viernes, 30 de noviembre de 2012

Cristina Kirchner has vowed never to pay the "vultures."

Argentina's President Basically 

Just Declared War On New York


  • Yesterday, Argentina won a substantial victory when a New York Appeals Court ruled that its legal battle with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer would continue on without the country having to make a $3 billion payment to bond holders on December 15th.
  • You would think that Argentina's President, then, would be breathing a sigh of relief.
  • Instead she's breathing fire....this is a matter of national sovereignty
  • She has vowed never to pay the "vultures."



Read more: www.businessinsider.com

Le "mariage" homosexuel est un non-sens juridique autant qu'un négationnisme anthropologique, car des personnes de même sexe se retrouvent, ipso facto, en état patent d'incapacité (au sens juridique et biologique) à fonder une famille



Le Salon Beige (Lu dans L'Action française 2000)

"Ce terrorisme d'une coterie sexuelle (certaines associations "LGBT" lourdement subventionnées ne dépassant pas la centaine d'adhérents) est parvenu à étouffer au sein de la société française, comme de l'oligarchie intellocrate, toute velléité de questionnement critique sur la réalité psychologique et anthropologique de l'homosexualité, sauf à voir fondre sur soi les anathèmes habituels. 

Si des homosexuels s'allongent sur le divan de la psychanalyse pour confier leurs troubles, la psychanalyse a échoué (ou a renoncé) à faire admettre, à la façon de Tony Anatrella (prêtre et psychologue), « qu'en réalité l'homosexualité est toujours symptomatique d'un conflit intrapsychique non résolu ». 
....

La reconnaissance du statut d'Etat observateur à l'ONU pour les Palestiniens est une victoire symbolique. Mais quels seront les bénéfices concrets et les risques apportés par ce changement? Passage en revue.


Palestine à l'ONU: quels risques, quels bénéfices?





Le projet d'admission de la Palestine comme "Etat observateur" soumis ce jeudi à l'Assemblée générale, a aisément recueilli la majorité simple requise, avec 138 voix pour, 9 contre et 41 abstentions. 
Le chef de l'Autorité palestinienne avait choisi de présenter cette demande devant l'Assemblée générale de l'ONU après l'échec, l'automne dernier, d'une précédente initiative pour la reconnaissance d'un Etat membre à part entière devant le Conseil de Sécurité

Mais quels changements réels vont sortir de ce processus pour les Palestiniens? - Les bénéfices et les risques ne sont pas forcément là où on les attend.

  • Ramener la cause palestinienne sur le devant de la scène ...
  • Replacer le droit international au centre des discussions ...
  • Renforcer le Fatah de Mahmoud Abbas, très affaibli ...
  • Profiter de la dynamique enclenchée par le cessez-le-feu à Gaza ...
  • Le risque pour les Palestiniens de la diaspora ...
  • Le risque de représailles de la part des Etats-Unis et d'Israël ...



Lireici: www.lexpress.fr

Avec cet état d’esprit, ferme sur ses options mais équilibré dans son approche, l’Institut Thomas More apporte sa contribution au débat en formulant des réponses aux 10 questions que chacun doit se poser sur ce qui est en jeu dans ce dossier majeur pour l’avenir de la société toute entière

MARIAGE ENTRE PERSONNES DE MÊME SEXE ET ADOPTION 

10 QUESTIONS SUR LA FAMILLE

www.institut-thomas-more.org | info@institut-thomas-more.org

Paris

20, rue Laffitte – F-75 009 Paris | Tel +33 (0)1 49 49 03 30 | Fax +33 (0)1 49 49 03 33

Bruxelles

Rue de La Fauvette, 92, B-1180 Bruxelles | Tel +32 (0)2 374 23 13 | Fax +32 (0)2 358 56 48



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jueves, 29 de noviembre de 2012

Then, as today, societies were uncertain about which model of society to strive for and how to repair monetary systems. Societies bet on the wrong ideas; we may be committing similar mistakes now

The 1930s All Over Again?



Many people draw parallels between today and the 1930s, labeling this the Great Recession. They note the high unemployment rate, referring not to the mismeasured, official statistic, but to the number more than double that rate, which also accounts for those who dropped out from the labor force and are no longer counted as “unemployed.” Others worry about the deflationary risk, the dollar devaluation, and the status of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. Still others worry that the “vital few” — those with high scientific aptitudes and entrepreneurial drive — no longer come to or stay in the United States, but stay in or go back to the many countries whose Iron Curtains have been punctured since 1989.

Yet the most worrying parallel with the 1930s is one that is not discussed. Then, as today, societies were uncertain about the model of society they should strive for and about how to repair domestic and international monetary systems after wildly varying expansions of credit during and after World War I in the different countries. In addressing these two questions, societies ended up betting on the wrong ideas, which had long-term, disastrous consequences. We may be committing similar mistakes now.

Recall the 1920s and 1930s: Germany, Hungary, Austria, and Italy all destroyed their middle classes and financial markets with hyperinflation — a destruction that has always been a recipe for both political instability and predictable centralization of power. After all, once financial markets are destroyed, even if inadvertently, governments and central banks become financial intermediaries — by default.
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Read more: www.american.com

Given that the federal debt is $11 trillion, the government’s debt is already more than four times greater than its income. If the debt-to-GDP ratio rises to 200%, as CBO forecasts for 2037, the situation changes dramatically, with the debt-to-income ratio rising to more than 10. This would be the equivalent of a family who earns $100,000/year buying a $1.25 million house.

A Debt Strategy For The Next 30 Years

 

 

 

The United States is on an unsustainable fiscal course. This year marks the fourth in a row that the U.S. federal deficit will exceed $1.1 trillion. Since the end of 2007, the federal debt, now $11 trillion, has doubled as a share of annual GDP—from 36% to 73%. The long-term outlook is even worse. 

The deficit is likely to improve in the next few years, but it will then turn upward again due to the projected rise in federal spending on Medicare and Social Security. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), spending on those two programs will rise from 8.7% to 12.2% of GDP by 2037. 

The good news is that U.S. lawmakers and policy experts from across the political spectrum have begun in earnest to outline possible strategies for tackling this looming debt crisis. Unsurprisingly, many suggestions—from the Left and the Right—are misguided or not particularly constructive. For example, a number of left-leaning think tanks have recently supported a “financial transactions” tax that would cause huge distortions, raise far less revenue than projected, and push more of the industry offshore. Similarly unhelpful, some conservative groups have advocated abolishing various small spending programs on the grounds that such cuts will improve the fiscal outlook, even though their elimination would have only a trivial impact on the overall federal budget. 

Given the plethora of ideas being floated, it is critical that policymakers—both liberal and conservative—zero in on a framework that effectively addresses our fiscal challenges and permits specific policies to be properly evaluated. Outlined below are three key principles that are essential to this endeavor and offer concrete policy applications based on these principles. 

First let’s provide some context for understanding the size of the problem.
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Read more: ncf.uschamber.com

Free markets with flexible prices coordinate the activities of millions of people in a remarkable and typically sensible way

Economists and res publica: 
 
The virtues and limits of economic analysis
 


Introduction

  • With the possible exception of lawyers, economists are now the profession with the most influence on public policy. 
  • In the 1960s, when I began working at the US Bureau of the Budget, Charles Schultze, an economist and then-director of the bureau, tried to ensure that most of the public policy and program evaluation offices were headed by economists. 
  • Economic thinking still dominates the Office of Management and Budget, the Congressional Budget Office, and the General Accounting Office, and it is influential in policy and program evaluation offices across US agencies and departments. 
  • Moreover, economic thinking is at the forefront of most public policy schools at our leading universities. 
  • Intentional or not, economists now have a large say in forming the laws and regulations we make as a polity. 
  • The question that naturally arises is: what are the civic benefits that accrue from adopting the economist’s view of the world—and, in turn, what are the limitations?
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Download .pdf here  

Read more: www.aei.org/ 

UK - Their only “crime” was to hold the “wrong” opinions


Political Correctness Reaches New Low in UK



  • In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Love promoted nothing but hatred and the Ministry of Truth spread nothing but lies. 
  • Although totalitarianism of the kind described and analyzed by Orwell has all but disappeared from the face of the earth, give or take a country or two, totalitarianism of another, softer kind is marching its slow way through the institutions. 
  • In the name of diversity and tolerance, it enforces uniformity and bigotry: and there is no vice as insidious as that which, in the search for power, takes itself for virtue.
  • In England, this degeneration has gone further than almost anywhere else in the western world. 

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Books - Why has our culture become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public debate coarsened?

Is the Enemy Us?


CLAIRE BERLINSKI


Embracing—and challenging—Bruce Bawer’s powerful new book

In his new book, Bruce Bawer has proposed an answer to vexing questions: Why has our culture become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public debate coarsened? Bawer locates the source of these misfortunes in the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation—above all, the emergence of multicultural “identity studies.” The academy, he observes, is “the font of the perfidious multicultural idea and the setting in which it is implanted into the minds of American youth.”

In what must be reckoned a martyrdom operation, Bawer has spent countless hours not only reading the collective oeuvre of the leading luminaries in Black, Women’s, Gender, Queer, Fat, and Chicano Studies, but also traveling America to attend their conferences. At a gathering of the Cultural Studies Association at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, Bawer encounters the young Michele, who’s “like, a grad student at UC Davis?” She’s “sort of reviving a Gramschian-style Marxism,” involving the idea that global warming is “sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?” Bawer claims that his heart goes out to her. (His heart is bigger than mine.)
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L’Europe est post-chrétienne, relativiste, ouverte à un multi-culturalisme où toutes les cultures sont égales – à l’exception de la culture occidentale, qui devient bien moins égale que les autres


Le crépuscule qui vient sur l’Occident


par MILLIERE GUY 

En lisant les commentaires postés sous mes derniers articles, j’ai vu que certains lecteurs s’arrêtent à l’accessoire.
J’ai, quelques jours, pensé que Mitt Romney serait élu lors de l’élection présidentielle américaine. Mon analyse recoupait celle de Karl Rove et Charles Krauthammer, Michael Barone et Dick Morris, qui travaillent sur le sujet depuis aussi longtemps que moi, voire depuis plus longtemps que moi. J’avais tort sur ce point et pendant ces quel­ques jours. Mais c’est là l’accessoire.
L’essentiel est ailleurs. Il est dans ce que j’ai analysé dans mon dernier livre. La présidence Obama a effectivement été un désastre de dimension planétaire. Le second mandat de Barack Obama va voir le désastre s’accentuer.C’est ce qui compte et ce qui importe, et presqu’aucune analyse en langue française ne permet de déchiffrer le désastre qu’a été la présidence Obama au cours des quatre dernières années ou de déchiffrer les risques très concrets d’accentuation du désastre au cours des quatre années qui commencent.
Une mutation des États-Unis, accélérée et exacerbée par Obama, est en train de s‘opérer. Elle va donc se poursuivre au cours de ce second mandat en conduisant le pays vers un déclin économique, géopolitique et culturel dont les conséquences sont déjà très graves, et vont devenir cataclysmiques.
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Lors d'une longue tirade sur le terrorisme, Nicolas Dhuicq explique que les terroristes "manquent souvent d'autorité paternelle". Et dénonce le projet de loi sur le mariage gay "qui va provoquer la psychose."


Un député UMP compare les enfants d'homosexuels aux terroristes


VIDEO

 

Par 




Par Sebastien Tronche



Russia - the glasnost authors urged themselves and their compatriots to continue to say and print truth. Truth cleanses, uplifts, ennobles, and frees.


For dignity in democratic citizenship: Russia's unfinished moral revolution and anti-authoritarian movements today



  • A close examination of the causes of the Russian Revolution of 1987–91 indicates that it was precipitated not by the traditional structural calamities of economic or financial crises, military defeat, or natural disasters but by a moral and intellectual awakening of the Soviet people. 
  • The tug of war between the power of the state and the conscience of the citizen became a source of widening conflict. 
  • Moral and intellectual revolution of the late 1980s attempted to recover people’s dignity by constructing democratic citizenship rooted in economic and political liberty and personal responsibility. 
  • Russia’s revolution is an example of moral renewal generated from “below” by civil society rather than the state. 
  • In Russia today, burgeoning grassroots movements appear to continue what glasnost started by seeking to inculcate and widen modern, enlightened, democratic citizenship.

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Read more: www.aei.org



What Are They Thinking? 

A Study of Youth in Three Post-Soviet States



Since today’s politically active youth is tomorrow’s political establishment, Nadia Diuk’s study of The Next Generation in Russia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan is a must-read not only for students of the former Soviet Union but for all those interested in the dynamics of modern-day anti-authoritarian struggles. One of Diuk’s aims is to discern the political and economic future of the three post-Soviet republics by compiling a comprehensive sociological portrait of the generation that is now entering civic maturity—as Diuk refers to it, “the first free generation after decades of Communism.”
The study is based on two sets of comprehensive polling data, collected in 2003 and 2010 from Russians, Ukrainians, and Azerbaijanis under the age of thirty-four. Taken together, they allow a comparison of the state and progress of youth public opinion.
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What difference would it make for a fiat currency-issuing central bank to be deeply insolvent on a mark-to-market basis?


Does Interest Rate Risk Matter... 

If You’re the Fed?



The combined balance sheet of the Federal Reserve has $2.9 trillion in assets and $55 billion in equity, for leverage of a heady 52 times and a capital ratio of a paltry 1.9 percent. On top of this high leverage and little capital, the Fed runs massive interest rate risk, with investments in long-term mortgage-backed securities (MBS) of over $900 billion and longer-term Treasuries of $1.65 trillion.
“The huge and rising government bond holdings of Japanese banks leave them vulnerable to a spike in interest rates, the International Monetary Fund has warned,” the Financial Times reported recently. But somehow the IMF did not warn about the Fed’s huge and rising bond holdings, which leave the Fed vulnerable.
A rise in interest rates from their historic lows is inevitable at some point. How vulnerable is the Fed’s balance sheet to interest rate risk? 
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Read more: american.com

martes, 27 de noviembre de 2012

In the event of default, Argentina could be saved by soy, but they'd have to bounce back from some serious setbacks.... pronto


The Fate Of Argentina Could Come Down To The Soybean



Let's assume that Argentina absolutely will not pay the "vulture" hedge funds that just successfully (for now) sued the country for $1.3 billion in sovereign bonds.
That could mean that the country would be considered in default, and that could result in calamity.
We'll know by December 15th, because that is when a  New York Court ruled that Argentina must pay all parties that hold its sovereign debt dating back to 2001. 
For the past decade, it has only been paying those that restructured their debt in 2005 and 2010.
This ruling is the culmination of a decade-long legal battle spearheaded by billionaire Paul Singer, and if Argentina defies it, it could mean "game over."
And the terms that the Court has laid down for payment leave little room for funny stuff, though Argentina maintains that it will not pay.
So the worst could happen. But if it does, there is something that could ensure that the Argentina carries on.
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Read more: www.businessinsider.com

“We are committed to an ecumenism of conviction, not an ecumenism of accommodation.”


By Francis J. Beckwith   

Those are the words of my friend, Timothy George, a Baptist theologian who serves as Dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University. He was referring to the signatories of “The Gift of Salvation,” one of the many statements issued by Evangelicals and Catholics Together, a group that was formed through the initiative of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Charles Colson, both of whom are no longer with us.


I spent most of last week experiencing the delights of this “ecumenism of conviction” first hand. I delivered three papers at the 64th annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, the academic association for which I served as president until resigning a week after I was received back into the Catholic Church in May 2007. 

 Two of my papers were given on panels that directly addressed issues over which Catholics and Protestants disagree.
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USA - In this new capacity the government conceives itself as being subject to nothing—not to the Constitution, amendments, reason, or natural law. It will not be put quite this way, but that is the effect. This is what we elected




Is Christianity the measure of modernity or 
is modernity the measure of Christianity?


.........


Many writers and voices have pointed out that the present administration is by all odds the most anti-Catholic regime in this country’s history. That did not prevent some 50 percent of Catholics from voting for it. But that may be a clue about the problem. Often the leaders of those measures and decrees most against officially stated Catholic positions are formulated and carried out by those who are Catholics. Several other writers have argued that so long as these high-profile Catholics carry out anti-Catholic policies and remain in apparently good standing in the Church, many Catholics will conclude that, whatever the noise about these issues, it must be all right to be a Catholic and take positions contrary to what the bishops and Church seem to hold.

Why Catholics do not defend themselves against such attacks on their religion and their place in public life has long puzzled many sympathetic citizens. Part of the reason is that the current attacks—which revolve around marriage and family life and the proper order of one’s interior moral life—are not attacks against the faith as such. They are about what we can and should figure out from reason and natural law. Catholics are involved here not primarily because they are Catholics but because they are human beings. These issues are not what we usually call “religious” issues. It is true that, in many ways, the Church is the last public defender of the natural law and of reason itself in these areas, but that is because revelation does not replace but agrees with and heals reason when it goes wrong in its own order.

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Read more: www.catholicworldreport.com

William Kilpatrick on what the spread of militant Islam means for the future of the West.






William Kilpatrick is an author and lecturer who taught for many years at Boston College and whose articles on Islam have appeared in numerous publications, including Investor's Business Daily, FrontPage Magazine, the National Catholic Register, and World magazine. 

He has written several books, including Psychological Seduction and Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong, and his most recent book,Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West, will be released next week from Ignatius Press. 

Kilpatrick recently spoke with Catholic World Report about Islam and its growing significance for the West. 

CWR: You begin by noting that, yes, there is some common ground between Christianity and Islam, but the differences are far more important. What are the most important differences between the two religions?
William Kilpatrick: Beneath the surface similarities lie important and largely irreconcilable differences. Islam rejects the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection.  ...
....

hRead more: www.catholicworldreport.com



Le Point.fr - Publié le 

VIDÉO. Cette semaine, l'évêque de Gap et d'Embrun évoque la liberté religieuse

Chaque semaine, monseigneur Jean-Michel di Falco-Léandri, évêque de Gap et d'Embrun, offre aux internautes du Point.fr une chronique vidéo. Il y évoque les grands problèmes de notre époque et de notre société, propose un regard chrétien sur le monde et les soubresauts qui l'animent, et donne son avis sur l'actualité.
 
Aujourd'hui, il revient sur le dernier rapport de l'AED (Aide à l'Église en détresse), selon lui, "le véritable guide de la liberté religieuse dans le monde". À l'aide de ce guide, l'évêque de Gap et d'Embrun propose de voyager à la rencontre de la liberté religieuse. Du Vietnam à l'Inde, en passant par la Chine, l'Arabie saoudite, l'Égypte..., chaque jour, des hommes et des femmes donnent leur vie pour cette liberté de culte, qui semble si normale en France.
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François Hollande chez les franc-maçons






Lire ici: lesalonbeige.blogs.com



The Holland government and a family-less society

Benedetta Cortese

  • The French government has submitted a bill for the recognition of same-sex couples, including the possibility of adoption, and this bill will be examined by the French Parliament at the beginning of next year. 
  • People ordinarily say that behind this bill there is the issue of the so-called rights of homosexuals. 
  • But that’s not true at all; there is much more behind it than that. 
  • The recognition of same-sex weddings is the door leading to a society much different from the one we have known thus far. 
  • Let’s consider why.


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On a litter bin near my house, into which people are supposed to place the wrappers of their almost continuous snacks, there is a child’s drawing with the legend ‘Keep your planet clean’: not, nota bene, ‘Keep your town clean,’ which is a call to decent behaviour, but ‘Keep your planet clean,’ which is an appeal to an ideology which must not be questioned


The UK’s Policy of Truth v. Existential Failure

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Love promoted nothing but hatred and the Ministry of Truth spread nothing but lies. Although totalitarianism of the kind described and analyzed by Orwell has all but disappeared from the face of the earth, give or take a country or two, totalitarianism of another, softer kind is marching its slow way through the institutions. In the name of diversity and tolerance, it enforces uniformity and bigotry: and there is no vice as insidious as that which, in the search for power, takes itself for virtue.
In England, this degeneration has gone further than almost anywhere else in the western world. In northern town of Rotherham recently a perfectly decent couple who fostered children in need of care and attention had their foster-children removed from them because they were members of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, which was deemed by the local council, controlled by the Labour Party, to be racist. There were no allegations that they couple had maltreated any children; indeed, to all appearances they were exemplary foster parents (of children of non-British background, incidentally). Their only ‘crime’ was to hold the ‘wrong’ opinions.
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La Royauté du Christ que nous célébrons aujourd’hui n’est ni le reliquat du triomphalisme supposé de l’Eglise d’antan, ni le confinement de la souveraineté divine dans l’enceinte de nos cœurs ou de nos églises de pierres. La Royauté du Christ est un fait total, plénier, universel


La Royauté du Christ oblige l'Eglise 

à intervenir dans le débat public


Mgr Raymond Centène

Voici l'homélie de Mgr Centène, évêque de Vannes, prononcée hier, lors du pèlerinage ou du « Pardon » des élus en la basilique de Sainte-Anne d’Auray 
..............
... l’Eglise peut et doit intervenir dans le débat public lorsque cette identité de l’homme est remise en question. Et dans cet exercice, son but est toujours de remettre l’homme et sa vérité au cœur des décisions, qu’elles soient politiques, économiques ou sociétales. Comment ce devoir - que l’Eglise doit exercer jusqu’au martyr - est-il compatible avec le principe désormais communément admis de la laïcité... ?
........



Cercle des Célestins - « L’entente des droites n’est pas qu’un enjeu électoral – les élections passent même au second plan à vrai dire – il s’agit d’abord de mener la guerre culturelle, de disputer enfin à la gauche son hégémonie intellectuelle et morale en réaffirmant fièrement nos valeurs. »





Tribune libre d’Édouard Josse
Certains intellectuels de droite estiment que la gauche ne constitue plus un danger majeur pour notre pays et notre civilisation, tant son idéologie est en passe d’être déjugée par les faits. 
La gauche de gouvernement, social-démocrate, connaîtra selon eux le même sort électoral que la gauche socialo-communiste après la chute de l’URSS. 
On avance trois raisons principales à ce phénomène : 
  • la faillite de l’État-Providence, qui étrangle le contribuable et hypothèque l’avenir de ses enfants ; 
  • la mondialisation qui expose le monde ouvrier à de nouvelles menaces socio-économiques et les identités nationales au piège du « multiculturalisme » ; enfin, 
  • la montée en puissance d’un néo-patriotisme chez les jeunes générations venant s’allier au reste de la population vieillissante, sensible aux thèmes de la sécurité, de l’immigration et de la liberté économique. 

Puisque la gauche ne peut ni se défaire de sa culture du « service public » à laquelle elle a lié son destin, ni rompre avec l’universalisme internationaliste qui l’empêche de préférer les ouvriers « de souche » aux ouvriers immigrés, le contexte serait nécessairement favorable à la droite.
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Lire ici: www.ndf.fr

USA - Entre 2000 et 2009, le nombre d’avortements a baissé de 6% et le taux d’avortement de 7%.


États-Unis : Taux d’avortement en forte baisse