BAGHDAD (Reuters) -Iraq signed a deal with Turkey on Sunday under which water infrastructure projects to be carried out by Turkish firms will be financed with revenue from oil sales, a Turkish official said.
The Iraqi prime minister’s office said in a statement that the two countries had signed an accord on an implementation mechanism for a water cooperation agreement that they sealed last year. It did not provide details on the mechanism.
Iraq’s government will establish a committee for water infrastructure projects and invite bids for them from Turkish companies, with payments for the projects to be financed by revenue from Iraqi oil sales to Turkey, the Turkish official said.
The initial batch of projects expected under the agreement includes three water harvesting dam projects and three land reclamation initiatives, an Iraqi water resources official said.
The original framework water agreement was signed in April 2024 during a visit to Baghdad by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, which marked a new phase of better relations between the two neighbours after years of strained ties.
Scarce water resources in Iraq have long been an issue between the two countries, with around 70% of Iraq’s water resources flowing from neighbouring countries, especially via the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. Both flow through Turkey.
(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Jan Harvey)
China has spent months building up its oil reserves. That might come in handy in the wake of the new sanctions the U.S. recently imposed on Russian crude.
During the first nine months of the year, the world’s second-largest economy imported on average more than 11 million barrels of oil a day, an amount above the daily production of Saudi Arabia, according to official customs data. Analysts estimate 1 million to 1.2 million of those barrels were stashed in reserves each day.
SYDNEY (Reuters) -Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Sunday that he wrote to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to resolve a long-running tussle over who will host next year’s COP31 summit.
Australia and Turkey submitted bids in 2022 to host the United Nations climate conference and both countries have refused to concede to the other ever since.
Asked on Sunday if he thought Australia would end up as host, Albanese said: “There’s no real process for finalising the matter. I’ve written to President Erdogan of Türkiye, we’re continuing to engage.”
“It’s hard when there’s no consensus, when you’ve got two bids. Our bid, of course, is in partnership with the Pacific,” Albanese added, according to an official transcript of remarks on Sky News television.
A regional diplomatic bloc of 18 countries, the Pacific Islands Forum, is backing Australia’s bid. Several Pacific island nations are at risk from rising seas.
Albanese said Australia wanted to ensure Pacific island nations’ interests are protected.
“They’re particularly vulnerable to climate change. For them, countries like Tuvalu and Kiribati, this is an existential threat to their very existence, which is why this is such a strong issue in our region,” he said.
Turkey has previously argued its Mediterranean location would help reduce emissions from flights bringing delegates to the conference, and has pointed out its smaller oil and gas industry compared to Australia.
In July, the UN urged Australia and Turkey to resolve the hosting standoff, calling the delay unhelpful and unnecessary. It had set a deadline of June for the group to reach consensus.
The annual talks rotate through five regional groups, with COP31’s host needing to be unanimously agreed upon by the 28 members of the Western Europe and Others Group bloc.
(Reporting by Sam McKeith in SydneyEditing by Rod Nickel)
(Reuters) -Russia’s foreign ministry denounced on Saturday “excessive military force” by the United States in the Caribbean Sea deployed as part of a drive against drug trafficking and reaffirmed its support for Venezuela’s leaders.
“We firmly denounce the use of excessive military force in carrying out actions in anti-drugs operations,” foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a commentary on her ministry’s website.
“Such actions are in violation of both U.S. domestic legislation … and the norms of international law.”
A U.S. campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific against what Washington says is the illegal drug trade has targeted at least 14 boats and killed 61 people.
The United States has built up a large military presence in the Caribbean in recent months, with fighter jets, warships and thousands of troops.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has occupied large swaths of territory, drawing broad international condemnation.
In her comments, Zakharova said Russia “confirms our firm support for the Venezuelan leadership in defending its national sovereignty.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro signed a strategic partnership agreement in Moscow in May.
Maduro has repeatedly alleged that the United States is hoping to drive him from power.
CAIRO (Reuters) -Prime ministers, presidents and royalty descended on Cairo on Saturday to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the Pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities.
The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, pandemic and wars in neighbouring countries.
“We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a press conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a country whose history goes back more than 7,000 years.”
Spectators including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gathered late on Saturday before an enormous screen outside the museum, which projected images of the country’s most famous cultural sites as dancers in glittering pharaonic-style garb waved glowing orbs and scepters.
They were accompanied by Egyptian pop stars and an international orchestra decked out in white beneath a sky lit with lasers, fireworks and hovering lights that formed into moving hieroglyphics.
By opening the museum, Egypt was “writing a new chapter in the story of this ancient nation’s present and future,” Sisi said at the opening.
The audience included German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi, and the crown princes of Oman and Bahrain.
The museum’s most heavily promoted attraction is the expansive collection of treasures from Tutankhamun’s tomb, uncovered in 1922, including the boy-king’s golden burial mask, throne and sarcophagus, and thousands of other objects.
A colossal statue of Ramses II that sat for decades in a downtown Cairo square bearing the pharaoh’s name now adorns the grand entry hall.
The complex’s sleek design evoking the Pyramids cuts a marked contrast to the dusty and often outmoded displays in the neoclassical Egyptian Museum that opened over a century ago in central Cairo overlooking Tahrir Square.
The old museum suffered indignities in recent years, including the looting of several display cases during Egypt’s 2011 uprising, when antiquities theft was rife.
In 2014, the beard of Tutankhamun’s burial mask broke off when workers were changing the lights in the display case, then clumsily glued back on. The following year the mask was more properly restored and put back on display.
Officials hope the new museum can end a perception fueled by such events that Egypt has been remiss in caring for its priceless treasures, and add weight to its claims for Egyptian objects held in museums abroad to be returned.
“Is it a national shrine or a global showcase? A gesture of cultural sovereignty or a tool of soft power?” read an article in a special edition of state-run Al-Ahram Weekly devoted to the museum, which it called “a philosophy as much as it is a building.”
“The GEM is not a replica of the Louvre or the British Museum. It is Egypt’s response to both. Those museums were born of empire; this one is born of authenticity.”
The museum’s more than $1 billion price tag was funded in large part by Japanese development loans. Designed by an Irish firm, Heneghan Peng Architects, it covers some 120 acres, making it roughly the same size as Vatican City.
Officials are also betting that the museum, the latest in a series of mega-projects launched or completed since 2014, can accelerate a revival of tourism, a vital source of foreign currency for an economy battered by years of regional conflicts and economic uncertainty.
A series of galleries had been opened late last year but many exhibits were not accessible to the public.
(Reporting by Alex Dziadosz; editing by Mark Heinrich)
PARIS (Reuters) -A woman and a man were placed under formal investigation over the $102 million Louvre Museum jewel heist, the Paris prosecutor said on Saturday, bringing the total number charged in the case to four.
The man, 37, known to police for previous thefts, was charged with organised theft and criminal conspiracy. The woman, 38, was charged with complicity in organised theft and criminal conspiracy.
Three other people who had been arrested on October 29 along with the man and the woman were freed without charge, the prosecutor’s office said.
The two new suspects were brought before investigating judges and remain in pre-trial detention, the prosecutor said. Both deny involvement in the heist.
The prosecutor gave no further details about them, but French media reported that the woman was from La Courneuve, a hardscrabble suburb north of Paris.
The prosecutor said last week that the first two suspects charged in the case had “partially admitted” their involvement.
They included a 34-year-old Algerian who has lived in France since 2010 and was detained by police as he tried to board a flight to Algeria, and a 39-year-old who was already under judicial supervision in an aggravated theft case. Both live in Aubervilliers, a low-income neighbourhood in northern Paris.
The prosecutor said that investigations are continuing. So far, no trace has been found of the stolen jewels.
Two weeks ago, two hooded thieves used a movers’ lift to reach a second-floor window, smashed the jewels’ display cases using power tools, and fled on the back of scooters driven by two accomplices. The heist has sent shockwaves around the world as it exposed security flaws at the world’s most-visited museum.
(Reporting by Geert De ClercqEditing by Peter Graff)
BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany’s defence minister is confident its fractious ruling coalition can agree on a new model of military service in time for it to come into effect next year as planned, given security concerns over Russia, he told Reuters on Saturday.
The cabinet has already agreed to minister Boris Pistorius’ proposal for a new voluntary military service to help boost the number of recruits and reservists.
The plan still requires approval by German parliament, however, and it has met with resistance from lawmakers within Pistorius’ own party, the Social Democrats, and some of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives.
“Everyone is aware of the seriousness of the situation,” Pistorius said. “I am therefore confident that the law will come into force at the beginning of the year.”
MORE TROOPS TO MEET NATO TARGETS, BOLSTER DEFENCES
Pistorius last month rejected one compromise, which had put forward the idea of a conscription lottery for young men if voluntary recruitment falls short. That proposal also called for scrapping a universal medical evaluation of young men’s ability for service.
But the arbitrary nature of a lottery could frustrate younger generations, he said, and result in recruiting candidates who were not motivated.
“We must convince the younger generation with arguments instead of frustrating them,” Pistorius said. “We must make it clear to them that it is worthwhile to have a strong army that is a deterrent to states like Russia.”
Universal medical examinations, meanwhile, were necessary, he said, so that, in the event of an attack, Germany would not waste time determining “who is operationally capable as a homeland protector and who is not”.
Germany ended its previous compulsory military service programme in 2011 and has since struggled to meet troop targets.
Pistorius wants to increase the number of active soldiers from 180,000 currently to 260,000 by the early 2030s to meet new NATO force targets and strengthen Germany’s defences – part of a planned surge in military spending.
‘KAMIKAZE DRONES’: CRUCIAL TECH ON UKRAINE’S BATTLEFIELDS
Separately, Pistorius said Germany aims to finish testing the loitering munitions – so-called “kamikaze” single-use drones – of three companies by the end of this year before choosing one and submitting an order proposal to parliament.
The procurement of loitering munitions has been controversial in Germany, with some politicians associating the weapons with targeted extrajudicial killings by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
But the army is now rushing to catch up and arm itself with the technology, which has proven crucial in the war in Ukraine and is being used by both Russian and Ukrainian forces.
“At present, three companies are participating in this testing phase,” Pistorius told Reuters. “It will last until the end of the year.”
The Financial Times reported earlier this week that Germany planned to award a contract for kamikaze drones to defence start-ups Helsing and Stark as well as defence giant Rheinmetall. They would each receive a share of the contract, worth close to 300 million euros ($350 million) each, it said.
Pistorius, however, said no agreement had been reached yet.
(Reporting by Sabine Siebold; Writing by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Joe Bavier)
NOVI SAD, Serbia (Reuters) -Tens of thousands of protesters poured into Serbia’s second city on Saturday a year after a railway station roof collapse that killed 16 people, unleashing discontent over alleged corruption and a lack of accountability many blame for the disaster.
Months of protests across Serbia, stoked by anger over the failure so far to prosecute those responsible for the roof collapse have rattled President Aleksandar Vučić’s long grip on power and raised calls for early elections.
Protesters streamed into the northern city of Novi Sad, where the disaster occurred, in cars, buses or on foot, some having walked long distances, witnesses said. One of Novi Sad’s main boulevards was packed with people.
The protesters – many of them young people – observed 16 minutes of silence – one for every victim – from 11:52 a.m. (1052 GMT), when the roof caved in following renovation work on November 1, 2024.
Protesters held up large red hearts bearing the names of the collapse victims, clutched white flowers and laid wreaths in front of the railway station.
The tearful father of one of the victims, dressed in black, stood for hours staring at his daughter’s name affixed among others to the station’s perimeter fence.
There were no reports of violence, which had marred some protests during the summer when riot police used stun grenades and tear gas to break up rallies.
‘WE SAY THAT THIS IS ENOUGH’
“This is a major tragedy for the Serbian people. We cannot bring those people back but we can feel the pain with their families and say that this is enough,” said Sladjana Burmaz, a 51-year-old economist from the central town of Valjevo.
“These people were not killed by accident, their deaths were the result of a poor system, poor politics … Justice would be served if those responsible were held accountable,” she said.
Vučić, in an Instagram post, published a photo of himself in a church holding a candle at a commemoration ceremony in the capital Belgrade for the victims of the disaster.
“Let the names of those killed be a reminder that human life is above any divisions (in society),” Vučić wrote. The government, he added, had designated Saturday as a day of national mourning.
The protest movement, led by students, academics and opposition leaders, accuse Vucic and his populist nationalist party of presiding over corruption, shoddy public services, nepotism and curbs on media freedoms. They deny the accusations.
INDEPENDENT REPORT TO EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
An independent commission of professors, judges, and technical experts that investigated the disaster reported to the European Parliament last week that it had found high-level state graft that led to poor construction standards and the hiring of unqualified subcontractors.
Government officials have denied such accusations. Recently, Vučić and Parliament Speaker Ana Brnabic said the roof collapse could have been an act of terrorism.
Prosecutors have indicted several senior state officials on charges of endangering public safety, but a court has yet to confirm the indictment, preventing a trial from going ahead.
(Reporting by Ivana Sekularac; editing by Mark Heinrich)
LONDON (Reuters) -Prince William heads to Brazil next week for the awards ceremony for his multi-million-dollar environmental prize, hoping to refocus attention away from the scandal of his uncle Andrew and back on the royals’ causes.
William will visit some of Rio de Janeiro’s most famous landmarks on what will be the British heir’s first Latin American trip.
The aim is to turn the spotlight onto a line-up of environmental projects before the annual awards ceremony for the prince’s Earthshot Prize.
The visit comes days after King Charles stripped his younger brother of his title of prince and evicted him from his mansion, banishing his sibling from public life to try to prevent any further damage to the royal brand from Andrew’s ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
During his three-day trip, William will seek to focus on his main philanthropic environmental cause, which aims to find innovations to combat climate change, and awards five winners 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) each to drive their projects.
William will visit Sugarloaf mountain, the Maracana soccer stadium, the Christ the Redeemer statue and the Copacabana beach where he will play volleyball, a Kensington Palace spokesperson said.
His wife Kate, who is in remission after cancer treatment, will not be joining him.
South America is an uncommon destination for the British royals who tend to focus overseas trips on Europe or the foreign realms where the king is head of state, such as Canada.
William has never been to Brazil or Latin America before, while Charles last went there in 2009.
This year, the Earthshot events will take place a week before the United Nations COP30 climate summit which is also being held in Brazil and which the prince will attend in place of his father.
“With its energy, its people and its iconic landscapes it is the perfect place to celebrate amazing environmental innovation and host our biggest and best Earthshot ever,” Jason Knauf, chief executive of the Earthshot Prize, said.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony on November 5 which will feature a host of celebrities and performances from Australian popstar Kylie Minogue and Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil.
Organisers say the summit surrounding the event will attract more than 1,000 global leaders, some of the world’s biggest philanthropists along with global mayors and world-leading scientists.
(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
The White House is set to announce that the Dutch semiconductor company that paused shipments weeks ago and risked upending global car production will resume sending chips under a framework agreement reached during talks between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, people familiar with the plans said.
The new policy on the Dutch chips is part of a forthcoming document from the White House laying out the details of the U.S.-China trade deal signed this week, according to the people.
Luxembourg’s Justice Minister Elisabeth Margue confirmed recently that the small European country is considering the idea of introducing a state-controlled monopoly on online gambling and sports betting.
Luxembourg Considering Online Gambling Monopoly
Margue responded to questions from Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party (LSAP) MP Dan Biancalana, who expressed concerns about player protection and the increasing presence of gaming machines in local cafés. According to European case law, it is possible to establish such a monopoly, but the government must then ensure the protection of its citizens, Margue said. She explained that authorities are examining these issues internally with all relevant parties to determine what actions can and must be taken, and how far measures should go if the initiative proceeds.
The minister added that reforms are in progress to permit National Lottery gaming terminals in these establishments, while all other similar devices are set to be banned. At the same time, Health Minister Martine Deprez noted that Luxembourg has an agreement with the Center for Excessive Behavior and Behavioral Addictions (ZEV) to tackle problem gambling. With the number of people seeking help for addiction nearly tripling from 2020 to 2024, reaching 100, the ZEV budget has risen from EUR 220,000 (around $254,000) in 2020 to EUR 560,000 ($646,000) this year.
Should Luxembourg move forward with a monopoly, it would mark a departure from the prevailing approach in Europe. In recent years, many countries across the continent have shifted away from exclusive state control toward open licensing systems. Proponents of this shift argue that competition enhances channelization and consumer protection.
What’s the State of Online Gambling in Luxembourg?
Online gambling operators are not established in Luxembourg but are instead based in jurisdictions where such activities are legally permitted. Luxembourg residents are allowed to participate in these online casinos and play for real money, as doing so is not prohibited under national law. Winnings from these platforms can be withdrawn to a local bank account without restriction.
However, the overall gambling sector in the small European country seems quite healthy. Luxembourg’s gambling market is projected to generate around $447.8 million in revenue in 2025, according to industry estimates. Casinos and casino games are expected to account for the largest share, with a projected market volume of roughly $270 million. Average revenue per user (ARPU) is forecast to reach about $478 next year. Looking ahead, the number of users in the gambling sector is expected to climb to around one million by 2030.
“The World as a Labyrinth” probes how Contreras’s work is attuned to a universal consciousness shared across eras and geographies. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
Different authors converge on the notion of a collective subconscious to explain the recurrence of symbols and archetypes across time and space. The work of Mexican artist Alejandro García Contreras is deeply attuned to that flow of universal consciousness shared by humanity across eras and geographies—a collective subconscious that, as Carl Jung described, is not a static archive but a living field of imagination continually reshaping itself through the “original instructions” already embedded in the human psyche.
The best art often begins with this kind of soul call, transforming creation into a mission. For Contreras, that call came early, through an image he encountered as a child in a book given to him by his grandfather—a mystical man and shaman. The book, an encyclopedia of the occult exploring timeless questions through myth and enigma, became, as the artist describes it, “a kind of guide or amulet for my imagination.” In the chapter on Vampirism and Lycanthropy, Contreras discovered a terrifying yet seductive image: a harpy-like woman attacking a naked man. “That image would never leave me,” he tells Observer. “That erotic undertone—imperceptible to me at the time—was etched into my memory.”
The image, however, bore no signature or caption. Only years later, thanks to Google, did Contreras learn it was a painting by Bolesław Biegas, a visionary Polish artist from the early twentieth century. His connection to Biegas deepened when, during an Art Explora residency in Paris, Contreras found himself—by both chance and intention—at the Polish Library in Paris (Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris). Walking through the Biegas Museum, he experienced a profound sense of reconnection that would later inspire his latest exhibition.
Contreras spent hours in the museum that day, piquing the curiosity of the staff. After hearing his story, they introduced him to Agnieszka Wiatrzyk, one of the museum’s curators. The exhibition that emerged from this encounter stands as a testament to that journey and the spiritual connections it nurtured—one of those rare stories that renew faith in art’s power to connect the soul to something greater, beyond the confines of individual existence.
Alejandro García Contreras. Courtesy of the artist
With “The World as a Labyrinth,” soon-to-close at the Polish Library in Paris, Contreras presents his ceramic cosmologies, enigmatic bronze narratives and visionary cosmic paintings in a dialogue that spirals through the evocative connections between Bolesław Biegas and the symbolism of Gustave Moreau. Set within the historic Polish Library—one of the oldest and most significant Polish cultural institutions outside Poland, a trove of artifacts and archives celebrating the genius of the fin-de-siècle Polish diaspora from Biegas to Chopin—the exhibition provides a profoundly poetic setting for Contreras’s exploration of spiritual lineage and universal consciousness.
“These artists come from completely different contexts of space and time than me, but that’s exactly where the connection happens,” Contreras reflects as he walks us through the show. “What I’ve been trying to do through my own practice is to explore this idea of non-time—a space where symbols and archetypes resist chronology. It’s something that persists within a kind of collective imaginary, the shared language of the human soul,” he adds. “I love thinking of it that way—what Jung called the collective unconscious. That’s what connects us all. We’re each channeling something ancient and shared, even if we’re doing it from different places, in different eras, or for different reasons.”
Blending contemporary pop culture with Mexican folklore, ancient mythology, occultism and religion, Contreras constructs a syncretic continuum of cultures and traditions as an imaginative attempt to grasp the mystery of the universe’s origin and the soulful essence of human existence. The multilayered narratives alchemically shaped within his intricate glazed ceramics combine the rich symbolic heritage of his homeland with cross-cultural philosophical concepts and the Japanese pop and underground cultures of manga and anime, revealing the timelessness of themes, dramas and questions that accompany human life. His art becomes a living expression of what Michael Meade describes as the mythic realm—something circular rather than linear—a non-chronological space where symbols are not relics but living presences, constantly re-entering the world through imagination.
Though his art draws first from his lived experience as a deeply sensitive soul navigating a terrestrial, time-bound realm, Contreras approaches his practice as both alchemist and shaman, mediating between the visible world and the unseen structures of the spirit. His conjurations of symbolic references span the entire course of civilization, uncovering recurring psychological and narrative patterns. Ancient and contemporary symbols converge to reveal, within the dialectic of time, enduring messages and meanings that embrace the circle of life and the open, deeply rooted relationship Mexican culture holds with life, death and rebirth.
A childhood encounter with Biegas’s painting became the seed of Contreras’s lifelong fascination with the unknown. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
While studying Biegas’s archives, Contreras discovered many of the motifs and forms he had instinctively explored in his own work. A vitrine displaying Biegas’s drawings of dinosaurs is paired with similar early sketches and works by Contreras, creating a play of resonances and echoes that runs throughout the exhibition—a dialogue born not of imitation but of an unconscious, spontaneous connection across time. This mirroring extends beyond formal affinities to a shared cosmology, turning myth into a mirror for the psyche, where divinity and desire, the physical and celestial, the individual and collective coexist. The thread of visionary mystical continuity finds another echo in Gustave Moreau, whose symbolist and allegorical compositions anticipated the mystical sensuality that animates, in distinct ways, both the work of Biegas and Contreras.
Common among all three artists is a timeless fascination with the femme fatale, used here as a cosmic principle exposing, much like the Romantics’ sublime, humanity’s confrontation with its own limits and mortality. The heroines that populate Contreras’s works stand fiercely against subjugation to the male gaze, echoing how Biegas’s androgynous figures often carry a predominantly masculine energy despite their traditional depiction as feminine muses.
Drawing from the vast repertoire of manga and anime—which reinterpret ancient myths and tales—Contreras revives the power of archetypes, celebrating the deconstruction of female stereotypes while infusing them with agency and desire. Aware of their seductive force, as in Biegas’s paintings, these heroines stand in opposition to their male counterparts—often faceless spirits or demons who pursue, crave and depend on them for their own pleasure, becoming ensnared by their desires.
“What I’m trying to do is connect different symbolic universes,” Contreras explains, citing the example of a devil woman conceived by a great manga artist from Japan called Kōna Guy. “Her representation looks almost identical to one of Biegas’s figures: wings sprouting from her head, a sensual, otherworldly presence,” Contreras explains. “I’ve been playing with these connections, linking manga—which I’ve come to understand more deeply after spending time in Japan—and the broader field of contemporary pop culture with ancient myths.” As Contreras notes, manga have become one of the most influential and innovative visual languages shaping our collective imagination today, sharing the same symbolic world-building power that ancient tales, myths and oral traditions once held.
From Moreau’s Parisian refinement to Biegas’s Slavic mysticism and Garcia Contreras’s metaphysical roots in the Mayan jungle, three worlds converge in the exhibition. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
At the same time, in his portrayal of the femme fatale, Contreras intentionally reveals the vulnerability embedded in sexual instinct and its longing for balance and love. His figures often exist within the tension of unresolved emotion, an energy that likewise pulses through Biegas’s paintings. Yet luminous in their esoteric charge, the works of both artists gesture toward a nonhuman, nonterrestrial rhythm—an access point to the collective consciousness, where natural elements and creatures coexist beyond the confines of civilization, society and religious taboo.
In three-dimensional form, Biegas’s bodies are elongated, twisted and torqued—often caught in uneasy postures that suggest ecstasy, suffering, or transfiguration—embodying the soul’s yearning to escape the limits of the physical body and resist strict categorization. Similarly, Contreras’s heroines freely merge references, becoming symbolic figures that appear to belong to another world, one guided more by spirit than by sensory impulse.
At the heart of all three artists’ work lies a meditation on the primordial force of Eros, the vital energy from which all things emerge and to which all things return in the endless cycle of matter and transformation it sustains. Echoing Michael Meade, here Eros transcends romantic love or physical desire and is expressed—through earthly symbology—as a cosmic current of connection, the animating energy that binds life and fuels creation and imagination. In this sense, Contreras, like Biegas, revives the ancient Greek conception of Eros as the principle that draws separate entities into relation, forging unity from multiplicity: the adhesive of the cosmos, the thread binding soul to soul, human to world, myth to meaning—moving toward wholeness, creativity and beauty, not as sentiment but as sacred vitality.
Embracing this shared symbolic language, for Moreau as well as for Biegas and Contreras, figuration is never portraiture or realism—it is a vessel of metaphysical energy, an incarnation of inner states, cosmic forces and psychic archetypes. For all three, art functions as revelation—a bridge between the visible and invisible realms.
The show brings together forty-four works including paintings, drawings and sculptures in porcelain, plaster, clay and wax. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
Animating compositions that oscillate between harmony and chaos, drawn with a line that is at once delicate and forceful, their figures operate on both psychological and spiritual planes: they externalize emotions, instincts and dreams—what both Biegas and Contreras describe as “the invisible life of things.”
The works of these three artists, this exhibition reveals, resonate with Jacobo Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory, which proposes that experience emerges from the interaction between the energetic field created by the brain (the neuronal field) and the energetic structure of the universe—a liminal space where life and destruction converge and where the mystery of creation can be reawakened.
Biegas’s works from around 1900-1910 already envision the human form as a microcosm of the universe: faces dissolve into stars, limbs unfurl into spirals or vegetal motifs in his Cosmic Cycle, depicting figures intertwined with planetary and astral forms. Humanity here is part of a universal choreography—just as in Contreras’s paintings, where texture and brushwork magmatically shape symbolic visions that seem to recreate within the canvas the same formative process governing all existence: matter, atoms, energies and forces converging into new life. In both artists, the physicality of form dissolves into the ceaseless motion of evolution and transformation, as art becomes a liminal threshold between matter and spirit—a portal to other extensions of the human soul.
This connects to another recurring theme in both artists’ work: the Island of the Dead, a motif inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s Symbolist painting Die Toteninsel (1880s), which haunted many European artists of that era. Yet while Böcklin’s island symbolized the passage between life and death—a romantic vision of eternity—Biegas and Contreras reinterpret it as a metaphysical landscape of transformation rather than finality, a site of passage where matter and spirit merge. That island, like the artwork itself, becomes a center of consciousness, embodying the belief that human existence is cyclical—part of a universal rhythm binding life, death and creation into one continuous flow.
This exhibition reveals how the symbolism of Alejandro García Contreras—like that of Moreau and Biegas—is ultimately a holistic, syncretic ode to our potentially infinite individualities, urging us to embrace a renewed spiritual universality that awakens the soul to its place within a greater cosmic whole. Their art becomes an exploration of the invisible territories of transformation, where life, memory, ancient myth and contemporary consciousness converge to uncover luminous truths about what it means to exist, to create and to harness the power of mythic imagination to access other dimensions. That mythic imagination—the primordial act, as Mircea Eliade described it, and the world’s original language, in Michael Meade’s words—remains capable of restoring coherence and meaning in a fractured age.
The show offers a revised history of Symbolism in a single time and place; here, the distinction between modern and contemporary art, with its ambivalences, dissolves. Courtesy the artist and Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris
After years of damaging headlines over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of sexually abusing a teenager, Andrew has been stripped of all his titles and his Windsor mansion residence.
LONDON—In recent days, King Charles III moved decisively to shut down a slow-burning scandal that threatened to tarnish not only his reign but that of his son Prince William.
For over a decade, the former friendship between Charles’s younger brother Andrew and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein generated negative headlines, embarrassing the royal family. Andrew had long denied he abused an American teenage girl introduced to him by Epstein decades ago, but a drumbeat of fresh disclosures in recent weeks brought the scandal back to Britain’s front pages, sparking fresh public disapproval and complaints from lawmakers about the man 8th in line to the throne.
PARIS—The thieves had prepared a jerry can of gasoline to quickly set fire to the truck-mounted lift and other equipment they had just used to penetrate the Louvre Museum and steal France’s crown jewels.
A blaze might have destroyed evidence linking them to the crime. But the clock was ticking. Security forces were closing in. So the thieves made a critical decision: They left the truck intact and jumped on their scooters to make a getaway along the Seine River.
The central bank place will more emphasis on developments that could upend its expectations and less on forecasts that convey too much certainty about the future.
BUDAPEST (Reuters) -Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday his government would launch a pension top-up, stepping up his political campaign ahead of national elections in 2026.
Faced with the weakest economic stretch of his 15-year rule, Orban has already announced tax cuts for families, wage hikes and a massive subsidized housing loan programme ahead of the vote, stretching the state budget at a time when the economy is stagnating.
Hungary’s third-quarter GDP data came in flat on Thursday, missing expectations and signalling a stagnating economy.
Orban told state radio on Friday that growth this year could be between 0.6% and 1%. This is way below earlier government projections for 3.4% growth in 2025, which was cut later to 2.5% and then 1%.
He also said the economy cannot be boosted by cutting spending as some economists suggest.
“We should do what is good for people….and not what straightens the numbers. So I believe Hungary’s economy cannot be put on the growth track with saving steps,” Orban said.
He said the only question was in how many steps the so-called “14th-month pension” could be introduced. The top-up would see pensioners who already receive an extra month’s worth of pension per year receive an extra “14th month” payment.
While the economic recovery remains weak, stubborn inflation is preventing interest rate cuts. The central bank’s base rate stands at 6.5%.
Orban also faces strong competition from a new centre-right opposition party which currently leads most polls.
Peter Virovacz, an economist with ING Bank, said introducing the pension top-up would cost an equivalent to 0.6% of Hungary’s GDP.
Hungary’s fiscal consolidation will be slower than expected, Fitch Ratings said earlier this month, adding that recently flagged tax cuts could create additional risk to its deficit and debt projections amid weak growth.
(Reporting by Krisztina Than and Anita Komuves; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
(Reuters) -In his first job interview with Reuters, Anthony Grey was asked why he wanted to cover international news. To be mixed up in important events, he said.
His wish would come true – to a ruinous degree.
Three years later, in 1967, Grey – by then the agency’s Beijing correspondent – became a pawn in a drawn-out feud between China and the United Kingdom. After the crown colony of Hong Kong arrested communist reporters, Chinese authorities retaliated by placing Grey under house arrest.
The Briton’s ordeal would last some 26 months – and make him famous around the world.
Finally set free in October 1969, he told the press: “I felt very, very low many times. But I didn’t despair.”
Grey would go on to work for the BBC, write several popular novels and set up a charity to assist other state hostages.
He held no bitterness towards his former captors. The trauma of solitary confinement nonetheless lingered his entire life.
Grey, who had Parkinson’s disease, died on October 11 in Norwich, England, his daughters Lucy and Clarissa Grey told Reuters. He was 87 years old.
Anthony Keith Grey was born on July 5, 1938, in Norwich, the second child of driver Alfred Grey and shopkeeper Agnes (née Bullent).
Raised by Agnes after his parents’ divorce, Grey was estranged from his father for most of his life. An athletic pupil who excelled in English, he was once described by a friend’s mother as “restless”. He wore the epithet with pride.
After leaving school at 16, he did national service with the air force in Glasgow. Concerns that he would eventually require glasses prevented him from becoming a pilot.
Grey harboured another hope: to write fiction. But he sensed that he should first find out more about life. He chose journalism.
In 1960 he joined Norwich’s Eastern Daily Press newspaper, where he overlapped with Frederick Forsyth, who died earlier this year. Both reporters later joined Reuters, before writing novels.
The news agency first posted Grey to East Berlin, ahead of which he took German lessons in London with a teacher called Shirley McGuinn. She would eventually become his wife.
From his base in Berlin, Grey travelled to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland. On several occasions he was followed, and questioned, by Soviet agents, he said. Among his accomplishments: breaking the news that a prisoner exchange was in the works to free Gerald Brooke, a British lecturer held captive in Russia, years before the exchange finally took place.
‘A CORRESPONDENT’S DREAM’
One night in January 1967 a Reuters executive rang to ask whether he would go to Peking, as Beijing was then known.
“It was a correspondent’s dream,” Grey recalled in his 1970 book “Hostage in Peking”. China’s capital city, then convulsed by the Cultural Revolution, was generating a torrent of headlines, but was host to just four Western reporters.
“I made a conscious effort to restrain the enthusiasm of my reply. I was twenty-eight. I didn’t want to be thought over-eager and unreliable. Yes, I quite liked the idea.”
Grey had no special knowledge of China. All he had was 18 months’ experience covering another communist part of the world: Eastern Europe.
As he set off, he was advised to gauge the state of the country from his train seat by whether smoke rose from the factory chimneys and rice shoots from the paddy fields – “a measure of the ignorance existing among outsiders of conditions in China at that time”, he later remarked.
One of his first reports debunked a Russian news bulletin claiming a famine in South China. A few weeks later, while he was covering May Day celebrations, Mao Zedong passed within a few feet of him. Caught up in the crowd’s commotion, Grey failed to film the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
Grey’s relative freedom of movement ended abruptly on July 21, 1967. That day, a foreign ministry official told him that, in view of the “illegal persecution” and “fascist atrocities” in Hong Kong against Chinese correspondents, he would no longer be allowed to leave his house. He protested that his British employer was independent from the British state, to no avail.
Of his house arrest, Grey wrote in his diary that evening: “The novelty of it prevented me feeling depressed; I feel a small sense of how unjust the measure.”
There ensued four weeks of relative normality in Reuters’ staffed, two-storey residence on the edge of the Forbidden City. That all changed on August 18.
That night, Red Guards burst into the house, daubed paint on him and dragged him into the yard, his arms wrenched behind his back and his head forced down – an agonising position known as jet-planing.
The intruders killed his cat, Ming Ming, and shouted: “Hang Grey! Hang Grey!”
Around midnight, they finally left. “I was aching all over and out of breath, and didn’t sit down for a long time,” Grey wrote in his diary.
After that, the conditions of his detention became much starker. Guards confined Grey to one tiny room, its walls plastered with Maoist propaganda.
A pen was his only solace. With it he secretly journaled, wrote short stories and compiled crossword puzzles. “I would occupy the emptiness of time by thinking of cliches and colloquial phrases and making up what I thought were smart or groan-provoking puns as clues,” he wrote in the foreword to his 1975 collection “Crosswords from Peking”.
Among his favourite ones: “The law of graffiti?” Tantalisingly, he declined to give readers the four-word answer.
‘CAUGHT UP IN A BATTLE OF FACE’
The British government insisted on quiet negotiations with China. But as that approach proved fruitless, Grey’s peers launched a far more public campaign to secure his release. The tall, slender reporter became a fixture on front pages.
When his wait was finally over, a Chinese official told him that he owed his freedom to the release of the communist reporters.
“I don’t think Peking cared desperately about the news workers in Hong Kong in themselves,” Grey later wrote. “I was simply caught up in a battle of face between two intransigent governments.”
Readjusting to society proved a challenge, especially as Britain had changed so much during his captivity. Recreational drugs abounded, as did miniskirts, long-haired men and – with the musical “Hair” – on-stage nudity.
His status too had changed. “The former newshound, accustomed to hunting safely in numbers with the press corps pack, had been separated out – had become the fox, the hunted one,” he wrote in his book “The Hostage Handbook” decades later.
He went on to host a current affairs programme on BBC radio and write several thrillers. But the unexplained death in Cairo of journalist David Holden in 1977 – a chilling real-life incident of the sort Grey had lightly imagined in his novels – put him off the genre.
After that he wrote sprawling historical fiction set in China, Vietnam and Japan. His best-selling work was “Saigon”.
Grey would have a few more dalliances with journalism. In 1983, he wrote “The Prime Minister Was a Spy”, a book which alleged that Australia’s Harold Holt, who is widely believed to have drowned at sea in 1967, had in fact fled the country in a Chinese submarine.
The stridently anti-communist Holt had spied on Beijing’s behalf for 38 years, Grey wrote.
Holt biographer Tim Frame called the theory “a complete fabrication”. Relying on a former Australian naval officer who claimed to have Chinese informants, Grey himself wrote of his account: “I can’t guarantee that it is true.”
A 1996 BBC radio documentary about unidentified flying objects led him to yet more unorthodox views. “At the end of my own investigation, I personally feel sure that extraterrestrial craft are visiting us,” he concluded in the broadcast.
After that, Grey became a follower of Rael, a Frenchman who said that humanity had been created by alien scientists. His movement – Raelism – defines itself as an atheist religion. A French parliamentary inquiry called it a cult.
Grey’s faith, which led him to write the foreword to Rael’s 2005 book “Intelligent Design”, became, for a time, all-consuming. It threatened to engulf his finances, reputation and mental health, the latter already largely hobbled by his experiences in Beijing.
Four decades on from captivity, Grey, who fell in and out of depression, finally saw a psychiatrist. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In brighter moments, he would laugh with Lucy about how much he identified with Billy Joel’s lyrics: “Darling I don’t know why I go to extremes / Too high or too low there ain’t no in-betweens.”
Grey had an open yet troubled mind. He could also be “wonderfully silly”, Clarissa said.
Both daughters are journalists. They survive him, as do Lucy’s children Eddie and Oscar.
Preaching forgiveness, Grey let go of any resentment towards the British and Chinese authorities, as well as towards his fellow journalists, who had pressed him for stories even at his lowest. He founded several charities, including Hostage Action Worldwide and Planet of Forgiveness.
Sitting at home in England’s South Downs listening to John Williams’s “Cavatina” with a Chivas Regal in hand was his idea of bliss.
He was married to Shirley for 22 years. Following their separation, and before her death from cancer in 1995, they remained close friends. He would visit her every week to tackle a crossword together.
The answer to his own clue, “The law of graffiti?”, it turned out, was “Writing on the wall”.
Conceived in detention half a century ago, all four walls of his cell covered in Maoist mantras, the pun brought a smile to his face.
(Editing by Andrew HeavensArchival research by Rory Carruthers and Susan Ponsonby)
BUDAPEST (Reuters) -Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday that he will need to convince U.S. President Donald Trump that Hungary is exposed to pipeline networks when it comes to energy to gain an exemption from U.S. sanctions on Russian oil.
Orban told state radio that the issue of energy will need to be settled at the meeting scheduled for November 7. Orban has said earlier that he would discuss U.S. sanctions on Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil with Trump, and will also aim to conclude a broad economic agreement with the United States.
(Reporting by Krisztina Than and Anita Komuves; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
