Salut!

La Rentrée, la mixité and la morale laïque in Montpellier

Great values, but trumped by laïcité?

A second bite at the same cherry - the Montpellier Muslim mothers and their demand for an end to social apartheid at school - produced this opinion piece* as France prepares for the big return to school life on September 1 ...

As summer crowds begin their retreat from French beaches, the country with Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish populations is preparing for an academic year that promises compulsory new lessons on secular morality and continuing controversy over substitutes for pork in school canteens.

New York small talk with John Lennon, music in the Manhattan air

Zubin Mehta conducts a concert in Central Park in the 1970s. Bill was probably in the crowd. Image: New York Philharmonic Digital Archives

With his delicious mouthfuls of New York reminiscence - see them all at http://www.francesalut.com/not-a-native-new-yorker/ - Bill Taylor has struck a chord with readers. By which I mean they have enabled Salut! to get some.

'There's music on Clinton Street all thru the evening ...' sang Leonard Cohen. Bill remembers something of the same from his younger years in New York ...

Let's all Google Sundar Pichai

I did tweet Sundar Pichai, the new CEO of Google, and ask what advice he had for any bright young thing hoping to be, well, the next Sundar Pichai. I am sure he was just too busy to reply and is far to nice a guy to be planning online reprisals for anything in this profile for The National's Weekend magazine supplement*. By the way, is it true that Enid Blyton was the first to coin the word Google, using it for the name given by a character in one of her books to describe a tasty bun? ...

Making themselves heard: Montpellier's Muslim mums fighting 'social apartheid' at school

Picture courtesy of Nanda Gonzague, the photographer who worked on this report*. See more of his photography at http://www.nanda-gonzague.com/

In a country that has liberty, equality and fraternity as its national motto, a banner that denounces “social apartheid” should do more than prick the collective conscience. It should sting like a scorpion.

The campaign of a group of Muslim mothers who are demanding an end to the “ghettoisation” that condemns their children to attend schools where every pupil is of immigrant origin, has duly stung liberal French consciences.

French Connexion: the UberPop taxi revolution

The voice of the street has been heard again and French taxi drivers have seen off, for now, the upstart rivals from UberPop. The law is currently against the news service but I argue in my latest column for The Connexion, an English-language monthly distributed throughout France, there will be more battles to come before the war is decided ...