Today, the French senate voted to legalize gay marriage after a week of heated debate. The bill, which won a 179-157 majority vote, will now return to the National Assembly for a second reading before expected approval in May. The second reading is seen as a technicality as the members of the National Assembly approved the move on February 12.
Across the course of history, French discoveries have proved invaluable to the field of science. Children still learn the stories of Louis Pasteur, who discovered that invisibly small bacteria spoil food and cause disease, and Marie Curie, who found and named the unseen power of radioactivity. Now there's one more name to add to the list of geniuses upending the world's assumptions: Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon, who has declared that bras make women's boobs saggy.
"Which camel, Monsieur Président? Oh, that camel? Ah, yes. We ate it."
For about 20 minutes this morning, the top headline on the Drudge Report was "DRONES TO DELIVER NEWSPAPERS." It was a nice bit for Drudge, one that satisfied both his obsession with drones and his obsession with media, and had a good future-shock value for his aging, perpetually terrified audience. It was also, obviously, an April Fool's Day joke.
At the beginning of the 20th century, wealthy French banker Albert Kahn embarked on a project, "Archives of the Planet," through which he sent photographers around the world to document, in an early color photography process called autochrome, the cultures and settlements of peoples from six continents. (You can see some examples here.)
A hapless French driver became an inadvertent speed demon when his car malfunctioned and refused to slow down for nearly an hour.
France, hotbed of infidelity, has taken one step closer to allowing same-sex couples the privilege of having extra-marital affairs. This morning, the National Assembly, which is the lower house of France's parliament (it is much like our Congress, but different in that it appears they vote on things), voted 249 to 97 in favor of gay marriage.
There is not a detail in the story of France's Orson Welles Gérard Depardieu's apparently-real move to Russia to avoid higher taxes that will not delight you. After President François Hollande attempted to make good on his campaign pledge to increase taxes on the wealthy, Depardieu announced plans to leave France for Russia's 13% flat tax and his new best friend Vladimir Putin.
French protesters who gathered in Marseilles yesterday to protest a bill allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt were momentarily silenced by the sight of two comely counter-protesters engaged in a full-on make out session.
Every child has wished at one point or another that he or she would walk into school and there would be banners announcing that all homework had been cancelled forever. Of course, God would never answer the prayers of little American boys and girls — but he has heard the cries of French schoolchildren, and their wish is now, almost, a reality.
Last Friday, French gossip magazine Closer published a series of photographs of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless. Yesterday morning, police in Paris raided the publication's offices of Closer magazine, searching the building and inspecting the staff's computers in an attempt to find the name of the photographer. And today, the photos were printed, for the fourth and fifth time, respectively, in Sweden and Denmark.
French magazine Closer just published some photos of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless while "staying at the French chateau of the Queen's nephew, Lord Linley — making it now two royal nudie picture scandals in three weeks. Click though for some NSFW scans.
