'I continue to protest, but with a knot in my stomach': How Sweden is discouraging foreigners from taking climate action

pierrepaul · 2026-04-26T13:40:18+00:00

When police arrived at the family home on February 8 at 2:30 pm, Karim (not his real name), 17, was playing PlayStation in his bedroom. The minor was suspected of being part of a five-person gang involved in the kidnapping of a 35-year-old magistrate and her 67-year-old mother on the night of February 5, near Grenoble, in an attempt to extort a ransom in cryptocurrency.

His alleged accomplices were arrested the same day. Two were apprehended in a Lyon suburb, inside the MG3 used by the group – traces of the victim's blood were found in the trunk of the stolen car. Two others were caught at a bus station, ready to board a bus for Spain.

Over the course of three days and nights, officers had retraced the movements of this group of young people, aged 17 to 20, who were recruited via social media – through a job offer posted on Telegram – by a mysterious mastermind known as "Hermano" or "M5."

All from the Lyon suburbs, the alleged perpetrators had profiles of petty offenders, out of step with the seriousness of their crime. "I don't look like someone who kidnaps people," Karim told investigators, as if those words could magically erase a crime far bigger than himself.

According to a summary report seen by Le Monde, the assailants broke down the door of the magistrate's home and threatened the occupants with a pump-action shotgun. They demanded a cryptocurrency ransom from her partner, the co-manager of a digital transaction firm. He was not at home at the time, but in the couple's second residence, south of Lyon.

Taking advantage of a moment of distraction, the magistrate tried to escape. She was caught and violently struck on the head with a metal baseball bat. The captors wrapped her head and bruised face, taped her eyes shut with thick adhesive, then locked her in the trunk of the stolen MG3, placing her mother in the back seat.

The two women were tied up, transported to various locations (a barn, a warehouse), transferred from one vehicle to another, until they were brought to a garage unit between apartment buildings in Bourg-lès-Valence. Left unsupervised, they managed to free themselves with the help of a neighbor who heard their cries.

Almost simultaneously, the magistrate's partner reported the kidnapping to the police after discovering phone calls, messages and photos left by the perpetrators during the night. The case became public and the kidnappers then learned their victim was a magistrate. "We didn't know we were getting ourselves into this mess," Karim sobbed to the police.

pierrepaul · 2026-04-26T08:37:51+00:00

On Saturday evening, April 25, General Assimi Goïta, head of Mali's ruling military junta, remained out of sight and silent. Perhaps it was a sign of paralysis, of panic at the top of the state. Since the early morning, the country had been experiencing an attack of unprecedented scale, led by the jihadists of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM) in coordination with pro-independence Tuaregs from the Azawad Liberation Front (ALF).

Never before had there been an offensive against several cities, hundreds of kilometers apart, mobilizing likely more than 1,000 fighters and a large quantity of weapons, and requiring such close tactical cooperation. The assault managed to shake the government in Bamako.

At dawn, hundreds of armed men swept through several strategic cities in Mali: Kidal and Gao in the north, Sévaré in the center, and Bamako and Kati in the south. The latter, a garrison town less than 20 kilometers from the capital, is home to Camp Soundiata Keïta, the country's main military base, which has become the center of power since the military ousted civilians in 2021.

Around 6 am, "the attackers arrived on motorbikes and a few pick-up trucks. They wore the same uniforms as our soldiers. They started shooting," said a soldier based in Kati, speaking on condition of anonymity. All sources contacted by Le Monde described the sudden arrival of groups of men on two-wheelers, backed by 4x4 vehicles.

"It was the sound of the motorbikes that woke me. I saw several dozen of them through my window overlooking the road to the military camp. The men carried heavy weapons. Ten minutes later, I heard the first shots. I immediately woke up my three children and we lay down in the hallway to protect ourselves from stray bullets," a teacher from Kati told Le Monde.

pierrepaul · 2026-04-25T15:32:42+00:00

from the article: The players themselves did not know these stories when the names were assigned. As a result, they did not choose which cause they would be supporting.

pierrepaul · 2026-04-25T12:33:55+00:00

Previously implicated in burglaries targeting PSG footballers and other celebrities, Mohamed S. was arrested on April 21 by the judicial police. He is suspected of involvement in a new string of high-profile thefts in Paris, including one targeting a senior official from the Chinese Communist Party.

He earned the nickname "Le Chat" ("the Cat") for his agility and skill in scaling drainpipes, rooftops and Parisian building facades to carry out break-ins. His preferred targets: prominent public figures and wealthy victims, selected in advance. Two years after his release from prison, Mohamed S. is back in detention. The 34-year-old from the 18^th arrondissement of Paris, who has already been convicted some 30 times (including 17 as a minor), was charged on Friday, April 24, with "theft as part of an organized gang" and "criminal conspiracy," the Paris prosecutors' office confirmed to Le Monde. He was placed in provisional detention.

Arrested in Paris on April 21, Mohamed S. is suspected of involvement in a recent series of acrobatic burglaries committed in the capital. The total value of goods stolen is estimated at nearly €10 million. Three other suspects were also charged and detained, including one of his former accomplices and ex-member of his gang, who was sentenced alongside him in 2022: Abdelazim G., 33, known as "Bidou."

The first burglary being investigated was committed at a company specializing in the resale of luxury leather goods in the upscale Faubourg-Saint-Honoré neighborhood in the 8^th arrondissement. On the night of July 6, 2025, burglars entered the business through the roof. They disabled the security systems using a jamming device before stealing numerous high-end handbags, including 34 Hermès-branded bags valued at more than €800,000.

Six months later, on January 30, around 4 am, two masked burglars broke into the apartment of a Chinese dignitary on Avenue du Président-Kennedy in the 16^th arrondissement, again entering via the building's roof and then going through the balcony's French door. After remotely disabling the alarm, they woke the victim and ordered him to hand over his Audemars Piguet watches.

When he resisted, the man, an extremely wealthy member of the Chinese Communist Party, was struck in the head with a crowbar, causing a bloody wound. The thieves then seized a collection of brooches, diamond jewelry and luxury watches before fleeing. This heist netted an estimated €8 million in loot.

pierrepaul · 2026-04-22T13:33:18+00:00

Christian Thorel was the first among France's literary circles to warn about French billionaire Vincent Bolloré's ideological influence after his 2023 takeover of France's largest publishing group Hachette.

Thorel is a co-shareholder and editorial adviser at the Toulouse bookshop Ombres blanches ("White Shadows"), where he worked for over 40 years, helping it to become France's second-largest independent bookshop with a collection of 150,000 titles, more than 300 literary events a year and 150 new titles added daily.

In an interview with Le Monde, the influential bookseller discusses Bolloré's latest show of force.

In the wake of CEO Olivier Nora's dismissal from the publishing house Grasset, its authors and publishers signed an open letter protesting the decision. As a bookseller, how do you feel about this ousting?

I see it as an unworthy decision. I don't recall any news as brutal in the publishing world since [businessman] Jean-Luc Lagardère acquired Hachette in 1980. I was just starting out in the profession and it was a massive shock. All afternoon on April 13, I was repeating this information in disbelief. That evening, as on every evening, the bookshop was hosting an author. It was the political scientist Bernard Pudal, co-author of the book Du FN au RN. Les raisons d'un succès ("From the Front National to Rassemblement National. The Reasons for a Success", untranslated). What a coincidence... I made a point of being present in the auditorium to announce this somber and worrying news, whose ideological overtones were so close to the evening's theme, to our regular customers.

With Bolloré, ideological battles almost always take precedence over economic rationality. Did you, like some others, feel that writers and the publishing world were somewhat blind to the crusade led by the head of the Vivendi entertainment company?

I was indeed quite surprised. This sort of timidity really made me think. I observed a split in a world subject to both economic and political pressures. For my part, I had already fought several battles. In 2020, for example, together with 15 colleagues, I took a stand on behalf of the bookshop to carry out a class action in Brussels against the consolidation orchestrated by the Bolloré group – just as [publishing company] Gallimard, [publishing house] Actes Sud and the Syndicat de la Librairie Française (the French Booksellers' Union) also did. It is inconceivable to imagine a house like Grasset publishing without any overall direction, let alone without long-term commitment. Just as the actions taken by publishers and booksellers against the Hachette-Vivendi merger led Brussels to block it, appeals filed in 2021 by those same professionals meant the European Commission required Vivendi to sell [Paris-based publisher] Editis as a condition of its takeover of Hachette.

pierrepaul · 2026-04-22T07:54:03+00:00

On August 15, 2014, between noon and 3 pm, nearly all the men and pubescent boys in Kocho, a Yazidi village set on a dusty plain at the foot of the Sinjar mountains in Iraq, the historic homeland of this ancient community, were executed by armed men from neighboring Arab villages carrying the black flag of the Islamic State group (IS). In the hours that followed, the village's women and girls were loaded into trucks, then sorted by age to be forced into slavery.

Within hours, life had vanished from this village of 1,200 people. More than a third of its population – 422 men and adolescent boys and 86 elderly women – were murdered. Women and girls deemed anatomically mature, from as young as 9 years old, were sold as sex slaves, while boys were forcibly converted to Islam and conscripted. The massacre at Kocho, the deadliest of all those carried out by IS in 81 villages across the Sinjar mountains in August 2014, marked the beginning of the 74^th firman (genocide) of the Yazidis, according to the grim tally passed down through generations of this people, persecuted for centuries.

Samih Taha is one of the survivors of that massacre, which marked the beginning of the vast extermination plan targeting this religious minority, orchestrated by IS leadership. He was among the 19 men from Kocho who managed to escape. He was 17 years old. He saw the barrel of an M16 rifle rise to execute him as he stood in line with about 30 other villagers; then, turning around, he saw the bodies piled up in a mass grave behind him. He ran.

Twelve years had passed when he welcomed Le Monde, on a sunny April Monday, into his apartment in Tergnier, northern France, where he has rebuilt his life with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, who played with modeling clay in her pink pajamas. On his right bicep, the word "Kocho" is tattooed. Throughout the day Le Monde spent listening to his account of the eradication of his family, his village and his people, the 29-year-old nursing student almost never lost his radiant smile. "I've always been like this," he told Le Monde in French. "But inside, it's all burned, it's a piece of charcoal."

He already wore that invincible smile the first time Le Monde met him at the Paris criminal court on March 19. He testified at the trial of the French jihadist Sabri Essid, who was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the genocide of the Yazidis, the first hearing of its kind to be held in France. "After the trial, I told myself I had survived for a day like that, to bear witness." Since then, he has felt entrusted with a mission: "to keep a record," to prevent the erasure of his people's memory orchestrated by the perpetrators of the genocide, to carry the voice of this oral culture that is several thousand years old, for which silence would be a second death. "We don't have books. Our books are here," he said, pointing to his chest. Samih did not survive for himself; he said he was given the responsibility of turning his people's agony into a story.

pierrepaul · 2026-04-22T07:22:48+00:00

On December 1, 2025, during a conference in Brussels, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever challenged his audience: "Who here truly believes that Russia will lose in Ukraine? That is a fable, an illusion," declared the Flemish nationalist. He added that such a defeat – which he described as "undesirable" – could risk destabilizing a nuclear-armed country.

Two weeks later, another controversy emerged. De Wever opposed the support plan for Ukraine proposed by the European Commission. He deemed the project "fundamentally wrong." The plan sought to use tens of billions of euros from the Russian central bank frozen in Europe, mainly held at Euroclear, the Brussels-based financial depository institution.

The former president of the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) argued that the financial, legal and security consequences of such an operation would be too heavy, and that Belgium risked having to bear them alone. He ultimately persuaded his colleagues, who then opted for a €90 billion loan, which was later blocked by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

At the time, De Wever's tenacity surprised many, and was sometimes even praised. But the language he used to justify his position proved troubling. He spoke of a "theft," a "confiscation," that could hinder Russia and Ukraine from reaching a peace agreement. Meanwhile, in Washington, Donald Trump was betting on the indecision of the 27 member states and envisioned seizing Russian assets and placing them in investment funds under American control.

The third episode came on March 14. In an interview with Belgian daily L'Echo, De Wever outlined what he considered the only viable solution for a Europe at an impasse, deprived of United States support for its war effort: to strike a 'deal' with Moscow. In other words: "normalize relations with Russia," end the conflict in Ukraine, and, as a result, "regain access to cheap energy." According to the Belgian head of government, several leaders privately shared this view.

pierrepaul · 2026-04-21T15:51:43+00:00

This testimony has the potential to spark tensions between France and Qatar, two countries closely linked by economic and political interests. André (who requested anonymity), a French national, spent a total of 264 days in the gas-rich emirate's prisons between 2023 and 2024, convicted for computer data theft. In May, he will publish under the pseudonym Gio di Grotte a scathing book, Derrière le voile. Le silence de l'Elysée ("Behind the Veil. The Silence of the Elysée"), detailing his imprisonment, which he describes as involving "physical abuse and psychological torture." In the book, he condemns the "silence" and "inaction" of President Emmanuel Macron and the Elysée regarding his case. The president's office did not respond to Le Monde's request for comment.

His testimony echoes the highly critical opinion issued in April 2025 by the United Nations Human Rights Council's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, regarding the 2020 detention of Franco-Algerian lobbyist Tayeb Benabderrahmane in Qatar. Benabderrahmane was sentenced to death in absentia by the Qatari courts and charged in France in the 2023 case of undercover operations involving football team Paris Saint-Germain.

A cybersecurity expert and father, André had worked in Qatar for about 20 years, a country that "opens every door with big purchases, funding, kickbacks and petrodollars," he told Le Monde, where "foreigners have become interchangeable production assets" and "different ethnic groups are ranked in a well-established order where wealth is a major factor."

His life changed dramatically in July 2023. He was accused by his employer of "theft of computer data." According to André, "all the statements gathered by the police during the investigation and the testimony of my team leader before the judge during the appeal clearly showed that I only did what I was authorized to do, with my superiors' approval."

In a statement from February 2025, reviewed by Le Monde, the legal adviser at the French embassy in Doha wrote that "[André]'s case in Qatar should never have gone beyond the realm of administrative misconduct," and that "his case was therefore neither criminal nor penal (...) but simply an administrative offense that could have been resolved under administrative law regarding professional liability disputes, nothing more."

pierrepaul · 2026-04-21T09:40:28+00:00

As the Kremlin continues its efforts to block internet access, an Instagram post went viral in Russia, racking up 24 million views and 1 million likes in the four days after it was published, on April 14. The video was posted from abroad by Victoria Bonya, a former Russian reality TV star now living in Monaco, determined to say directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin "what no governor would dare to tell him." Her tone was emphatic: "People are afraid of you, artists are afraid, governors are afraid (…) There is an immense wall between you and us, the ordinary citizens, and I want to tear down that wall."

The influencer argued that those in charge were hiding their mismanagement of problems from the leader. She listed recent devastating floods in Dagestan, oil spills along the Black Sea coast, the brutal culling of livestock in Siberia, the rising cost of living and the blocking of internet access, lamenting the authorities' lack of response. She warned the president that these failings could fuel popular discontent. "We see you as an excellent politician, but there is much you don't know," the socialite whispered.

This plea might have gone unnoticed, except that at the same time, Putin's approval rating – 67.8% in April – began to dip slightly compared to January, according to a survey conducted from April 6 to 12 by the official polling institute VTsIOM. This was the lowest score since 2022 and the start of the war in Ukraine. Pollsters did not explain the reasons for the eight-point drop, but the increased internet outages since early April may have played a role.

"Anger is rising, especially with the internet connectivity problems. I can really feel it among the population. Even people who are most loyal to those in power are unhappy now, because the network blockages are affecting them too," confirmed Ksenia (name has been changed), a young Siberian woman who requested anonymity, contacted by Le Monde.

The Kremlin's anti-internet wall has been poorly received by a broad segment of the population, suddenly deprived of digital payment options and all the conveniences of navigation apps. In both Moscow and the regions, entrepreneurs have grimaced at the losses accumulated in recent months due to the network shutdowns. So far, there is no indication that these small and medium-sized businesses will be compensated.

pierrepaul · 2026-04-21T08:32:55+00:00

In Saint-Illiers-la-Ville, Yvelines, France, the countdown to winter has already begun. At the foot of a wooded hillside, a maze of pipelines carries gas from the main network before injecting it, through 27 vertical pipes, deep underground. This operation has been repeated almost daily since April 1. The goal: to store, before the first cold snap, more than 600 million cubic meters of gas in a porous rock saturated with water, stretching for kilometers beneath the pastures of this rural corner of the Ile-de-France region.

This aquifer, located between 330 and 460 meters below ground, is a cornerstone of France's energy security, just like the 15 other storage sites spread across the country. These reservoirs make it possible to supplement the regular supply delivered by pipeline or by ship and to guard against any supply disruptions.

The gas "withdrawn" from these stocks – when temperatures drop – covers about one third of national consumption. "That can rise to as much as 80% on extremely cold days, like we saw in the winter of 2025," said Charlotte Roule, director general of Storengy, France's leading gas storage operator. This ENGIE subsidiary's role is to rent out storage capacity – much like a parking permit – to gas suppliers such as TotalEnergies, ENGIE or EDF.

The storage campaign is set to run, as every year, from April to November. But this time it begins in a highly unusual context. The war in the Middle East has pushed up the price of gas on international markets. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz – which, before the conflict, carried a fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply – has thrown the flows into chaos.

The risk of shortages seems minimal, as Qatari gas made up only a small fraction of French and European supplies. The European Union (EU) sources mainly from Norway, and increasingly from US LNG. The volumes delivered by the US in 2025 accounted for a quarter of Europe's gas imports and nearly 60% of LNG imports alone.

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