Press review 30 October 2008

by Carly Jane Lock

Article published on the 2008-10-30 Latest update 2008-10-30 07:29 TU

This morning's French dailies didn't actually reach the office due to a newspaper distribution strike, but thankfully, the papers were available online.

Centrist daily Le Monde carries a piece on the desperate humanitarian situation in the eastern democratic republic of Congo where tens of thousands of people are fleeing their homes as rebel forces led by Tutsi leader Laurent Nkunda advance on the city of Goma.

Le Monde says the fact that an estimated one and a half million displaced people in North Kivu are either living in shelters or on the streets, underlines the Congolese troops' failure to deal with the situation, and says that the UN mission in the DRC doesn't seem to be getting anywhere either.

The paper slams MONUC's "purely military" stance and says the only way to avoid a catastrophe in the DRC is to step up peace efforts, and set up a framework for negotiations between both the Congolese authorities, who are accused of backing Hutu rebels, and the Rwandan government who are accused of supporting the Tutsis.

Today's communist daily l'Humanité looks at the background to the US elections in a report on families across the United States who have lost their homes as a result of the subprime crisis, which is currently gripping the world's superpower.

There are pictures of American families who are roughing it in tents because they couldn't keep up with their mortgage repayments. One American couple told the paper that their hometown of Waverly in Baltimore state has become a ghost town where most of the houses there are empty and many shops have had to shut down.

L'Humanité also denounces racist lending practices in Baltimore where one bank has apparently been charging its African-American customers higher interest rates for mortgage loans because it considers them to be a higher risk.

 The Dalai Lama appears on the front page of this morning's right-leaning Le Figaro. The paper reports on China's offer of fresh talks with Tibet's exiled spiritual leader. The Dalai Lama is losing faith and says he has little hope that negotiations with China will further Tibet's bid for independence.

Financial daily Les Echos is the most upbeat of this morning's papers and that's got to be a good sign.... Rate cut euphoria dominates the front page. Markets in Europe were on a high yesterday and France's CAC 40 share index rose more than nine per cent, hours after the US Federal reserve pushed its benchmark federal-funds rate down half a percentage point, to one per cent.

Meanwhile, the editor of l'Humanité hits out against the world's biggest earners. The paper says the escalating salaries of top bosses in France and across the globe were already outrageously high, but now they're obscene.

L'Humanité was referring to an article published yesterday in Capital magazine, which revealed the multi-million-euro salaries of the bosses of France’s top 40 companies. The paper was outraged to learn that last year the executive director of French insurance firm AGF raked in over 23 million euros!