By Andreas Rinke
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff called on political parties to agree quickly on who should succeed her after next Sunday's election and avoid the kind of protracted coalition talks that followed the last vote four years ago.
The leading candidates for chancellor face off in a final primetime television debate on Sunday evening.
The likelihood of long coalition talks after the vote means Merkel will not be leaving office any time soon. She remains chancellor until a majority of Bundestag lawmakers elect a successor, who is then sworn in.
"My wish is for a swift government formation," Helge Braun told Reuters, adding that even though the current government would continue to govern during looming coalition talks there were certain limitations over the scope of leadership.
"So I warn against losing time due to a very long government formation. One can certainly ask for the parties to swiftly express their preferences after the election over what their favoured coalitions are - so that one does not endlessly lose time in discussions."
There are no formal restrictions on Merkel's powers until a successor is chosen, but she is a consensus seeker and previous chancellors have not taken radical decisions during this time.
Following Germany's last general election in 2017, it took a record six months before the new government was sworn in.
Braun's comments come as the latest INSA poll for German weekly Bild am Sonntag puts the Social Democrats (SPD) at 26% support, stable from a week ago, while the conservative bloc of Merkel's centre-right Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, added half a percentage point to come in at 21%.
The gap has been even wider in polls measuring the popularity of the individual chancellor candidates, indicating the uphill struggle conservative Armin Laschet is facing against his Social-Democrat contender, Olaf Scholz.
Both candidates will clash on Sunday evening at 8.15 pm (1815 GMT) in what is the last of three primetime television debates that will also include Annalena Baerbock of the Greens, who are third in polls at 15%.
Current polls, which show a highly fragmented picture as voters increasingly flock to smaller parties, leave room for several coalition scenarios, giving the liberal Free Democrats a potential king-maker role in upcoming coalition talks.
(Additional reporting by Christoph Steitz; Editing by David Clarke and Nick Macfie)
By Tom Balmforth and Maria Tsvetkova
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russians vote on Sunday in the final stretch of a three-day parliamentary election that the ruling party is expected to win after a sweeping crackdown that crushed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's movement and barred opponents from the ballot.
The expected win by the ruling United Russia party will be used by the Kremlin as proof of support for President Vladimir Putin despite malaise over years of faltering living standards.
The party that backs Russia's 68-year-old leader faces a ratings slump, state pollsters say, but remains more popular than its closest rivals on the ballot, the Communist Party and nationalist LDPR party, which often back the Kremlin.
United Russia holds nearly three quarters of the State Duma's 450 seats. That dominance last year helped the Kremlin pass constitutional reforms that allow Putin to run for two more terms as president after 2024, potentially staying in power until 2036.
"If United Russia manages (to win), our country can expect another five years of poverty, five years of repressions, five lost years," ran a message to supporters on Navalny's blog this week.
Navalny's allies were barred from running after his movement was banned in June as extremist. Other opposition figures allege they were targeted with dirty tricks campaigns or not allowed to compete.
A Communist strawberry tycoon says he was unfairly barred, while a liberal opposition politician in St Petersburg says two identically-named "spoiler" candidates are running against him to confuse his voters.
TACTICAL VOTING
The Kremlin denies a politically-driven crackdown and says individuals are prosecuted for breaking the law. Both it and United Russia deny any role in the registration process for candidates.
Navalny's camp is promoting a tactical voting ploy against United Russia that authorities want blocked online. Since voting began on Friday, Google, Apple and Telegram messenger have limited some access to the campaign on their platforms. Activists accuse them of caving to pressure.
The election runs until 1800 GMT on Sunday when polling stations close in the European exclave of Kaliningrad. It is the last national vote before the 2024 presidential election. Putin, who turns 69 next month, has not said if he will run.
In Moscow, Navalny's tactical voting campaign has recommended their supporters vote for politicians like the Communist Party's Mikhail Lobanov. He said he welcomed the Navalny campaign and criticised United Russia.
"People see the glaring inequalities, they feel the effects of economic policy and the swell of repression and respond with dissatisfaction accordingly," Lobanov said.
At a polling station in Lobanov's district, three people told Reuters they had voted for United Russia and three said they had voted Communist, two of them at the behest of Navalny's team.
One Moscow pensioner who gave his name only as Anatoly said he voted United Russia because he was proud of Russia's muscular foreign policy and Putin's efforts to restore what he sees as Russia's rightful great power status.
"Countries like the United States and Britain more or less respect us now like they respected the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s… The Anglo-Saxons only understand the language of force," he said.
Other voters voiced anger at United Russia at a polling station in the capital of more than 12.5 million where United Russia has fared worse in recent years than in some regions.
"I'm always against United Russia. They haven't done anything good," said Roman Malakhov who voted Communist.
The vote is being held alongside elections for regional governors and local legislative assemblies. It is stretched over three days as a COVID-19 precaution.
(Additional reporting by Polina Nikolskaya; Editing by Gareth Jones)
In the midst of World War II, with the Nazis extolling their Viking heritage, the Swedish writer Frans G. Bengtsson began writing "a story that people could enjoy reading, like The Three Musketeers or the Odyssey."
Bengtsson had made his literary reputation with the biography of an 18th-century king. But for this story he tried a new genre, the historical novel, and a new period of time. His Vikings are common men, smart, witty, and open-minded. "When encountering a Jew who allies with the Vikings and leads them to treasure beyond their dreams, they are duly grateful," notes one critic. "Bengtsson in effect throws the Viking heritage back in the Nazis' face."
His effect on that Viking heritage, however, was not benign. His story, Rode Orm, is one of the most-read and most-loved books in Swedish, and has been translated into over twenty languages; in English it's The Long Ships.
Part of the story takes place on the East Way, which the red-haired Orm travels in a lapstrake ship with 24 pairs of oars. Based on the Oseberg ship's 15 pairs of oars or the Gokstad ship's 16, such a mighty vessel would stretch nearly 100 feet long and weigh 16 to 18 tons, empty. To cross the many portages between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, Red Orm's "cheerful crew" threw great logs in front of the prow and hauled the boat along these rollers "in exchange for swigs of 'dragging beer,'" Bengtsson wrote.
This, say experimental archaeologists, is "unproven," "improbable," and—after several tries with replica ships—"not possible."
But Bengtsson's fiction burned itself into popular memory. Early scholars were convinced, too: A drawing of dozens of men attempting to roll a mighty ship on loose logs illustrates the eastern voyages in the classic compendium The Viking from 1966.
"Seldom has anything been surrounded by so much myth and fantasy" as the Viking ship, notes Gunilla Larsson whose 2007 Ph.D. thesis, Ship and Society: Maritime Ideology in Late Iron Age Sweden, has completely changed our understanding of the Vikings' eastern voyages.
Like the myth of the Viking housewife with her keys, the myth of the mighty Viking ship is so common it's taken to be true. But the facts do not back it up.
In the 1990s, archaeologists attempted several times to take replica Viking ships between rivers or across isthmuses using the log-rolling method. They failed. They scaled down their ships. They still failed. Their ships were a half to a third the length of Red Orm's mighty ship. They weighed only one to two tons, not 16 tons. Yet they could not be cheerfully hauled by their crews, no matter how much beer was provided. The task was inefficient even when horses—or wheels or winches or wagons—were added.
We think bigger is better, but it's not.
The beautiful Oseberg ship with its spiral prow and the sleek Gokstad ship, praised as an "ideal form" and "a poem carved in wood," have been considered the classic Viking ships from the time they were first unearthed. Images of these Norwegian ships grace uncountable books on Viking Age history, uncountable museum exhibitions, uncountable souvenirs in Scandinavian gift shops.
But a third ship of equal importance for understanding the Viking Age was discovered in 1898, after Gokstad (1880) and before Oseberg (1903), by a Swedish farmer digging a ditch to dry out a boggy meadow. He axed through the wreck and laid his drain pipes. The landowner, a bit of an antiquarian, decided to rescue the boat and pulled the pieces of old wood out of the ground. His collection founded a local museum, but the boat pieces lay ignored in the attic—unmarked, unnumbered, with no drawings to say how they had lain in the earth when found—until 1980, when a radiocarbon survey of the museum's contents dated them to the 11th century. Their great age was confirmed by tree-ring data, which found the wood for the boat had been cut before 1070.
In the 1990s, archaeologist Gunilla Larsson took on the task of puzzling the pieces back into a boat. She had bits of much of the hull: of the keel, the stem and stern and five wide strakes, even some of the wooden rail attached to the gunwale. She had most of the frames, one bite, and two knees. About 2 feet in the middle of the boat was missing: where the ditch went through. The iron rivets had rusted away, but the rivet holes in the wood were easy to see and, since the distance between them varied, the parts could only go together one way. The wood itself had been flattened by time, but it was still sturdy enough to be soaked in hot water and bent into shape—the same technique the original boatbuilder had used.
When she had solved this 3D jigsaw puzzle, she engaged the National Maritime Museum in Stockholm to help her mount the pieces on an iron frame; the Viks Boat went on display in 1996. Then she created a replica, Talja, and tested it by sailing, rowing, and portaging around Lake Malaren. Talja glided up shallow streams, its pliable planks bending and sliding over rocks. With only the power of its crew, it was easily portaged from one watershed to the next, from Lake Malaren to Lake Vanern in the west, itself draining into the Kattegat.
A second Viks Boat replica, Fornkare, was built in 2012 and taken on the Vikings' East Way from Lake Malaren to Novgorod the first year, then south, by rivers and lakes, some 250 miles through Russia the second year. Concludes Fornkare's builder and captain, Lennart Widerberg, "The vessel proved itself capable of traveling this ancient route" from Birka to Byzantium.
The Viks Boat is 31 feet long—longer than two earlier replicas that failed the East Way portage test—and about 7 feet wide, comfortable for a crew of 8 to 10. Its replicas passed the portage test for two reasons. First, they were built, like the original, with strakes that were radially split, not sawn. The resulting board is easy to bend and hard to break—at less than half an inch thick. The resulting boat is equally seaworthy at almost half the weight of the same size boat built with the same lapstrake technique, but using sawn boards. Empty, the Viks Boat replicas weigh only half a ton—about as much as a horse.
The second reason the Viks Boat replicas proved adequate for the East Way was that archaeologists had set aside Frans Bengtsson's fantastical log-rolling technique for crossing from stream to stream.
By studying the ways the Sami had portaged their dugout canoes through the waterways of Sweden and Finland throughout history, the archaeologists began to see signs of similar portage-ways around Lake Malaren. They built some themselves and had teams race replica ships through an obstacle course of portage types: smooth grassy paths, log-lined roads or ditches (with the logs aligned in the direction of travel), and bogs layered with branches. A team of two adults and seven 17-year-olds finished a winding, half-mile course with Talja in an hour. When the portage was straight over 4-inch-thick logs sunk into the mud so they didn't shift, the boat raced at 150 feet a minute.
The beauty of the Gokstad ship, its poetic quality, comes from its curves, the hull swelling out from the gunwale then tightly back in, making a distinctive V-shape down to the deep, straight keel. These concave curves improve the ship's sailing ability at sea. But the keel cuts too deep to float a shallow, stony stream like those that connect the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Over a portage, even the minimal keel of the Viks Boat replicas needed to be protected with an easily replaceable covering of birch, as had been found on the original. The Old Norse name for this false keel was drag. To "set a drag under someone's pride" was to encourage arrogance.
Historians and archaeologists of the Viking Age have long benefited from an ideological false keel. With the Viks Boat taking its rightful place as an exemplar of the Viking ship, it's time to knock off that damaged drag and replace it. Says Larsson, "We should get used to a completely different picture of the Scandinavian traveling eastward in the Viking Age, one that is far from the traditional image of the male Viking warrior in the prow of a big warship."
Nancy Marie Brown is the author of The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women.
ORLANDO, Fla. — A few dozen sunrises were enough for the crew of Inspiration4, which returned to Earth nearly three days after lifting off from Kennedy Space Center becoming the first all-civilian crew to launch into orbit. The SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience and its four passengers splashed down at 7:06 p.m. in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. Weather remained calm as the deorbit maneuvers ran like clockwork with the final descent taking less than an hour. “Thanks so much SpaceX. It was a heck of a ride for us,” said mission commander Jared Issacman. “We’re just getting started.” Ev...
(Reuters) - Some Afghan girls returned to primary schools with gender-segregated classes on Saturday, but older girls faced an anxious wait with no clarity over if and when they would be able to resume their studies at the secondary school level.
Most schools in the capital Kabul have stayed shut since the Taliban captured the city just over a month ago.
Taliban officials say they will not return to the fundamentalist policies - including a ban on girls receiving an education - when they last ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
They have now promised that girls will be able to study - but only in segregated classrooms.
Nazife, a teacher at a private school in Kabul which had mixed classrooms before the Taliban takeover, said they had made changes in order to reopen.
"Girls study in the morning and boys in the afternoon," she said. "Male teachers teach boys and female teachers teach girls."
However, there was uncertainty for many other girls at the school, which teaches at both primary and secondary level.
On Friday the education ministry said boys' secondary schools would soon reopen, but made no mention of girls.
"Their spirits are down and they are waiting for government announcements so they can resume studying," said Hadis Rezaei, who teaches the school's female secondary-level pupils.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told the local Bakhtar News Agency on Saturday that arrangements were being made to reopen girls' secondary schools but he gave no date.
"The education of girls is fixing a generation. The education of boys may affect a family but the education of girls affects society," said the school's principal, Mohammadreza.
"We are very closely following the matter so that girls can resume their education and complete their studies."
(Reporting by Islamabad newsroom; Writing by Alasdair Pal; Editing by Gareth Jones)
By Anna Mehler Paperny
HAMILTON, Ontario (Reuters) - Canada's election is in a dead heat two days before the Sept. 20 vote, according to a new poll on Saturday, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Conservative rival both campaigned in the same seat-rich region to scour up votes.
The latest Sondage Leger poll conducted for the Journal de Montreal and the National Post newspapers put the Conservatives one percentage point ahead of Trudeau's Liberals, with 33% over 32%.
The tightness of the race has put the focus on turnout, with low turnout historically favouring the Conservatives. The Leger poll put the third-place left-leaning New Democratic Party at 19%.
Trudeau, 49, called an early election, seeking to convert approval for his government's handling of the pandemic into a parliamentary majority. But he is now scrambling to save his job, with Canadians questioning the need for an early election amid a fourth pandemic wave.
On Saturday, the Liberals announced they would drop a candidate over a 2019 sexual assault charge that the party said was not disclosed to them. Kevin Vuong, a naval reservist running in an open Liberal seat in downtown Toronto, denied the allegations on Friday, noting the charge was withdrawn.
"Mr. Vuong will no longer be a Liberal candidate, and should he be elected, he will not be a member of the Liberal caucus," the party said in a statement on Saturday.
Earlier this month, Liberal member of parliament Raj Saini ended his re-election campaign amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards female staffers.
Both Trudeau and his Conservative rival Erin O'Toole were campaigning around the Toronto region on Saturday.
O'Toole, 48, is slated to appear in a Conservative-held riding west of Toronto that was closely fought during the 2019 election.
The area’s member of Parliament, who is not running again, came under fire last spring for saying COVID-19 lockdowns were the "single greatest breach of our civil liberties since the internment camps during WW2."
(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
By Lidia Kelly and Gus Trompiz
MELBOURNE/PARIS (Reuters) -Australia has made a "huge" diplomatic error by ditching a multi-billion-dollar order for French submarines in favour of an alternative deal with the United States and Britain, France's envoy to Canberra said on Saturday.
Canberra announced on Thursday it would scrap its 2016 deal with France's Naval Group to build a fleet of conventional submarines and instead build at least eight nuclear-powered ones with U.S. and British technology after striking a trilateral security partnership nL1N2QH2X7.
The move caused fury in France, a NATO ally of the United States and Britain, prompting it to recall its ambassadors to Washington and Canberra, and also riled China, the major rising power in the Indo-Pacific region.
Malaysia said on Saturday that Canberra's decision to build atomic-powered submarines could trigger a regional nuclear arms race, echoing concerns already raised by Beijing.
"It will provoke other powers to also act more aggressively in the region, especially in the South China Sea," the Malaysian prime minister's office said, without mentioning China.
Beijing's foreign policy in the region has become increasingly assertive, particularly its maritime claims in the resource-rich South China Sea, some of which conflict with Malaysia's own claims.
"This has been a huge mistake, a very, very bad handling of the partnership - because it wasn't a contract, it was a partnership that was supposed to be based on trust, mutual understanding and sincerity," France's Ambassador Jean-Pierre Thebault told reporters in Canberra before returning to Paris.
France has previously branded the cancellation of the deal - valued at $40 billion in 2016 and reckoned to be worth much more today - a stab in the back nL1N2QI002.
'DUPLICITY'
Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian later described the row as a "crisis" in France's relations with the United States and Australia.
"There has been duplicity, contempt and lies - you can't play that way in an alliance," he told France 2 television.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said France was a "vital ally" and that the United States would work in the coming days to resolve the differences.
Analysts say that even if U.S. officials hope the crisis will blow over quickly, it could do lasting damage to Washington's alliance with France and Europe and throws into doubt the united front that the Biden administration has been seeking to forge against China's growing power.
Australia said it regretted the recall of the French ambassador and that it valued the relationship with France and would keep engaging with Paris on other issues.
"Australia understands France's deep disappointment with our decision, which was taken in accordance with our clear and communicated national security interests," a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne said on Saturday.
Thebault said he was very sad to have to leave Australia but added there "needs to be some reassessment" of bilateral ties.
In separate comments made to SBS radio, Thebault said of the ditched agreement: "It was not about selling salads or potatoes, it was a relationship of trust at the highest level covering questions of the highest level of secrecy and sensitivity."
The row between Paris and Canberra marks the lowest point in their relations since 1995, when Australia protested France's decision to resume nuclear testing in the South Pacific and recalled its ambassador for consultations.
Public opinion in France, where President Emmanuel Macron is expected to seek a second term in an election due next year, has also been very critical of Australia and the United States.
"You can understand for geopolitical reasons Australia getting closer to other anglophone countries like the United States and Britain," said Louis Maman, a Parisian surgeon out for a stroll on Saturday on the Champs-Elysees.
"But there was a real contract and I think there was an alliance and a friendship between Australia and France. It's spoiling a friendship," he said. "I took it as a betrayal."
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly and Stefica Nicol Bikes in Australia, Gus Trompiz and Ardee Napolitano in Paris; Editing by Gareth Jones and David Clarke)
By Alexandra Ulmer
CIUDAD ACUÑA, Mexico (Reuters) - Eddyson Langlais, 24, was huddled under the Del Rio International Bridge in Texas, alongside thousands of fellow Haitian migrants on Friday night, when he saw news on Facebook that felt like a gut punch: The United States was going to fly Haitians back to their homeland.
He immediately called his parents in Port-au-Prince, who live in a small house with several other cousins in the Haitian capital. His father, a taxi driver who has been unable to work since his car broke down, and his mother, who sells bread in the street, did not mince their words.
"If they deport you, you are going to live in misery," Langlais said they told him.
Langlais conferred with his wife, fellow Haitian Lovelie Exantus, whom he’d met when they were both living in a poor Haitian-dominated neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. Langlais worked as a welder, making just around $300 a month, some of which he sent back to his family in Haiti.
Exantus didn’t know what to do either. They lay down, but Langlais could not sleep at all as he lay awake under the bridge across the Rio Grande that connects Ciudad Acuña, Mexico to Del Rio, Texas.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Saturday that it was addressing an influx of migrants, most of them Haitian, to Del Rio in part by accelerating expulsion flights to Haiti and other destinations within the next 72 hours. DHS said the Biden administration was working with countries where the migrants started their journeys - for many Haitians countries such as Brazil and Chile - to accept returned migrants.
Many Haitian migrants awaiting processing fled long ago to avoid poverty back home, where the economy has been devastated by earthquakes, the coronavirus pandemic and political unrest. The Caribbean island is the poorest in the Western hemisphere.
On Saturday morning, on the Mexican side - migrants have been crossing back in forth to Mexico to get supplies and to Texas to await processing, Langlais weighed what to do.
"I am the one who supports my family. If I go back we are going to die of hunger," he said.
But Mexico, he said, had no life for him either. He tried to find work in Tapachula in September, in the south near the Guatemalan border, when he first arrived. Supermarkets turned him away, he said, because he didn’t have proper work papers. Obtaining them would have taken months because officials kept moving appointments, Langlais said. "If I have to wait for months for the paper, I’m going to die."
Langlais, who spoke in English, said he’d worked as an informal interpreter for missionaries in Haiti. He said he aspired to go to the United States to study welding.
Holding two bags of sliced bread he’d just bought on the Mexican side, Langlais hesitated for a few minutes under the punishing sun, before making up his mind.
"I think I’ll go to America. I’m going to pray to god, because that has the power."
(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Donna Bryson and Diane Craft)
Attendance was sparse at Saturday's rally in Washington, DC backing the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6th in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which was won by Joe Biden.
Capitol Police estimated turnout was only 400 to 450 people.
CNN's Shimon Prokupecz reported live from the scene.
"Some were upset at the former president because they felt that he, by coming out and saying people shouldn't come or they felt he wasn't strong enough in support," he reported. "I did hear from some of those folks who took issue with it, but I didn't hear them changing their opinions or their support of the former president."
"And as much as I just want to make one other point, as much as the organizers said, well, this wasn't political, this wasn't about politics, it really was, in the end. Everywhere you went here, you hear, you see signs about the former president," he added.
Trump was scheduled to spend his day attending a golf tournament in New Jersey.
Watch:
CNN 09 18 2021 14 12 04 www.youtube.com
By Humeyra Pamuk and David Brunnstrom
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - European capitals celebrated a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June, as President Joe Biden's top diplomat cracked jokes in French in Paris, posed for selfies with French youth and spoke at length about revitalizing the transatlantic relationship.
It was a breath of fresh air after four years of former President Donald Trump's brash "America First" administration, during which U.S. ties with Europe lurched from one crisis to another amid policy decisions that often blindsided European countries.
But less than three months after Blinken's repair tour, Washington finds itself in an unprecedented diplomatic crisis with France over a trilateral deal with Britain to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines that sank a $40 billion contract for French-designed vessels.
France reacted with fury, saying the new deal had been hatched behind its back and resorting to language almost unheard of in public pronouncements between allies, calling it "brutal" and a "stab in the back".
On Friday it went further, taking the extraordinary step of recalling its ambassadors to Washington and Australia and accusing the Biden administration of acting like Trump in pushing Paris aside.
Analysts say the crisis is more than commercial, and one of trust, and even if U.S. officials hope it will blow over quickly, it has the potential to do lasting damage to the alliance with France and Europe and throws into doubt the united front Washington has been seeking to forge against China's growing power.
French diplomats said they first learned of the deal when news leaked in Australian media hours before the official announcement on Wednesday, although Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted he had made clear to French President Emmanuel Macron in June that he might scrap the agreement with France.
Either way, from the French perspective, the U.S. move flies in the face of what Biden's administration has pledged since the end of the Trump era: a return to multilateralism and close cooperation with partners and allies, with Europe an important element of that.
"This makes Europeans realize that maybe some of Trump's policies, beyond the scandals and the tweets, were not an aberration but signaled a deeper shift away from Europe," said Benjamin Haddad, director of the Atlantic Council's Europe Center.
"At a time when the Biden administration wants to rally Europeans in a common transatlantic front to push back against Chinese assertiveness, why not bring in the key EU actor in the region?"
Some see further clumsy policy-making by Biden's administration hard on the heels of his chaotic end to America's two decade-long intervention in Afghanistan, about which European nations complained they had not been properly consulted.
"Just like Afghanistan, this new 'America First' opus is poorly conceived and even more poorly executed," a French diplomat said.
ATTEMPTS TO SOOTH FRENCH ANGER
Blinken has attempted to sooth French anger, calling France a vital and long-standing ally in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, and the White House and State Department quickly issued placatory statements after Paris recalled its ambassadors.
The State Department said Washington hopes to continue discussions on the issue at a senior level in coming days, including during next week's United Nations General Assembly.
David Bell, a history professor at Princeton University, said precedent indicated the crisis would blow over, eventually.
The French were clearly "very annoyed" and showed that in a "fairly dramatic" way, he said, while recalling previous moments of high tension, including France's withdrawal from NATO command in the 1960s and refusal in 2003 to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
But diplomatic relations have not been suspended, and at some point the ambassadors will be sent back, Bell forecast, noting that Macron's gesture comes ahead of a potentially tight re-election race next year.
"Macron is trying to reawaken that Gaullist tradition of French independence" in foreign policy, he said.
WEAKENING INDO-PACIFIC FRONT
While the NATO allies might well find ways to recover from what some see as the worst diplomatic crisis in their history, experts warn of serious harm to Biden's broader China strategy.
The trilateral submarine deal should strengthen the hand of the United States and its allies in the face of growing Chinese power, but the damage caused by the alienation of France could outweigh this.
"China must be laughing all the way to the bank," said Francois Heisbourg, senior advisor for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "They have the prospect of removing Europe's potential presence alongside the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific area."
Though stronger U.S.-Australia ties would concern the Chinese government, France, the EU's leading military power, has taken a strong stance in urging a tough line on China when other EU countries such as Germany have seemed more concerned about not upsetting commercial ties with Beijing.
"There is a downside for China, but the upside I think is greater – the notion that Europe is essentially going to stay in the wings and not play an active role in the Indo-Pacific as a whole," Heisbourg said.
He said France might narrow its focus to concentrate on its specific Indo-Pacific interests, rather than working to push back against China more broadly.
A day after the submarine deal was announced, the European Union unveiled its formal strategy to boost its presence in the Indo-Pacific and counter China. But with France deflated, there is increased risk this effort will either be stillborn or the transatlantic strategy towards China will become further disjointed, Heisbourg said.
"We must survive on our own, as others do," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said, speaking of the "strategic autonomy" that France and Macron have championed.
Even so, other analysts believe the compelling need to counter Beijing will help Western countries bridge their differences.
"The increasing level of global anxiety about China is the tide that lifts all boats here," said Greg Poling of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"I'm pretty confident that there's going to be a rough few months ahead, but Paris is going to get over it because its strategic interests dictate that it has to get over it."
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and David Brunnstrom; Additional reportng by Steve Holland, Heather Timmons and Mike Stone; Editing by Mary Milliken and Daniel Wallis)
The line-up at the Louis Vuitton Foundation's new exhibition in Paris reads like a who's who of artistic giants from the Belle Epoque: Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Matisse, Cezanne...
What is most surprising is that they all come from one collection -- a pair of Russian brothers from the late 19th century who just happened to have an absurdly good eye for who would become the geniuses of their generation.
Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, born into a textile dynasty in the 1870s, went to Paris and came back with treasures -- Manet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin -- that were barely recognized as such at the time.
Indeed, Mikhail was the first to bring Van Gogh and Gauguin paintings to Russia.
Some 200 of their portraits, sculptures and photographs will be on show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation from Wednesday, on loan from Russian museums.
They had a torturous route through the 20th century -- surviving revolution and years hidden away after World War II.
The new exhibition in Paris has also had its troubles, delayed three times by the pandemic and finally starting a year late.
But it promises to be another successful borrowing from the Russian archives, following the museum's mammoth success with the Shchukin exhibition in 2016-17.
That show -- a similar treasure trove compiled by a contemporary of the Morozov brothers -- drew 1.29 million visitors to the Louis Vuitton Foundation, which it said made it the most successful show in France for half a century.
No doubt much attention will go to the work by Van Gogh, who gets a room apart for his little-known late work "Prisoners Exercising", featuring a familiar ginger-haired figure staring at the viewer, a self-portrait snuck into the grim setting.
- Exile and recovery -
Mikhail Morozov's high living brought him an early death at 33, though he had already amassed 39 masterpieces.
His brother Ivan picked up the baton and became one of the world's great collectors.
But it all came crashing down with the Communist revolution of 1917 in Russia.
Ivan was reduced to being "assistant curator" of his own collection as his home became a state museum, before soon fleeing into exile.
Later, the paintings were sent into hiding in the Ural mountains when the Nazis invaded in 1941.
They spent years out there, fairly well preserved by temperatures that often fell to minus-40 degrees, and it was only in the late 1950s that the Soviet government dug them out and sent them to the Tretyakov, Pushkin and Hermitage collections.
"The Morozov Collection: Icons Of Modern Art" is at the Louis Vuitton Foundation until February 22.
© 2021 AFP
The Cuban government published the draft of a new family code this week that would allow same-sex marriage, adoption by gay couples and recognizes surrogacy, but the road ahead is long, because the legal framework must be approved in a referendum and religious groups are likely to oppose it. The proposal defines marriage as “a voluntary union between two persons” instead of a woman and a man, as the current law from 1975 says. The change of those few words sparked a major debate in the country in 2018 when authorities removed similar language from the draft for a new constitution following cri...
France on Friday recalled its ambassadors to the United States and Australia in a ferocious row over the scrapping of a submarine contract, an unprecedented step that revealed the extent of French anger against its allies.
President Emmanuel Macron recalled the envoys after Canberra ditched a deal to buy French submarines in favor of US vessels, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said.
Le Drian said that the decision was made to "immediately" recall the two French ambassadors due to "the exceptional seriousness of the announcements made on September 15 by Australia and the United States".
The abandonment of the ocean-class submarine project that Australia and France had been working on since 2016 constituted "unacceptable behavior among allies and partners," the minister said.
"Their consequences affect the very concept we have of our alliances, our partnerships, and the importance of the Indo-Pacific for Europe," he added.
US President Joe Biden announced the new Australia-US-Britain defense alliance on Wednesday, extending US nuclear submarine technology to Australia as well as cyber defense, applied artificial intelligence and undersea capabilities.
The pact is widely seen as aimed at countering the rise of China.
The move infuriated France, which lost a contract to supply conventional submarines to Australia that was worth Aus$50 billion ($36.5 billion, 31 billion euros) when signed in 2016.
A White House official expressed "regret" over the French envoy's recall but added "we will continue to be engaged in the coming days to resolve our differences, as we have done at other points over the course of our long alliance."
State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a tweet that Washington understood France's position and was in "close contact" with Paris.
He added that the issue would be discussed "at the senior level", including at the United Nations General Assembly next week, which both Le Drian and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will attend.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby meanwhile acknowledged that telephone talks earlier between US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and French counterpart Florence Parly showed "that there is still much work to do in terms of our defense relationship with France."
The French ambassador recalls from the United States and Australia -- key allies of France -- are unprecedented. Withdrawing envoys is a last resort diplomatic step taken when relations between feuding countries are plunged into crisis but highly unusual between allies.
"I am being recalled to Paris for consultations," France ambassador to the US Philippe Etienne wrote on Twitter. "This follows announcements directly affecting the vision we have of our alliances, of our partnerships and of the importance of the Indo-Pacific for Europe."
Paris sees itself as a major power in the Indo-Pacific due to overseas territories such as New Caledonia and French Polynesia which give it a strategic and military foothold unmatched by any other European country.
France had made no effort to disguise its fury even before the recalls and on Thursday Le Drian accused Australia of back-stabbing and Washington of Donald Trump-era behavior over the submarines deal.
The row has for now at least put on hold hopes of a post-Trump renaissance in Paris-Washington relations under Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a fluent French speaker who was educated in Paris.
France's European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune also said Friday that Paris was unable to trust Canberra in ongoing European Union trade deal talks following the decision.
France meanwhile called off a gala at its ambassador's house in Washington scheduled for Friday.
The event was supposed to celebrate the anniversary of a decisive naval battle in the American Revolution, in which France played a key role.
Australia earlier shrugged off Chinese anger over its decision to acquire the US nuclear-powered submarines, while vowing to defend the rule of law in airspace and waters where Beijing has staked hotly contested claims.
Beijing described the new alliance as an "extremely irresponsible" threat to regional stability, questioning Australia's commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and warning the Western allies that they risked "shooting themselves in the foot".
China has its own "very substantive program of nuclear submarine building", Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison argued Friday in an interview with radio station 2GB.
China claims almost all of the resource-rich South China Sea, through which trillions of dollars in shipping trade passes annually, rejecting competing claims from Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Beijing has been accused of deploying a range of military hardware including anti-ship missiles and surface-to-air missiles there, and ignored a 2016 international tribunal decision that declared its historical claim over most of the waters to be without basis.
Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, in Washington, said she understood the "disappointment" in Paris and hoped to work with France to ensure it understands "the value we place on the bilateral relationship and the work that we want to continue to do together".
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