French ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy stripped of Legion of Honour medal
It comes in line with the rules of the Legion of Honour.
The conservative politician, who was president from 2007 to 2012, has been at the heart of a series of legal cases since leaving office.
He was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling by both a Paris court in 2021 and an appeals court in 2023 for trying to bribe a magistrate in exchange for information about a legal case in which he was implicated.
He was sentenced to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for one year, a verdict upheld by France's highest court, the Court of Cassation, in December.
Earlier this year, Sarkozy stood trial over allegations he received millions of dollars from Libya for his successful presidential campaign in 2007.
He denies the claims.
Prosecutors requested a seven-year prison sentence.
The verdict is expected in September.
Sarkozy becomes the second former head of state to be stripped of the Legion of Honour – France's highest distinction – after Nazi collaborator Philippe Petain, who was convicted in 1945 for treason and conspiring with the enemy for his actions as leader of Vichy France from 1940-1944.
Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was stripped of his Legion of Honour award in the wake of widespread sexual misconduct allegations against him in 2017.
Disgraced cyclist and former Tour de France star Lance Armstrong also had his French Legion of Honour award revoked.
Sarkozy retired from public life in 2017 though still plays an influential role in French conservative politics.
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The Independent
a few seconds ago
- The Independent
Hollyoaks star asks late mother's friends not to attend stepfather's funeral
Hollyoaks actor Callum Kerr has requested that friends of his late mother not attend his stepfather's funeral, after the couple were found dead in what is being treated as a murder-suicide. Andrew Searle and Dawn Kerr, who were both aged in their 60s, were found dead in their home in the south of France in the early afternoon of February 6. Mrs Kerr was found lying dead in front of her house, partly undressed and with a significant head injury, while Mr Searle was found hanged inside the property, which is in the hamlet of Les Pesquies in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, Aveyron. Police launched an investigation to establish whether the couple died as a result of a murder-suicide or if a third party was involved. Prosecutor Fabrice Belargent previously said that 'the analysis carried out does not so far show any evidence that a third party was involved'. In a statement on Tuesday, Mr Kerr said it would be 'inappropriate' for his mother's memory to be 'associated with a service honouring the man who, based on all available evidence, may have been responsible for her death'. He called for the funeral arrangements for the pair to be kept separate and for photographs showing the couple together not to be shared. A map of Villefranche-de-Rouergue: The full statement, which is signed by Kerr and his sister Amanda Kerr, reads: 'In the absence of any evidence suggesting third-party involvement in the tragic death of our mother, Dawn Kerr, the prevailing hypothesis remains that of a murder-suicide. 'Our mother was killed by multiple blows to the head, and Andrew was found deceased by hanging. 'His injuries are consistent with self-hanging, and no defensive wounds were found on his body. 'There is also no evidence of any third party's involvement at this stage. 'While the official investigation is still ongoing, we cannot ignore the circumstances as they stand. 'For this reason, we must respectfully but firmly request that our mother not be included in any way in the funeral arrangements being made for Andrew. 'Please do not share photographs of them together. 'Please do not attend Andrew's service if you were a friend of our mother. 'It would be inappropriate for her memory to be associated with a service honouring the man who, based on all available evidence, may have been responsible for her death. 'We ask for understanding, privacy and respect as we continue to grieve and seek justice for our mum.' Callum Kerr played Pc George Kiss in the popular Channel 4 soap opera, and appeared in Netflix 's Virgin River. According to his LinkedIn page, Mr Searle was a retired fraud investigator specialising in financial crime prevention who worked at companies including Standard Life and Barclays. A statement issued by French prosecutors in February said: 'The two deceased persons, a man and a woman, were the owners of the house in which their bodies were discovered. 'They were British expatriates, retired, and had been living in Aveyron for five years. 'The first victim, Ms Kerr, has a significant head injury. 'A box containing jewellery was found near her, but no item or weapon which could have caused the injuries were located. 'Mr Searle, who was found hanged… did not show any visible defensive injuries.' If you are experiencing feelings of distress, or are struggling to cope, you can speak to the Samaritans, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@ or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call or text 988, or visit to access online chat from the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Times
6 minutes ago
- Times
How postwar Germans tried to censor films with Nazi villains
Running throughout the middle of the 1960s, Combat! was one of the most vivid and successful Second World War dramas yet aired on the small screen. Its fictional but meticulously realistic account of an American infantry unit battling through German-occupied France after D-Day left millions, from Toronto to Taiwan, Los Angeles to Lima, glued to their black-and-white television sets every week. Yet it stuck in the craw for one group of viewers: West German officialdom. Two decades after the end of the war, diplomats and civil servants were horrified by what they saw as a flood of 'anti-German' films and television series that slandered the Wehrmacht soldiers as villains. 'You see them plundering, committing arson and murdering women and children,' the West German outpost in Caracas wrote in a cable to the foreign ministry, adding that it was quietly lobbying to have Combat! taken off the airwaves. This was part of a clandestine international campaign to try to suppress unflattering depictions of the Third Reich's war machine, which is detailed in a landmark historical study of the postwar West German government. It was an era in which Germans still widely believed in the myth of the 'clean Wehrmacht', which maintained that the Nazi military and its generals were mere soldiers doing their jobs and innocent of war crimes. Where atrocities had been committed, the theory held, the Nazi dictatorship and its 'party soldiers' in the SS were to blame. Later scholarship demonstrated conclusively that this was not the case: the Wehrmacht had in fact committed numerous war crimes on its own initiative, including the massacres of thousands of prisoners of war, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the rape of as many as ten million women. However, the West German state under Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor from 1949 to 1963, insisted on its innocence as a matter of policy. This was not just a political strategy to court the votes of millions of Wehrmacht veterans; it was also viewed as an essential part of the justification for West Germany's rearmament against the threat from the Soviet bloc from the early 1950s. • Secret files reveal the Nazis chosen to run West Germany In 1951 Adenauer had even persuaded Dwight Eisenhower, who had led the Allied assault on Nazi Germany and then became the supreme commander of Nato forces in Europe, to issue a statement absolving the 'great majority' of German soldiers. This belief was so entrenched that West German officials were outraged by postwar films that shed light on the Third Reich's crimes against humanity. Some of these incidents are already notorious: in 1956, for example, the West German interior ministry and embassy in Paris tried to have Night and Fog, the French director Alain Resnais' award-winning documentary about the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps, withdrawn from the programme at the Cannes film festival. Jutta Braun, a senior researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, has uncovered evidence that these efforts were much more extensive than previously known, and lasted until well into the 1970s. Sifting through the archives of the German Federal Press Office (BPA), Braun found officials had not only maintained a list of 'anti-German propaganda' in war films but also used underhand means to try to get them pulled from cinemas and television schedules. Its targets were numerous: not only Combat! and Night and Fog but also other popular American series such as The Rat Patrol, which told the story of American and British soldiers trying to sabotage Rommel's Afrika Korps, and Jericho, which followed British, American and French spies behind enemy lines. In 1965 the West German embassy in Washington, led by an ambassador who had previously headed the anti-American propaganda section in the Nazi German foreign ministry, went so far as to blame 'the type of Jewish liberal who has great influence in the modern communications industry' for the tide of 'hate-films' that had added murderous German soldiers to the pantheon of 'bad guys'. The campaign also affected Canada, where the public broadcaster, CBC, had aired a documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 and a film from 1944 that imagined the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. The West German embassy complained that it was 'defaming' a Nato ally and secured an apology from the head of CBC, who said the scheduling had been a mistake by his staff. Other diplomats suggested using threats and financial pressure to bully the films' sponsors and distributors into backing out. 'We do not wish to impose a political burden on our export sector, but the embassy regards an intensified pressure in this area as promising,' the embassy in Guatemala wrote back to Bonn in 1967, as the central American state was gripped by enthusiasm for Combat!. One member of staff in the Washington embassy boasted of having persuaded a Kentucky-based tobacco company to pull its sponsorship for an unspecified Second World War television series. In 1965 the embassy planted articles in the Staats-Zeitung und Herold, one of the biggest German-language newspapers in the US, that called on Americans with German roots to lodge protests with the broadcasters, the sponsors and their local congressmen. It explicitly called this a 'campaign … with the goal of curbing anti-German television broadcasts'. Not even WGBH, a worthy public broadcaster in Boston that relayed programmes from West Germany, was spared. The embassy criticised it for making an English-language version of a German documentary about everyday life in a concentration camp instead of picking up an 'excellent' television adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's play Don Carlos. 'This 'defensive battle' against so-called 'anti-German' films, especially in the United States, shows how hard the BPA was working to uphold the 'honour of the German soldier',' Braun said, adding that it 'reveals the authoritarian understanding of the state' and lack of a 'pluralistic view of the world'. Britain got off lightly. The embassy in London kept a watchful eye on popular series such as Colditz, an early 1970s drama about Allied prisoners of war trying to escape from Colditz Castle in Saxony, and Fawlty Towers. This was not always a comfortable experience: when the West German broadcaster WDR syndicated Fawlty Towers in 1978, it omitted the famous 'Don't mention the war' episode in which Basil Fawlty cannot keep himself from abusing a family of German hotel guests. Yet the West German diplomats in the UK were on the whole much more restrained than their counterparts in the Americas, praising the quality of television shows such as the documentary series Inside Germany and Thames Television's 1975 programme The Final Solution: Auschwitz. In fact the embassy was sanguine when the BBC broadcast a strident wartime propaganda film called 49th Parallel in 1974, more than 30 years after it was a hit in cinemas, and a London correspondent for the Welt newspaper published an apoplectic editorial calling on the West German government to defend its veterans. Karl-Günther von Hase, the West German ambassador in London and a previous head of the BPA, was forgiving of the British public's taste in war films and saw the issue in a more nuanced light. Most of the commentary in the British press, he noted, had come out against the 'glut of 'stupid-Hun' films'. He cabled to Bonn: 'There is scarcely any western country where the experience of the war has remained so alive as it has here. Britain had to fiercely defend its existence and mobilise the very last of its strength in two world wars.' Braun also found intriguing evidence that Britain might have meddled in the German media on at least one occasion. In the 1950s the Overseas News Agency, a New York-based entity that was secretly funded by what is now known as MI6, approached the BPA with a plan to plant positive articles about the history of soldiery, from Alexander the Great to the present day, in dozens of local newspapers. The BPA, which thought the idea fit with its own secret strategy of 'counter-infiltration', handed the agency 2,700 deutschmarks (a little over €8,000 in today's terms) to help it deliver the texts to 90 West German publications. Braun said it was not entirely clear whether the articles about soldiers were a covert British attempt to tilt the West German population towards supporting rearmament, or simply an opportunistic scheme dreamt up by the agency's go-between with the government in Bonn. However, she said these dark arts and the murky nexus of intelligence, spin and journalism were characteristic of the postwar years. Early in his chancellorship, Adenauer told Otto Lenz, his chief of staff, that the 'most urgent' priority was 'the establishment of appealing propaganda' for the state. Various proposals circulated at the highest level of his government for upgrading the BPA into a 'propaganda ministry' reminiscent of its Nazi predecessor under Joseph Goebbels, but in the service of democratic ideals. Although these plans were ultimately discarded, the BPA still 'stood in the shadow' of Goebbels's super-ministry, according to Braun. It stooped to methods such as suppressing its own opinion polling whenever the results cast the Germans in an unfavourable light, such as a study that found only 12 per cent of them had a positive opinion of Jews. It also hired several senior officials who had previously worked in Goebbels's propaganda apparatus. Felix von Eckardt, who ran the office from 1952 to 1955, had written more than 25 screenplays during the Third Reich, including The Dismissal (1942), which implied Hitler was Bismarck's true heir. Hans Schirmer, director of its overseas department in the 1950s, had joined the Nazi party weeks after Hitler seized power in 1933 and worked for Goebbels's ministry. A number of others had worked for the regime's newspapers. 'I was astonished how easy it was even for former journalists at Nazi, antisemitic hate-sheets such as Der Angriff or the Völkischer Beobachter to get jobs at the press office,' Braun said. 'And how simple it seems to have been for these people to 'write in any direction' — before 1945 in the service of the Nazi war of aggression, and then in the young Federal Republic to improve the image of the postwar democracy.' In the end, however, the BPA never attained anything like the level of power or influence that the propaganda ministry had wielded under the Third Reich, and democratically minded officials in its upper echelons often shot down the more outlandish plans for manipulating the public. Braun cited a 'witticism' from Von Hase: 'Goebbels sold criminal policies dangerously well. You could plausibly claim that our policies weren't criminal, but you also have to admit that they weren't dangerously well sold either.' 'That is correct,' Braun added. 'And, of course, it's a good thing.' The study is published in Das Kanzleramt: Bundesdeutsche Demokratie und NS Vergangenheit (The Chancellery: West German Democracy and the Nazi Past) by Jutta Braun, Nadine Freund, Christian Mentel and Gunnar Take
Edinburgh Live
2 hours ago
- Edinburgh Live
Edinburgh gang war boss shared business with drug-dealing bodybuilder
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Edinburgh gang war boss Ross McGill was in business with a drug-dealing Mr Scotland before the pair were exposed in a cracked Encrochat bust. McGill co-owned EKLean dry cleaning business in East Kilbride with professional bodybuilder John Barry McDuff until 2021 - a year before he fled to the United Arab Emirates amidst fears he would be arrested after French cops broke into the encrypted criminal phone network. McDuff, 41, was later sentenced to seven years at the High Court in Glasgow in 2024, for his role in a lucrative Class A drug trafficking operation, reports our sister title the Daily Record. Underworld sources claim the pair operated as partners in the racket. McGill and McDuff were both registered directors for EKLean on the Companies House website in February 2021. Images from the firm's social media pages show the clothes cleaners promoting garment care for expensive designer brands such as Moncler, Louis Vuitton and Prada. (Image: Getty Images) Speaking to the Record, the source said: "McGill and McDuff were business partners for a number of years and built up a substantial drug dealing network throughout Scotland. "Both used the Encrochat network and after it was busted people started to get the jail and McGill moved fast before the authorities caught up with him. "McGill moved to Spain and eventually Dubai, but McDuff wasn't as smart and the police were soon knocking on his door." When McGill fled the country, he left McDuff as the sole owner of the firm with the business still registered under the gym bunny's name. Since moving to Dubai, McGill has rubbed shoulders with international cartel bosses and moved his criminal operation on to another level. While McDuff, crowned Mr Scotland in 2012 after winning the 90kg category at the National Amateur Bodybuilding Championships, was caged after the High Court in Glasgow heard he used handles such as ""BIggie-Gla" on Encrochat for his involvement in the supply of cannabis, cocaine and heroin. The source added: "McDuff is stuck in jail while his old partner has gone on to mix with some of the biggest criminals in the world. "McGill was running a lot of businesses as well as the dry cleaners, but he shut them all down in 2022 and took his money out. "He knew he had been discussing some very incriminating stuff on Encrochat and when it was cracked he left without any intention of ever returning to Scotland." McGill lived quietly in Dubai, orchestrating huge drug deals before he launched a gang war on the streets of Scotland earlier this year. Members of caged Edinburgh kingpin Mark Richardson's crew were accused of ripping him off to buy £500,000 worth of cocaine with fake bank notes. McGill soon announced that everyone linked to Richardson was a target. Properties and businesses throughout Edinburgh were set on fire throughout March, before the war spread to Glasgow in April, targeting the notorious Daniel clan for their association with Richardson. Police Scotland's investigation to the feud, Operation Portaledge, has lead to 55 people being arrested for a variety of offences.
