French press review 28 May 2013

Allegations of chemical warfare in Syria and plans to boost employment prospects for young Europeans are among the stories in today's papers..

Le Monde's main story is headlined "Chemical warfare in Syria" and alleges the use of poison gas by the Syrian army against anti-Al-Assad rebels.

The centrist paper, two of whose journalists claim to have first-hand evidence of a chemical attack, says most western diplomats don't want to know about the claims, fearing that the poison gas debate will be used by Damascus as an excuse to cancel next month's peace talks in Geneva.

The other diplomatic problem is that a number of western leaders, including US president Barack Obama, have described the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian army as the "red line" beyond which outside military forces would be obliged to intervene.

There is no shortage of earlier claims of the use of poison gas in this war, but the latest evidence from two Le Monde journalists, if scientific analysis supports their allegations, will be the first conclusive, objective proof of such activity.

The symptoms of those affected by the gas allegedly used by the Syrian army suggest that the chemical in use is the nerve gas, sarin, used in the 1994 attack on the Tokyo metro, and classified as a weapon of mass destruction by UN Resolution 687. It basically stops the muscles from relaxing, making breathing and heart function impossible. Victims typically die of asphyxiation.

It is time, says Le Monde, to put an end to the ambiguity, unless we are prepared to see a repeat of the March 1988 atrocity in the Kurdish city of Halabja when an estimated 5,000 people died in a two-day sarin gas attack launched by Iraq.

Catholic La Croix gives pride of place to the "New Deal" on employment, a European initiative to be launched here in Paris later today, with a view to reducing the number of young Europeans who are out of work.

The economic crisis has seen Europe's jobless rate rise relentlessly, with those under 25 the worst affected. Eighteen EU member countries have more than one fifth of their young people on the dole.

The basic idea of today's New Deal is to make existing funds and energies more efficient by facilitating public-private co-operation.

Businesses will be offered very low-rate loans to enable them to expand, provided they take on young employees to drive that expansion.

A sort of Erasmus programme for apprentices is to be set up, with a view to training young workers in the countries where their future skills will actually be needed. Germany, for example, can't recruit all the skilled workers it needs in key sectors like engineering, medicine and hotel management.

The final plank in today's proposal is that funds are to be made available to help young people start their own businesses.

All of which sounds very promising, but the first and last proposals, at least, would seem to fail to address the crucial problem posed by cheaper labour pools in the developing world.

Should governments be looking at how to re-train their manual workforces for the service sector, rather than trying to compete with the emerging economies where a tiny salary and appalling conditions will do very nicely, thank you, because it beats starving to death?