A factory that is less and less ordinary…
One visit can hide another
On March 30, 4th graders from Les Deux Vallées secondary school in Cheylard, in the Vivarais region of France, paid a visit to a seemingly ordinary company. While the more assiduous students had to restrain themselves from yawning at the presentation of the various aeronautical professions, the more sensitive ones may have thought that, after all, a school day away from the four walls that confine dreams was something to be welcomed. On the same day, a second group was also touring the plant, but in a much more interested way, as it was made up entirely of entrepreneurs and elected representatives.
Both visits took place in La Voulte-sur-Rhône (Ardèche), and more specifically at the headquarters of Fregate Aero, which builds “structural sub-assemblies for airplanes and helicopters, using metal, sheet metal and machined parts. Our main customers are Airbus, Dassault and Safran”, according to Frédéric Guimbal, the company’s president. That day, the man with the tense smile dishing out a clumsy promotion for his death box had other things on his mind. Three days earlier, at around 5am on Monday March 27, an arson attack had hit the Fregate Aero group’s second factory, located in the village of Beauchastel, less than five kilometers away.
Continue reading A factory that is less and less ordinary… (France)
disfigured by loggers, ravaged by energy companies, polluted by industrialists and colonized by accomplices of the Chilean state — the last few decades have been marked by unrelenting struggle.
Among the tedious publications that the French state releases every year to offer a semblance of democratic veneer is the annual report of the Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Techniques de Renseignement (CNCTR), the body created in 2015 to monitor the proper use of spying measures deployed by these agencies. The release of its 2022 Annual Report on June 15 may have passed somewhat unnoticed, but it’s still worth extracting a few bits of information. All the more so since the report details the official array of surveillance measures carried out on their own initiative, upstream and as a preventive measure, by all the intelligence agencies, leaving us to imagine how this expansion can then be translated into additional prolonged surveillance in a judicial rather than administrative framework (in the form of opening a preliminary investigation or inquiry, which the person who is targeted will not immediately be aware of).
