French press review 5 February 2014

The government gives a boost to the fight against cancer. There's more fuss about tax. The left is in disarray over the goverment's family law. And are black holes science fiction?

Le Monde gives pride of place to the bad news that while cancer research is clearly progressing, huge inequalities remain in the availability of treatment.

The uneven access to treatment is obvious on a global scale but, even within France, there are better and worse places to suffer from cancer.

France is to spend nearly 1.5 billion euros on the fight against the disease over the next five years. The initiative has been broadly welcomed by patient groups and the medical profession, even if the failure to further penalise smokers has drawn some criticism. Thirty per cent of French cancer deaths are directly linked to the smoking of cigarettes, even though the price of tobacco in France is now the highest in continental Europe.

Le Figaro warns that the middle classes face a new threat in the form of a change in the tax regime concerning the CSG, the Generalised Social Contribution.

If an idea to abolish tax relief on the contribution, which helps to finance the social security budget, recently mooted by two Socialist deputies was finally to see the legal light of day, something like 10 billion euros would be added to the national tax bill, with middle-class families the hardest hit since they profit the most from the current tax relief.

Both left-leaning Libération and communist L'Humanité continue to bewail the government decision to delay the debate on the controversial family law.

Following mass protests last weekend by right-wing Catholic groups, the president has decided to defer discussion intended to clarify such sensitive questions as medically assisted procreation for lesbian couples and the rights and obligations of mothers who agree to carry someone else's child.

Libération is scandalised that a bunch of "reactionary" protestors can force the government to abandon a necessary piece of legislation.

L'Humanité says this latest climbdown is just what you would expect from a president who has already sold out basic socialist principles in accepting a liberal economic stance.

Le Monde's front-page editorial on the decision says the president has shown a certain amount of political intelligence, saving his and the government's energy for the real challenges, like unemployment and the local elections, rather than getting drawn into a street fight with a bunch of fundamentalists who refuse to entertain any views other than their own.

The only shame is that, as in the case of the ecotax last year, the Hollande administration seems incapable of heading off trouble before it gets to the angry crowd with a rope stage.

Business daily Les Echos notes the end of the Bill Gates era at the world's number one computer company, Microsoft.

The financial paper wonders if the various recent changes at the top management level at Microsoft will help to slow the erosion of the market share of the company's Windows system and the integration of the recently acquired phone manufacturer Nokia.

Le Monde also carries the confusing information that, according to the English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, black holes, those areas in space surrounding stellar bodies of such density that nothing, not even light, can escape from them, are really grey.

In fact, says Hawking, black holes really don't exist at all, because the idea of the horizon - the limit beyond which the immense gravity of the black hole ceases to be effective - is pure science fiction.

A French specialist has rejected the Cambridge don's clarification as changing nothing in real terms since supermassive bodies do exist in the universe and their extraordinarily powerful gravitational fields do have the effect of creating things that look like "holes", whether black, grey or covered in little pink spots.