†Take The Veil Off, Or Go Home: The Washington Post reports that assimilated Muslim immigrants in France understand why President Nicolas Sarkozy is dismayed by women wearing black burqas that cover every inch of their bodies save for a narrow slit at the eyes:

French people have long been accustomed to Muslim women wearing head scarves and long dresses. But the sight of women covered by black veils, increasingly frequent in some towns, has become the latest test of France's uneasy role as host to the largest Muslim population in Europe, nearly 6 million out of 64 million. Because of its stark distinction from the way European women dress, the full veil has generated a public outcry, becoming a symbol widely perceived as an assault on France's secular values.

"It's ridiculous," sneered Jose Aparecio, 66, a retired plumber surveying the busy square in Venissieux. "I don't know what they're trying to prove." …

To some extent, the resentment also has spread among Muslim immigrants, particularly the elderly, who from humble beginnings worked hard to become part of the society and now see fellow Muslims challenging their adopted values. "If they don't like it here, they can always leave," sniffed Mustafa Zemaoui, 65, a retired locksmith who was sipping on a little glass of rosé wine as the lunch hour approached.

In that vein, the official High Authority Against Discrimination and for Equality ruled recently that government-sponsored, free French classes are entitled to exclude fully veiled women because, on one hand, the veil covering their mouths impeded teaching and, on the other, the classes are part of an effort to integrate immigrants into society.

According to the WaPo, André Gerin - a former mayor of Venissieux who now represents the town in parliament and led a group of 90 lawmakers introducing a resolution to study whether the burqa and niqab, both of which completely cover the face, should be banned - had “made it a point to work closely with Muslims, who make up a little more than half of Venissieux's 60,000 residents.” But he began to worry that "[t]here is real ideological work underway to refute the best parts of what makes up Western civilization" when two young Venissieux Muslims were captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and held at Gitmo.

Gerin tells the WaPo that an earlier wave of Muslims who immigrated from Algeria and Morocco want to become integrated into French society, but not younger French-born Muslims who are radicalized in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

† Honor Killing And Beheading: Stereotype Or True To Type?: The New York Post reports that “[t]he crazed husband” of Bronx physician Haleh Mohseni, 40, “burst into” the home she had rented in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, and critically wounded her with a shotgun blast to the abdomen. Before he killed himself, Mohammad Shojaeifard, 49, fatally shot their daughter Mandana Shojaeifard, 17, and Mohseni's mother, Batool Biraman. The Stiletto read other accounts of the carnage by The Associated Press, Newsday, New York Daily News, ABC News, and the Web sites of several NY-area local news programs; only the Post mentioned that Mohseni, is Iranian, and Shojaeifard, is Bangladeshi (the estranged couple met in medical school in Bangladesh some 20 years earlier). Is this yet another instance of an honor killing occurring in NY state? Shouldn’t journalists be trying to find out?

† Your Bonus: $0. Continued Employment: Priceless.: The Washington Times notes that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other Wall Street firms under the illusion that they would be shielded from opprobrium raining down on them if they paid back taxpayer bailout funds before awarding lavish bonuses “have come in for a rude awakening”:

In the wake of revelations that ... big banks plan to distribute a record-breaking $74 billion in bonuses after a prosperous half-year of trading in the financial markets, members of Congress and their constituents are refocusing on what they consider to be overpaid Wall Street employees. The House moved last week on legislation to severely restrict future financial pay. …

[T]he House approved a bill to prohibit risky financial pay practices through broader regulation and require executives at all corporations to give shareholders a "say on pay" packages. …

Congress also is honing plans to levy heavy taxes on the rich to pay for an expansion of health care and other government programs, and Wall Street for decades has hosted the world's wealthiest enclave of millionaires and billionaires.

Robert Shapiro, who was an economic adviser to President Clinton and now heads NDN's Globalization Initiative, a center-left economic think tank, said giant bonuses on Wall Street were widely thought to have helped cause the financial crisis last year.

"The old practices that got us into this mess still go on," he said, noting that Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms that made big profits trading in stocks, commodities, currencies and other markets this year plan to distribute the bonuses as they have in the past to employees who helped generate such large, short-term profits. The problem is, he said, some of their trading strategies - such as placing big, leveraged bets on rising oil prices or a fall in the dollar - might involve substantial long-term risks and losses as well.

† King Of The Heels: Jenny Sanford, the aggrieved wife of philandering Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC), essentially told her husband "good luck movin' up, 'cause I'm movin' out." The first lady and her four sons moved out of the governor’s mansion in Columbia and plan relocate to the family's oceanfront cottage on Sullivan's Island near Charleston, “almost two hours by car from the state capitol,” reports The Washington Post. According to The Associated Press, Mrs. Sanford and “several other women moved bags of clothes, a suitcase and armloads of suits and dresses on hangers from the governor's mansion … before departing in a caravan of sport utility vehicles. Three of the four boys were present, carrying tote and duffel bags.”

[Hat Tip: The Heel, an Ivy-educated attorney with a prestigious New York firm, and occasional contributor to this blog.]

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Restorative Capital Punishment): Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby takes issue with the The Sentencing Project’s report, “No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America,’’ denouncing the number of prisoners sentenced to life without parole (41,000, or 1.8 percent, of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S.): 

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Americans experienced 44 million crimes in 1973. By 2007, that number had dropped to 23 million - and this even as the population grew by more than 75 million.

During those “three decades of ‘tough on crime’ policies,’’ in other words, crime in America was nearly halved. Since the mid-1990s, the plunge in violent crime has been especially steep: from more than 51 crimes of violence per 1,000 US residents in 1994 to 21 in 2005 - a 59 percent reduction. …

Nowhere in “No Exit’’ is there any breakdown of the crimes that led to the 140,000 life sentences now being served. Yet the report devotes almost obsessive attention (including five statistical tables) to the alleged racial disparity those sentences reflect. About 48 percent of lifers are black, 33 percent are white, and 14 percent are Hispanic. “These figures are consistent with a larger pattern in the criminal justice system,’’ the report notes, “in which African Americans are represented at an increasingly disproportionate rate across the continuum from arrest through incarceration.’’ …

Though blacks account for just one-eighth of the US population, they are six times more likely than whites to be murdered, and seven times more likely to commit murder. That hard fact, not racism, explains the high proportion of lifers who are black. But such inconvenient facts appear nowhere in the Sentencing Project’s report. “No Exit’’ brims over with information and statistics - but only those that reinforce its sponsor’s preconceived views.