A car appears embedded in a McDonald fast-food restaurant at Corbeil, Nov. 5, France. (AFP File Photo)

France is struggling to pin down the cause of the Paris riots: Are organized criminal gangs--even Islamic radicals--out to undermine the state, or have successive governments simply failed to give millions of immigrants a chance in life? Rampages that have gripped the poorer immigrant-populated outskirts of Paris since Oct. 27, spreading for the first time Thursday night to other parts of the country, have left many in the country short of an explanation.
The rioters are young, overwhelmingly Muslim men, second-generation immigrants from France’s former Arab and African colonies, who claim they are protesting economic misery, racial discrimination and provocative policing. This argument has been widely echoed in the press, by Muslim and community representatives and by the left-wing opposition, which accuses the center-right government of slashing budgets for social work in these communities. Hard-line new law-and-order policies implemented by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have also been widely accused of fueling anger in the high-rise, mainly immigrant estates where the trouble has spread.
Sociologist Michel Wieviorka, speaking in Le Parisien newspaper, charged that Sarkozy had “stigmatized entire communities“ by arguing that crime-ridden areas should be “cleaned with a power-hose.“ The interior minister--while recognizing more must be done to haul the suburbs out of poverty and exclusion--insisted on Thursday the violence was being orchestrated by unknown ringleaders. Police union leader Bruno Beschizza said the riots were “a form of urban terrorism, led by a minority of kingpins, who have a financial interest such as drug trafficking, or an ideological one such as Islamic radicals.“
But a senior national police official said there was “no evidence that the rioting is being orchestrated“ and that it was “unjustified to speak of an Islamist influence.“ Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe has also warned against lumping together “a religion, Islam,“ with “a handful of extremists“ and “criminal networks.“
Most observers searching for the root causes of the riots accuse successive governments of turning a blind eye as immigrant ghettos, synonymous with unemployment and social deprivation, swelled outside France’s big cities. Today, some 750 areas are classed as “Sensitive Urban Zones“ (ZUS), where unemployment hovers at 20 percent--twice the national average--and average incomes are 60 percent of the national average, government statistics show. Among young men between 15 and 25, unemployment reaches 36 percent--and even higher if only--young Arab men are counted. Youth violence--with car-burnings a regular feature--has been steadily building in these dilapidated estates, with major outbreaks of rioting around once a year and countless minor incidents which go unreported.
Sociologist Wieviorka said the riots stemmed from years of “broken promises“ by the French state, and called into question the country’s entire model for integrating newcomers into French society. The French model, secular and republican, insists that all citizens are equal before the state, but has been accused of leaving cultural minorities without a voice, notably France’s estimated five million Muslims.
AFP.COM

At last, the truth about Judith Miller is out. This anti-Arab White House stenographer can no longer pass herself off as a reporter, with all the ethical criteria that that word implies.
One would hope that the New York Times’ disgrace would serve as a lesson to other newspapers that they must report facts not fabrications about the Middle East, and to ensure that all points of view are properly represented, even if to the extent of agreeing with unpopular rŽgimes. Lamentably, this rather obvious lesson is lost on the Globe and Mail and its new foreign editor Stephen Northfield.
Over the past week or so, the Globe has run no fewer than four stories parroting the findings of a UN report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis alleging that Syria was behind the February bombing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Nowhere in the Globe will you find that:
Zuheir Al Siddiq, the chief witness against Syria, was known to have lied to the UN commission;
The Commission is having doubts about his testimony;
Siddiq was paid for his “testimony“; and
He was recommended to Mehlis by Rifaat Al Assad, uncle of President Bashar Al Assad, who wants the presidency for himself.
All of this can be found in the October 22 edition of the German magazine Der Spiegel. I sent Northfield an
article from www.arabmonitor.info containing these findings, as well as an article by veteran Associated Press and Newsweek reporter Robert Parry that confirmed the contents of the monitor story and added other salient details.
For example, the 54-page report states that the bomb that killed Hariri and 22 other people in Beirut was likely in a white Mitsubishi Canter Van that had been stolen in Japan on October 12, 2004. Parry writes:
“On page 42 the UN report states that the Japanese forensic team reported that the van was traced back to Sagamihara City, Japan, where on October 12, 2004, it was stolen. The UN report contains no details about the Japanese investigation of the theft, nor does it indicate what Japanese police may have discovered about the identity of the thieves or how they may have shipped the van from a suburb of Tokyo to the Middle East in the four months before the Hariri attack.“
In the October 26 edition, we are treated to this story by Middle East stenographer Mark McKinnon: “UN team in Syria faces threats--Investigators looking into Hariri’s death are at risk, author of damning report says.“
Damning report? That’s begging the question, isn’t it? Beyond its dubious content, the article even states that this interim report suggested that the murder was likely planned in Damascus, with the complicity of senior figures in the Syrian regime. Yet the report’s accuracy is blindly accepted.
As I wrote on March 17, a more credible theory is that Hariri was killed because he opposed the construction of a US air base in the north of Lebanon. Also, the bomb was similar to the one rogue Syrian intelligence agents used in the 2002 car bombing of Lebanese Christian leader Elie Hobeika, who was prepared to testify against Israeli leader Ariel Sharon in a Brussels human rights court.
Get ready for another murderous rampage based upon a pile of definite maybes, fabrication and innuendo, and propped up by a palace press that places the need to frame an Arab rŽgime above honest reporting.
Greg Felton,
a Canadian writer on the Middle East
METIMES.COM

Britain’s super-rich are pouring funds into wealth management accounts at UBS, the elite Swiss bank handling the world’s biggest pool of private money.
British investors kept pace over the past quarter with a surge of fresh money from Asia, the Middle East, and the United States, boosting UBS’s net profits by 71pc.
Earnings were a record 2.77 billion Swiss franc, pushing up shares by 3.2pc to 113 Swiss franc in Zurich.
The world’s richest stepped up their investments over the past three months, adding 51 billion Swiss franc to the bank’s wealth management units.
UBS now has 2,670 billion Swiss franc invested in assets, with the lion’s share coming from private individuals.
“We’re talking about the ’uber-wealthy’, the top tier of billionaires,’’ said Simon Maughan, an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
“UBS doesn’t disclose the details but it looks as if a lot of the money is coming from China. There’s also petro-dollar recycling from the Middle East.’’
A UBS spokesman said inflows from Britain and Germany had been the fastest growing in Europe for several quarters. “We’re much bigger than people think in Britain, and we’re expanding our business by hiring client advisers.
“It’s not just the boom in the City: there’s a lot of existing wealth in Britain that goes back a long time.’’
Some of the clients come from Laing & Cruikshank, the venerable stockbrokers taken over by UBS last year, bringing £5 billion in assets.
Analysts said the bank did not court investors unless they could put up at least 500,000 Swiss franc.
“We don’t have a minimum threshold, but we concentrate on clients who have the need for higher-end services. And of course we’re a High Street bank in Switzerland, serving retail clients,’’ the UBS spokesman added.
UBS’s strong figures follow a 46 per cent rise in third-quarter profits by Deutsche Bank.
Clive Standish, UBS’s chief investment officer, said: “The market offered plenty of opportunities and we had the business strength to take advantage of them.’’
The core business of wealth management earned about 1.98 billion Swiss franc, but there was also a 69pc surge in earnings to 592 million Swiss franc from investment banking and merger and acquisitions.
Maughan said it would be hard to maintain the recent torrid pace of M&A growth.
“There’s a very good chance we have reached a cyclical peak in investment banking. A lot of good news is already in the numbers, but we still think it’s worth holding the stock.’’
GULF-NEWS.COM

Central Asia regained global strategic importance in 1991 when the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet empire allowed energy companies around the world to compete for the region’s vast oil and gas resources.
Since then, Russia has been able to maintain its monopoly over the hydrocarbons export routes. But US companies have become major players in the contest to develop oil and gas resources. And more recently, Chinese entities have become increasingly present.
Murad Esenov, editor of the Swedish-based “Central Asia and the Caucasus“ journal, says the United States, Russia, and China have become the three main forces competing for influence in Central Asia. “This is a normal phenomenon because all those countries have their own interests in Central Asia, especially because of energy resources,“ Esenov says.
But Anara Tabyshalieva, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Regional Studies in Bishkek, stresses that control over Central’s Asia’s energy resources is only one aspect of the economic race taking place in the region.
“If you come to any market in Central Asia, you can see all goods come from Russia or from China. So both countries are also interested in Central Asia [for trade],“ Tabyshalieva says.
Military Race
Besides economy and trade, competing powers have been eager to forge military and political ties in what many regard as a potentially volatile region.
In many ways, Russian, Chinese and American interests converge on the counter-terror and stability fronts. All three powers agree that global terrorism poses a common threat wherever it lays down roots--as al Qaeda did in Afghanistan.
But Moscow and Beijing have jointly opposed the growing US military presence in the region.
That presence has included Washington’s increased military assistance to Central Asian armies as part of the US-led war on terror.
Russia and China have responded in part to America’s increased regional presence by developing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The organization groups China, Russia and four of the Central Asian republics--Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
“Russia and China united to counterbalance the US presence. They use for instance the [SCO] to try to prevent [the expansion of the] US military presence in Central Asia,“ Tabyshalieva says.
The race for military influence has seen the United States and Russia sometimes engaged in a tit-for-tat race to put military bases into Central Asian countries.
Diplomatic Differences
But if the great powers sometimes seem to be doing almost the same things in Central Asia, their foreign policies toward the regional governments also contain fundamental difference.
Unlike Beijing and Moscow, Washington is pushing Central Asian governments to institute human rights and democratic reforms. That insistence has raised suspicion and sometimes anger among Central Asian leaders.
In July, Tashkent told the US military to vacate the air base in Kharshi-Khanabad after Washington joined international demands for an independent probe into an uprising and military crackdown in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijon in May.
As the great powers battle for influence in Central Asia, some analysts say that, today, it is still Russia that is the Central Asian republics’ main partner.
Alex Vatanka, the Eurasia editor of the London-based “Jane’s Country Risk,“ says that since the incidents in Andijon, the Russians and Chinese have had the upper hand, at least in Uzbekistan. “But also the regime of President [Kurmanbek] Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan has come out in fairly plain language and said that for Kyrgyzstan, strategically, in the long-term, Russia counts above all,“ Vatanka says.
EURASIANET.ORG

Britain's Prince Charles (r) and his wife Camilla (2nd r), Duchess of Cornwall, walk in a farmers market in Point Reyes Station, California, USA, Nov. 5. (Reuters File Photo)

On a dull day you can have some fun saying the same word over and over again. Soon it becomes a stupid sound with no meaning, but it feels hilarious tripping off the tongue. You get the same effect when a word leers at you from bizarrely assorted contexts. For example: relevant. What can it mean now it applies to Prince Charles’s hopes and dreams, David Blunkett’s fatal blunders, and Bavarian folk dancers?
In my heart, I know aspiring to be it is a mistake. Had I been Prince Charles introducing my second not-so-young-and-less lovely bride to the American nation 10 years after he introduced his spectacularly popular first, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. Not when the tour is supposed to be a charm offensive, highlighting the common bonds and shared traditions of the UK and the US.
Not when scarcely a soul in any of the 50 states gives a fig who or what he is, now he’s no longer just the former husband of the late Diana. But there he was. On telly, on the eve of the tour, looking miserable and saying relevant was the most important thing for him to be and he only hoped when he was dead, he would be more so than he is today.
It’s his own fault. He’s been extremely diverting as the Prince of Wales. We’ve had huge fun with his sex life, his extravagance and his petulance, but mostly because they prove how irrelevant he is. Those who tell us he is misunderstood are mainly organic food growers or dyed-in-the-wool monarchists and for them, I can see, he might have a point. For the rest of us, his views--even those on the environment, which are shared by many sane people--carry no weight because his way of life resembles no other person’s on earth.
David Blunkett’s was becoming as silly, which is why he was hounded out of office. It’s a tragedy when it had been so admirable for so long in so many ways. What we’ve been asking ourselves all week is how relevant the poor judgment he was exercising in his private life was to the rest of it and I’d like to say not at all, but that would be lying. You take any private life that goes hand in hand with a professional life and you get spillage.
His astonishing disregard for fallout--whether from an obsessive affair with a married woman, an imprudent fling with a girl he met at a disco, a job with a peculiar DNA research company, or his willful neglect of proper procedure for MPs with business connections--was suicidal. Voters don’t mind a laughing stock but they hate a politician taking the mickey. Even if that wasn’t what he was doing, it was how it looked and looks are what count in our shallow times.
It’s possible they all see themselves as trees in a tree museum and the world as a parking lot, and believe that one day we’ll be sorry. But when I say relevant over and over again, imagine my surprise, it starts to sound like elephant and when I say elephant I think white elephant. When a man becomes a white elephant, it’s time for him to change his game or call it a day, even if it does mean the rest of us have to look elsewhere for laughs.
Barbara Toner
GUARDIAN.CO.UK