🇫🇷🇮🇪 Ireland's power grid to be linked to France by 2026

👉🏻 Paris and Dublin reached an agreement Friday for the future "Celtic Interconnector" which will connect the Irish power grid to the European continent by 2026.

🔎 This 700 MW high-voltage submarine link will connect the southern coast of Ireland to northern France, covering 575 km, and will allow Ireland to export the electricity produced by her offshore wind turbines.

🇬🇧 This decision is also a consequence from the Brexit, since Ireland was so far connected only to its British neighbor.

🔗 Source

🇫🇷🇺🇦 French government to send 100 power generators to Ukraine

👉🏻 The French government is sending "100 generators with a power of 50 to 100KWA trough Romania", so that they can be "handed over to the Ukrainian authorities in the next few days", the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said this Friday.

🔎 This shipment is part of an operation to send more than 500 generators by several countries of the European Union. So far, 85 generators had already been sent from France to Ukraine and Moldova, the Ministry added.

🔗 Source

🇫🇷🇺🇦 How French special services help Ukraine

Rybar's team was able to obtain confirmation of the work in Ukraine of private contractors associated with the French foreign intelligence service DGSE and with the military intelligence department DRM.

▪️The French, in addition to open military assistance in the form of supplies of equipment and weapons, coordinate the work of the state PMC DCI, which trains Ukrainian special forces in France, Poland and Ukraine.

▪️The second area of ​​work was aerial reconnaissance in cooperation with the Luxembourg company CAE Aviation. The company operates reconnaissance aircraft in the Black Sea to monitor the activity of the Russian Armed Forces.

🔻What is known about DCI?

▪️The private military company Défense conseil international, 50% state-owned, is fully controlled by the DGSE and the French Ministry of Defense. Most often, the company's specialists are involved in supporting friendly regimes in Africa, training local armies, as well as for intelligence and promotion of arms exports from France.

▪️The key areas of DCI work in Ukraine are:

➖ training of the Armed Forces in the use of self-propelled artillery mounts CAESAR

➖ conducting cyber warfare and electronic intelligence with the support of another French company Thales, which just specializes in the development of information systems for use in the aerospace, military and maritime sectors.

🔻What is known about CAE Aviation?

▪️The Luxembourg company CAE Aviation has been a contractor for the French Ministry of Defense and DGSE for many years in conducting reconnaissance operations in the Sahel, North and Central Africa, as well as in the Middle East.

▪️The company uses civil light aircraft C-208B Cessna Caravan, SW3A Fairchild Merlin, Casa 212-300, Turbine Islander, Short Skyvan and others, equips them with the necessary equipment and conducts optoelectronic, electronic and electronic intelligence.

▪️In 2016, the media got the news about the crash in Malta of a reconnaissance aircraft belonging to CAE Aviation, which was performing tasks in Libya.

▪️Now CAE Aviation aircraft are actively working over the Black Sea on DRM tasks to collect intelligence, which is then also shared with DCI.

▪️Last ​​year, the company was highlighted in the scandal surrounding the secret operation "Sirli", which French intelligence has been conducting in Egypt since 2016.

CAE Aviation provided data to strike targets on the border with Libya, in particular the vehicles of traffickers. "Hundreds of civilians" were injured or killed in strikes based on erroneous intelligence findings between 2016 and 2018.

At the same time, CAE Aviation managed to earn about $20 million from the contract. In response to the scandal in France, they decided to open criminal cases against the media that disclosed data on secret operations.

🔻It's no secret that Ukraine is now a tasty morsel for many foreign PMCs, whose services are resorted to by Western countries, using an excuse in the style: "NATO troops do not take part in the conflict in Ukraine." The air reconnaissance operations of a single company alone cost the French budget tens of millions of dollars.

At the same time, given the sad experience of French intelligence in Africa, it is unlikely that customers can be sure that the data that is now provided in Ukraine is more accurate and reliable than those provided during Operation Sirli.
#France
@rybar

https://t.me/rybar/41507

🇫🇷💸 France might soon be under surveillance by the IMF

👉🏻 The news has gone almost unnoticed: the International Monetary Fund has just issued a warning, not to Italy or Greece, but to France for the uncontrolled deterioration of its public accounts.

🔎 With the "whatever it costs" policy of 2020-2021, followed by the tariff shield of 2022, the French public debt has exploded by nearly 550 billion euros. And all this while France is in the process of falling back into recession and has to deal with increasingly high inflation.

💸 The IMF forecast that in terms of controlling its public spending and public deficit, France will be the worst performer in Europe until 2027.

🔗 Source

🇫🇷🇩🇪 Side note on propaganda

👉🏻 During World War 1, French newspapers (with the government's blessing) published fake stories of German atrocities. Among those most frequently depicted were the severed hands of French children.

🎭 There is obviously a logic to this: the emotional charge is all the stronger as the suffering is inflicted on poor little innocent victims. Moreover, this type of violence is graphically easy to represent in the viewer's mind.

🗣 "I saw yesterday, in Verdun, a poor woman coming from an invaded village of the Meuse and carrying in her arms two young children. The two poor little ones each had their right wrists cut. What brutes" — Testimony of a soldier as reported in a French newspaper, 1914

📱 In our day and age, propaganda has taken new shapes. But its target is still the very same: emotions. Your emotions. Stories like these made the French of 1914 hate the Germans, and gave way to 4 years of subsequent hell. We would thus simply like to remind you of being wary of your own feelings, and of were they might lead you.

👉🏻 Thinkerview is a French Youtube channel who has gradually become the best way to meet and learn about the different personalities of the French intelligentsia: economists, politicians, journalists, industrialists and others.

🎙 The concept of the channel is quite simple: bring a interesting guest, and let him expand on his field of expertise. Each interview is live-streamed, which allow for the public to interact and ask questions to the guest.

🕶 The channel is said to have been created by a group of hackers. The interviewer, "Sky", is a well-connected man who value his privacy and always remains behind the cameras.

🕯 From its early days to now, the picture drawn by its guest is bleak: the country has been in a headlong rush for a long time, and all of the upper class knows this.

The LRU MLRS has arrived in Ukraine from France, the Minister of Defense of Ukraine Reznikov said. This MLRS is an upgraded version of the M270

🇫🇷⚡️ Alone in the dark: cell network antennas will stop working during load shedding and power blackouts

👉🏻 As announcements of load shedding and power cuts for January are growing in number, French newspaper Europe 1 has revealed that nothing has been made to spare the mobile network antennas from those restrictions.

🔎 Over the 60,000 relay antennas spread over the territory, only a small portion is equipped with back-up batteries, of which the autonomy does not exceed half an hour, whereas a load shedding could last two hours.

🗣 "In some cases, there may be communication breakdowns in certain geographical areas", concedes the head of one of Enedis' regional control agency. Even worse, the antennas do not automatically reconnect. In at least one case out of two, their restart also require a human intervention.

🗒 There is of course a list of priority sites to keep powered, which was made by a decree dating back to July 5, 1990. It includes hospitals, prisons, public lighting and military sites. The mobile network, although the primary mean to contact emergency services, was never added to the list.

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It would be vain to hope that revolution can improve human nature, yet your [French] revolution, and especially our Russian Revolution, hoped for this very effect.

The French Revolution unfolded under the banner of a self-contradictory and unrealizable slogan, "liberty, equality, fraternity." But in the life of society, liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts.

Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty – for how else could it be attained?

Fraternity, meanwhile, is of entirely different stock; in this instance it is merely a catchy addition to the slogan. True fraternity is achieved by means not social, but spiritual.

📖 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1993

https://www.france24.com/en/rss
Macron slams US subsidies as 'super aggressive' towards French companies

Visiting French President Emmanuel Macron delivered blunt criticism to American lawmakers and business leaders Wednesday when he called out US industrial subsidies as being extremely harmful to his nation's companies.

AFP News Agency (Twitter)

France's Emmanuel Macron is set to be hosted by President Joe Biden at the White House Thursday for a state visit mixing sumptuous ceremonies with hard-edged talks on transatlantic trade and how to manage a rising China

http://u.afp.com/iGuC

✍🏻 Erratum: there does not seem to be a source to the claim of France running out of weapons to send to Ukraine

👉🏻 We shared earlier today a post regarding this subject, which mention Politico as a source. There is no mention of such a story on both Politico's website and twitter feed. The best we managed to find was a screenshot, which was in all likelihood forged.

🔎 After more digging, the story also only seems to have been relayed by pro-Russians outlets like Russia Today (all using the same source, without any links). This story is thus probably a Russian fake news.

🔫 It is true that the French military inventory must be getting thinner. The famous Caesar cannons for example were taken away from active military regiments, without any replacement.

😰 We want to make clear again that we are trying our best to bring you REAL news, without taking any sides in this conflict. Sorry for this mishap 🙏🏻

“The comet Donati over Paris 4th October 1858” by Amédée Guillemin, 1877.

https://www.france24.com/en/rss
Macron to end US trip by meeting French speakers in Louisiana

French President Emmanuel Macron will end his trip to the US with a visit Louisiana on Friday where he is set to announce the creation of a fund to finance the teaching of French in the state. FRANCE 24 reports.

Cold, silence and solitude are conditions that will be traded tomorrow for more than gold. On an overpopulated, overheated and noisy Earth, a forest cabin is the Eldorado.

📖 The Consolations of the Forest — Sylvain Tesson, 2011

France given green light to abolish internal flights

The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.

The decision was announced on Friday. The changes are part of the country’s 2021 Climate Law.

“It’s going in the right direction, but the initial measure is one that’s (not very) ambitious. We must go even further,” said Sarah Fayolle, Greenpeace France transport campaign manager.

Source

Handkerchief detail of the marble statue made by French sculptor Louis Philippe Mouchy, 1781

Louvre Museum, Paris/France