Al Jazeera article here:
I can see there are questions about their paperwork. Not ideal though.
An AJ article? Youâll be posting GBN content next! 
Last time I looked at AJ it had some ok journos. You might need to pick and choose a bit.
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I canâât bear to watch that news station, it scares me with views openly stated and the vitriol against people they donât like.
Itâs good and enlightening to see and understand what the others look at and thinkâŚ
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AJ has some sensible stuff, and balances out some of the gutter press.
I lnow the kids of friends of ours who are political asylum seekers had to jump through an enormous number of hoops at 17 to be able to get a residence card in their own right. By which time they had been in France for 10 years or so.
AJ or GBN? It could apply to both, but at least AJ does(did?) have some excellent journalism, even if often it was only on subjects that reinforced their existing position.
AJ journalism seems very good at a time when others have dumbed down their reporting.
The editorials are often interesting but come from deeply entrenched POV, often extremely anti-western. I find it useful to get a viewpoint from outside the western bubble, plus they often report on things ignored by the BBC for example.
I wouldnât want it to be my sole source of news, but would take it over any channel from the US.
We had a new student join our French class this morning, a refugee from Kabul whose spoken French was quite developed, but who struggled to write the name of her daughter, whoâd not been able to attend school before they came to France. It made us think of what they must have gone through before and after leaving Afghanistan and what a struggle it must be to integrate here.
Nevertheless perhaps due to being from a city she seems much more capable of becoming integrated than a Muslim Somali woman in the other class, who must have had a very restricted previous life.
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GBN/Frogface channel
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Afghanistan wasnât a complete backward hellhole before the Soviet invasion, people including women were educated and had autonomy. Pretty much incessant war for the last forty-odd years hasnât completely wiped out the kind of cultural capital that can be transmitted within a restricted circle. I canât speak for Somalia but I donât think it has ever had the infrastructure that Afghanistan had.
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This is a horrible position for the people involved. Sadly, by the sound of it they entered France on the wrong visa.
#The OQTF, delivered by Franceâs Ministry of the Interior, informed him that he did not hold the proper visa to study since he arrived on a tourist visa.
#These students are in a grey area because they arrived with their parents on nonstudy visas as children.
#She arrived from Tunisia in 2019 with her family on a tourist visa.
I feel for the youngsters now finding themselves in this awful predicament.
However, let it also be a warning for those people (albeit few) who post on SF about coming to France on âtourist/whateverâ visa, just to get here, and then plan to more or less play it by earâŚ
Getting the paperwork correct at the beginning is very important.
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That was the impression I got travelling through in the '60s with a large party of around 30 and no discrimination against the female members who were not required to wear a veil of any kind.
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Hear hear. It reminds me of the debates that occurred on a photographersâ forum i once helped run, where some folks (usually American it has to be said) would insist that it was absolutely fine to travel anywhere in the world on a tourist visa and shoot weddings or commercial jobs without bothering to get a work permit.
Yes they would often get away with it, but occasionally the border authorities would have a fit of diligence and they found themselves on the next plane home, with a very unhappy client.
Ironically, the USA was one of the most risky places for foreigners to try and work illegally, and is even more so now of course.
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