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French press review 27 July 2011

Le Parisien goes to London ahead of next year's Olympics. Le Monde looks to Oslo. Le Figaro stays in France to deliver bad news for the Socialists, while l'Humanité stands up for the homeless.

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The London Olympic Games kick off exactly one year from today. That's the main story in Le Parisien, and will give you an idea that there's not a huge amount of real news stirring this morning.

If you plan to visit London during the running and jumping festivities in 12 months' time, you need to get moving and, maybe, talking to your bank manager.

Two nights in London in a two-star hotel, with tickets for the athletics, fencing or swimming competitions, will set you back between 1,500 and 2,000 euros. A four-night package, including a seat at the opening ceremony, runs to 8,000 euros.

Le Monde continues to rake over the ashes of last weekend's Oslo massacre, attempting to analyse the more than 1,500 web pages of information left by the man who has claimed responsibility for the killing of 76 people.

The suspect appears to have planned his action in minute detail. And he appears to have been obsessed by what he calls "the Muslim invasion" of Norway. He also criticises "multi-cultural elites", "the feminist/sexual revolution" and the "importation of voters". He called on Europeans to organise "armed resistance" against these various threats.

Right-wing Le Figaro gives pride of place to the Socialist Party, so you can guess that the news is not good from a socialist point of view.

The six candidates in the race to be chosen to represent the party in next year's presidential election face the impossible task of being polite to one another, true to party principles and, at the same time, somehow convincing voters that they are the man or woman for the job. So, of course, it will turn into the polite equivalent of a dogfight.

The 35-hour working week, the best age at which to retire, whether nuclear power is worth the risk and how best to get the nation's poor unemployed back to work are the key bones of contention.

Le Figaro's rhetoric is interesting. The battle on the left is first described as "a fairground punch-up", then as a struggle which has already seen several nasty knife-jabs. And, chortles the right-wing daily, it can only get worse.

Less contentiously, Le Figaro reports that Washington, the federal capital of the United States, has decided to shorten the names of some of the city's underground stations, mainly in response to struggling writers of texts or Twitter messages for whom something like "U Street African-American Civil War Memorial Cardozo" is a thumb-wrenching pain in the butt, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor.

That's now going to be simply "U Street".

One station they can't alter is "Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport" because that name is protected by federal law and can neither be altered nor abreviated.

Locals, who've always called the stop "Ronnie", will go on breaking the law. No wonder Washington has the worst crime statistics in the United States.

As the euro and the US dollar go down the tubes, French banks have decided that the future of money is in mobile phones. Soon, not only checking your accounts, but actually paying for goods and services will be things you do with your phone.

To prepare for this revolution, several banks have decide to get into the phone market and will soon be happy to increase your overdraft so that you can purchase a new mobile, complete with high-tech applications to enable you to further increase said overdraft. Ain't technological progress a wonderful thing?

At the other end of the reality spectrum, communist l'Humanité looks at the plight of France's homeless population as government cuts funding for emergency services. There was already, according to the Communist Party daily, a deficit of 15,000 beds in the area around Paris.

To this must be added the 5,000 beds recently axed as part of cost-cutting policy which has seen the head of the French capital's social security services resign from a sector which, he says, has been abandonned by the authorities.

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