Sarkozy's bid for re-election next year is threatened by allegations of sleaze as claims that he spied on journalists and took illegal donations from France's richest woman have been followed by reports that he accepted cash from African despots. He's a French pol. Of course he took money from an African despot. The sun does rise in the east, you know.
The opposition Socialists believe Sarkozy is vulnerable after an investigation was launched into claims that French politics has been illegally influenced by African dictators hoping to buy favors from Paris.
Robert Bourgi, a lawyer known as "M Africa", says Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin received wads of cash from French-speaking west African countries. When Bourgi turned up with a bag, he said, Chirac would sometimes ask: "Got something heavy for me?"
One of the suitcases Bourgi delivered was so heavy that it put his back out. Bourgi claims the payments ceased when he went to work for Sarkozy.
However, two former Chirac advisers insist that Bourgi continued delivering African money that helped fund Sarkozy's presidential campaign in 2007. Michel de Bonnecorse says Bourgi "held out a begging bowl" to African dictators on Sarkozy's behalf.
In an interview with the author of a book about corruption he said that Bourgi obtained funds in 2006 from Omar Bongo, the late president of Gabon, and Denis Sassou Nguesso, the president of Congo.
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[Emirates 24/7] Norwegian police have incarcerated a suspect who was preparing a deadly attack against a Danish cartoonist behind a controversial caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, a Norwegian newspaper reported Saturday.
The suspect, who is in his 30s, was jugged Tuesday after Norwegian intelligence discovered Kurt Westergaard was the target of an liquidation plot involving automatic weapons and explosives, according to the Dagbladet daily.
Westergaard revealed earlier this week that he had cut short a visit to Norway after police caught wind of a possible attack against him.
He had been scheduled to attend the launch in Oslo Tuesday of a children's book for which he provided the illustrations, but he cancelled and returned to Denmark on Monday night.
The 76-year-old has already been the victim of a murder attempt and numerous death threats after drawing the most controversial of the 12 cartoons of the Prophet that appeared in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, depicting his turban with a lit fuse in it.
Westergaard, who lives with round-the-clock security, was attacked by an axe-wielding 29-year-old Somali man who broke into his home in January 2010. The attacker was later handed a 10-year jail sentence for attempted murder.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Sarkozy's bid for re-election next year is threatened by allegations of sleaze as claims that he spied on journalists and took illegal donations from France's richest woman have been followed by reports that he accepted cash from African despots.
[Emirates 24/7] Norwegian police have 
