President François Hollande's 47-year old partner was slammed for eschewing her Left-wing principles in favour of unabashed champagne Socialism despite the threat of "thousands of job losses in the coming weeks" in companies ranging from Renault to Air France.

VSD, the weekly magazine, trained its ire on the 47-year-old divorcee's decision to attend the haute couture shows of Paris fashion week.

It described photos of the first lady beaming alongside France's richest man Bernard Arnault at the Dior catwalk show as a "political fault".

"While thousands of French are fighting to avoid redundancy … (she) attended the fashion shows," it wrote.
"Valérie Trierweiler, who often claims to be 'Socialist to her soul' … ultimately prefers supporting the one industry that has no particular need of her help – the luxury fashion world.
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"It sends out a very mixed message to the millions of voters who elected her partner to office hoping for a change in morals and mentality.

"Instead of choosing to support welders or other workers, she has chosen to offer her presence, her support to Dior, to Yves Saint Laurent and the entire luxury industry."

The virulent broadside comes after former first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy was regularly branded a frivolous figure painfully unaware of the plight of the average French person while her husband Nicolas Sarkozy was president.

The multi-millionaire former supermodel was particularly mocked for declaring "we're simple ordinary folk" in a desperate bid to convince the French her husband was a "man of the people" during his failed re-election bid.

Now VSD said her successor had fallen into the same trap.
"Mixing with the elite has always had the power to anaesthetise the conscience and dilute one's convictions, and Valerie Trierweiler clearly hasn't been able to hold out against this for long."
Miss Trierweiler met Mr Hollande, 57, at a political rally 15 years ago and have been a couple for five years.
In what appeared to be a damage limitation counter-strike, a picture of Miss Trierweiler walking arm in arm with Mr Hollande was splashed on the front cover of Thursday's Paris Match, the magazine she still works for.
France's first couple was shown strolling in the public Luxembourg gardens, and sitting at a café terrace, just like any other ordinary Parisian couple.

HSBC Holdings Plc’s $9.4 billion sale of its stake in Ping An Insurance (Group) Co. to Thai billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont was initiated by the insurer’s chairman, the official who was approached to buy the stake said.
The disclosure is the first confirmation of the Chinese insurer’s role in brokering the transaction and highlights Ping An Chairman Peter Ma’s determination to find his own partner as HSBC looked to exit a decade-long investment.

The logo of Ping An Insurance (Group) Co. is displayed during a news conference in Hong Kong, China. Photographer: Jerome Favre/Bloomberg
Ma approached Tse Ping, vice chairman of Charoen Pokphand Group Co., about buying the stake, the Thai company executive said. Both are members of an advisory body to China’s legislature. Dhanin’s CP Group completed the deal, the largest sale of a Chinese company to a foreign buyer, on Feb. 6.

“Mr. Ma wanted a long-term investor so that Ping An’s share price doesn’t fluctuate too much,” Tse said in an interview in Hong Kong yesterday. “Ping An is a good company -- we like its culture and business model. That’s why we are willing to pay a good price for it.”

Ma’s role illustrates the influence exerted by Chinese executives over their investors and the importance of personal connections in closing a transaction that allowed London-based HSBC to reap a $2.6 billion profit. The deal survived a last- minute withdrawal of funding by China Development Bank Corp. and scrutiny by regulators in Beijing.
HSBC’s Search

HSBC spent months searching for potential buyers until Ma approached CP Group, whose main business is agriculture, Tse said, declining to elaborate on the discussions with Ma. Among those approached was Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte, Tse said.
Tan Yong Meng, a spokesman for Temasek, declined to comment, as did officials at Ping An and HSBC.
The deal has already yielded a $1.3 billion paper profit for Dhanin, who is Thailand’s second richest man with an estimated net worth of $6.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. About 55 percent of his fortune is from overseas private companies.

Questions about funding fueled concerns about the deal’s survival at times. Ping An shares fell the most in more than five months on Jan. 8, when Chinese magazine Caixin reported CDB had pulled financing after learning of the involvement of Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese financier, in the deal.
In an earlier report, Caixin said Xiao channeled funds from three municipal commercial banks that he reportedly controls to help CP Group purchase the Ping An shares. Xiao denied any involvement in the transaction in a Dec. 23 statement via his lawyer, Caixin reported.

A 200-year-old law forbidding women to wear trousers in Paris has finally been revoked.

By Devorah Lauter, Paris3:32PM GMT 03 Feb 2013153 Comments
On January 31, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France's minister of women's rights, made it officially impossible to arrest a woman for wearing trousers in the French capital.
The law required women to ask police for special permission to "dress as men" in Paris, or risk being taken into custody.
In 1892 and 1909 the rule was amended to allow women to wear trousers, "if the woman is holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse."

The law was kept in place until now, despite repeated attempts to repeal it, in part because officials said the unenforced rule was not a priority, and part of French "legal archaeology."

In July however, in a public request directed at Ms Vallaud-Belkacem, Alain Houpert, a senator and member of the conservative UMP party, said the "symbolic importance" of the law "could injure our modern sensibilities," and he asked the minister to repeal it.

Ms Vallaud-Belkacem agreed, and in a published statement on Jan. 31st wrote: "This ordinance is incompatible with the principles of equality between women and men, which are listed in the Constitution, and in France's European commitments.
"From that incompatibility follows the implicit abrogation of the ordinance."
The restriction focused on Paris because French Revolutionary rebels in the capital said they wore trousers, as opposed to the knee-breeches, or the "culottes," of the bourgeoisie, in what was coined the "sans-culottes" movement. Women rebels in the movement demanded the right to wear trousers as well, but were forbidden to do so.

Horatio Nelson famously instructed his officers that "you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil".

By Henry Samuel, Paris7:55PM GMT 07 Feb 201317 Comments
So he may be turning in his grave to learn that the bloodstained chemise he died in after a French musket ball pierced his shoulder at the battle of Trafalgar is to return to enemy territory for the first time since his demise.

Nelson's undress uniform, which he changed into as his fleet sailed into battle almost 208 years ago, is to be lent to the Musée de l'Armée in Paris as part of its exhibition on Napoleon and Europe from March 27 until July 14.

This will be the first time the uniform Nelson was wearing when he was fatally wounded on the deck of HMS Victory has left Britain since it was brought back from the famous battle along with Nelson's body in 1805.

The musket ball hole in the left shoulder of the coat can be clearly seen, along with blood stains on the tails and sleeve.
It will return to London for October 2013, where it will be the centrepiece of the museum's new Nelson, Navy, Nation gallery which looks at how the Royal Navy shaped individual lives and the course of British history over the 18th century.
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While the uniform is out of the country Nelson's full dress uniform will be displayed in its place for the first time in over a decade.
Considered the most decisive British naval victory of the Napoleonic Wars, the Battle of Trafalgar was a naval engagement fought by the British Royal Navy against the combined fleets of the French Navy and Spanish Navy.
Although it spectacularly confirmed Britain's naval superiority, the Napoleon Wars continued for another 10 years.

Interdealer brokers, the middlemen who line up buyers and sellers of securities for banks, are emerging as key enablers in the Libor scandal after three firms paid a total of $2.6 billion for rigging global interest rates.
Employees at firms including ICAP Plc, the world’s biggest interdealer broker, and RP Martin Group Ltd., a smaller British competitor, passed on requests from derivatives traders asking rate-setters at others banks to make favorable submissions, e- mails released as part of the global probe of interest rate- rigging show. In some cases, the middlemen took bribes as payment for the services in the form of so-called wash trades, regulators said, without identifying the firms that did.

The London interbank offered rate is the basis for more than $300 trillion of securities. The banks that set the rate stand accused of rigging it for years to boost profits. Five years after alarm bells first sounded, regulators are handing out fines and criminal sanctions to those responsible for rate manipulation. This story is featured in the March issue of Bloomberg Markets Magazine. Bloomberg Television's Mark Barton reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

Audio Download: Libor Banks Should Consider Deal With Victims: View, 2/1
The brokers assumed greater influence as credit markets froze at the start of the financial crisis in 2007. Bankers charged with making submissions to the London interbank offered rate increasingly relied on information from the brokers to determine what figures to contribute. That left the benchmark vulnerable to manipulation by traders trying to profit from bets on derivatives. The outcome of those bets often depended on where the Libor rate fell on International Money Market dates, or IMMs, the quarterly dates when futures contracts settle.

“I really need a low 3m jpy libor into the imm...” one trader e-mailed a broker on March 3, 2010, according to a transcript of a conversation released by the U.S. Department of Justice when Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc paid a $612 million fine for interest-rate rigging on Feb. 6. “Any favours you can get with [Submitter-1] would be much appreciated...”

‘Steak’ Offered

That discussion was between Tom Hayes, the former UBS AG and Citigroup Inc. trader arrested in December over his alleged role in the scandal, and Brent Davies, an employee at ICAP in London, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The submitter was Paul White, an employee at Edinburgh-based RBS, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Later that day, Davies asked White if there was “any chance at all” he could lower his rate, adding “if u cud see ur way to a small drop there might be a steak in it for ya,” the transcript shows.
In the exchange, White said his rate should be unchanged. The next day he lowered his three-month yen Libor submission by 1 basis point, according to the regulator. A basis point is the equivalent of 0.01 percentage point.
Wash Trades
White declined to comment as did lawyers for Hayes and Davies. Davies, who isn’t under investigation by any regulator, joined ICAP in September 2009 and was suspended on full pay from January 2012, one of the people said. ICAP is being investigated by Britain’s Financial Services Authority as well as Canada’s Competition Bureau.
The firm has put three more employees on paid leave, Chief Executive Officer Michael Spencer told reporters on a conference call yesterday after the firm said trading volume increased in January. He said the London-based firm has led its own internal investigation and declined to comment on any other probes.

Germany's education minister has come under mounting pressure to resign after her university stripped her of her doctorate after ruling that she had plagiarised chunks of the paper.

The ruling against Annette Schavan comes as a blow to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who is aiming to win a third term in office in federal elections this September.

A panel of academics from Düsseldorf University found that Ms Schavan had "systematically and deliberately" passed off the work of others as her own without sufficient sourcing in her 1980 thesis, entitled "Person and Conscience." The decision prompted immediate opposition calls for the head of Ms Schavan, who in her capacity as education minister is responsible for academic standards.

Andrea Nahles, general secretary of the opposition Social Democrats, said Ms Schavan must "face the consequences of her actions," while Green party leader Jurgen Trittin claimed that she no longer had any credibility as education minister and that her "position was no longer tenable."

Mrs Merkel has so far stood by her beleaguered minister. Steffen Seibert said the chancellor still had "full confidence" in Ms Schavan, and added that she was "in good contact" with the education minister who is on holiday in South Africa.
Mr Seibert added, however, that when Ms Schavan returns "the two will have an opportunity to talk in peace".

Adolf Hitler anniversary: Angela Merkel warns far-Right could rise again 30 Jan 2013
The education minister has been one of Mrs Merkel's most popular cabinet members, but faced with growing calls for her to sack the minister, and aware of the need to nip any scandal in the bud well ahead of September's election, the chancellor may well have to jettison Ms Schavan.
She will also be eager to avoid a repeat of the damaging political fallout from an earlier plagiarism scandal in 2011 that forced Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the then defence minister, to quit.
With her political career hanging by a thread Ms Schavan vowed to fight on.

A few days ago my colleague, Mia Aquino, put out the following call for urgent iPhone assistance on Twitter:

Mia's not alone: Complete home button malfunction is one of the more common maladies befalling iPhones, if Apple's support forums are any indication.

There are all sorts of suggestions for fixes in the link above: Recalibrate the home button; blow in the charging port like it's an old NES game; dab some WD-40 on the button itself. Or, the old reliable: Visit the Apple Store and cry helplessly until the Geniuses give you a new phone to make you leave.

Any of these might do the trick for you. Failing those, though, there is a sure-fire way to gain access to your home button without tinkering with or possibly damaging your hardware that I've had friends employ and enjoy in the past.

Fact is, you can get your home button on the touchscreen, available for you at any point that the screen is powered on. Go into Settings, and then General, and then Accessibility, and then Assistive Touch. Turn Assistive Touch on, and you'll see a persistent white dot in the top left corner of your screen.

This is your new home button, and more: Tapping it will open a menu that can take you home, launch Siri, lock your screen and turn the volume up and down, among other features.

You can drag that button anywhere on the screen you desire, pinning it down wherever you find most convenient.

It's a fantastic feature for those who find themselves with a malfunctioning home button, and also seems far safer to use while driving. Those who have difficulty with the iPhone's home or volume buttons -- men and women with arthritis, for example -- might also find it much easier to navigate their phones with an on-screen button.

Got any other tips to fix or circumvent a broken home button? I'd love to read them below. And if you have any other personal tech questions, drop me an email at captaingadget@huffingtonpost.com and I might just feature it on the site.