Agence France-Presse

One common media-created misconception in the Bush years is that the Clinton administration fully supported the international Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but the Bush administration arrived and refused to take any action on it. In reality, while Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto agreement for the United States, the Clinton administration never submitted it to the Senate for ratification (just like Bush), and the Senate voted 95 to zippy in a nonbinding sense-of-the-Senate resolution against Kyoto in 1997, because the agreement would curb American and European emissions, but place no restrictions whatsoever on China or other polluting "developing" nations.

Agence France Presse was the latest to use bias by omission to relay the Bush-killed-Kyoto theory. It was a story on that global savior Al Gore, declaring he would not run for president in 2008:

As America’s elected officials debate non-binding resolutions to rebuke President George W. Bush over his troop surge in Iraq, news comes from that country’s prime minister of “dazzling successes” in Baghdad.

Anyone care to wager whether this will get any attention from the media this evening?

As reported by Agence France-Presse (h/t Drudge, emphasis mine throughout): "Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told US President George W. Bush by videolink that the first few days of their countries' joint security plan in Baghdad had been a great success."

The article quoted Maliki's office directly:

In a huge blow to America’s ability to defend itself from future terrorist attacks both home and abroad, the European Central Bank has told SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, that it must halt the transfer of personal banking information to American authorities by April.

As reported by Agence France-Presse on February 1 (h/t to Dan at Riehl World View): “The agency, the European Data Protection Supervisor, told the bank to come up with measures ‘to make its payment operations fully compliant with data-protection legislation,’ urging it to ‘take appropriate measures as soon as possible.’”

Hadn’t heard about this? Well, how could you? After all, according to Google and LexisNexis searches, the only major American media outlet to bother reporting this was, coincidentally and quite ironically, the New York Times.

Isn’t that a delicious twist of fate? Yet, the hypocrisy in this goes much deeper.

The AP has published a story today about the grand opening of the first McDonald's outlet with a drive-through window in China. It opened yesterday in Beijing to rave reviews from its first customers.

Apparently, the fast food chain is growing by leaps and bounds in the communist enslaved nation. McDonald's China CEO, Jeffery Schwartz is quoted in the AP piece about the company's growth in the Red Nation. "It's huge. It's a real priority for the global company because of the potential growth in China...We think drive-throughs are a big part of this."

And, when you read the AP's story everything seems upbeat and glowing about McDonald's growth and future opportunities in China." It's all good", as they say. And, it is no surprise that the AP's business writer, amusingly named Joe McDonald -- no I am serious, that IS his name-- was so aglow over the heightened business opportunities for the McDonald's chain.

Lordy, Lordy (HT Instapundit), the economic "surprises" don't stop. The report is from AFP:

Economists are hastily upgrading their forecasts for the US economy after a series of surprisingly strong reports suggesting the so-called "soft landing" may be over and growth is accelerating.

Over the past week, surprises have come in stronger-than-expected reports on US job creation, the trade balance and retail sales -- all key contributors to economic activity.

Lehman Brothers chief US economist Ethan Harris on Friday boosted his forecast for fourth quarter 2006 growth to an annualized rate of 3.3 percent, a leap from the firm's prior call for just 2.0 percent growth.

"After slowing in November, the economy seems to have regained its stride," Harris said.

..... The latest data defy predictions that the slump in real estate would filter into other areas of the economy, notably consumer spending.

The latest data showed US employers added a healthy 167,000 new jobs in December (196,000 with revisions to prior months -- Ed.), with unemployment holding at a low 4.5 percent. Average wages were up 4.2 percent annually.

That's what happens when economists like Ethan Harris read too much Paul Krugman and Rex Nutting, and not enough of yours truly (see cautious "3% or more" prediction about halfway through the post).

First, the United Nations publishes a children’s book to ignite fears in the world’s youth over global warming being the new bogeyman. Next, the Secretary General tells an environmental conference that the world’s developed nations should address climate change as seriously as they do weapons of mass destruction. Sounds like a Trey Parker and Matt Stone theme, doesn't it?

Well, hold on to your wallets sports fans, because Kofi Annan is on tour again spreading fear and gloom to the world largely on the backs of American taxpayers. As reported in an Agence France Presse article Wednesday (emphasis mine throughout): “UN chief Kofi Annan demanded that world leaders give climate change the same priority as they did to wars and to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.”

Predictably, Annan didn’t miss an opportunity to suggest that this is all the West’s fault:

What is it about the MSM that they have to get a shot or two in, even when the news being reported is positive?

On August 10th, Yahoo! News offered us an Agence France Presse story reporting the good news that the U.S. Military is meeting their recruitment goals for the most part. The news was rather good and a bit startling since most MSM news stories seem to allude to the feeling that things are universally bad for the Military.

Military recruiters either met or exceeded their goals in July, putting the US active duty force in a strong position to finish the year with the needed number of new recruits, Pentagon figures show.

So goes the first paragraph. Wow, you might think. Maybe things are doing well?

Agence-France Press, the French press agency, must be violating child labor laws. That can be the only possible conclusion one can reach after reading this Allahpundit post at Hot Air which chronicles the petty and immature oeuvre of its photographer Paul Richards who seems unable to take a picture of George W. Bush in which the president is not making a ridiculous or sinister gesture.

Now it's true that some unreasonable, unclear-thinking Americans out there might believe AFP to be politically biased. But that is completely impossible. Therefore, one must come to the conclusion that Richards is 11 years old.

In the opening lines of this alarmist piece, "Global warming behind disastrous typhoon season in China" put out by AFP yesterday (HT to Drudge), the reader is confronted with the the media's view of the facts:

 Global warming is contributing to an unusually harsh typhoon season in China that started around a month early and has left thousands dead or missing, government officials and experts say.

 OK. Then they begin to pile it on.

"Against the backdrop of global warming, more and more strong and unusual climatic and atmospheric events are taking place.

As picked up by the DrudgeReport, an AFP dispatch from Greece on Tuesday recounted how left-wing actor Tim Robbins, “at a news conference in Athens promoting his stage version of George Orwell's 1984,” blasted President Bush's policies and the news media for ignoring Bush's supposed crimes. “We have right now a media that is willfully ignoring the high crimes and misdemeanors of the President of the United States," Robbins charged. He lamented that “Clinton lied about a blowjob, and got impeached by the media and Congress," while Bush “got us into the [Iraq] war based on lies that he knew were lies....yet no one in the media is calling for impeachment."

The un-bylined May 2 AFP dispatch from Athens added that “Robbins pointed out similarities between current U.S. policies on terrorism and the authoritarian society described by Orwell” in his 1984 novel: “'Unfortunately, the book and the play is more relevant now than it ever has been,' he said. '(It) talks about continuous warfare as a means to control the Western economy, and as a way to control rebel elements within society through the use of fear, constant fear.'" Citing the “renditioning of innocent people without trial,” Robbins asserted: “This is exactly what Orwell was talking about when he spoke of thought crimes." (With link to video of earlier call for Bush's impeachment)

Trolling through the wire-service news on Yahoo! can be a bit of an adventure. This Agence France Presse dispatch on China's "parliament" is a good example. To the less educated among us, they might think China's a Western-style democracy. The unbylined article began with the usual liberal focus on the maldistribution of wealth:

China's parliament opens its annual session amid high security with Premier Wen Jiabao listing the plight of the nation's rural poor and the fast-rising wealth gap as top national priorities.

You have to read all the waaaay down to paragraph 20 (!)  to get the obvious point: "Although the congress is the world's largest parliament, it is regarded as a rubber-stamp body for the country's Communist Party rulers who have led China since 1949." That is the first time in the article the word "communist" appears.

AFP (Agence France Presse) reports from Doha, Qatar, that President Clinton denounced the cartoons of Muhammad with a bomb for a hat and other "outrageous" cartoons. But Laura Ingraham made a good point today: why is he stumping for the Danish-flag-burning Islamic fanatics, feeling their pain, and having no comment on the Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles using our military amputees as a punch line? Here's a piece of the AFP report:

Former US president Bill Clinton warned of rising anti-Islamic prejudice, comparing it to historic anti-Semitism as he condemned the publishing of cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.

On Friday, talks ended in Canada in regard to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in rock-star fashion as former U.S. President Bill Clinton hit the podium--unofficially.

Still, one is hard-pressed not to imagine the press over at Agence France-Presse (AFP), the self-proclaimed "world's oldest news organization," wetting themselves as you read the breathless and unambiguous copy they wrote regarding Clinton's "show-stealing appearance."