It took 22-year-old Mamoudou Gassama just seconds to reach a child that was dangling from the fifth-floor balcony of a building in Paris, saving the four-year-old boy.
The undocumented migrant worker from Mali was rewarded handsomely for his courageous act. French President Emmanuel Macron met with the man and granted him French citizenship and a job as a firefighter.
USA Today reports:
“Bravo,” Macron said to 22-year-old Mamoudou Gassama during a one-on-one meeting in a gilded room of the presidential Elysee Palace that ended with Gassama receiving a gold medal from the French state for “courage and devotion.”
...The young man said he has papers to legally stay in Italy, where he arrived in Europe after crossing the Mediterranean, ending a long, rough stay in Libya. But he came to France last September to join his older brother, who has lived in France for decades.
Gassama, dressed in tattered blue jeans and white shirt, recounted his experience which took place at around 8 p.m. Saturday when he and friends saw a young child hanging from a fifth-floor balcony.
“I ran. I crossed the street to save him,” he told Macron. He said he didn’t think twice. “When I started to climb, it gave me courage to keep climbing.”
God “helped me,” too, he said. “Thank God I saved him.”
The boy's father was detained overnight for neglect. Read the rest
As a child in 1942, Mireille Knoll escaped the capture of Jews by police in occupied France during The Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup. The majority of those arrested during the roundup were sent to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Her evasion of France's Nazi puppet police force during the second world war allowed her to survive the horrors of the Holocaust, unlike so many of her neighbors and relations. But she couldn't escape racism. Her time on earth came to an end this past week after she was stabbed 11 times and left to die in her burning apartment, in Paris, France. She was 85 years old.
According to the The Washington Post, Knoll's murder has French journalists and Jewish advocacy groups concerned that, given the area and brutality in which her life was ended, there could be reasonable grounds for the murder to be considered a hate crime. As in North America, Anti-Semitic hate crimes have been on the rise in France. In the past year, bigots and fascists who were once too afraid to show their hate in public have made their way into the mainstream, emboldened by the politics of our times.
From the Washington Post:
Jewish advocacy groups were quick to put the case within the context of rising anti-Semitism in France and to point out the similarities to another high-profile case being investigated as anti-Semitic: the April 2017 killing of Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jewish physician and kindergarten teacher who was beaten in her apartment and then thrown out a window.
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When Disney built Euro Disney (now Disneyland Paris), it was required to partner with a French company that borrowed heavily, couldn't get out from under its debts, and ended up beholden to creditors who forced it to limit spending on the park, trapping it in a cycle of unpopularity and underinvestment.
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O’Naturel is a nudist restaurant in Paris. The New Yorker's Henry Alford had a bite and an eyeful:
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After dodging security, photographer Nina Richard quietly hung Lorde's well-reviewed, sophomore album Melodrama onto the walls of Le Musée du Louvre in Paris, France.
Presenting her photographic evidence, she tweeted:
Why the Louvre?
According to Slate, the act of displaying the album in the museum is a way of bringing the lyrics of its fourth track, "The Louvre," to life:
But we're the greatest, they'll hang us in the Louvre
Down the back, but who cares, still the Louvre
Melodrama was recently nominated for a 2018 Grammy Award.
(Slate) Read the rest
The Louvre in Paris decided that the "Domestikator," the 40-foot-tall installation by Atelier Van Lieshout seen above, wasn't the right fit for the adjacent Tuileries Gardens. The plan was to show it during this month's Fiac! International Contemporary Art Fair.
“Online commentaries point out this work has a brutal aspect,” wrote the Louvre’s director, Jean-Luc Martinez Martinez, in a letter to fair organizers. “It risks being misunderstood by visitors to the gardens.”
The Louvre was also reportedly concerned that in the Tuileries Gardens the sculpture would be too close to a children's playground.
The new plan is that starting next Wednesday, the "Domestikator" will be situated in front of the Centre Pompidou that houses the Musée National d'Art Moderne.
“To have this major piece in front of the Pompidou is a victory,” Julien Lombrail, director of the London-based gallery Carpenters Workshop, which represents Atelier Van Lieshout, told the New York Times. “It’s an incredible moment for Paris and the public, when we have so many issues surrounding art and censorship. It’s important for us to engage for the future.” Read the rest
The International Olympic Committee took the unprecedented step of announcing the 2024 and 2028 Olympic host cities (Paris and LA), because both cities were bidding unopposed, and LA had to be bribed with a $1.8B "grant" from the IOC to agree to host the games. Read the rest
Paris, France is making good on its promise to reopen long polluted waterways to bathers.
Up to three hundred people at any time can use the lifeguard-protected pools, although the pools only have locker space for 80. Located in a part of Paris already popular as a place to stroll in fine weather, the new bathing spot is likely to prove a major hit in an already hotter-than-average summer. Early reports suggest that the water is indeed delightful, though a small residuum of green algae does make a post-bathe shower a good idea.
How did Paris pull this off? The city’s been working on cleaning up the waters here for decades. Paris’s canals here were once unsurprisingly filthy, running as they do through a former industrial area once packed with cargo barges and polluted by sewage. Since the 1980s, however, regulations managing industrial run-off have tightened substantially, while Paris has invested heavily in wastewater treatment and in preventing sewage from being discharged into the canal during periods of high water. Two years ago, following a concerted clean-up, bacteria levels dropped below safe levels, and rogue bathers have been jumping in the water here for a while. Meanwhile, the Canal Saint Martin, which runs downstream from the basin down to the Seine, was entirely drained and cleaned in 2016, a process that sent a powerful visual message to Parisians that the area’s historic filth was being swept away.
Via CityLab Read the rest
The French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs tweeted a 🔥 video today on Trump's Paris Accord decision.
After president Emmanuel Macron's epic tweet yesterday, this is something else. Read the rest
The city of Paris has installed "anti-refugee boulders" beneath a highway overpass in Porte de La Chapelle in a bid to stop Syrian refugees from sleeping in the flyover's shelter while they wait for space to open up at a nearby humanitarian relief center operated by Emmaus solidarité. Read the rest
"Everywhere they went, the attackers left behind their throwaway phones."
Buried in the New York Times story Mark poked fun at earlier for its Crypto Panic vibe, a confirmation of sorts that there's really no evidence the terrorists used crypto at all. There is lots of evidence they used throwaway burner phones to evade detection while planning mass murder. Again, no evidence encryption, none, period. This is significant because these attacks, and similar ones that followed, are at the core of an anti-encryption charm offensive by the FBI and Department of Justice, now targeted at Apple's iPhone.
Ars Technica rehashes the details of the NYT piece and then puts it plainly:
Until we have stronger evidence to the contrary, it seems likely that encryption played little or no part in the Paris terrorist attacks.
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Musicologist Mylène Pardoen and a team of 3D artists created this "sonic tableaux" of 18th century Paris based on a 1781 map and numerous historical documents and research on what Paris's Grand Châtelet district, between the Pont au Change and Pont Notre Dame bridges, may have sounded like at the time. From the French National Center for Scientific Research:
“I chose that neighborhood because it concentrates 80% of the background sound environments of Paris in that era, whether through familiar trades—shopkeepers, craftsmen, boatmen, washerwomen on the banks of the Seine, etc.—or the diversity of acoustic possibilities, like the echo heard under a bridge or in a covered passageway,” Pardoen explains. While historical videos with soundtracks are nothing new, this is the first 3D reconstitution based solely on a sonic background: the quality of the sounds (muffled, amplified…) takes into account the heights of the buildings and their construction materials (stone, cob etc.).
This urban soundscape was recreated based on documents from the period, including Le Tableau de Paris, published in 1781 by Louis-Sebastien Mercier, and the work of historians like Arlette Farge, a specialist on the 18th century, Alain Corbin, known for his research on the history of the senses, and Youri Carbonnier, an authority on houses built on bridges. The audio tour includes sounds like the cackling of birds in the poultry market, the hum of flies drawn to the fishmongers’ stalls, the sound of the loom at the woollen mill that used to stand at one end of the Pont au Change, that of the scrapers in the tanneries on Rue de la Pelleterie, of typesetting at the print shop on Rue de Gesvres… all overlaid with the incessant cries of the seagulls that came to feed on the city’s heaps of waste....
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Despite the French Ministry of Interior's demands to crack down on Internet anonymity, Prime Minister Manual Valls has gone on record saying he won't allow such a thing to pass: Read the rest
A mother in northeast France received a text from a phone traced to Syria: “Your son died as a martyr Nov. 13.” Read the rest
In the wake of the Paris attacks, the French National Assembly has declared a state of emergency with sweeping powers, without any substantial debate. Included in the bill are the power to order the nation's ISPs to block websites without any judicial review or court order, and for authorities to seize and search electronic devices without a warrant.
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In France, police are searching for three terrorism supporters who stabbed a Jewish school teacher at a Jewish school in Marseille.
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See more photos at Wink Fun.
750 Years in Paris is a historical graphic novel sans words as well as a stunning coffee table art book. Paris-based artist Vincent Mahé (aka Mr. Bidon) illustrates 60 snapshots of the same building in Paris, spanning from the year 1265 with cows grazing in front of its humbler beginnings to 2015 in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. With the smallest of details, from words of storefront signs to the clothing of people to the state of the building itself, Mahé is able to subtly and masterfully inject humor, horror, nostalgia, historical facts and pride into his various images.
The back of the book has a timeline to help decipher some of the historical events revolving around the images. For instance, directly quoted from the book (and images shown above):
1515 – Francis I is crowned king and enters the city in a lavish procession.
1804 – Napoleon’s enthronement and imperial troops procession.
1915 – World War 1.
2015 – 4 million in the streets defending freedom of speech.
As I began to write this review, the horror of Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris unfolded before the world, making this newly-released book all the more poignant and significant.
750 Years in Paris
by Vincent Mahé
Nobrow
2015, 120 pages, 8.4 x 13 x 0.7 inches
$18 Buy a copy on Amazon
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