), Mr Bellard, who earns a living as a software consultant in digital television in Paris, said in an email exchange.
Mr Bellard took 131 days, comprising 103 for the computation in binary digits, 13 days for verification, 12 days to convert the binary digits to a base of 10 and three final days to check the conversion. The only unusual thing is that it has five 1.
“It is a completely standard PC. Mainstream PCs generally have only one 1-teraoctet disk.5-teraoctet hard disks.
Extracts of the 2,699,999,990,000-digit outcome have been published so that they can be compared to preceding records in order to gain independent verification, Mr Bellard said.”
Bellard has placed on his website details of the achievement, including the use of a high-powered mathematical engine called the Chudnovsky algorithm that chewed through the computation. .
Files containing the digits are also being offered to any outside organisation keen on hosting the record, he said..14159. in a string whose digits are believed never to repeat or end..
“Optimising these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge,” he said.
Bellard said he was “not especially interested” in Pi’s digits but more in taking up the gauntlet of writing the software to carry out the arithmetic.
-

.French police are investigating whether a pickpocket stole thousands of euros from passengers as they slept on an Air France flight from Tokyo to Paris.
“There is an investigation under way,” a spokesperson for the border police at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris said.
A report on the website of the Le Figaro newspaper said around 4,000 euros ($6,260) appeared to have been stolen from five business class passengers as they slept on the overnight flight.
A woman alerted the cabin crew when she woke to find a large sum missing, the passenger said. . Counting Swiss francs, euros and yen, there was apparently about 3,000 euros,” the passenger said.
“This lady called staff to say that all the cash in her handbag had been stolen.
A spokeswoman for Air France said the pilot had alerted police who were waiting when the flight touched down.
She said that while the company was responsible for baggage carried in the hold, passengers had responsibility for possessions they had with them in the cabin.
“I would say that it is really extremely rare to have several passengers at once reporting thefts on board,” she said.
-

.Extremely cold weather across northern Europe has left scores of people dead and caused widespread transport chaos.
Temperatures as low as minus 22 degrees Celsius have led to the deaths of 122 people in Poland, with the main river, the Vistula, now frozen over and resulting in fears of flooding.
In the Swiss Alps, avalanches have killed at least seven people, while in western France, 14 regions have been hit by heavy snow.
In the past two days Britain’s national grid issued only its second warning in history about supplies.
Severe weather warnings are still in place across the UK, which is in the grip of its longest cold snap in 30 years.
The military was called in after around 1,000 vehicles were stranded when more than 40 centimetres of snow blocked the A3 highway in southern England.
More snow was expected in London and the forecast for Scotland was for an overnight low of minus 20 degrees Celsius.
Authorities in southern Britain have warned motorists to only use their vehicles if absolutely necessary.
“If you do have to go out take some warm clothes etc,” he said.
Richard Westman, from the special response team at the roads authority, says people need to listen more carefully to the warnings. .
“But people don’t.
Around 5,000 homes in Sussex are still without power as the country suffers through the cold snap, which is expected to last at least another week.”
Thousands of schools have been closed and around half the UK workforce stayed home, which is said to have cost the economy $1 billion in lost output.

.Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has taken a break from the rough and tumble of Italian politics, shopping for nudes on the French riviera. .
Art gallery spokesman Loic Deltour described the works as “sensual nudes” worth “several tens of thousands of euros”.
Witnesses said security was visibly tight around Mr Berlusconi during his shopping trip.
The billionaire media magnate, 73, has been mostly out of the public eye since December 13, when a man, said to have a long history of psychiatric troubles, hit him in the face with a miniature model of Milan cathedral.
-