News round-up, July 4, 2023
Ukraine says: Putin is planning a nuclear disaster. These people live nearby… “The current state of water availability required for cooling the reactors and spent fuel at the plant poses a significant risk. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam has significantly exacerbated the situation and has heightened the probability of a nuclear meltdown.
〰️
Ukraine says: Putin is planning a nuclear disaster. These people live nearby… “The current state of water availability required for cooling the reactors and spent fuel at the plant poses a significant risk. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam has significantly exacerbated the situation and has heightened the probability of a nuclear meltdown. 〰️
The news of the day…
According to Spiegel, the German foreign intelligence agency (BND) is again under heavy “hailstorms…
The German foreign intelligence agency, the BND, has been under immense criticism lately due to its delayed awareness of the Wagner Group's coup attempt in Russia. There have been discussions about the removal of the current director, Bruno Kahl, as a result.
The German Chancellor's proposal to examine the issue has put the agency's performance under a "microscope", which has not occurred in a considerable time.
The BND's failures have been mounting, with the inability to anticipate the Taliban's assumption of power in Afghanistan, ignoring warnings about Russia's intentions to invade Ukraine, and the recent espionage case of Carsten L. Despite the warning signs, Bruno Kahl decided to travel to Kyiv on the eve of the invasion, only to be confronted with the harsh reality of war upon awakening.
Most read…
China Restricts Exports of Two Minerals Used in High-Performance Chips
Industry executives see export ban on gallium and germanium as retaliation over chip curbs by U.S. and others
WSJ By James T. Areddy, and Sha Hua, July 4, 2023 Venezuela Bans a Top Opposition Figure From Public Office
María Corina Machado, a longtime adversary of President Nicolás Maduro, was leading a pool of some 14 opposition presidential hopefuls
WSJ By Juan Forero, and Kejal Vyas, June 30, 2023 Will “El Niño” on top of global heating create the perfect climate storm?
Rising temperatures in north Atlantic and drop in Antarctic sea ice prompt fears of widespread damage from extreme weather
The Guardian by Jonathan Watts, Julian Amani, Paul Scruton and Lucy Swan, Mon 3 Jul 2023 The politics of the French riots
This is largely an insurrection without aims: a scream of fury, an anarchic rejection of government; an act of gang-warfare writ large; a competition in performative destruction.
POLITICO EU BY JOHN LICHFIELD, JULY 3, 2023Another Stumble German Intelligence Criticized for Slow Reaction To Russian Coup Attempt
Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, is under fire for learning too late about the recent Wagner Group coup attempt in Russia. It's possible the agency's head could soon be out as a result of the late response, which many see as one too many.
Spiegel By Matthias Gebauer, Martin Knobbe, Marina Kormbaki, Fidelius Schmid, Christoph Schult und Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt, 03.07.2023
At the COA Spring Gala 2023, Andrés Gluski, the CEO & President of AES and Chairman of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, presented President Lacalle Pou with the prestigious Gold Insigne. This award was given in recognition of President Lacalle Pou's outstanding leadership in successfully transforming Uruguay into a prominent technology and innovation hub, all while upholding a thriving democracy and robust economy.
Chinese exporters of products and materials containing gallium and germanium will need to apply for special licenses as of August. PHOTO: CFOTO/ZUMA PRESSChina Restricts Exports of Two Minerals Used in High-Performance Chips
Industry executives see export ban on gallium and germanium as retaliation over chip curbs by U.S. and others
WSJ By James T. Areddy, and Sha Hua, July 4, 2023 A solar farm in New Mexico. The U.S. has taken steps to reduce China’s dominance over the U.S. solar market. PHOTO: SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
SINGAPORE—China set export restrictions on two minerals the U.S. says are critical to the production of semiconductors, missile systems and solar cells, a show of force ahead of economic talks between two rivals that increasingly set trade rules to achieve technological dominance.
The minerals—gallium and germanium—and more than three dozen related metals and other materials will be subject to unspecified export controls starting Aug. 1, Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce said Monday. Its statement referred to safeguarding national security and interests and said some future export applications would require review by the government’s top body, the State Council.
The China-U.S. rivalry increasingly features export restrictions tailored to slow the high-technology industries of the other nation. Trading complaints about such controls, which both sides say are designed to protect national security, have featured in a return to high-level talks between the two governments. More focus on the issue is likely when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visits Beijing later this week and if Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo makes an expected trip in the coming months.
Tech Companies Depend on China for Rare Earths. Can That Change?
Neodymium is critical to making the wheels of a Tesla spin or creating sound in Apple’s AirPods, and China dominates the mining and processing of this rare-earth element. So the U.S. and its allies are building their own supply chain. Photo illustration: Clément Bürge/WSJ
“The U.S. Commerce Department had no immediate comment.
The U.S. in October halted exports to China of equipment used to produce more technically advanced semiconductors and has leaned on allies like South Korea and the Netherlands to do the same. Beijing warned its companies to consider the national-security implications of exports to the U.S. It banned the use of products made by Micron, the U.S.’s biggest memory-chip maker, in its critical information-infrastructure firms, while warning American allies to reject what it terms Cold War-type protectionism peddled by Washington.
Complexities bind the U.S. and China in production of wares such as semiconductors in ways that make it difficult for either side to act too rashly, a kind of technology-sector equivalent of mutually assured destruction. The Biden administration is trying to entice producers such as Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to expand in the U.S. but getting them to turn their back on China appears unlikely.
The new restrictions on gallium and germanium affect specialty metals produced and refined primarily in China, giving it leverage in some cutting-edge sectors. Neither gallium or germanium is traded in large quantities. Both nevertheless have uses important to particular industries, especially production of semiconductors that are often designed in and for use in the U.S. even if made in Taiwan and South Korea.
“This measure will have an immediate ripple effect on the semiconductor industry, especially with regards to high-performance chips,” said Alastair Neill, board member of the Critical Mineral Institute who has nearly 30 years of experience with China’s metals industry.
Estimated production of unrefined gallium in 2022
——China: 540,000 ——Rest of the world: 10,000 kilograms.
Note: Other countries that produce unrefined gallium are Russia, Japan, South Korea and Ukraine.
Source: U.S. Geological Survey
China has smarted at U.S. efforts to slow the advance of its semiconductor manufacturing, which Washington warns is ultimately aimed at strengthening Beijing’s military. The Biden administration has made it difficult for China to buy lithography machines needed to produce high-performance chips, and last week scored a win when the Dutch government said its equipment makers like ASML would need government permission to ship some products abroad.
Chinese chip makers and suppliers who gathered in Shanghai for a recent industry event were in a grim but defiant mood following a Wall Street Journal report that the Biden administration is considering new restrictions on exports of artificial-intelligence chips to China.
Industry analysts see a pattern of tit-for-tat. “If you don’t send high-end chips to China, China will respond by not sending you the high-performance elements you need for those chips,” said Neill, who added that Beijing usually tries to match U.S. trade measures with a countermeasure of equal proportion.
Both gallium and germanium appear among 50 minerals that the U.S. Geological Survey deems “critical,” meaning they are essential to the economic or national security of the U.S. and have a supply chain vulnerable to disruption.
Gallium, a soft, silvery metal at room temperature, is a key ingredient in a fast-growing class of semiconductors used in phone chargers and electric vehicles, among a growing range of commercial and military applications. About 53% of the U.S.’s gallium was imported from China between 2018 and 2021, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, with imports decreasing substantially in 2019 after the U.S. imposed higher tariffs on Chinese gallium. There is no U.S. production of unrefined gallium.
Gallium arsenide—a compound with arsenic—is widely used for high-performance chips because it is more resistant to heat and moisture as well as more conductive than silicon. At the moment, “no effective substitutes exist for GaAs in these applications,” noted the 2023 U.S. Geological Survey on gallium.
The U.S. military relies on gallium nitride, a related product, for its properties for efficiently transmitting power deployed in the most advanced radars under development. It is also being used in the replacement for the Patriot missile-defense system being made by RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies. Beijing previously had said it would seek to prevent a unit of RTX, which didn’t respond to a question about gallium, from using Chinese products in its military technology.
An arm of Raytheon Technologies is on Beijing’s ‘unreliable entities list,’ which prohibits companies from export and import activities related to China. PHOTO: PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/REUTERS
In 2016, the U.S. blocked the proposed purchase by Chinese investors of a controlling stake in an auto and light-emitting diode components business unit of the Dutch electronics company Philips valued at $2.8 billion over concerns of the dual-use potential for gallium nitride.
Sales of chips using gallium nitride were $2.47 billion last year, according to Precedence Research, but are expected to climb to $19.3 billion by 2030. Chips produced with gallium-arsenide are expected to grow from $1.4 billion last year to $3.4 billion in 2030, according to Research and Markets.
Germanium, a lustrous, grayish-white metal, can make silicon a faster conductor and is often used in making fiber-optic systems and solar cells, including those used in space applications.
To trade experts, China’s new export restrictions on the commodities is a reminder of an earlier export-quota system Beijing imposed for rare earths, another group of metals produced mostly in China that have prized qualities for high-technology manufacturers. The U.S. in 2014 won a case at the World Trade Organization that argued China’s export limits on rare earths, as well as tungsten and molybdenum, were inconsistent with international trade rules.
Later, in 2019, Chinese leader Xi Jinping made a visit to one of the country’s key rare-earth production zones. To analysts, the visit appeared to be a warning Beijing could disrupt trade in the minerals, days after the Trump administration made it illegal to supply some U.S. technology to Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies.
Export controls allow Beijing to target individual companies as well as broader sectors of particular industries and make decisions based on geopolitical considerations, said Paul Triolo, senior vice president for China and technology-policy lead at the Washington-based advisory firm Albright Stonebridge Group.
Chinese exporters of products and materials containing gallium and germanium will need to apply for special licenses as of August. PHOTO: CFOTO/ZUMA PRESS
China has signaled to the U.S. that it is interested in establishing a new bilateral dialogue on export controls, and the latest move could provide Beijing with more leverage in coming discussions with Washington, he said.
The controls announced Monday follow a pattern of quieter restrictions on American access to other commodities produced in China, such as materials known as super-abrasives that also are used in high-technology industries, according to Nazak Nikakhtar, a trade lawyer who formerly held roles related to national security and commodity supply chains at the Commerce Department and is now a partner at Washington law firm Wiley Rein LLP. “It’s really arm-flexing, to remind the U.S. how strong they are and to remind us how much control they have over our supply chains,” she said.
While Nikakhtar said she doesn’t think the gallium and germanium restrictions are designed to be a bargaining chip for the coming talks with American officials, she said they should seize the opportunity to remind their Chinese counterparts that Washington can close loopholes on its current export restrictions and that it has the power to apply economic sanctions.
…”We proudly announce that several AES companies have been certified as Great Places to Work, including AES El Salvador, AES Dominicana, AES México, AES Panamá, and AES Puerto Rico. AES Servicios América ranked 3rd in the Great Place to Work for Women Argentina 2023. We're committed to providing an inclusive and empowering work environment for all, and our employees are our most valuable asset. Let's collaborate for a brighter, cleaner, and more sustainable future.
Ricardo Manuel Falú
Senior Vice President, Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer and President, New Energy Technologies SBU
María Corina Machado, pictured in Caracas last week among supporters, is a conservative politician and activist. PHOTO: GABY ORAA/BLOOMBERG NEWS / Editing by Germán & CoVenezuela Bans a Top Opposition Figure From Public Office
María Corina Machado, a longtime adversary of President Nicolás Maduro, was leading a pool of some 14 opposition presidential hopefuls
WSJ By Juan Forero, and Kejal Vyas, June 30, 2023 María Corina Machado, pictured in Caracas last week among supporters, is a conservative politician and activist. PHOTO: GABY ORAA/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s regime on Friday barred opposition figure María Corina Machado, a conservative who had been drawing energetic crowds on the campaign trail, from running in presidential elections expected next year.
“I’m not sorry nor surprised nor worried,” Machado, a 55-year-old politician and activist, said via text message to The Wall Street Journal shortly after the ruling. “We knew that they were going to do it. It is a big mistake on their part.”
The decision by the Comptroller’s Office dims already faint prospects for free and fair elections in 2024. Biden administration officials have repeatedly said that the Maduro government must organize democratic elections for Washington to lift sanctions against regime officials and the country’s lifeblood oil industry.
Maduro’s government has barred other politicians who had been popular in polls from campaigning and holding office, most notably Leopoldo López and Henrique Capriles, a two-time presidential candidate. The regime has often made vague assertions of irregularities or corruption for prohibiting politicians from running.
Popular opposition politican Leopoldo López was banned from running for presidcent. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
“We condemn the prohibition of @MariaCorinaYa,” Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, the New York-based group, said on her Twitter account. “This decision violates her political rights and those of the Venezuelan people. The international community, especially those governments with access to Maduro, should request that this very serious decision be reversed.
In prohibiting Machado from holding office for 15 years, the Comptroller’s Office cited alleged corruption and her support for a U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition movement that has used economic sanctions to dislodge Maduro. Machado, who is well-known among politicians in Washington and other capitals, has been open about supporting efforts to unseat Maduro.
Machado’s actions are an “affront to public ethics, administrative morality, the state of law, peace and sovereignty,” the Comptroller’s office said in a five-page letter dated June 27 and made public by a pro-regime lawmaker. The letter accuses Machado of working with the opposition to cut off the Maduro administration’s access to foreign bank accounts and overseas assets, including U.S. refiner Citgo Petroleum Corp., and gold bullion at the Bank of England, leaving them vulnerable to creditors that are seeking to recoup billions of dollars in debts from Caracas.
In recent polls, Machado, who comes from a wealthy family of industrialists, has led a pool of some 14 opposition presidential hopefuls ahead of October primaries the opposition had scheduled to pick a single presidential candidate. The Caracas consulting firm Poder y Estrategia said a poll done in early June showed that Machado had the support of 57% of respondents who planned to cast a ballot in the primaries.
María Corina Machado signed an application to be eligible to run for president last week in Caracas. PHOTO: CARLOS BECERRA/GETTY IMAGES
Machado will still be able to participate in the primaries because the opposition is organizing them independently of the regime-controlled National Electoral Council. But Friday’s ban will prohibit Machado from facing off against the regime’s eventual candidate, who is widely expected to be Maduro. A date for the presidential election has yet to be set.
The government’s prohibition against running underscores its determination to avoid an opening for an opposition politician to win in an election, said Eduardo Battistini, president of Venezuela’s First Justice Party in exile.
“Today, by barring Maria Corina Machado as they have dozens of opponents, they are removing those who propose change in Venezuela,” he said.
Machado has been barred by the Maduro regime from leaving the country since 2015, when the Comptroller first banned her from political office for 12 months. Friday’s announcement increased that ban to 15 years.
In recent weeks, she had been campaigning around the country, including in the cattle-growing heartland of Venezuela, long a Socialist Party stronghold. She pledged to dismantle a state-led economic model that has driven the oil-rich nation into financial ruin. And unlike other opposition politicians, Machado also said she wanted to privatize state energy giant Petróleos de Venezuela SA.
Pollsters and political analysts say that Venezuela’s opposition movement has faced widespread voter apathy since its leadership voted in December to remove Juan Guaidó as its leader. The U.S. and its allies had since 2019 recognized him as Venezuela’s legitimate president because they had deemed the 2018 election that Maduro had won as fraudulent.
Image: Germán & CoCooperate with objective and ethical thinking…
People walk through a dust storm in Prayagraj, India. Countries across the world are experiencing record temperatures. Photograph: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/ Editing by Germán & CoWill “El Niño” on top of global heating create the perfect climate storm?
Rising temperatures in north Atlantic and drop in Antarctic sea ice prompt fears of widespread damage from extreme weather
The Guardian by Jonathan Watts, Julian Amani, Paul Scruton and Lucy Swan, Mon 3 Jul 2023 “Very unusual”, “worrying”, “terrifying”, and “bonkers”; the reactions of veteran scientists to the sharp increase in north Atlantic surface temperatures over the past three months raises the question of whether the world’s climate has entered a more erratic and dangerous phase with the onset of an El Niño event on top of human-made global heating.
Since April, the warming appears to have entered a new trajectory. Meanwhile the area of global sea ice has dropped by more than 1 million sq km below the previous low.
“If a few decades ago, some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon, we are now witnessing our climate changing at a terrifying rate,” said Prof Peter Stott, who leads the UK Met Office’s climate monitoring and attribution team. “As the El Niño builds through the rest of this year, adding an extra oomph to the damaging effects of human-induced global heating, many millions of people across the planet and many diverse ecosystems are going to face extraordinary challenges and unfortunately suffer great damage.”
The El Niño climate pattern emerges when normal easterly winds weaken and warm water spreads across the whole Pacific.
The immediate impact is on marine life which is unaccustomed to waters that have warmed by several degrees in some areas. More worrying still, the extra energy in the ocean, which is the world’s biggest heat absorber, may bring fiercer-than-usual storms, more destructive rain dumps and longer, hotter heatwaves.
When the extremes in the north Atlantic started to be registered in April, the hope was that this would prove a temporary blip. In May, however, the average temperature in the region was the highest since records began in 1850. On 12 June, the climatologist Brian McNoldy stirred up a Twitter storm by calculating that, based on past data, there was a one in 256,0000 chance of this happening.
This anomaly prompted some commentators to wonder if something unforeseen – a black swan event – was taking place in the climate system. Calmer heads explained that it was more likely the result of El Niño and other natural factors being amplified by the greenhouse gas emissions from cars, factories and forest clearance.
Michael Mann, the presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania, warned against “cherry picking” one set of data from one region over a relatively short period of time. It was more important, he said, to focus on the bigger picture: that burning fossil fuels was leading to more powerful and destructive hurricanes as well as providing the energy in the atmosphere to fuel extreme weather events, such as droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and floods. “We need to step back and look at the big picture. And it is alarming. The truth,” Mann said, “is bad enough.”
Katharine Hayhoe, the chief scientist with the Nature Conservancy and distinguished professor at Texas Tech University, said the north Atlantic temperature anomaly was the result of long-term loading of the climate system by 380 zeta joules of extra heat from human emissions of heat-trapping gases. “Nearly 90% of it has been going into the ocean; and it’s that gradual but inexorable increase in ocean heat content over time scales of decades rather than years that most worries climate scientists,” she said.
Around Ireland and the UK, coastal waters have been several degrees warmer than average for the time of year. Storms are now forming in the Atlantic earlier than normal, almost certainly as a result of the extra energy that is building up in the surface layer of the ocean. For the first time in June, there have been two simultaneous named tropical storms in the Atlantic, Bret and Cindy.
However, rather than seeing the north Atlantic spike as a one-off event, Richard Betts, the head of the climate impacts division at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter said: “We can expect this kind of event to happen more often – which of course is a major cause for concern. For me, these graphs [of Atlantic surface temperature and Antarctic sea ice] are like yet another hammer blow driving home the urgency of the climate situation we are now in.”
While human emissions and El Niño are likely to be the two main drivers of the north Atlantic spike, Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the Breakthrough Institute, said more time was needed to disentangle other possible contributing factors, such as this year’s unusual dearth in Saharan dust levels, the large amount of stratospheric water vapour, the slowing of ocean circulation and the increasing frequency of El Niño events.
More broadly, Hausfather said, the trends were in line with climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that showed warming would accelerate in coming decades unless emissions were reduced. “I’m reluctant to say that it’s worse than we expected, because what we expect in a world where we don’t reduce emissions is bad enough.”
How much worse things get depends on the intensity and duration of this El Niño. Carlos Nobre, who is one of Brazil’s top climate scientists, said there was a 60% chance that this year’s El Niño would be a strong one. This would be “very very worrying” for the Amazon rainforest, which sustained some of its worst degradation during 2015-16, when an El Niño event caused the dry season to become longer and left the vegetation more vulnerable to fire.
Elsewhere in the world, the latest El Niño is already causing misery. In Mexico, several cities have recently broken the record for their hottest days ever, including Chihuahua, Nuevo Laredo and Monclova. Many cities in Texas are sweltering in their worst-ever heatwaves. The same is true in China, where more than 20 cities, including Shandong, Tianjin and Huairou have registered new peaks. In Europe, the Austrian town of Oberndorf sweltered in a freakishly hot midnight temperature of 36.1C, one of the continent’s highest-ever nighttime temperatures. In the Middle East, people are used to heat but they can normally expect some respite at high altitudes. That was not the case in Iran last week, when the temperature in Saravan hit 45C – one of the hottest days ever recorded at an elevation of more than 1,000m.
Many things are still uncertain. Scientists will not know for a couple of months how severe El Niño will be. Its wind-sheering effect could inhibit storm formation and help to balance out the pressure of the sea-level temperature. The north Atlantic heat spike is already showing signs that it may fade.
But there is no doubt among scientists that things will continue to get worse as long as greenhouse gases continue to rise and natural climate stabilisers, such as the Amazon, continue to be cut down.
Hayhoe said the trends made her feel “even more concerned and even more motivated to ensure I’m doing everything I can to help people understand the profound risks climate change poses to them and how each of us can be a powerful advocate for climate action”.
“It makes me feel sad and anxious,” said Stott. “Sad for the level of environmental destruction going on around the world, including the continuing destruction of the Amazon rainforest. And anxious for how people are going to cope if this carries on much longer, not just in far-away places that are already very hot and dry, but here in the UK where fires, flash floods and droughts are getting more and more frequent and intense. It isn’t a secure and sustaining future to look forward to. I still hope a turning point can be reached such that greenhouse gas emissions do start to reduce rapidly. And I know that this can be done without devastating our quality of life, quite the opposite in fact.”
Seaboard: pioneers in power generation in the country…
…“More than 32 years ago, back in January 1990, Seaboard began operations as the first independent power producer (IPP) in the Dominican Republic. They became pioneers in the electricity market by way of the commercial operations of Estrella del Norte, a 40MW floating power generation plant and the first of three built for Seaboard by Wärtsilä.
A French firefighter looks at a burning car in Floirac on the outskirts of Bordeaux, south-western France | Philippe Lopez/AFP/ Editing by Germán & CoThe politics of the French riots
This is largely an insurrection without aims: a scream of fury, an anarchic rejection of government; an act of gang-warfare writ large; a competition in performative destruction.
POLITICO EU BY JOHN LICHFIELD, JULY 3, 2023John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.
Beware of those who offer a simple explanation of the riots that have exploded in multi-racial suburbs across France.
These are not, for the most part, political riots — although they are influenced by, and will dangerously inflame, the poisonously divided politics of France.
They are not religious riots. Many of the very young rioters may have a sense of besieged Muslim identity, but they are driven by anger rather than their religion. This is an insurrection, not an intifada.
They are not, properly speaking, truly race riots. The great majority of the many millions of hard-working residents of the racially mixed suburbs which surround French cities are not involved.
Rather, they are the main victims of the destruction of cars, buses, trams, schools, libraries, shops and social centers which began after a 17-year-old boy was shot dead by a traffic cop in Nanterre, just west of Paris, last Tuesday. Parents and other adults are now beginning (belatedly) to try to contain this explosion of violence by young men and boys as young as 12.
The riots are, in a sense, anti-France; but they are also, in part, mimetically French. Grievances go more rapidly to the street in France than in other countries. The worst excesses of the largely white, provincial Yellow Vests movement in 2018-19 came close in blind violence to what we have seen in the last week.
The riots are, for sure, anti-police and anti-authority.
Young men of African and North African origin are much more likely to be stopped by French police than young white men. Seventeen people, mostly of African or North African origin, have been shot dead in the last 18 months after refusing to obey police orders to halt their cars.
The last big explosion in the suburbs, or banlieues, lasted for three weeks in October-November 2005. The new eruption shows some signs of abating after only six days but has already crossed new boundaries.
The 2005 riots were confined to the suburbs themselves. There were attacks on buildings and public transport but little direct confrontation with police. There was almost no looting and pillaging.
On this occasion, police have been attacked with fireworks, Molotov cocktails and shotguns. Shops and shopping centers have been raided. The rioting has pierced the invisible barrier between the inner suburbs and prosperous French cities — although a threatened attack on the Champs Elysées in Paris on Saturday night came to little.
Protestors flee from an exploding firework on a street in Nice, south-eastern France early July 2, 2023 | Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images
The opportunistic looting appears mostly to be the work of the very young. The more targeted violence — including an attack by a blazing car on the home of a mayor in the south Paris suburbs on Saturday night — is more organized and more obscurely political.
There are convincing reports of the involvement of the ultra-left, mostly white, Black Bloc movement which has tried to establish links with suburban youth in recent years.
But this remains largely an insurrection without aims: a scream of fury, an anarchic rejection of even local forms of government; an act of gang-warfare writ large; a competition in performative destruction between disaffected young men in suburbs and towns across France.
The other great and menacing difference with 2005 is the national political background. Eighteen years ago, France was a country dominated by the traditional parties of the center-right and center-left. No prominent politicians encouraged the riots. Few sought to profit from them by suggesting that France faced racial or religious civil war.
Now French politics is split three ways between a radical left, President Emmanuel Macron’s muddled, reformist center and a hard and far right that thinks in explicitly racial terms.
The hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and some of his closest allies have infuriated even other left-wing politicians by refusing to condemn the riots, even the looting. “I don’t call for calm, I call for justice,” Mélenchon said (despite the fact that the policeman who inexplicably shot 17-year-old Nahel last Tuesday has already been charged with homicide).
Meanwhile, a powerful but divided far right is pressing Macron to crack down violently on the rioters (despite the fact that another death, however accidental, could send the riots into an uncontrollable new dimension).
The teenagers on the streets are almost all French — not immigrants. And yet Marine Le Pen’s rival Eric Zemmour — echoed by editorials in the usually more careful center-right Le Figaro — has spoken of a “war” with “foreign enclaves in our midst.”
This inflammatory language is not new. Le Pen, Zemmour and others habitually refuse to recognize that the multi-racial suburbs contain millions of hard-working people — mostly French-born — without whom the prosperous cities could not survive.
They also refuse to recognize the substantial evidence of brutality and racial discrimination by the French police in their admittedly thankless work in the banlieues.
The boy shot dead in Nanterre was not yet born at the time of the 2005 riots. A new generation of young people has grown up in the last 18 years in the suspicion, or belief, that much of the rest of France will never accept them as French.
Many of those French people will look at the events of the last week and their prejudices and fears will be confirmed or deepened.
The riots will abate in time. Over €4 billion has already been spent to improve life in the banlieues in the last two decades. More will doubtless be found to try to reverse the orgy of self-harm of the last week.
It is harder to see what can reverse the spiral of suspicion, misunderstanding, rejection and fear.
The BND's headquarters in Berlin: Germany's foreign intelligence agency is under fire. Foto: Jörg Carstensen/ picture alliance/ Editing by Germán & CoAnother Stumble German Intelligence Criticized for Slow Reaction To Russian Coup Attempt
Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, is under fire for learning too late about the recent Wagner Group coup attempt in Russia. It's possible the agency's head could soon be out as a result of the late response, which many see as one too many.
Spiegel By Matthias Gebauer, Martin Knobbe, Marina Kormbaki, Fidelius Schmid, Christoph Schult und Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt, 03.07.2023The BND's headquarters in Berlin: Germany's foreign intelligence agency is under fire.
Foto: Jörg Carstensen / picture alliance
It was business as usual for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz when he appeared on a national political interview lasts Wednesday and was asked about the country's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, and its response to the internal Russian power struggle. The chancellor spoke quietly, with deliberation, as he always does. Addressing the recent uprising of the Wagner Group mercenaries in Russia, he said that the BND "did not, of course, know beforehand" about events that were about to unfold.
“In light of U.S. media reports that the CIA had learned about Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin's plans well before the escalation, the chancellor said that a closer look needs to be taken at the flow of information among allies. "We will all have to discuss that together," he said.
It sounded as if Scholz was doing his best to protect the BND. But insiders within the intelligence community were startled by the chancellor's words. The statement that the BND "of course" knew nothing could also be interpreted as cynicism – or that the chancellor has reduced his expectations of the agency to zero. It is, of course, part of the job of an intelligence service to catch developments like what happened just over a week ago as early as possible.
The chancellor's suggestion that they would now have to discuss things was also carefully noted. Because it would mean that the BND's performance would be coming under the microscope - a place it hasn't been recently. Ultimately, agency head Bruno Kahl may even find himself in the hot seat.
The impetus for the chancellor's concealed displeasure came from two press reports in recent days. "How the German government was taken by surprise by the Wagner revolt," DER SPIEGEL wrote as events unfolded. "Caught cold again," read the headline in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
The German government initially tried to contain the damage. Of course, the BND had already informed the Chancellery about the events on Friday, meaning one day before the advance of Prigozhin's troops on Moscow dominated the news broadcasts.
First Information Obtained in Mid-June
Meanwhile, the BND also tried to water down critique. On Tuesday morning, a high-ranking security official commented on the matter at a symposium in Berlin. The meeting of dozens of representatives from politics and business took place under the Chatham House Rule, according to which discussion participants are not to be identified by name afterward.
The representative speaking on behalf of the agency saw no reason for criticism. Of course, he said, the German government had already been informed several times about the tensions between Wagner chief Prigozhin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. He said they may not have been aware of the the march on Moscow weeks in advance – "but neither had the Americans."
By then, the U.S. media had long since begun reporting that the intelligence services of the United States may very well have possessed such information. The Washington Post reported that the initial information began to emerge in mid-June. According to other media, selected politicians in the U.S. Congress along with high-ranking military and government officials, known collectively as the Gang of Eight, had already been briefed on Wednesday. On Friday, June 23, the intelligence services briefed the White House.
And Germany's BND? Initial attempts to shield the agency ultimately failed. Last Tuesday, BND headquarters issued an order to thoroughly review its own knowledge and all information provided by the intelligence services of friendly countries in advance. And security policy experts in the parties in Germany's government coalition began discussing whether the president of the BND would be able to keep his job.
Bruno Kahl, 60, became head of the service in 2016 after his predecessor, Gerhard Schindler, was removed from the position unexpectedly. Schindler had actually survived the scandal involving files from the U.S. spy agency NSA before then-Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU ) suddenly sent him into temporary retirement.
Kahl's mission at the time had been to reform the service and keep it scandal-free. Internally, however, the complaint quickly arose that it was becoming increasingly difficult to achieve good results at all because of the many new control mechanisms. International partner services noted with pity that the BND was "quite obviously shackled" by German legislation, as one foreign intelligence chief put it.
Indeed, the Wager Group uprising wasn't the first time recently that the BND had been accused of cluelessness.
By the time the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, for example, BND analysts had been warning for several years of the country's approaching collapse, and even predicted the Taliban's seizure of power eight months before Kabul fell. But when it actually came to pass, the BND was caught flat-footed. Two years later, that failure is still a focus of a parliamentary investigative committee in the German Bundestag.
BND experts also long dismissed warnings from American and British services about specific plans by Russia to invade Ukraine. It wasn't until a few days before the February 2022 invasion that the concerns of their Anglo-Saxon colleagues slowly began to take hold in Berlin as well. But that didn't stop BND President Kahl from flying to Kyiv on the eve of the Russian invasion – only to wake up to war.
Then, in December, police arrested BND employee Carsten L. on suspicions he served as a Russian spy. It subsequently came to light that the agent had passed security checks despite his apparently right-wing extremist views – and had even been granted responsibility for the security checks of other BND employees.
"The BND's information base on Russia's inner workings was obviously thin."
Ulrich Lechte, member of the Free Democratic Party
Some of these mishaps can be explained, dismissed or glossed over by the BND. Speaking to parliament, Kahl claimed that Putin's invasion had "not really surprised" the BND. And in the case of Carsten L., the BND pointed out that the damage was insignificant given that the double agent had been uncovered at such an early stage. But such explanations can only be used so many times.
"Slowly, we're beginning to be surprised by events too often," says Ralf Stegner of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), the chairman of the Afghanistan investigation committee in the German parliament.
"The BND's information on Russia's inner workings was obviously thin," says Ulrich Lechte, foreign policy spokesman for the parliamentary group of the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) in the Bundestag. "There is no other explanation for the fact that no information whatsoever was provided to us in parliament about the imminent uprising of Prigozhin and the Wagner group."
"The situation is definitely frustrating," says Sara Nanni, a member of parliament with the Green Party. She also says it is far too easy to cast blame on the BND. All of this is "also a question of resources," she says.
Should the BND have been aware of Prigozhin's plans at an early stage? "This kind of thing doesn't happen overnight," says a former senior CIA official who had jurisdiction over Russia. "There's troop movement and equipment relocation, communications – you pick up on a lot of things."
In fact, and this is part of the assessment, there are major differences between American intelligence services and the BND. The CIA has many more employees than the German foreign intelligence service, the worldwide interception of signals intelligence is conducted by another agency, the NSA. The BND tries to cover everything in one agency: the monitoring of communications, managing human sources and conducting research into publicly accessible sources of information. Employees also produce extensive analyses. At many other intelligence services, those efforts are considered a waste of time; whereas at the BND, they are considered to be the agency's paramount work.
For some time now, the strengths of German intelligence have been primarily in technical reconnaissance and liaison – the art of asking friendly intelligence agencies to share their insights.
In Washington, London and possibly also in Paris, information was apparently available again this time. Only, it would seem that it didn't find its way to Berlin. When the partners were asked about the criticism, they reportedly said that the U.S. media coverage had been exaggerated. That the information that had been shared with Congress had been more of a general nature. Some experts are even claiming that the narrative of the Americans' detailed knowledge of secret goings-on within Moscow's power apparatus was intended primarily for Russian ears – and that the U.S. media had allowed themselves to be harnessed for that strategy. Or was Berlin deliberately left out?
At any rate, the Germans' skeptical attitude in the run-up to Putin's invasion of Ukraine has not been forgotten on the other side of the English Channel and the Atlantic. As if to prove the point, the U.S. news network CNN reported last week that the U.S. had shared its detailed intelligence only with select allies, including the United Kingdom. CNN reported it had been "extremely detailed" information.
In fact, some information had been made available to the BND. Prior to the coup attempt, for example, Berlin had received several indications that tensions had been building between Wagner boss Prigozhin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, the BND was unable to verify that information independently. It's also unlikely it received the tip that Prigozhin would call for a march on Moscow.
The service interpreted satellite images provided by the United States, according to which Wagner's troops were gathering near Rostov-on-Don, as being consistent with the mercenaries' announced return to their bases. The fact that they were actually preparing to seize Rostov apparently hadn't been apparent to the BND analysts.
The discontent over the latest developments has since spread to the German ministries controlled by the partners in the coalition government. According to reports, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party expressed irritation that she had participated in a meeting with high-ranking BND representatives as recently as Friday – and that the power struggle between the Wagner mercenary group and the Kremlin hadn't even been broached.
The Foreign Ministry has also expressed displeasure that even the sparse information it does receive from the BND must be painstakingly elicited from the agency. Sources say the Foreign Ministry learned through their own analysis of Russian Telegram groups that Prigozhin's private army was on a confrontation course with the Kremlin. One of Baerbock's staffers apparently then asked the BND what was going on.
It was not until much later in the evening that a response from the intelligence officials arrived – with rather sparse explanations that didn't go beyond the level of what could be inferred from public sources, according to Foreign Ministry officials.
To be fair, even in normal times, officials in the Foreign Ministry don't think very highly of the BND. But officials inside the Defense Ministry also seemed displeased about the situation. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius of the Social Democrats first learned of the attempted Wagner coup on the morning of Saturday, June 24. From news agencies.