How can France ban outdoor smoking?
The announcement came courtesy of Health Minister Catherine Vautrin, who described it, without irony, as a 'new dynamic' in France's anti-smoking campaign. It's hard to imagine a better illustration of political displacement. Unable to fix anything that actually matters, the French state contents itself with issuing €135 fines to middle-aged women having a Marlboro Light on a bench.
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The Independent
16 hours ago
- The Independent
Macron condemns ‘antisemitic hatred' after attackers chop down tree honoring murdered Jew
French President Emmanuel Macron pledged Friday that no effort will be spared to track down and prosecute unknown attackers who chopped down an olive tree planted in homage to a French Jew murdered in 2006. The commemorative tree for Ilan Halimi, planted 14 years ago in the northern Paris suburb of Épinay-sur-Seine, was felled on Wednesday night, seemingly with a chainsaw. The town posted a photo on its Facebook page showing the tree's leafy, bushy top completely severed from its base, leaving just the stump poking from the ground. 'Cutting down the tree that honored Ilan Halimi is an attempt to kill him for a second time,' Macron posted on X. 'It will not succeed: the Nation will not forget this child of France, killed because he was Jewish.' 'All means are being deployed to punish this act of hatred. In the face of antisemitism, the Republic is always uncompromising, he added. Halimi was found naked, handcuffed and covered with burn marks near railroad tracks in the Essonne region south of Paris on Feb. 13, 2006. He died on the way to the hospital after being held captive and tortured for more than three weeks. He was 23. The brutal killing revived worries in France about antisemitism and led to deep anxiety in France's Jewish community, the largest in western Europe. French Prime Minister François Bayrou, in a post on X, said the olive tree 'was felled by antisemitic hatred.' 'No crime can uproot memory. The never-ending fight against the deadly poison of hatred is our foremost duty,' he wrote. In a separate post, the Paris police chief condemned 'this ignoble act' and said an investigation has been launched. 'Everything will be done to find the perpetrators and deliver them to justice,' he pledged. Attackers have previously desecrated other efforts to keep Halimi's memory alive. In 2017, a commemorative plaque near Paris was ripped off, thrown on the ground and covered with antisemitic writing.
Spectator
20 hours ago
- Spectator
The Chagos Islands deal just gets worse and worse
There has always been something mad about the government's deal over the Chagos Islands. The British Indian Ocean Territory was formed in 1965 from the seven atolls of the Chagos Archipelago and over 1,000 smaller individual islands. They had previously been administered as part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius, a British possession since 1810. Mauritius became independent in 1968 and had long claimed sovereignty over the BIOT, which the United Kingdom had consistently rejected and which has never been upheld by a judgement in any international court. Last year, however, the government reached an agreement with Mauritius to surrender sovereignty of the BIOT while retaining control through a 99-year lease of the military base at Diego Garcia, formally leased by the United States from the Ministry of Defence as Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia. After some subsequent renegotiations, a final agreement between the UK and Mauritius was published in May. As well as surrendering sovereignty, the government will pay on average £101 million a year for the lease of Diego Garcia, and it gave an overall estimated cost of £3.4 billion. So let us be quite clear about this aspect of the deal: the UK is giving away sovereignty it has exercised for more than two centuries to a country 1,250 miles from the BIOT, which has never held independent jurisdiction over the Chagos Islands and has no historical or cultural connection to them save through British and previously French administration. It is doing so because, in the Prime Minister's words: 'If Mauritius takes us to court again, the UK's longstanding legal view is that we would not have a realistic prospect of success.' And we are paying billions of pounds to induce Mauritius to accept this surrender. A price tag of £3.4 billion to prevent the upholding of a largely spurious claim in a politicised court on the bogus and nebulous grounds of 'decolonisation' is a high one, and the government has rightly been criticised for an abject and weirdly slavish sacrifice on the altar of international law. Sir Keir Starmer and his attorney general, Lord Hermer, regard the messy and often highly partial notion of international courts as sacrosanct; for them, this is simply the price that must be paid to be good global citizens. It now seems that the price may be higher than admitted; much, much higher. The Daily Telegraph has obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act which purport to show that the Government Actuary's Department initially estimated the nominal cost of the agreement to be £34.7 billion. This was reduced to £10 billion by applying an assumed annual inflation rate of 2.3 per cent over the 99-year lease period (it is currently 3.6 per cent, so that is ambitious). The total was then lowered again by between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent per year by the application of a Treasury practice called the Social Time Preference Rate; this represents the fact that people value benefits received immediately more highly. It therefore converts future costs and benefits into their present-day value. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office argues that this is a 'standard' calculation for long-term government spending and there has been no attempt to deceive or mislead. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Telegraph notes that this calculation was not applied, for example, to the Social and Affordable Homes Programme announced last year by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner. She could therefore promote a spending commitment of £39 billion, maximising rather than minimising the headline figure. The government needs to deal with this quickly. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it has been guilty of at least sharp practice, seeking radically to underplay the costs of a very bad deal. Remember that Starmer dismissed suggestions that the total bill might be between £9 and £18 billion as 'absolutely wide of the mark'. This kind of actuarial legerdemain, shuffling figures to say, in effect, that two plus two does not have to equal four, is shoddy and underhand. And the government has no reservoir of goodwill from which it can draw. In order for the treaty to come into force, parliament will have to agree the Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill introduced in July. The overall cost must be a vital part of that debate and parliament would be perfectly entitled to reject the bill. It is mad enough to be spending £3.4 billion giving away British sovereign territory. To pay 10 times that, and to work hard to minimise the published figures, is beyond madness. £34.7 billion is more than half the UK's annual defence budget. This is not Sir Keir Starmer reluctantly paying some modern-day Danegeld; instead he seems to have flung handfuls of cash at the Vikings before they ever set sail.
South Wales Guardian
a day ago
- South Wales Guardian
Starmer could attend second US-Russia meeting on ending Ukraine war, says Trump
On the eve of the summit, Mr Trump said leaders from Europe, which could include members of the so-called 'coalition of the willing' that have supported Ukraine, could attend a subsequent meeting if the event in Alaska on Friday is successful. The Prime Minister has been a key player in the group which has also included French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office at the White House, Mr Trump said: 'We have a meeting with President (Vladimir) Putin tomorrow, I think it's going to be a good meeting. 'But the more important meeting will be the second meeting that we're having. We're going to have a meeting with President Putin, President Zelensky, myself, and maybe we'll bring some of the European leaders along. Maybe not.' He added: 'I think President Putin will make peace. I think President Zelensky will make peace. We'll see if they can get along. And if they can it will be great.' Mr Trump said the summit aims to bring peace to Ukraine, and 'save a lot of lives'. Earlier this week the US leader told his European counterparts that his goal for the summit was to secure a ceasefire. Sir Keir chaired a meeting of the 'coalition of the willing' on Wednesday – a European-led effort to send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine to monitor any deal – and said there was a 'viable' chance of a truce. It came after Sir Keir and Mr Zelensky met on Thursday at Downing Street, where they said there was 'strong resolve' for peace in Ukraine. The two leaders embraced as the red carpet was rolled out for Mr Zelensky's arrival in Downing Street, and they later had breakfast. They expressed cautious optimism about the prospect of a truce 'as long as Putin takes action to prove he is serious' about ending the war, a Downing Street statement said. In a separate statement, Mr Zelensky said there had been discussions about the security guarantees required to make any deal 'truly durable if the United States succeeds in pressing Russia to stop the killing'. But concerns linger over the prospect of Kyiv being excluded from negotiations over its own future, and pressured to cede territory, after Mr Trump suggested any agreement may need to involve 'swapping of land'. Ukraine has already rejected any proposal that would compromise its borders. In a readout of the morning meeting between Sir Keir and Mr Zelensky, a Downing Street spokesman said: 'They had a private breakfast where they discussed yesterday's meetings. 'They agreed there had been a powerful sense of unity and a strong resolve to achieve a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.' During the meeting on Thursday, Mr Zelensky urged the UK to join PURL – Nato's Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List initiative – to provide weapons to Kyiv. 'It is important that, within the framework of the coalition of the willing, we should all be able to achieve effective formats for security co-operation,' he later said. 'We also discussed the continuation of support programmes for our army and our defence industry. Under any scenario, Ukraine will maintain its strength.' The Times reported that Britain was planning to scale back its plans for a military peacekeeping force in Ukraine. UK military chiefs are said to be considering air reassurance over western Ukraine, training support to the Ukrainian military and the clearance of mines from the Black Sea. The Government has been contacted for comment. Further sanctions could be imposed on Russia should the Kremlin fail to engage and the UK is already working on its next package of measures targeting Moscow, the Prime Minister said. 'We're ready to support this, including from the plans we've already drawn up to deploy a reassurance force once hostilities have ceased,' Sir Keir told allies on Wednesday. 'It is important to remind colleagues that we do stand ready also to increase pressure on Russia, particularly the economy, with sanctions and wider measures as may be necessary.'
