The French Catholic daily La Croix has raised doubts about the participation of the French “first lady” Cecilia Sarkozy in the liberation of the Bulgarian nurses, who were held prisoners in Libya for eight years. An unsigned editorial published on the front page of the paper on 24/7 says the affair generates “confusion of gender and roles” because the negotiations for the liberation of prisoners are the responsibility of the “Minister of Foreign Affairs” and not of the “wife of the head of state”. “It’s not easy to understand the participation of Cecilia Sarkozy in Tripoli – says the editorial – even if, like many, she was moved and challenged by the plight of the nurses. We hope her intervention was not prompted by the wish to obtain a media benefit from their liberation. The European diplomats who have conducted the negotiations with Libya for years would hardly appreciate that”. The Catholic paper also wonders whether “the first lady of France” ought necessarily to have played a “role” in a “delicate affair of great complexity in which there was a lot left unspoken, parallel diplomacy and perhaps even clandestine negotiations for the sale of French arms”. Another front-page story in the French dailies is the storm that has broken metaphorically over the country’s premier sporting event, the Tour de France, dragged into the mire by the doping scandal. Le Monde (26/7) thus leads with the front-page headline: “The Tour de France destabilized”. A lot of coverage is devoted to the story inside the paper, including a “portrait” of Jacques de Ceaurriz, director of research of the National Anti-Doping Laboratory: “nightmare of the riders” in the Tour de France, comments Le Monde, following the expulsion of the latest “victim”, Alexandre Vinokourov, who tested positive after a blood transfusion. “Over the last ten years – points our the doctor – anti-doping had made significant progress”, but “a whole battery of measures needs to be mobilized to counter it: the police to dismantle the drug trafficking, the authorities that deal with the introduction of health products on the market to control the arrival of a new molecule…”. The ethical implications of the cases of doping in the Tour de France are also discussed in the German press. A comment in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (26/7) says: “The Tour of scandal may even have a value: it has demonstrated the effectiveness of anti-doping controls and thus discovered the truth about professional cycling, revealing before the world public the disturbing mentalities and mechanisms against which the professionals have long had to struggle. We can no longer continue in this way. But can we go ahead at all? Yes, but only by making a clean break with the past”. And in the Frankfurter Rundschau , Stefan Hebel observes: “It is interesting to ask oneself why the deception seems to be yielding just now (…). There have always been those who wanted to protect the core of professional cycling from destruction from doping (…). The guilty ones must be punished more severely (…). Political action must not continue to withdraw from the task… and we spectators must learn to renounce, because the operation cannot succeed with the spectacle now underway. So: deprive us of our drug. Interrupt the Tour and restore it to us in two year’s time, this time as a real sport”. “What went wrong?” is the question posed in the British daily The Guardian (24/7), following the floods of the Severn and Thames that have left large tracts of central and southern England under water: the worst floods in the UK for 60 years. Patrick Wintour and Karen McVeigh, in a front page editorial, emphasize that the British government is under accusation, in particular, for failing “to overhaul UK flood defences and drainage systems”; “lack of information for those affected by flooding”; “insufficient risk assessment”; and “developing planning decision being taken without a full understanding of the risks of urban flooding”. The war of words between Spanish premier Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the President of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, Msgr. Ricardo Blázquez, on the new subject in the school curriculum “Education in citizenship” is reported in El Mundo of 24/7. To Zapatero, who had declared to the 23rd Congress of Socialist Youth in Spain that “no faith can be imposed over the laws in a democracy”, Bishop Blázquez replied that “faith is proposed, not imposed”. “The glorification of violence, the instigation to violence, the legitimising of ideas and conduct contrary to human rights and the dignity of women, all this constitutes a mixture that can cause sudden tragedies but that undoubtedly pollutes in depth segments or sections of the world of immigration”, comments Carlo Cardia ( Avvenire) on the arrest of the imam of the mosque of Ponte Felcino (Perugia). Apart from the terrorist emergency, however, “the State must act in other ways so that citizens be able to distinguish what is healthy from what is sick, what is innocuous from what is harmful”.
