Unedited Television Script

Many of today’s front pages cover the one year anniversary of the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers, the trigger for the past year’s economic turmoil. La Croix features an article on the Lehman Brother’s tour in London, much of which is now vacant. Nine floors are totally empty with four floors below that being used by PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors. 500 of those auditors are former Lehman employees. It could take them ten years to go through the paper work and decide who owes what to whom.

One of France’s business paper asks what has changed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers one year ago today. The left-leaning Libération might have the answer: not much has changed at all. This is the opinion of the vast majority of French people according to a poll. 9/10 said hardly anything has changed and such a crisis could happen again. 92% of employees have this view, 88% of manuel labour workers, 98% of 18-24 year olds and 100% of farmers! Even 83% of UMP (France’s ruling party) voters think we could see a crisis like the current one unfolding again.

Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui en France reports on rising concerns over the swine flu vaccine. Up to a third of healthcare workers are not so sure they will have it. Is it a good idea to be vaccinated with a product that was developed in under four months – a record for pharmaceutical labs – tested on just a couple of thousand guinea pigs? What about side effects?

Michelle Rivasi, a Europe Ecology MEP, has written to the Health Minister, Roselyne Bachelot, demanding more transparency on what is in the vaccine. It contains additives intended to amplify the effects of the vaccine including aluminium and mercury. These have known adverse effects. In 1976, a swine flu vaccine was administered to 40 million Americans and that program had to be stopped because of several cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome – a neurological condition linked to the vaccine.

The Communist paper l’Humanité unsurprisingly dedicates its front page to last weekend’s Fête de l’Humanité (Festival of Humanity) which it helped to found in 1930 as a means of funding the paper. While the French Communist Party is not so popular with the electorate, the festival has gone from strength to strength. This year 600,000 attended the event at a huge park to the north of Paris near the suburb of La Corneuve. T-shirts emblazoned with “Stop the Capitalist Flu” could be seen by the more left-leaning revellers. The event is a mix of debates, speech and music with Communist Party stands from all over France and the world. L’Humanité declared this years event a huge success.

France’s Culture Minister, Frédéric Mitterand, attended the festival on Sunday and got an extremely poor reception. Le Figaro reports that the nephew of iconic Socialist and former President François Mitterand was called a ‘social traitor’ and a ‘sell out’ by angry hecklers. Frédéric Mitterand recently joined Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right government.