World Control: France

Air France to trial biometric boarding cards

French airline Air France said Wednesday it planned to trial biometric boarding passes that would allow passengers to be fast-tracked through airport checks using a scan of their fingerprint.
Source: Breitbart, September 5, 2007

France Bans Laypeople From Reporting Violence

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.
Source: PC World, March 6, 2007

Threat to homeschool rights turned back

A campaign of telephone calls and e-mails from American homeschoolers is being credited with convincing legislators in France to withdraw a plan that would have made such home instruction efforts there illegal, according to the Home School Legal Defense Fund.
Source: January 13, 2007

France grants residency to some 7,000 illegals -minister

France has selected nearly 7,000 illegal immigrants out of 30,000 applicants to benefit from a special one-off measure granting them permanent residency, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said on Monday….
Hundreds of people have campaigned against the expulsion of illegal immigrant families in past months, saying the government tried to use children registered at French schools as a way of tracking down families without residency papers.
Source: Reuters (online), September 18, 2006

French Religious Symbols Ban Cuts Two Ways

They arrived as they do every December: gaily wrapped gifts destined for children at a kindergarten in rural northern France.
But this year, teachers unwrapped a few, took a look and sent all 1,300 packages back to City Hall. The presents were innocent, but strictly speaking, illegal: seasonal chocolates shaped like Christian crosses and St. Nicholas.
As Christmas approaches, France is awakening to the realization that a new law banning conspicuous religious symbols at schools – a measure used mainly to keep Muslim girls from wearing traditional Islamic head scarves to class – can cut both
ways.
Source: Guardian Unlimited (online), December 13, 2004