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French press review 1 December 2010

From WikiLeaks to rock’n’roll, the papers are all leading with different stories this morning. Le Monde stays with WikiLeaks, whilst Libération dedicates its entire front page to the breakup of of French rockers Noir Désir.

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Drummer Denis Barthe announced the split after guitarist Serge Teyssot-Gay said Monday he was pulling out of the Bordeaux-based group.

Lead singer Bertrand Cantat has made the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the past few years after he was convicted of battering his actress girlfriend Marie Trintignant to death in a hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2003. He was released on parole in 2007.

The paper looks back at the interviews it’s had with the group and, perhaps inappropriately, has a mug shot type photo of each band member.

Libération also continues with the story it broke on the 271 Picasso paintings that were found at the home of a retired electrician, Pierre Le Guennec, who worked fitting burglar alarms into the artist’s home in the early 1970s.

Responding to the crowds of reporters that gathered outside his house in Mouans Sartoux in the South of France, the 71-year-old Le Guennec asked what all the fuss was about.

“They are only old papers. They could have just as well been thrown away,” he said referring to the Picasso paintings that have been valued at 60 million euros.

“I was not aware of their value,” he is reported as saying. “It is Madame who gave them to me,” referring to Picasso’s wife Jacqueline.

Libération has published some of the pictures of this newly-discovered body of work.
Meanwhile, Le Monde continues with the WikiLeaks revelations of secret US diplomatic cables. It stands firm in its belief that publishing them is for the greater good, and in the online version of the newspaper yesterday, editorial director Alain Frachon posted a video making a case for publication.

But, Le Figaro begs to differ. In an editorial entitled “WikiLeaks: the triple deception”, Alain-Gerard Slama rails against what he calls a “culture of indifference”, and accused WikiLeaks of peddling myths.

Le Monde has an investigation of its own, known as Karchi-gate, and it dedicates a five-page dossier to the affair. It goes back to the 1995 leadership campaign of France’s conservative majority, between Eduard Balladur and Jacques Chirac, detailing the key events before and after an attack in Karachi on the 8 of May 2002 that killed 11 French engineers.

It follows the legal proceedings launched by the families of those killed and links the campaign and the cancelling of the commissions to the attack, which was first blamed on Al-Qaeda.

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