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French press review 25 November 2017

The Eurozone economy is perking up. Pornography is a plague for many French youngsters. Why does the Chinese firm which makes Apple iPhones employ 16-year-olds? And guess why there'll never be a cure for the common cold.

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The Eurozone economy is showing signs of sustained growth. That's the main headline in Le Monde.

The latest figures show that growth across the monetary union will come in at a whopping 2.2 percent this year, mainly due to a global trend towards growth, cheap oil prices, and a variety of generous monetary policies.

Even the usual dunces, France and Italy, are showing hints of catching up. And the signs are good for more of the same next year. Always assuming the German political crisis doesn't bring the whole house of cards down around our ears.

The plague of pornography

Le Figaro gives the top of the front page to pornography, saying that French children are increasingly using their telephones as a source of sex education, and that they are being exposed to the violence and domination prevalent in the world of hard porn.

President Emmanuel Macron is to launch an awareness programme aimed at parents this weekend, part of his broader plan to combat violence against women.

Apple assembler exploiting Chinese kids

Le Monde's economy pages detail how some Chinese 16-year-olds are obliged to work up to 60 hours every week assembling Apple's latest technological gem, the iPhone X.

The centrist paper says as many as 3,000 students have recently been recruited by the huge assembly company Foxconn, to cope with the demand for the latest Apple phone. They work overtime, which is illegal for their age group, and they cost the company less in social charges and holiday allowances.

An iPhone X will set you back more than one thousand euros.

Apple is one of the richest commercial operations on the plannet, having demolished the record for annual profits previously held by the oil company ExxonMobil.

The common cold is not so common afterall

Le Figaro's science pages explain why it is impossible to cure the common cold. Guess what, that supposedly incurable illness does not exist.

The conservative paper interviews a philosopher of medical science, Maël Lemoine, who has just published a book entitled "A Short Philosophy of the Cold".

The first question is the obvious one: as we sneeze, cough and snort our various ways through the start of another northern winter, is the man sure that he's right.

His answer is categoric: there is no specific illness which we can call the common cold.

OK. But. He goes on to say that the situation is fairly frequent in medicine . . . you have a bunch of symptoms, you are totally miserable, you think you have some disease, let's say X, and the doctor says no, X does not exist. Which leaves you with the symptoms and the misery but without the 26 euros you had to pay for the doctor to tell you that you have confused your nosological categories.

To return to the less-than-common cold, bad weather can give you sore eyes, a runny nose and a throat that feels like you swallowed a bucket of hot, rusty ball bearings. But that is not to be confused with a viral infection which produces exactly the same symptoms but is not the same disease. Picky, this philosopher?

Only a blood test for the virus will enable your doctor to tell what you have or have not got. That'll be 30 euros for the blood test.

Cold weather is not what causes colds. The only reason kids get more colds at the end of the summer holidays is because they suddenly find themselves cooped up in groups of thirty in schoolrooms, sharing viruses like they were cheap sweets.

Kids in Japan get more colds in April, which is when the Japanese school year re-starts after the long break.

The only link between colds and winter is that we spend more time indoors, close to other humans, and thus to their viruses.

And there are hundreds of such viruses out there, each and every one of them capable of producing the symptoms that we used, erroneously, to call the cold.

I hope that makes you feel better. That'll be fifty euros please.

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