AS BOB DYLAN, Ken Kesey aand other luminaries of the Sixties counterculture attended Jerry Garcia’s secret funeral in the California town of Belvedere, the outbreak of mourning across America last week for the benignly dissolute guitarist of the Grateful Dead provided a reminder that the country is not as consumed by prissy, tedious moralising as Washington’s policy makers appear to believe. Only one of these channels, a Tunisian one, is included in the alternative, more pricey, cable packages.It is not clear how far Mr Briantais’s ban was inspired by naive idealism and how far it was a political pandering to right-wing anti- immigrant feeling.French media commentators, however, say satellite has come to stay. No one could cite a single instance of a satellite dish falling off a balcony.The dish suppliers say the ban is “scandalous” and “illegal”. The law states that no one needs permission to put up a dish smaller than 100cm in diameter.Human rights groups, immigrant organisations and others condemned the ban as a violation of individual liberty.After investing in a satellite dish for about pounds 120, residents can watch many of the programmes they want – on the north African, Arab and Turkish channels – for free. To many French traditionalists, though, not only those sympathetic to the extreme right-wing National Front, the dishes represent a threat – the threat of a population that lives physically in France but inhabits a world of Virtual Islam.
The Socialist mayor of Courcouronnes, Guy Briantais, citing aesthetic and safety grounds (“in strong winds, one might be blown off and injure someone”), last week announced that he was banning satellite dishes People have six months to take them down The announcement caused uproar The safety argument was ridiculed.

It is the same in council estates on the edge of almost any big French city. To the north African and Turkish immigrants trapped in their flats by lack of language or job, the grey discs offer a window on a world more friendly than the one outside their front door and a chance for their French-born children to know their roots. Once it’s invented,it’s a bit like trying to get rid of prostitution.”. ON THE THE council estates of Courcouronnes, half an hour south of Paris, myriad satellite dishes festoon the balconies of every tower block. Why don’t the MPs go to Bosnia instead? I don’t like the nuclear tests either, but nuclear technology is here to stay. “I’m scared and disappointed by all this slander,” he said “I’m worried that Australia might lose its dignity. The first ships in a New Zealand protest fleet left last weekend.Franck Francois is not impressed.

Last week Mr Keating pledged A$200,000 (pounds 94,000) towards the hire of a protest ship to carry Australian, Japanese, and European MPs to the vicinity of Mururoa for the tests. The Australian media responded to the latter suggestion with derision. Cartoonists portrayed people returning from a Mururoa holiday with misshapen heads. Advertising agencies invited by the Sydney Morning Herald offered: “The holiday at the Tropic of Cancer”, “The hottest holiday in the Pacific”, “The tan that radiates” and “Club Merde – have the holiday of your Half- Life”.Canberra has refrained from discouraging such cynicism. Whereas France regards Australia as an upstart that wants to push it out of the Pacific, Australia accuses France of miscalculating the strength of the region’s concerns about the long-term environmental consequences of further nuclear testing on an atoll which has already been subjected to 138 underground explosions.There were glimmers of a crack in Paris’s resolve last week, when a French Foreign Ministry official said that the tests due to start next month would be the last, and that France would close the Mururoa test site when they finish in May and would possibly turn it into a Club Mediterranee resort. The entente cordiale of that year now lies in ruins.Two countries with strong streaks of nationalism have become locked in an unprecedented diplomatic showdown. A fine museum dedicated to La Perouse, the product of French- Australian co-operation, opened at Botany Bay for Australia’s bicentenary in 1988.

He appears to have only two forms of relaxation: his family, and lovingly maintaining his collection of French Empire clocks.There has always been an uneasy stand-offishness between Anglo-Saxons and the French in Australia, ever since the British beat them to Botany Bay by only a few days. Drive a few miles through a tangle of suburbs south of Sydney, and you will come to a monument, on the foreshore of Botany Bay, to Jean-Francois de La Perouse, the French explorer who sailed two ships into the bay on 26 January, 1788, just as the British were sailing out of it with the First Fleet of convicts to settle Sydney a few miles up the coast. Ironically, Mr Keating is one of Australia’s greatest devotees of French art and culture. I’m expecting our cafe will be defaced again.”The personal abuse was returned in kind last week when demonstrators marched on the Australian embassy in Paris shouting “L’Australie aux chiottes”, and Le Figaro published an astonishing open letter to Paul Keating, the Australian Prime Minister, accusing Australia of practising “ethnic purification” against Aborigines, and Mr Keating of seeking to “assuage your guilty conscience” by attacking France. We have nothing to do with the French government’s decision on nuclear testing We oppose it. But the way Australians are protesting by personal abuse against us has gone too far. Mr Laucher pointed to a headline in a Sydney newspaper: “Pourquoi les Francais sont des canards” He said: “It’s quite disgusting We’ve been in Australia for seven years.