Carla Bruni 'besotted' after becoming aunt to African baby... will she adopt one of her own?

Carla Bruni has become an aunt to a baby from an impoverished African village - increasing her own desire to adopt one of her own.

The 41-year-old supermodel is said to be ‘besotted’ with the four-month-old boy, whose mother is the French First Lady’s older sister, actress and comedienne Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, 44.

The news was announced in French magazine Point de Vue on Wednesday. It comes after a highly personal interview in Madame Figaro magazine earlier this month, in which Carla spoke of adopting.

What she didn’t reveal at the time was the new arrival.

‘It’s the first time Carla has become an aunt and she’s thrilled that a black African is now part of her family,’ said a source close to the former supermodel in Paris.

It raises the intriguing possibility of Carla and her husband, head of state Nicolas Sarkozy, becoming parents of the first black French presidential baby in history.

No French president has ever adopted a child, although Francois Mitterand had a love child who was kept secret until the president died.

Only this week the First Lady launched the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation, aimed at improving educational opportunities for immigrant youths from troubled housing estates.

She is committed to improving race relations, and reversing the reputation for discrimination and racism which the French Republic has built up over the years.

In the interview in early March Carla was asked directly if she was intending to become pregnant soon.

She replied: ‘I would like that, but I don't know if it will be possible at my age.

‘If it's not possible biologically, I will adopt one. I'm not obsessed by blood ties. I think you can form strong bonds without that.’

Miss Bruni has a seven-year-old son, Aurélien, from a previous relationship while her husband, who is 54, has three sons and two step-daughters from his two previous marriages.

Expanding on her enthusiasm for adoption, Miss Bruni even said it was the ‘purest form of motherhood.’

She said: ‘If someone had deposited my son Aurélien in a basket in front of the door like in the fairy stories, I would love him in the same manner.

‘Being someone’s mother, it’s for always, not solely the first nine months, and that lasts a lifetime.

‘Adoption is perhaps the purest form of motherhood. Therefore I would love to have a child but I will not fight against nature.’ continues here

‘She loves the little boy, and there’s no doubt that the next step will be adopting one of her own if she can’t have a child biologically.

‘Carla followed every minute of her sister’s long adoption procedure, so now knows exactly how it’s done.’

President Sarkozy demands second Irish referendum on EU treaty

Ireland must hold a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty, Nicolas Sarkozy told colleagues yesterday in the clearest sign of a European Union plan to try to save the document ratified by 21 other countries. 

A second vote would have to take place in an attempt to reverse Ireland's rejection of the treaty last month by a margin of 53.4 per cent to 46.6 per cent, the French President told MPs from his party at a private meeting. 

Mr Sarkozy, who is acting as chairman of the EU while France holds its presidency for six months, has denied in public that there is a secret plan to force a second vote and has said that the solution must be proposed by the Irish Government at the next EU summit in October. “The Irish will have to vote again,” he was reported to have told a meeting in his office — words that are likely to inflame public opinion in Ireland, which Mr Sarkozy will visit on Monday. 

His trip is billed as a listening exercise, but Irish voters may now wonder whether Mr Sarkozy and other EU leaders have already made up their minds. Details emerged in Paris of a plan to stage a rerun of the vote backed by guarantees that Ireland will keep its EU commissioner as well as its military neutrality, its veto over tax policy and its right to set its abortion laws.

Pressure on Ireland has been increased by the continuing pace of ratification by other parliaments. Britain passed the document the week after the Irish “no” vote, followed by Cyprus, Belgium and the Netherlands. 

The treaty, which was intended to streamline decision-making in an enlarged EU, cannot be implemented until it is ratified by all member states. It has yet to be passed by the parliaments of the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain and Sweden, and is awaiting formal presidential signature in Germany and Poland. 

Senior EU politicians have called for the Irish to vote again in the spring because they want to conduct next June's European Parliament elections under the more streamlined rules. 

An official in Paris confirmed that Mr Sarkozy made the remark, while the French President's office declined to comment. The reported remarks were attacked by Declan Ganley, of the Libertas group, one of the most prominent anti-treaty campaigners. “This typifies the anti-democratic nature of what's going on in Brussels,” he told RTE radio. 

Mr Sarkozy's office said that he would not present a plan to the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen. “The President is coming to listen to the Irish, to listen to what Brian Cowen tells him. He is not coming to make proposals,” one adviser to Mr Sarkozy said. continues here

By Making Holocaust Personal to Pupils, Sarkozy Stirs Anger

ELAINE SCIOLINO

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”

The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.

Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his frequent praise of God and religion, of subverting both the country’s iron-clad separation of church and state and the national ideal of a single, nonreligious identity for all.

Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that the focus on victims could steer attention away from the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis. Still others warned that the plan could backfire, creating resentment among France’s ethnic Arab and African populations if they felt their own histories were getting short shrift......Article conts (-)