ROME — Italy on Friday gave permission for a second humanitarian group’s ship to disembark its passengers at an Italian port, seemingly softening its hard line against European-flagged vessels that rescue migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.
Italian authorities told the crew of the Geo Berents, chartered by the French group Doctors Without Borders, to head toward Salerno, near Naples, with its 248 migrant passengers. Already, a mother who gave birth to a baby on board Wednesday, the baby and three siblings had been evacuated, the group said.
Doctors Without Borders said it would take around 24 hours in rough seas to arrive but that the designation of a port was “a relief for the children, women and men who went through harrowing experiences since leaving their countries of origin.”
Earlier Friday, Italy allowed the German-flagged Louise Michel, which is funded and decorated by the street artist Banksy, to disembark its 33 passengers in Lampedusa, Sicily. In a tweet, the Louise Michel said the passengers had been rescued from a small wooden boat two days earlier.
“We wish them all the best for the future, and hope they will be better welcomed by civil society than by Europe’s violent border regime,” it said.
Soon after coming to power in September, Italy’s right-wing government of Premier Giorgia Meloni had argued that the flag countries of rescue ships are responsible for taking in the migrants and that Italy would no longer be the de facto port of automatic entry. Rome said it would only allow migrants deemed “vulnerable” to disembark.
That policy drove a diplomatic standoff with France last month over the fate of the Ocean Viking and its 234 migrants. Italy refused the rescue ship port for weeks, forcing France to take it in. Paris retaliated by suspending its participation in a European Union solidarity pact to accept 3,000 relocated migrants this year from Italy and reinforced its southern border crossings.
The aid groups and legal experts had argued the Italian policy contradicted international law and maritime conventions, which require rescued people to be disembarked as quickly as possible in the nearest port of safety.
A third ship is currently off Sicily awaiting port — the Humanity 1, operated by the German aid group SOS Humanity, with some 261 people on board.
“No place of safety has yet been allocated despite multiple requests. Meanwhile, the weather is worsening,” the group said in a statement.
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Follow AP’s global migration coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/migration
French President Emmanuel Macron discusses the impact the war in Ukraine and U.S. domestic policy are having on his country; Rebuilding and repopulating Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park; Jon Wertheim speaks with world number 1 pool player Shane Van Boening.
“Negative emotion is stronger than positive emotion,” Macron tells Bill Whitaker. “So on a lot of these social [platforms,] negative emotions, feelings, are the [ones] to triumph.”
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“Negative emotion is stronger than positive emotion,” Macron tells Bill Whitaker. “So on a lot of these social [platforms,] negative emotions, feelings, are the [ones] to triumph.”
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LONDON — The United Kingdom wants to police the internet. Shame the European Union got there first.
Brexit was supposed to let Britain do things quicker. But less than a month after the 27-member bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into force, London is still struggling to cobble together its own version of the rulebook, known as the Online Safety Bill.
On Monday it tried again, with Britain’s Digital Secretary Michelle Donelan presenting a tweaked bill to parliament. It got the backing of MPs, but faces fresh committee scrutiny before heading to the House of Lords. And the path to a settled law still looks far from certain.
The bill, which seeks to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” has not only been a casualty of the country’s political instability — it has also proved a divisive issue for the country’s governing Conservative Party, where a vocal minority of backbenchers still view it as an unnecessary limit to free speech.
“Far from being world-leading, the government has been beaten to the punch in regulating online spaces by numerous jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the EU,” said Lucy Powell, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow digital secretary.
Powell said the latest version of the Online Safety Bill was also at risk of getting stuck due to “chaos in government and vested interests,” adding that it was imperative the bill pass through the legislature by April, when the current parliamentary session ends.
Much of the disagreement over the bill has centered on rules policing so-called legal-but-harmful content. That’s been largely dropped from the latest version of the planned law, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government bowed to pressure from right-wing MPs within his own party, who argued that the provisions threatened free speech.
In the previous iteration of the bill, Ofcom, the country’s telecommunications and media regulator, was on the hook for enforcing rules that required social media giants to take action against potentially harmful but technically legal material like the promotion of self-harm.
The government’s scrapping of legal-but-harmful content hasn’t been universally welcomed, however. Nadine Dorries, Donelan’s predecessor as digital secretary, proposed the provisions and has griped that they’d already passed parliamentary scrutiny before the bill was paused.
Long and winding road
Britain’s attempts to regulate the internet really got going under Theresa May, who became prime minister in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and as lawmakers were beginning to become more tech-skeptic.
The Tories’ May 2017 election manifesto promised that “online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” but by the time Boris Johnson published his 2019 election offering, the Conservatives were also promising to protect the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content. Under Johnson’s close ally Dorries, a version of the legislation tackling legal-but-harmful content started to make its way through Parliament, before it was put on pause after he was ousted by Tory MPs.
Johnson, the former prime minister, often seemed caught between his own personal free speech philosophy and his populist instincts of attacking Big Tech.
The summer Tory leadership contest to replace Johnson reignited the debate, with contenders promising to look again at the law before the legal-but-harmful content provisions were ultimately watered down. Donelan replaced Dorries, becoming the seventh culture secretary since Brexit.
The EU’s path to its online rulebook has been quicker. In part that’s because questions over free speech haven’t yet become the political touchpaper that they now are in the Anglosphere. Nevertheless the EU mostly side-stepped the issue by keeping its own rulebook more squarely aimed at purely illegal content, and the European Commission has made it clear public it does not want to create a so-called “Ministry of Truth.”
That means the EU hasn’t had to contend with the deep divisions the Online Safety Bill has prompted in the U.K., especially among the governing Tories.
Instead, Brussels’ institutions have been mainly aligned on the key aspects of its framework, the DSA. The European Parliament and Council of the EU — representing the 27 European governments — largely supported the European Commission’s cautious approach to create rules to crack down on public-facing content illegal under EU or national laws like child sexual abuse material or terrorist propaganda.
When it comes to legal-but-harmful content, the EU’s approach requires very large online platforms — those with more than 45 million European users — to assess and limit the spread of content like disinformation and cyberbullying under the watch of regulators. Europe’s rules also have gone further than those on the other side of the channel by including mandated risk assessment and audits for tech giants like Meta and Alphabet so that they can be held accountable for potential wrongdoing. In the U.K., the main enforcement has been left to Ofcom via investigations.
Disagreements, when they came in Europe, have been on the edges, rather than at the core of the debate. Rows focused on limits to targeted ads and the level of obligations for online marketplaces like Amazon to carry out random checks on dangerous products on their platforms. In another example, some EU countries like France and Germany pushed and failed to force a 24-hour deadline for online platforms to take down illegal content.
Not just free speech
In the U.K., it’s not just free speech issues that have proved controversial. The EU set out separate rules aiming to clamp down on child sexual abuse material online, but the U.K. poured similar provisions into the Online Safety Bill.
That means high-stakes questions over how and whether the monitoring requirements undermine privacy — especially in encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp — are being dealt with separately in the EU. But in the U.K. they’ve been thrown into the same mix as wide-ranging free speech debates.
Differences between the rulebooks also raise the prospect of costly regulatory misalignment. While the U.K. bill slaps general monitoring requirements on the tech companies themselves, that’s explicitly banned by the EU. Last month, the British regulator and its Australian counterpart created a new Western coalition of online content regulators, though failed to invite any EU counterparts to those discussions. Only Ireland’s watchdog joined as an observer.
“This is about setting up our international engagement in expectation of setting up our rules,” Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO when announcing that initiative. “The success of this is about bringing together international partners.”
Clothilde Goujard reported from Brussels.
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Vincent Manancourt, Annabelle Dickson, Clothilde Goujard and Mark Scott
For many officials, it’s a topic they won’t touch. When pressed, politicians give memorized, terse and robotic answers.
The verboten subject? Ukraine’s potential NATO membership.
It’s an issue so potentially combustible that many NATO allies try to avoid even talking about it. When Ukraine in September requested an accelerated process to join the military alliance, NATO publicly reiterated its open-door policybut didn’t give a concrete response. And last week, when NATO foreign ministers met, their final statement simply pointed toa vague2008 pledge that Ukraine would someday join the club.
Not mentioned: Ukraine’s recent request, any concrete steps toward membership or any timeline.
The reasons are manifold. NATO is fractured over how, when (and in a few cases even if) Ukraine should join. Big capitals also don’t want to provoke the Kremlin further, aware of Vladimir Putin’s hyper-sensitivity to NATO’s eastward expansion. And most notably, NATO membership would legally require allies to come to Ukraine’s aid in case of attack — a prospect many won’t broach.
The result is that while Europe and the U.S. have plowed through one taboo after another since Russia invaded Ukraine in February — funneling mountains of lethal military equipment to Kyiv, slapping once unthinkable sanctions on Moscow, defecting from Russian energy — the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO remains the third rail of international politics.
Touching the issue can leave you burned.
French President Emmanuel Macron sparked an outcry over the weekend when he said the West must consider security guarantees for Russia if it returns to the negotiating table — a gesture that enraged Kyiv and appeared to go against NATO’s open-door policy. And behind the scenes, Ukrainian officials themselves faced annoyed colleagues after making their public plea for swift membership.
“Some very good friends of Ukraine are more afraid of a positive reply to Ukraine’s bid for membership in NATO than of providing Ukraine with the most sophisticated weapons,” said Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister.
“There are still many psychological barriers that we have to overcome,” he told POLITICO in a recent interview. “The idea of membership is one of them.”
‘De facto’ ally
Ukraine’s leadership has argued that for all intents and purposes, it is already a member of the Western military alliance — and thus deserves a quick path to formal NATO membership.
“We are de facto allies,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared when announcing his country’s bid to join NATO | Alexey Furman/Getty Images
“We are de facto allies,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared in September when announcing his country’s bid to join NATO “under an accelerated procedure.”
“De facto, we have already completed our path to NATO. De facto, we have already proven interoperability with the alliance’s standards,” he added. “Ukraine is applying to make it de jure.”
The Ukrainian leader’s statement caught many of Kyiv’s closest partners by surprise — and left several grumbling.
The overture threatened to derail a plan the alliance’s most influential capitals had essentially settled on: Weapons now, membership talk later. It was an approach, they felt, that would deprive Moscow of a pretext to pull NATO directly into the conflict.
In their statement last week, ministers pledged to step up political and practical help for Ukraine while avoiding concrete plans for Kyiv’s future status.
Ultimately, however, few allies question Ukraine’s long-term membership prospects — at least in theory. The divisions are more over how and when the question of Kyiv’s membership should be addressed.
A number of Eastern allies are arguing for a closer political relationship between Ukraine and NATO, and they want a more concrete plan that sets the stage for membership.
“My thinking is that it is basically unavoidable,” said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, “that NATO will have to have a way to accept Ukraine.”
On the other end of the spectrum, France’s Macron wants to take Moscow’s perspective into account.
“One of the essential points we must address — as President [Vladimir] Putin has always said — is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia,” Macron told French television channel TF1 in an interview released Saturday.
Most other allies essentially evade the subject — not rejecting Ukraine’s NATO dreams but repeating a carefully crafted line about focusing on the current war.
Here’s NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s version, offered last week: “The most immediate and urgent task is to ensure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent democratic nation in Europe.”
“The most immediate and urgent task is to ensure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent democratic nation in Europe,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg | Armend Nimani/AFP via Getty
And here’s Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra’s take from the same week: “The task here is to make sure that the main thing continues to be the main thing — and that is helping out Ukraine on the battlefield.”
U.S. NATO Ambassador Julianne Smith echoed the point in an interview: “The focus right now is practical support to Ukraine.”
Analysts say the fault line lies between primarily Western European capitals such as Berlin and Paris — which see membership as an ultra-sensitive issue to be avoided at the moment — and some Eastern capitals that see Ukrainian accession as a goal the alliance can begin working toward.
Since the war began, that divide has only become more “exacerbated,” said Ben Schreer, executive director for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Some countries simply don’t want to even have a conversation about this because they feel it might further harden Russian responses.”
Another path
Ukrainian officials do recognize that NATO membership is not imminent, but they still want a gesture from the alliance.
“The ideal scenario would, of course, be a very simple sentence from NATO: ‘OK, we receive your application, we begin the process of considering it.’ That would already be a major milestone achievement,” said Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, ahead of last week’s meeting.
Smith, the U.S. ambassador, said the Ukrainians are aware they need to do more before they could become members.
Ukraine formally adopted a constitutional amendment in 2019 committing to pursue NATO membership. But even though the country has pursued some reforms over the past few years, experts and partner governments say there’s more Ukraine must do to integrate Kyiv into Western institutions.
“There’s more work to be done, I don’t think that’s a mystery,” said Smith, adding: “I think they’d be the first to tell you that.”
As an interim solution, Kyiv has presented what it calls a pragmatic proposal for Western countries to help protect Ukraine.
“Russia was able to start this war precisely because Ukraine remained in the gray zone — between the Euro-Atlantic world and the Russian imperialism,” Zelenskyy said when presenting a 10-point peace plan in November.
The West’s “psychological barriers” need to be “overcome by changing the optics” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said | Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
“So, how can we prevent repetition of Russia’s such aggression against us? We need effective security assurances,” he said, calling for an international conference to sign off on the so-called Kyiv Security Compact, a new set of security guarantees for Ukraine.
But it remains unclear whether Ukraine’s Western partners would be willing to make any legally binding guarantees — or if anything short of NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause would prove a sufficient deterrent down the line.
“Some of those countries,” said IISS’ Schreer, “would be very reluctant.” Any written security guarantee, he noted, “from their perspective would probably invite strong Russian response, but it also would make them at this point of time part of this conflict.”
A Ukrainian victory, of course, could shift the calculus.
“If Ukraine is stuck in a stalemate, then NATO membership isn’t gonna happen,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But if it retakes its territory and accepts its borders — whatever those borders may be, whether it includes Crimea or does not, because that’s the fundamental question for Ukraine — then I think things can move very quickly.”
Asked if he is frustrated with Western partners, Kuleba was blunt.
“I know them too well to be frustrated with them — they are good friends,” he said. “It would be close to impossible for us to sustain the Russian pressure and to prevail on the battleground without them.”
But, the foreign minister added, the West’s “psychological barriers” need to be “overcome by changing the optics.”
Kyiv’s partners, he said, “have to begin to see Ukraine’s membership as an opportunity — and not as a threat.”
French President Emmanuel Macron discusses the impact the war in Ukraine and U.S. domestic policy are having on his country; Rebuilding and repopulating Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park; Jon Wertheim speaks with world number 1 pool player Shane Van Boening.
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France is America’s first and oldest ally, offering crucial support — both financial and military — during our Revolution.
During the 20th century, Americans fought and died on French soil in both World Wars. And now, once again, the old allies find themselves in a dynamic and dangerous moment with yet another war being fought in Europe.
This time, the French President is Emmanuel Macron, the youngest ever, who is striving to enhance France’s role in the world, while navigating divisions at home and relations with the U.S. strained by energy, trade, and defense issues. We spoke with him Thursday at Blair House during his state visit to Washington with President Joe Biden. Earlier in the week, we met the French President in Paris at the Elysee Palace.
Bill Whitaker: Bonsoir Monsieur le Président.
We met president Emmanuel Macron as he was preparing for his second state visit to Washington, D.C. – his first with President Joe Biden.
The setting could not have been grander, French presidents have run affairs of state from the Elysee Palace since Napoleon III in 1848. This room, the Golden Salon, was a favorite of Napoleon III and his wife, Eugenie.
Emmanuel Macron: You can see the E & N is for Eugenie and Napoleon.
Bill Whitaker: How about that?
Today, it’s the French equivalent of the Oval Office.
President Emmanuel Macron shows correspondent Bill Whitaker around Elysee Palace
Emmanuel Macron: And since de Gaulle, the office of the French president is here. And this is where I work.
Bill Whitaker: This is magnificent.
Emmanuel Macron: And by the way, this is something I got from my first state visit: this key is the key.
Bill Whitaker: To the Bastille?
Emmanuel Macron: To the Bastille. And it was brought by Lafayette.
Bill Whitaker: To the Americans?
Emmanuel Macron: To George Washington. As you know, because Lafayette was very much involved in the American Revolution. And the original is in the U.S. by the way. This is just a copy for me.
Emmanuel Macron is very much an original – a centrist determined to shake up the status quo. Seven months into his second term, he has survived massive street protests over high costs and taxes, fought off tough electoral challenges from the right and the left yet exudes an air of youthful optimism.
Bill Whitaker: At 44 you are the senior leader of Europe. Is that a comfortable fit?
Emmanuel Macron: Yes, because you can have both experience and energy.
Since February much of his energy has been focused on the war in Ukraine. From the U.S. it can feel a world away. From Macron’s vantage point, it’s a wildfire in the neighborhood.
Emmanuel Macron: Russia decided, 24th February this year to launch this war. I think they made a huge– a huge mistake. The first one was not to respect international law and– and– and to breach all the principles they– they did sign. And– and this is a killer for their credibility. And second, because probably they made a lot of mistakes in terms of assessment of their own capacities and the Ukrainian capacities. And now what happens is, since, let’s say, September they decided to bomb a lot of civilian infrastructures. And their perspective is to despair Ukrainian people and to make their life impossible during this wintertime.
Bill Whitaker: You have said that attacking civilian infrastructures is a war crime.
Emmanuel Macron: This is a war crime.
Emmanuel Macron
President Macron had hoped to prevent all of this with his own shuttle diplomacy this past winter, flying to Moscow to meet one-on-one with President Vladimir Putin.
Bill Whitaker: And it seemed that you thought you could talk him out of this.
Emmanuel Macron: Indeed, this is true. I thought that it was feasible to avoid the war at the time.
Still, Emmanuel Macron has been determined to keep an open dialogue with President Putin.
Emmanuel Macron: I always maintain regular discussions and direct contact with President Putin, because– I believe that the best way to– to reengage is to preserve this direct channel. Isolation is– is the worst thing, especially for– a leader like him.
Bill Whitaker: Isolation?
Emmanuel Macron: Isolation.
Bill Whitaker: Already, the war has caused food and energy prices to sky-rocket. How long can the open-ended western support of Ukraine go on?
Emmanuel Macron: I think it’s extremely important that all of us, meaning European, Americans, and– the maximum number of countries in this world do support Ukraine. It’s clear that Russia, and especially President Putin, decided to weaponize at least energy and food, creating a lot of– shortages, volatility, and inflation. And I think his bet is a war fatigue and a sanction fatigue.
Bill Whitaker: So how does this end?
Emmanuel Macron: I think it’s important to convey the message that this is the Ukrainians to decide it, the only way to find a solution would be through negotiations. I don’t see a military option on the ground.
The French president approaches diplomacy and politics with a cool logic, yet often generates heat. On the eve of his trip to Washington he told us he’d be direct with President Biden, like he was when they met early in Mr. Biden’s presidency.
Bill Whitaker: Mr. Biden said that, at his first G7 meeting as president, that he walked into the room and said, “The United States is back.” And that you said, “But for how long?” Do you doubt that the United States is a consistent and reliable ally?
Emmanuel Macron: If I look at the 20th century, I have absolutely no reason to have any doubt about where the U.S. stands when our liberty and our values are at stake. But when you look at the recent period of time, some change of administration had big impact on climate change, on Iran, on some other issues.
Bill Whitaker: You mean the Trump administration?
Emmanuel Macron: I do. So my point is just I want us to be allies, I want us to be friends, I want us to be partners. I want to engage with the U.S. but I don’t want to be dependent. And I think this is very important, because just imagine, on your side, would you accept as U.S. citizen to say, “My security, my– my future will depend on an election in France?” No, I cannot imagine.
Bill Whitaker: You think there needs to be a re-sync of relations. How have relations been out of sync?
Emmanuel Macron: I think this administration and President Biden personally is very much attached to– Europe. But when you look at the situation today, there is indeed a de-synchronization. Why? Energy. Europe is– a gas and oil buyer. The U.S. is a producer. And when you look at the situation, our industries and our households are not buying at the same price. So there is a big gap impacting purchasing power and competitiveness of our societies.
With Russian natural gas drastically cut, Europe is buying more from the U.S., but at a price as much as six times what Americans pay. This, at a time when inflation and unemployment in France are hovering around 7%.
Bill Whitaker: You have said that’s not how friends behave.
Emmanuel Macron: Yeah we are m– very much engaged together in this war for the same principles. But the cost of this war is not the same– on both sides of the Atlantic. And you should– you should be very aware of that.
President Macron also points to the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, new legislation designed to grow green jobs in the U.S. with subsidies and tax credits for electric cars and clean energy manufacturing in North America.
Emmanuel Macron: But they are, at this very moment of the war, a killer for our industry–
Bill Whitaker: A killer for your industry?
Emmanuel Macron: For sure. The U.S. decided two and a half month ago to subsidize much more big, new, green projects, which means for battery, for hydrogen, for a lot of things. The level of subsidies is now two to three times higher in the U.S. than in Europe. We are totally aligned in this conflict. We work hard. And I think if the day after the conflict the result is to have a weaker Europe because a lot of its industry will have been just killed. I do believe it’s not the interest of the U.S. administration and even the U.S. society. I think the main interest is obviously to protect your middle classes, which is a very fair one. I– I do the same for my country. And it’s to be competitive vis-à-vis China. But the result of the recent decision on this momentum, I would say, is it’s bad for Europe.
President Macron brought those concerns to the White House this past Thursday.
After the pomp and pageantry, the two presidents retired to the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, discussed the problems of the world for two hours and emerged unified.
Joe Biden: France is one of our strongest partners. We share the same values and will address all challenges together.
After meeting with members of Congress and a half hour before racing off to the state dinner, President Macron talked with us at Blair House, the presidential guesthouse.
Bill Whitaker: As we were talking in Paris, you’re a man who likes to be direct and look someone in the eye. So you’re sitting across from President Biden. What did you tell him about the challenges the Inflation Reduction Act is inflicting on your country and your people?
Emmanuel Macron: We had a very good and frank and fruitful discussion. President Biden’s intention is to make his country stronger, to create jobs here, to re-industrialize, and at the same time to address climate change issues, and to build more green industry in your country. I do share this objective. I do respect this objective. And guess what? I have exactly the same for my country.
Bill Whitaker: It sounded in the press conference like the two of you agreed to disagree or to at least keep talking. What we say in the United States is, it sounded like the two of you decided to kick the can down the road.
Emmanuel Macron: No. I don’t think so, honestly speaking. It’s not an agreement to disagree. This is a strategic agreement. And I think we do share now much more in depth our strategy on both sides.
Bill Whitaker: But you told us in Paris that the Inflation Reduction Act is an industry killer, a job killer.
Emmanuel Macron: For Europe.
Bill Whitaker: For Europe. And with unemployment and inflation in France hovering around 7%, it seems like this is urgent to get a resolution here.
Emmanuel Macron: I confirm. This is why I can tell you that what we decided with President Biden is precisely to fix this issue. And they are fixable.
Bill Whitaker: What can be fixed? He said he could think of some– some tweaks.
Emmanuel Macron: Yes.
Bill Whitaker: Some tweaks. Is that enough?
Emmanuel Macron: My point is to say it was urgent to raise this issue. I did it. It was urgent to discuss in depth about it, which we did this morning together. It’s urgent to fix it. We can do it.
Bill Whitaker: You are the senior politician in Europe right now. So when you go back to Europe– what do you tell your European partners? Was this state visit a success?
Emmanuel Macron: Yes, definitely. Number one, because we did confirm our total alignment on the Ukrainian situation. Second, we had a very fruitful and in-depth discussion on this context IRA and the side effects. And we will fix it on the short run. Third, we had a lot of convergence on climate change, health, security in Africa and a lot of projects. So for me, this is a very good state visit with a lot of very positive outcomes, I can tell you.
Produced by Marc Lieberman and Cassidy McDonald. Broadcast associates, Eliza Costas and Natalie Breitkopf. Edited by Sean Kelly.
John Dickerson reports on new developments in the Trump Mar-a-Lago investigation, President Biden’s first State Dinner, and the legal jeopardy facing FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
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President Biden welcomed French President Emmanuel Macron to the White House for the first state dinner of his administration. The two leaders held talks about the war in Ukraine ahead of the dinner. Ed O’Keefe has the details.
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The transatlantic reset between Brussels and Washington is on life support.
After four years of discord and disruption under Donald Trump, hopes were high that Joe Biden’s presidency would usher in a new era of cooperation between Europe and the U.S. after he declared: “America is back.”
But when senior officials from both sides meet in Washington on Monday for a twice-yearly summit on technology and trade, the mood will be gloomier than at any time since Trump left office.
The European Union is up in arms over Biden’s plans for hefty subsidies for made-in-America electric cars, claiming these payments, which partly kick in from January 1, are nothing more than outright trade protectionism.
At the same time, the U.S. is increasingly frustrated the 27-country bloc won’t be more aggressive in pushing back against China, accusing some European governments of caving in to Beijing’s economic might.
Those frictions are expected to overshadow the so-called EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC) summit this week. At a time when the Western alliance is seeking to maintain a show of unity and strength in the face of Russian aggression and Chinese authoritarianism, the geopolitical stakes are high.
Biden may have helped matters last Thursday, during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, by saying he believed the two sides can still resolve some of the concerns the EU has raised.
“We’re going to continue to create manufacturing jobs in America but not at the expense of Europe,” Biden said. “We can work out some of the differences that exist, I’m confident.”
But, as ever, the details will be crucial.
It is unclear what Biden can do to stop his Buy American subsidies from hurting European car-markers, for example, many of which come from powerful member countries like France and Germany. The TTC summit offers a crucial early opportunity for the two sides to begin to rebuild trust and start to deliver on Biden’s warm rhetoric.
Judging by the TTC’s record so far, those attending, who will include U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, will have their work cut out.
More than 20 officials, policymakers and industry and society groups involved in the summit told POLITICO that the lofty expectations for the TTC have yet to deliver concrete results. Almost all of the individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be attending the TTC | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Some officials privately accused their counterparts of broken promises, particularly on trade. Others are frustrated at a lack of progress in 10 working groups on topics like helping small businesses to digitize and tackling climate change.
“With these kinds of allies, who needs enemies?” said one EU trade diplomat when asked about tensions around upcoming U.S. electric car subsidies. A senior U.S. official working on the summit hit back: “We need the Europeans to play ball on China. So far, we haven’t had much luck.”
Much of the EU-U.S. friction is down to three letters: IRA.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provides subsidies to “Buy American” when it comes to purchasing electric vehicles, has infuriated officials in Brussels who see it as undermining the multilateral trading system and a direct threat to the bloc’s rival car industry.
“The expectation the TTC was established to provide a forum for precisely these advanced exchanges with a view to preventing trade frictions before they arise appears to have been severely frustrated,” said David Kleimann, a trade expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels.
Biden’s room for flexibility is limited. The context for the subsidies and tax breaks is his desire to make good on his promise to create more manufacturing jobs ahead of an expected re-election run in 2024. The U.S. itself is hovering on the edge of a possible recession.
In addition, the U.S. trade deficit with the EU hit a record $218 billion in 2021, second only to the U.S. trade deficit with China. The U.S. also ran an auto trade deficit of about $22 billion with European countries, with Germany accounting for the largest share of that.
Washington has few, if any, meaningful policy levers at its disposal to calm European anger. During a recent visit to the EU, Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, urged European countries to pass their own subsidies to jumpstart Europe’s electric car production, according to three officials with knowledge of those discussions.
“It risks being the elephant in the room,” said Emily Benson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, when asked about the electric car dispute.
After a push from Brussels, there were increasing signs on Friday that the TTC could still play a role. In the latest version of the TTC’s draft declaration, obtained by POLITICO, both sides commit to addressing the European concerns over Biden’s subsidies, including via the Trade and Tech Council. Again, though, there was no detail on how Washington could resolve the issue.
Politicians across Europe are already drawing up plans to fight back against Biden’s subsidies. That may include taking the matter to the World Trade Organization, hitting the U.S. with retaliatory tariffs or passing a “Buy European Act” that would nudge EU consumers and businesses to buy locally made goods and components.
Officials and business leaders pose for a photo during the TTC in September 2021 | Pool photo by Rebecca Droke/AFP via Getty Images
Privately, Washington has not been in the mood to give ground. Speaking to POLITICO before Biden met Macron, five U.S. policymakers said the IRA was not aimed at alienating allies, stressing that the green subsidies fit the very climate change goals that Europe has long called on America to adopt.
“There’s just a huge amount to be done and more frankly to be done than the market would provide for on its own,” said a senior White House official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “We think the Inflation Reduction Act is reflective of that type of step, but we also think there is a space here for Europe and others, frankly, to take similar steps.”
China tensions
Senior politicians attending the summit are expected to play down tensions this week when they announce a series of joint EU-U.S. projects.
These include funds for two telecommunications projects in Jamaica and Kenya and the announcement of new rules for how the emerging technology of so-called trustworthy artificial intelligence can develop. There’s also expected to be a plan for more coordination to highlight potential blockages in semiconductor supply chains, according to the draft summit statement obtained by POLITICO.
Yet even on an issue like microchips — where both Washington and Brussels have earmarked tens of billions of euros to subsidize local production — geopolitics intervenes.
For months, U.S. officials have pushed hard for their European counterparts to agree to export controls to stop high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment being sent to China, according to four officials with knowledge of those discussions.
Washington already passed legislation to stop Chinese companies from using such American-made hardware. The White House had been eager for the European Commission to back similar export controls, particularly as the Dutch firm ASML produced equipment crucial for high-end chipmaking worldwide.
Yet EU officials preparing for the TTC meeting said such requests had never been made formally to Brussels. The draft summit communiqué makes just a passing reference to China and threats from so-called non-market economies.
Unlike the U.S., the EU remains divided on how to approach Beijing as some countries like Germany have long-standing economic ties with Chinese businesses that they are reluctant to give up. Without a consensus among EU governments, Brussels has little to offer Washington to help its anti-China push.
“In theory, the TTC is not about China, but in practice, every discussion with the U.S. is,” said one senior EU official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “If we talk with Katherine Tai about Burger King, it has an anti-China effect.”
Gavin Bade, Clea Caulcutt, Samuel Stolton and Camille Gijs contributed reporting.
KYIV — In Crimea, the war is drawing ever closer, and nerves are on edge.
In conversations via secure communications, people in Crimea describe growing tension across the Black Sea peninsula as they increasingly expect the advent of direct hostilities. They say saboteur and partisan groups are now readying in the territory, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
Frustration and panic are surging, over everything from conscription to runaway prices. One person told of anger over an inability to secure hospital places thanks to the numbers of Russian wounded brought in from the fronts, while another said that the fretful Russian elite were trying to sell their glitzy holiday homes, but were finding no buyers.
When Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February, few people expected Ukrainian forces would nine months later be threatening to reclaim Crimea. That no longer feels like a military impossibility, however, after Kyiv’s well-organized troops showed that they could drive out Russian forces in offensive operations around Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine and Kherson in the south.
Tamila Tasheva, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s permanent representative in Crimea, has high hopes the peninsula will end up back in Ukrainian hands. “Yes, of course, it is entirely possible we will get Crimea back,” she told POLITICO.
“Our goal is the return of all our territory, which of course includes Crimea,” she said in her office in Kyiv. A 37-year-old Crimean Tatar, whose family lives on the peninsula, Tasheva is busy preparing plans for what happens after Crimea is “de-occupied” and is drafting a legal framework to cope with complex issues of transitional justice that will arise. She says while Kyiv would prefer the peninsula to be handed back without a fight, “a military way may be the only solution.”
“The situation is very different now from 2014. We have a lot of communication with people in Crimea and they’re increasingly angered by the high food prices and shortages in drugs and medicines,” she said. “And there’s been an increase in anti-war protests, especially since the start of conscription and partial mobilization.”
When asked about people forming anti-Russian partisan groups, she simply commented: “Of course they are.” The difference between 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and now comes down to the fact, she argues, that Ukraine has a strong army and a determined leadership and that is affecting and fortifying people’s thinking in Crimea.
Against the occupiers
For Putin, Crimea has long been a sacred cause — he called it an “inseparable part of Russia” — and that led many in the West to fear it could be a strategic red line. That sense was hardly helped by nuclear saber-rattler-in-chief, former President Dmitry Medvedev, who issued ominous warnings about any attack on Crimea. “Judgment Day will come very fast and hard. It will be very difficult to take cover,” Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, said earlier this year in comments reported by the TASS news agency.
Tensions ratcheted up dramatically, however, after the explosion on October 8 that damaged the Kerch Bridge, a vital supply line between Russia and Crimea.
People pose in front of a postage stamp showing an artist’s impression of the Kerch bridge on fire | Ed Ram/Getty Images
People in Crimea say the Russians are jittery and on the hunt for pro-Ukrainian sympathizers, fearing more acts of sabotage. Kyiv has never formally claimed responsibility for what was most likely a truck bombing. The people POLITICO talked with can’t be named for their own safety, but they included businessmen, lawyers and IT workers.
“There was panic afterwards,” said one IT worker. “Since then, officers and soldiers have been moving their families back to Russia. And the rich have been trying to sell their properties worth $500,000 to a million, but the market is dead,” he added.
“Because of the sanctions, a lot of people have lost their jobs and prices for everything, food especially, have skyrocketed and there isn’t much choice available either. If you were making a $1,000 a month before February, now you need to be around $3,000 to be where you were, and how are you going to do that with the tourism industry dead,” he said. Locals are fuming that they can’t receive medical attention because the peninsula’s hospitals are full of Russian soldiers wounded in the fighting in Kherson and Donetsk.
With the situation worsening, more partisan cells are forming, they say. “My group of patriots know each other well: We studied and worked together for years and trust each other — we are preparing, and we understand secrecy will determine the effectiveness of our actions,” said a former banker, who claimed to be leading a seven-man cell.
Inspired by the Kerch Bridge blast, his cell is planning to sabotage military facilities using rudimentary explosives made from ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel.
“There are many provocateurs around and the Russians are anxious, so we’re vigilant. We know other partisan groups, but we don’t actively communicate for security reasons,” he said. “We’ve a deal with a police chief who understands Russia is losing and is worried — he’ll give us key to his arsenal when needed with our promise that we will put in a good word for him later,” he added.
Whether such cells represent any kind of serious threat remains to be seen and POLITICO can’t verify the claims of would-be saboteurs, but retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, says he had expected partisan cells to form, encouraged by Kyiv and otherwise.
“I would have assumed this. Both locals as well as saboteurs who have been infiltrated into Crimea. Remember the Ukrainians, of course, did this to the German Wehrmacht throughout World War II. There’s a tradition of sabotage and insurgency,” he said.
“I would hate to be a Russian truck driver on a convoy somewhere, anywhere in the area these days. I think when it does come time for decisive action, it will be a combination of local partisans and infiltrated saboteurs,” he added.
‘Crimea is Ukraine’
Ukraine’s recent victories in northeastern and southern Ukraine are fueling confident talk in Kyiv about Crimea, and since Russian forces retreated from Kherson city, 130 kilometers from the northernmost part of the peninsula, the chorus has only been growing louder, as more of the peninsula comes into rocket and missile range of the Ukrainians.
After seizing Crimea, the Kremlin harbored ambitions to turn it into another glittering seaside Sochi — or showcase it as a Black Sea rival to France’s Côte d’Azur. Construction of condos started apace with plans to make Sevastopol a major Russian cultural center. A new opera house, museum and ballet academy were to be completed next year. Around 800,000 Russians may have moved to the peninsula since 2014. The war has ruined construction schedules.
People take part in celebrations marking the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Simferopol on March 18, 2022 | Stringer/AFP via Getty Images
Top Ukrainian officials have been taunting Russia, saying Crimea will soon be under Ukrainian control — by year’s end even or early next year. Zelenskyy has returned repeatedly to the theme: in October telling European and American parliamentary leaders: “We will definitely liberate Crimea.” His top adviser, Andriy Yermak, told POLITICO during the Halifax International Security Forum earlier this month: “I am sure that the campaign to return Crimea will take place.”
Ukrainian officials told POLITICO that Western European leaders had been the most jittery about pushing on to Crimea. America’s top general, Mark Milley, chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has cast doubt about Ukraine’s ability to reclaim the peninsula militarily, suggesting it would be overreach. At a Pentagon press conference on November 16, he said: “The probability of a Ukrainian military victory, defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include what they defined, or what they claim as Crimea, the probability of that happening anytime soon, is not high, militarily.”
But the White House hasn’t walked back President Joe Biden’s February 26 remarks when he made Washington’s position clear: “We reaffirm a simple truth: Crimea is Ukraine.”
Raising the pressure
Ukrainian forces have been increasing the tempo of military activity in and near Crimea using both aerial and innovative marine drones to swarm and strike in October and last Tuesday Russian warships stationed at Sevastopol, the home base of the Russian navy in the Black Sea. The Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said in a social media post after Tuesday’s attack that a couple of drones had been intercepted, later adding another three had been downed by Russian warships.
Kyiv has not commented on that attack, but last week, Ukraine’s top security official confirmed Israeli press reports that 10 Iranian military advisers in Crimea were killed by Ukrainian drones. “You shouldn’t be where you shouldn’t be,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s defense council, in an interview with the Guardian. The Ukrainians say Iranian technicians and operators have been assisting the Russians with the Shahed-136 armed drones supplied by Tehran.
The attacks appear to be unnerving the Russian military — especially those carried out by maritime drones. The October attack involved half a dozen radio-operated marine drones equipped with jet-ski engines. Some of the nearly six-meter-long drones are thought to have damaged two ships, a minesweeper and more importantly the Admiral Makarov, a frigate. On November 18, the Ukrainians repeated the exercise further afield with an attack on warships in the port at Novorossiysk, a Black Sea city in southern Russia.
One Crimea resident told POLITICO that the drone strikes appear to have forced Russian naval commanders to rethink the positioning of their ships. “A group of Russian warships were until recently regularly off the coast near my house. I used to watch them and if they fired missiles, I’d contact my family in various cities in Ukraine to warn them rockets were on their way. But now the warships have moved away, they were too vulnerable where they were.” he said.
The Russians are fortifying their defenses, especially in the Dzhankois’kyi district, the northern part of the Crimean steppe near Syvash Bay, according to Andrii Chernyak of the main intelligence directorate of the ministry of defense of Ukraine.
Hodges, the former general, disagrees with General Milley and says an offensive “is possible and I believe they will be working to be in place to begin this in a deliberate way as early as January.”
“Between now and then, they will continue to isolate Crimea by going after the Kerch Bridge again and also the land bridge that originates in Rostov and runs along the northern coast of the Sea of Azov down through Mariupol and Melitopol and on to the peninsula. The Ukrainians are going to be looking to pound away at the bridge and the land link, a form of eighteenth-century siege tactics,” he added.
Those siege tactics, he says, will be accompanied by daring use of high-tech weapons. “The U.S. navy has put a lot of development effort into unmanned maritime systems and to see what the Ukrainians have been doing with swarm attacks by drones has really impressed me,” he said.
The Ukrainians, he predicts, will attempt “to fight their way across the isthmus when the conditions are right,” adding: “This is going to come down to a test of will and a test of logistics.”
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
Twitter needs to comply with EU rules on content moderation and other online policies, French President Emmanuel Macron told Elon Musk in a meeting on Friday.
“Transparent user policies, significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech: efforts have to be made by Twitter to comply with European regulations,” Macron said after what he called a “clear and honest discussion” with the Twitter CEO in the U.S.
Twitter’s decision to stop enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation policy has come under fire in the EU.
Earlier this week, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton warned Musk that EU rules require platforms to moderate content, tackle disinformation and have transparent user policies, and that Twitter risked EU sanctions if it doesn’t comply.
Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, meanwhile, said that Twitter’s policy changes had drawn Brussels’ attention: “In my view, Twitter now is jumping to the front of the queue of the regulators,” she told POLITICO.
Twitter’s policy changes are “a big issue,” Macron said on Thursday in an interview on Good Morning America, adding: “What I push very much for is exactly the opposite: more regulation.”
“Free speech and democracy is based on respect and public order. You can demonstrate, you can have free speech, you can write what you want, but there are responsibilities and limits,” he argued.
Musk told Macron that Twitter would follow the Christchurch Call, which is aimed at restricting the spread of terrorist material on the internet, and would cooperate to improve child protection online, the French president said following their meeting.
WASHINGTON (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Washington on Tuesday for the first state visit of Joe Biden’s presidency — a revival of diplomatic pageantry that had been put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Biden-Macron relationship had a choppy start. Macron briefly recalled France’s ambassador to the United States last year after the White House announced a deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia, undermining a contract for France to sell diesel-powered submarines.
But the relationship has turned around with Macron emerging as one of Biden’s most forward-facing European allies in the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This week’s visit — it will include Oval Office talks, a glitzy dinner, a news conference and more — comes at a critical moment for both leaders.
The leaders have a long agenda for their Thursday meeting at the White House, including Iran’s nuclear program, China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and growing concerns about security and stability in Africa’s Sahel region, according to U.S. and French officials. But front and center during their Oval Office meeting will be Russia’s war in Ukraine, as both Biden and Macron work to maintain economic and military support for Kyiv as it tries to repel Russian forces.
The visit also comes as both Washington and Paris are keeping an eye on China after protests broke out last weekend in several mainland cities and Hong Kong over Beijing’s “zero COVID” strategy. At a red carpet arrival ceremony after landing in Washington on Tuesday evening, Macron ignored a shouted question from a reporter about whether he and Biden planned to discuss the China protests — the biggest show of public dissent in China in decades.
In Washington, Republicans are set to take control of the House, where GOP leader Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday following a meeting with Biden and fellow congressional leaders again vowed that Republicans will not write a “blank check” for Ukraine. Across the Atlantic, Macron’s efforts to keep Europe united will be tested by the mounting costs of supporting Ukraine in the nine-month war and as Europe battles rising energy prices that threaten to derail the post-pandemic economic recovery.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday described Macron as the “dynamic leader” of America’s oldest ally while explaining Biden’s decision to honor the French president with the first state visit of his presidency.
The U.S. tradition of honoring foreign heads of state dates back to Ulysses S. Grant, who hosted King David Kalakaua of the Kingdom of Hawaii for a more than 20-course White House dinner, but the tradition has been on hold since 2019 because of COVID-19 concerns.
“If you look at what’s going on in Ukraine, look at what’s going on in the Indo Pacific and the tensions with China, France is really at the center of all those things,” Kirby said. “And so the president felt that this was exactly the right and the most appropriate country to start with for state visits.”
Macron was also Republican Donald Trump’s pick as the first foreign leader to be honored with a state visit during his term. The 2018 state visit included a jaunt by the two leaders to Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of George Washington, America’s founding president.
French government spokesperson Olivier Veran said Tuesday that Macron’s second state visit is “a strong symbol of the partnership between France and the United States.” It shows “very strong ties” between the countries and comes at a moment where the world is faced with important international issues, including the war in Ukraine, food security, climate and energy, he said.
Veran added that there is a need for “re-synchronizing” the agendas of the European Union and the United States to face crises, especially on energy and rising prices.
Macron has a packed day of meetings and appearances in and around Washington on Wednesday — including a visit to NASA headquarters with Vice President Kamala Harris and talks with Biden administration officials on nuclear energy.
On Thursday, Macron will have his private meeting with Biden followed by a joint news conference and visits to the State Department and Capitol Hill before Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, are feted at the state dinner. Grammy winner Jon Batiste is to provide the entertainment. The White House prepared for days for Macron’s arrival, setting up a large tent for the festivities on the South Lawn and decorating light poles bordering the White House complex with French flags.
Macron will head to New Orleans on Friday, where he is to announce plans to expand programming to support French language education in U.S. schools, according to French officials.
For all of that, there are still areas of tension in the U.S.-French relationship.
Biden has steered clear of embracing Macron’s calls on Ukraine to resume peace talks with Russia, something Biden has repeatedly said is a decision solely in the hands of Ukraine’s leadership.
Perhaps more pressing are differences that French and other European Union leaders have raised about Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, sweeping legislation passed in August that includes historic spending on climate and energy initiatives. Macron and other leaders have been rankled by a provision in the bill that provides tax credits to consumers who buy electric vehicles manufactured in North America.
The French president, in making his case against the subsidies, will underscore that it’s crucial for “Europe, like the U.S., to come out stronger … not weaker” as the world emerges from the tumult of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a senior French government official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity to preview private talks.
Macron earlier this month said the subsidies could upend the “level playing field” on trade with the EU and called aspects of the Biden legislation “unfriendly.”
The White House, meanwhile, plans to counter that the legislation goes a long way in helping the U.S. meet global efforts to curb climate change. The president and aides will also impress on the French that the legislation will also create new opportunities for French companies and others in Europe, according to a senior Biden administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity to preview the talks.
Macron’s visit comes about 14 months after the relationship hit its nadir after the U.S. announced its deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia.
After the announcement of the deal, which had been negotiated in secret, France briefly recalled its ambassador to Washington. A few weeks later Macron met Biden in Rome ahead of the Group of 20 summit, where the U.S. president sought to patch things up by acknowledging his administration had been “clumsy” in how it handled the issue.
Macron’s visit with Harris to NASA headquarters on Wednesday will offer the two countries a chance to spotlight their cooperation on space.
France in June signed the Artemis Accords, a blueprint for space cooperation supporting NASA’s plans to return humans to the moon by 2024 and to launch a historic human mission to Mars.
The same month, the U.S. joined a French initiative to develop new tools for adapting to climate change, the Space for Climate Observatory.
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Corbet reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Colleen Long and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed reporting.
You can’t be fired because a company doesn’t think you’re “fun” enough.
Frédéric Soltan I Getty ImagesThe Court of Cassation in Paris.
At least, that’s according to France’s highest court, The Court of Cassation, which ruled earlier this month that a man who was fired for not wanting to participate in certain company activities billed as part of their “fun” culture was wrongfully terminated, according to The Washington Post.
The man’s legal team said their client wasn’t seen as “fun” because he refused to engage in corporate events with large amounts of drinking. The man also claimed a work culture where people did activities such as miming sexual acts, sharing beds with other employees at work events, and giving people uncouth nicknames, per the outlet.
A Google translation of the court documents characterized these acts as “practices advocated by the associates linking promiscuity, bullying, and incitement to various excesses.”
The decision says the man was fired in March 2015 for not embracing the company’s “fun” culture (calling it “professional incompetence,”) as well as being more rigid of personality, the documents claim.
The company in question is Cubik Partners, a management consulting firm. It did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
France is known for its pro-employee labor laws and well-known jokes about how it’s impossible to get fired there. That is also generally true for other countries in Europe, including Ireland, where Elon Musk’s Twitter has already faced a temporary injunction for firing an executive based there.
In this case, the court ruled that firing an employee for not doing the activities in question constituted a violation of “his freedom of expression,” and that it is a “fundamental freedom” to not engage in some sort of social activity.
The fired employee had asked for over $400,000 USD, which the Paris Court of Appeals rejected last year. This ruling turned over that court’s rejection in part, ordered the company to give the former employee $3,000 euros, and said it would look at his demand for damages at some point in the future, per Insider.
On a biting cold morning on November 28, 1972, a Frenchman was guillotined for a murder he did not commit, in a case that so traumatized his lawyer he would spend the rest of his life campaigning to end the death penalty. Roger Bontems, 36, was beheaded for being an accessory to the brutal murder of a nurse and a guard during a break-out attempt at a prison in eastern France.
Seven minutes after he was decapitated in the courtyard of La Sante prison in Paris, his co-conspirator Claude Buffet — a 39-year-old man convicted of a double murder that had sent shockwaves through France — met a similar end.
Photo taken in 1971 of Roger Bontems during his transfer to the Troyes prison in France. Bontems was sentenced to death for complicity in murder and guillotined on November 28, 1972.
STF/AFP via Getty Images
Among the witnesses of the executions was Robert Badinter, a crusading young lawyer who was haunted by his failure to save the life of his client Bontems.
In a 2002 interview, Badinter, who as justice minister famously defied a hostile French public to abolish capital punishment in 1981, revealed that for a long time after Bontems’s death, “on waking around dawn, I would obsessively mull over why we had failed.”
“They had accepted that he had not killed anyone. Why then did they sentence him to death?”
In September 1971, Buffet, a hardened criminal who is serving a life sentence for murder at Clairvaux prison, convinces fellow inmate Roger Bontems, who is serving a 20-year term for assault and aggravated theft, to join him in a high-stakes escape attempt.
The pair fake illness and are taken to the infirmary where, armed with knives carved out of spoons, they take a nurse and a guard hostage.
They threaten to execute their captives unless they are freed and given weapons.
This precipitates a standoff with the authorities that keeps the French glued to their TV screens until police storm the prison at dawn and find both hostages dead, their throats slit.
“The murderers’ lawyer”
The grisly murder of the nurse, a mother of two, and the prison warden, father of a one-year-old girl, sparks an impassioned debate about the death penalty, which had not been implemented since President Georges Pompidou came to power two years earlier.
Hundreds of people baying for the mens’ heads pack the streets outside the courthouse when they go on trial in Aube in 1972. The nurse’s husband and warden’s family are among those attending.
Buffet, who is portrayed in the media as a heartless monster, admits to killing the guard and stabbing the nurse, and defies the court to sentence him to death.
Bontems is found guilty of merely being an accessory. But he is also given the death penalty, amid intense pressure from prison wardens’ groups seeking revenge for their colleague’s death.
Badinter appeals to the highest court in the land not to apply the law of “an eye for an eye,” and then to Pompidou, who has pardoned six other death-row prisoners.
The lawyers of the convicted criminal Roger Bontems, Robert Badinter (L) and Philippe Lemaire (R), address the press after being meeting with the French President Georges Pompidou, on November 14, 1972 after pleading for a presidential pardon for their client, condemned to the death penalty.
-/AFP via Getty Images
His pleas fall on deaf ears in the face of a poll showing 63% of the French favor capital punishment.
On November 28, 1971, Bontems and Buffet are beheaded in the courtyard of La Sante prison, under a giant black canopy erected to prevent the media snapping pictures from a helicopter.
Badinter, whose Jewish father died in a Nazi death camp, would later say the case changed his stance on the death penalty “from an intellectual conviction to an activist passion.”
“I swore to myself on leaving the courtyard of la Sante prison that morning at dawn, that I would spend the rest of my life combatting the death penalty,” Badinter told AFP in 2021.
Five years later he helped convince a jury not to execute a man who kidnapped and murdered a seven-year-old boy, in a case that he turned into a trial of the death penalty itself.
Badinter called in experts to describe in grisly detail the workings of the guillotine, which had been used to decapitate prisoners since the French Revolution of 1789.
In all, he saved six men from execution, eliciting death threats in the process.
“We entered the court by the front door and once the verdict had been read and the accused’s head was safe, we often had to leave by a hidden stairway,” the man dubbed “the murderers’ lawyer” by his detractors, recalled.
When he was appointed justice minister in President Francois Mitterrand’s first Socialist government in June 1981, he made ending the death penalty an immediate priority.
Its abolition was finally adopted by parliament on September 30, 1981, after a landmark address by Badinter to MPs.
Decrying a “killer” justice system, he said: “Tomorrow, thanks to you, there will no longer be the stealthy executions at dawn, under a black canopy, that shame us all.”
Traveling to watch their team play at the World Cup took a little longer than usual for two French fans.
Mehdi Balamissa and Gabriel Martin decided the best way to travel from France to Qatar was on two wheels.
The friends spent three months traveling 7,000 kilometers (roughly 4,350 miles) by bicycle to reach Qatar 2022 and watch their beloved France defend its title.
“It was a crazy idea, but we’re the kind of people that have big ideas and don’t want to have any regrets,” Balamissa said, as both spoke to CNN Sport a day after arriving in the country.
“So, since we are both self-employed, we decided to block off three months of our time and come to Qatar.”
The pair started their mammoth journey at the Stade de France in Paris, home of the French national team, and finished at the stunning Lusail Stadium, the venue that will host the final at Qatar 2022.
They would travel on average 115 kilometers per day, taking appropriate rest days when needed.
The idea came about after cycling from France to Italy to watch their country play in the UEFA Nations League last year and they wanted to test themselves with a much longer trip.
They hoped their trip would promote the benefits of sustainable travel and said they plan to offer cycling workshops to children from disadvantaged backgrounds when they eventually arrive home.
But first the pair plan on enjoying their time in Doha. After all, they’ve worked hard for it.
Since arriving, the French Football Federation (FFF) has invited the pair to meet the team and provided tickets for all three of its group games.
France manager Didier Deschamps also presented each of them with a national jersey signed by the players.
“Everything here is revolving around the World Cup. We’re very excited to keep discovering the country,” Balamissa added.
“Many French people are super nice with us here and are proposing to take us places: to restaurants to visit different things.”
The pair are surprisingly energetic when speaking to CNN, considering the exhausting task they completed just 24 hours before.
Their eyes light up when talking excitedly about the trip which took them through a total of 13 different countries.
The two cyclists encountered many problems along the way, including dozens of flat tires, but relied on their infectiously positive attitude to get them through.
The pair laugh as they recall the time they had to travel 15 hours to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in order to find a bike repair shop before traveling 15 hours back to the exact point that they had stopped.
“We had many troubles, but we fixed them as we went,” Martin told CNN.
“In this kind of trip, you have to be really flexible. In fact, the main part of the trip is to be flexible and to just adapt to every situation the best you can. I think we did well, actually.”
Much of the trip was spent alone, cycling through multiple terrains with just each other and the open road for company. Occasionally, though, they would share a meal or two with the locals and immerse themselves in that particular country’s culture.
They battled through the heat of the desert in Saudi Arabia as well as flooded woodland areas in Hungary as they made their winding way to Qatar, stopping off at campsites, lodges and hotels to sleep.
Physically, they say, the challenge wasn’t too bad after their legs got used to the demands, but they relied on the kindness of others to keep going mentally.
“There were so many best moments, for instance, when we finished crossing Europe. It was absolutely fabulous. We crossed from the European part of Istanbul [Turkey] to the Asian side across the bridge,” Balamissa said.
Martin explained: “Usually, that’s forbidden [by bicycle], but we negotiated with the local police for hours and hours and they just followed us to protect us on the bridge.
“People along the way were so generous and kind.”
The pair agreed cycling through Jerusalem was another highlight of a trip that ended in spectacular fashion.
As they neared their final destination, the pair were joined by around 20 French and Qatari cyclists for the final stretch. They were then greeted by some of the world’s media and members of the French community living in Qatar.
Both said it was quite a shock to be around so many people having spent the last three months in relative solitude.
“It was very special when we got to Qatar because it meant it was the end of this crazy trip and this lifestyle that we actually enjoyed a lot,” Balamissa said.
Their plan now is to stay in Qatar for as long as France stays in the competition before flying back home.
Both are hopeful they won’t be back in France for a while.
“We’re staying until the final because France is going to win, of course,” Martin jokes. “We wouldn’t have come on our bikes otherwise.”
France won its opening match 4-1 against Australia and faces Denmark in its next Group D match on Saturday.
VERONA, Italy — Early season merrymakers sipping mulled wine and shopping for holiday decorations packed the Verona Christmas market for its inaugural weekend. But beyond the wooden market stalls, the Italian city still has not decked out its granite-clad pedestrian streets with twinkling holiday lights as officials debate how bright to make the season during an energy crisis.
In cities across Europe, officials are wrestling with a choice as energy prices have gone up because of Russia’s war in Ukraine: Dim Christmas lighting to send a message of energy conservation and solidarity with citizens squeezed by higher utility bills and inflation, while protecting public coffers. Or let the lights blaze in a message of defiance after two years of pandemic-suppressed Christmas seasons, illuminating cities with holiday cheer that retailers hope will loosen people’s purse strings.
“If they take away the lights, they might as well turn off Christmas,” said Estrella Puerto, who sells traditional Spanish mantillas, or women’s veils, in a small store in Granada, Spain, and says Christmas decorations draw business.
Fewer lights are sparkling from the centerpiece tree at the famed Strasbourg Christmas market, which attracts 2 million people every year, as the French city seeks to reduce public energy consumption by 10% this year.
From Paris to London, city officials are limiting hours of holiday illumination, and many have switched to more energy-efficient LED lights or renewable energy sources. London’s Oxford Street shopping district hopes to cut energy consumption by two-thirds by limiting the illumination of its lights to 3-11 p.m. and installing LED bulbs.
“Ecologically speaking, it’s the only real solution,’’ said Paris resident Marie Breguet, 26, as she strolled the Champs-Elysees, which is being lit up only until 11:45 p.m., instead of 2 a.m. as in Christmases past. “The war and energy squeeze is a reality. No one will be hurt with a little less of the illuminations this year.”
It’s lights out along Budapest’s Andrassy Avenue, often referred to as Hungary’s Champs-Elysees, which officials decided would not be bathed in more than 2 kilometers (1.5 miles) of white lights as in years past. Lighting also is being cut back on city landmarks, including bridges over the Danube River.
“Saving on decorative lighting is about the fact that we are living in times when we need every drop of energy,’’ said Budapest’s deputy mayor, Ambrus Kiss.
He doesn’t think economizing on lighting will dissuade tourists from coming to the city, which holds two Christmas markets that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
“I think it’s an overblown debate,’’ he said.
Festive lights, composed of LEDs this year, also will be dimmed from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. in the old city center of Brasov in central Romania and switched off elsewhere, officials said.
The crisis, largely spurred by Russia cutting off most natural gas to Europe, is sparking innovation. In the Italian mountain town of Borno, in Lombardy, cyclists will provide power to the town’s Christmas tree by fueling batteries with kinetic energy. Anyone can hop on, and the faster they pedal, the brighter the lights. No holiday lighting will be put up elsewhere in town to raise awareness about energy conservation, officials said.
In Italy, many cities traditionally light Christmas trees in public squares on Dec. 8, the Assumption holiday, still allowing time to come up with plans for festive street displays. Officials in the northern city of Verona are discussing limiting lighting to just a few key shopping streets and using the savings to help needy families.
“In Verona, the atmosphere is there anyway,’’ said Giancarlo Peschiera, whose shop selling fur coats overlooks Verona’s Piazza Bra, where officials on Saturday will light a huge shooting star arching from the Roman-era Arena amphitheater into the square.
The city also will put up a Christmas tree in the main piazza and a holiday cake maker has erected light-festooned trees in three other spots.
“We can do without the lights. There are the Christmas stalls, and shop windows are decked for the holidays,” Peschiera said.
After two Christmases under COVID-19 restrictions, some are calling “bah humbug” on conservation efforts.
“It’s not Christmas all year round,’’ said Parisian Alice Betout, 39. “Why can’t we just enjoy the festive season as normal, and do the (energy) savings the rest of the year?”
The holiday will shine brightly in Germany, where the year-end season is a major boost to retailers and restaurants. Emergency cutbacks announced this fall specifically exempted religious lighting, “in particular Christmas,’’ even as environmental activists called for restraint.
“Many yards look like something out of an American Christmas film,’’ grumbled Environmental Action Germany.
In Spain, the northwestern port city of Vigo is not letting the energy crisis get in the way of its tradition of staging the country’s most extravagant Christmas light display. Ahead of other cities, Vigo switched on the light show Nov. 19 in what has become a significant tourist attraction.
Despite the central government urging cities to reduce illuminations, this year’s installation is made up of 11 million LED lights across more than 400 streets — 30 more than last year and far more than any other Spanish city. In a small contribution to energy savings, they will remain on for one hour less each day.
The lights are Mayor Abel Caballero’s pet project. “If we didn’t celebrate Christmas, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin would win,” he said.
Caballero says the economic return is vital, both for commerce and for businesses in Vigo. Hotels in the city and the surrounding area were completely full for the launch of the lighting and are expected to be close to 100% every week.
Germany’s Christmas markets have crunched numbers that could make any lighting Grinch’s heart grow at least three sizes.
The market exhibitor’s association said a family Christmas market visit consumes less energy than staying home. A family of four spending an hour to cook dinner on an electric stove, streaming a two-hour film, running a video console and lighting the kids’ rooms would use 0.711 kilowatt-hour per person vs. 0.1 to 0.2 kilowatt-hour per person to stroll a Christmas market.
“If people stay at home, they don’t sit in the corner in the dark,’’ said Frank Hakelberg, managing director of the German Showmen’s Association. “The couch potatoes use more energy than when they are out at a Christmas market.”
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Associated Press reporters Thomas Adamson in Paris; David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany; Ciaran Gilles in Madrid; Justin Spike in Budapest; Giovanna Dell’Orto in Granada, Spain; Courtney Bonnell in London; and Stephen McGrath in Brasov, Romania, contributed.
