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Le scoop! France’s last newspaper hawker celebrated with prestigious award

For more than five decades he’s pounded the pavements of Paris, becoming part of the city’s cultural fabric as he strikes up conversations, greets longtime friends and offers parodies of daily news headlines. On Wednesday, the efforts of the man believed to be France’s last newspaper hawker were recognised, as Ali Akbar, a 73-year-old originally from Pakistan, received one of France’s most prestigious honours. In a ceremony at the Élysée Palace, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, described Akbar as the “most French of the French” as he made him a knight of the National Order of Merit in recognition of his distinguished service to France. “You are the accent of the sixth arrondissement, the voice of the French press on Sunday mornings. And every other day of the week, for that matter,” said Macron. “A warm voice that, every day for more than 50 years, has boomed across the terraces of Saint-Germain, making its way between restaurant tables.” Speaking to Reuters in August, Akbar highlighted the delight he got from walking through Paris each day. “It’s love,” Akbar said as he crisscrossed the cobbled streets of Saint Germain-des-Prés. “If it was for the money, I could do something else. But I have a great time with these people.” Born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Akbar said he stumbled across his calling after arriving in Paris in 1973. When visa issues stymied his first attempt to carve out a life in Europe, he was determined to find a job that would allow him to support his parents and seven siblings back home. With the help of an Argentinian student who was selling satirical magazines, Akbar joined the ranks of the few dozen newspaper sellers in the city. His ready smile, sense of humour and readiness to walk miles a day proved a hit, allowing him to make a modest living. By day he sold newspapers to France’s powerbrokers, such as the former president François Mitterrand, and to Sciences Po students who would later join their ranks, such as Macron and the former prime minister Édouard Philippe. At night, in his early years, he slept rough under bridges and in squalid rooms as he scrambled to send as much money as he could to Pakistan. As the decades passed, Akbar became a familiar face in the restaurants and bars of the Left Bank. “Ali is an institution,” said Marie-Laure Carrière, a lawyer. “If Ali didn’t exist, St-Germain-des-Prés wouldn’t be St-Germain-des-Prés.” Slowly and steadily, he built a life in Paris, getting married and raising five children, even as the newspaper industry began to wilt. While once it had been easy to sell as many as 200 newspapers a day, those days were a distant memory, Akbar said. “I sell about 20 copies of Le Monde in eight hours,” he said. “Everything is digital. People just don’t buy newspapers.” Still, he persisted. “I have a certain way of selling newspapers. I try to make jokes, so people laugh. I try to be positive and I create an atmosphere … I try and get into people’s hearts, not their pockets,” he said. When news of the order of merit came, it felt like a tribute of sorts to a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, particularly in a district once frequented by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. “People used to do their shopping in small shops. It was a village, there were small markets everywhere, butchers and fish shops. Everyone was local, everyone knew each other,” said Akbar. “Nowadays its different. Every day there’s a new face.” On Wednesday, Macron praised the journey that had landed Akbar at the Élyséé Palace. “Before becoming an icon of Parisian life, you grew up in Pakistan, on the streets of Rawalpindi. As children, you had to face the worst: poverty, forced labour, violence. You dream of only one thing: leaving. Escaping poverty, getting an education. Earning enough money to buy your mother a beautiful house,” said Macron. “You cross Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece. You experience life as an illegal immigrant, destitution and constant fear. But you persevere.” He said it was an honour to receive the distinction, telling the broadcaster Franceinfo it was a balm for the many wounds he had racked up in his lifetime. Even so, he said he had no plans to give up selling newspapers, insisting he would continue zigzagging the city’s streets and cafes as long as he had the energy. “Retirement will have to wait until the cemetery,” he joked.

Threat of US-Iran war escalates as Trump warns time running out for deal

The threat of war between the US and Iran appeared to loom closer after Donald Trump told Tehran time was running out and that a huge US armada was moving quickly towards the country “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose”. Writing on social media, the US president said on Wednesday that the fleet headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was larger than the one sent to Venezuela before the removal of Nicolás Maduro earlier this month and was “prepared to rapidly fulfil its missions with speed and violence if necessary”. Trump said: “Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal – NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS – one that is good for all parties. Time is running out, it is truly of the essence! “As I told Iran once before, MAKE A DEAL! They didn’t, and there was ‘Operation Midnight Hammer,’ a major destruction of Iran. The next attack will be far worse! Don’t make that happen again.” It was the starkest indication yet from Trump that he intends to mount some kind of military strike imminently if Iran refuses to negotiate a deal on the future of its nuclear programme. The post also reflects a remarkable shift in the White House’s stated rationale for sending a carrier strike group to the region, moving away from outrage over the death of protesters to the fate of Tehran’s nuclear programme. Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting earlier this month, telling them “help is on its way”, but he later backtracked on the grounds that “the killing has stopped”. There is speculation that he actually held back because he did not have enough military assets in the area, Gulf States had urged restraint and Israel had counselled it needed more time to prepare for likely reprisals from Iran. Activists say more than 30,000 people were killed during the recent unrest. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told the Senate on Wednesday that thousands had been killed and said the Iranian government was “probably weaker than it has ever been” since the 1979 revolution. Iranian missiles and drones could still pose a threat to US personnel in the region though, he said, and the US carrier strike group would carry out its mission “with speed and violence” if necessary. About 30,000 US military personnel were “within the reach of an array of thousands of Iranian one-way UAVs and Iranian short-range ballistic missiles that threaten our troop presence,” Rubio said. “We have to have enough personnel in the region … to defend against that possibility.” Trump would also maintain the “preemptive defensive option” of striking Iran if there were indications that it was planning an attack on US troops, he said. “They certainly have the capability because they’ve amassed thousands and thousands of ballistic missiles that they’ve built.” European diplomats had been expecting a crisis to develop over the weekend and detected signs of Israeli nervousness about the scale of possible Iranian reprisals. In a social media post written in Hebrew, Ali Shamkani, a senior adviser to the Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said: “Any military action by America, from any source and at any level, will be considered the beginning of a war, and the response will be immediate, comprehensive and unprecedented, directed at the aggressor, at the heart of Tel Aviv and at all its supporters.” The Gulf States and Turkey have been speaking to both sides, trying to find common ground between Iran and the US, but Tehran has said it will not negotiate under duress or with preconditions. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that a deal with Iran ought to happen. He told CNBC: “Obviously, the deal has to do with missiles. It has to do with enrichment. It has to do with non-state actor proxies. It has to do with [Iran’s stockpile of nuclear] material.” It has become clear in recent days that Trump is interested in curbing not just the remains of Iran’s already shattered nuclear programme but also its ability to fire long-range missiles, always seen as the centrepiece of Iranian military projection. In recent weeks Trump has also suggested Khamenei must leave the world stage, a demand Iran will reject. Asked by Senator John Cornyn about the potential for a change of regime in Iran, Rubio said: “You’re talking about a regime that’s been in place for a very long time … So that’s going to require a lot of careful thinking, if that eventuality ever presents itself. I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer to what happens next in Iran if the supreme leader and the regime were to fall.” Some will see the sudden escalation of the threat as a useful piece of distraction at a time when Trump is under domestic political pressure over the violence administered by homeland security officers in Minnesota. The Iranian mission at the UN in New York said: “The last time the US blundered into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it wasted $7tn, and over 7,000 American lives were lost. Iran stands ready for dialogue based on mutual respects and interests but if pushed it will defend itself and respond like never before.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said he was not prepared to negotiate under threats but he was willing to talk without preconditions, terms he had relayed via numerous intermediaries to Witkoff. In the last 24 hours, Araghchi and the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, have between them spoken to diplomats from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. All three Arab states will be feverishly exploring ways to reopen talks without Iran having to accept a preconditioned result. They were critical in persuading Trump to hold back from mounting an attack three weeks ago, but Trump now has greater flexibility of military options and seems more focused on a nuclear deal rather than punishing Iran for the bloody suppression of street protests. There is deep suspicion in Tehran about talking to the US since the two sides were in the middle of talks last June when Israel was given clearance by the US to mount an attack on Iran designed to decapitate its leadership and destroy its civil nuclear sites. Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister, urged the US to detach its wider demands about Iran’s missile programme and support for militia in the region from the nuclear file. He said he thought that if Witkoff insisted on putting all items on to the table at once, Iran would not respond. Trump has insisted that Iran abandon its domestic nuclear enrichment programme, permit UN nuclear inspectors to return and hand its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to a third party, most likely Russia. Iran has always held out against abandoning its domestic capacity to enrich uranium but has been willing to set rigid limits on its stockpile. Since the last round of negotiations ended with an Israeli and US attack killing 1,000 people and severely damaging its key nuclear sites, Iran has been weakened further by a plunging currency and rampant inflation. With the nuclear sites already damaged, the key targets in any attack would likely be Iran’s leadership. June’s attack revealed Israel had near total dominance of the skies above Iran. Almost all the Gulf states, fearful of Iranian reprisals, have said they are not willing to allow the US to use their airspace or bases to mount an attack on Iran. Iranian officials said: “We will target the same base and the same point from which air operations against us are launched, and we will not attack countries because we do not consider them to be enemy countries. We will increase our level of defence readiness against the US military buildup to the highest level. If the Americans want negotiations without pre-determined outcomes, Iran will accept it.”

Chagos Islands’ pristine ecology must be protected | Letter

Ending the pristine state of the Chagos region is arguably a greater loss of biodiversity than the extinction of the dodo, yet is often neglected in discussions of the transfer to Mauritius (What are the Chagos Islands – and why is the UK returning them to Mauritius?, 20 January). No other large tropical ecosystem on Earth has been so well protected, and its value to the science of ecology is correspondingly immense. It is not species richness or abundance that singles the Chagos out: it is the ecosystem’s near-natural functioning. Mauritian plans for fishing and other exploitation are not compatible with protection of the last great tropical wilderness area – which is currently teaching us how to repair and protect others. If politicians could vote to save the dodo, one hopes they would. Yet watching them voting for a legacy of irreversible destruction means any future claims they make regarding biodiversity conservation will ring as hollow as a dodo’s bones. Clive Hambler Lecturer in biological and human sciences, University of Oxford • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

Iran appears to ease internet blackout as cost of shutdown mounts

Iranian authorities appear to have relaxed – but not removed – internet restrictions, in what experts say is a sign of the mounting costs of the most severe internet blackout the regime has ever imposed. “There seems to be a real patchwork of connectivity. I think if most people have access, it’s some kind of degraded service,” said Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik. “It’s almost like they’re developing a content blocking system by trial and error.” On Wednesday, previously unavailable Iranian Telegram channels came back online. Data from Cloudflare and Kentik show that an uneven restoration of internet traffic to Iran began on Tuesday morning – reaching about 60% of pre-shutdown levels at one point. The pattern of this internet traffic did not follow a smooth curve, Madory said, but rather had jagged peaks, indicating authorities were likely continuing to throttle connections. A report from Filterwatch, an organisation monitoring Iran’s internet traffic, suggests that certain services, such as Google, Bing and ChatGPT, are now available to some users on a province-to-province basis, but many are unstable and many social media and messaging platforms remain unusable. Iran’s internet shutdown began on 8 January, after nearly two weeks of escalating anti-government protests. The blackout has become one of the defining features of what may be the bloodiest weeks in Iran’s recent history. It has helped obscure extreme violence against Iran’s population, with accounts of mass burials and truckloads of bodies filtering out of the country only sporadically, and often days late, through journalists, activists and a few Telegram channels. It has also likely cost Iranian authorities a great deal of money due to lost economic output, with whole sectors of the economy unable to work. Despite the regime’s efforts to whitelist certain websites and fine-tune their internet blockade, Iranian authorities have still said the shutdown has cost them up to $36m each day, according to a recent estimate by a government minister. This is on a par with previous research that has estimated the cost of various global internet blackouts to be hundreds of millions of dollars. The OECD put the cost of Egypt’s 2011 internet shutdown during the height of Tahrir protests at $90m. A report from an Iranian news outlet, confirmed by Iranian digital rights researchers, describes Iranian CEOs gathering in the dining hall of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce this week to access the internet – with all of their activity monitored by the government. Demand was so great that each businessperson was restricted to half an hour of access. One described the environment as “like an internet cafe from the 1980s or a university campus”. Two weeks ago, Iranian authorities appeared determined to continue the blackout for some time, perhaps indefinitely, with a government spokesperson reportedly saying the internet would be restricted until at least Nowruz, the Persian new year, on 20 March. Madory said authorities apppeared to be adjusting the shutdown, but not with an intention to end it. “It’s definitely not restored to pre-8 January levels,” he said. “Every day is different. Even within a day, it’s not consistent. It appears like they’re just developing this on the fly.”

Nato needs to be ‘reimagined’ with Europe showing more capabilities, says Marco Rubio – as it happened

… and on that note, it’s a wrap for today! US state secretary Marco Rubio has said that Nato “needs to be re-imagined,” saying that European allies need to rapidly increase their defence capabilities to be able to offer genuine security guarantees and reassurance even without the US backstop (17:07). Ramping up pressure on European partners, Rubio said they have “not invested enough in their own defence” over the last few decades, noting that “hopefully that is changing”. Rubio also said he was confident of getting to a “positive resolution” on Greenland, as “professional” talks get under way, away from “a media circus” to help with both sides’ flexibility in negotiations (17:10). His comments come as the Danish and Greenlandic prime ministers continue their tour of European capitals to show solidarity with the territory, visiting France’s Emmanuel Macron earlier today (12:54, 14:14, 15:51). They also come amid media reports that a Trump-allied Slovak prime minister Robert Fico was “shocked” and “worried” by Trump’s “psychological state” after meeting him in US earlier this month, a claim promptly and strongly denied by Fico himself (16:35, 16:59). In other news, The number of Russian and Ukrainian troops killed, wounded or gone missing in nearly four years of war could reach 2 million by this spring, according to a study contested by Moscow. The leaders of three Dutch political parties have agreed a new coalition deal, paving the way for a rare minority government in the Netherlands almost three months after elections that produced an upset victory for the centrist D66 party (14:34, 14:35). Hungarian prosecutors have brought charges against Budapest’s liberal mayor, Gergely Karácsony, over his role in arranging an LGBTQ+ rights rally, and are seeking to impose a fine without holding a trial. And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa, for today. If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

The arts of war: can Europe’s artists embrace the idea of ‘armed pacifism’?

One reason why art – painting, literature, film, theatre, all of it – is so important to society is that it creates spaces that can tolerate difficult answers to difficult questions. This makes art the opposite of politics, where politicians are under constant pressure to give easy answers to difficult questions. I was thinking about this distinction this month while watching the European film awards, this continent’s answer to the Oscars, which has moved its annual ceremony to January this year as it seeks to position itself as a major tastemaker for grownup cinema. One of the most gratifying wins of the night was the best documentary prize for Fiume o Morte! by the Croatian director Igor Bezinović – an Act of Killing-style re-enactment of the 1919 conquest of the Adriatic city of what is now Rijeka by a rag-tag army assembled by the proto-fascist dandy-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. It was precisely the kind of quirky cinematic gem that the European film awards should be there to champion: a film ignored by the main festivals, about an overlooked but relevant episode in history. In his acceptance speech, Bezinović thanked the non-professional actors he’d recruited in his home town of Rijeka. But since the awards ceremony was held in Berlin, he also drew attention to the fact that, last month, 55,000 students in 90 cities had taken to the streets to protest “against the militarisation of Germany and against conscription”. Bezinović said he hoped “that these protests will inspire students all over Europe”. These words were met with frenetic applause, which is understandable. Pacifism is at the core of modern European identity: we are a crowded-together collective of similar-but-different nation states, who have managed to not be at each other’s throats for an unprecedented period of time precisely because we extricated ourselves from intense militarisation. History has taught Europeans to be cautious not just of picking up guns but of being sucked into martial mindsets. They value peace prizes over war medals. The European film awards don’t celebrate stories of superheroes or military glories but tales about conflicted antiheroes, like the protagonists of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. American-style board games work with luck and conflict, while “Eurogames” run on collaboration and teamwork. And in Germany, especially, the spectre of a military-industrial complex fanning political fascism is not imagined but a fairly recent historical reality. And yet “no to militarisation” still feels like an easy answer to a difficult question. It’s difficult because the pacifist consensus that western Europe has established since the time of the cold war has relied on American security guarantees and Russian fossil fuels – two trade-offs that have started to look increasingly unwise since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and, at the very least, since President Trump’s threats of aggression against Greenland this year. All the evidence suggests that calls for European rearmament are not driven by an out-of-control yearning for former military glories, but a gradual awakening to these realities – which is why this turn is happening slowly and often reluctantly, and why Germany’s new plans fall some way short of conscription, as our Berlin correspondent Kate Connolly explored in a podcast this week. It’s understandable to feel frustrated with political leaders of the past having manoeuvred Europe into this conundrum, or with those of today remaining in the “comfort zone of cowardice and inaction”, as Nathalie Tocci wrote. But we should also ask what role we have to play in this – the kind of people on the liberal left who enjoy thoughtful European arthouse cinema, or indeed those who make it. Does being more sympathetic to the military automatically take artists down the same route as D’Annunzio, who was a revered literary figure with socialist sympathies before he tipped over into ultra-nationalism? Or can there be a middle way for culture in times of war? When I asked Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian’s chief culture writer, about this, she pointed me to the Ukrainian photojournalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov’s Bafta-nominated documentary 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a film “which is not so much ‘pro-military’ but ‘pro-soldier’, deeply empathetic towards the men who are sacrificing their lives for inches of Ukrainian soil”. In an essay published last year, the former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba argued that Europe does not have to abandon the idea of pacifism by arming itself to the teeth. Instead, to survive it might have to embrace the idea of being an “armed pacifist”. It’s the kind of paradoxical image you would usually expect from artists, not politicians. • To receive the complete version of This Is Europe in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.

Imran Khan’s health in ‘grave danger’ after eye blockage diagnosis, party says

Pakistan’s incarcerated former prime minister Imran Khan is facing severe eye damage and is being denied proper access to medical treatment while in solitary confinement, officials from his political party say. Khan, 73, considered Pakistan’s most high-profile political prisoner, has been in jail since August 2023. He is serving sentences for corruption and leaking state secrets, which he has claimed are part of a state-sponsored campaign to keep him out of power. Khan has largely been kept in solitary confinement, according to his lawyers and party leaders, who said they have been denied access to him for the past three months. According to a statement by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Khan’s party, their fears for his health worsened after reports the former prime minister had been diagnosed with a dangerous blockage in the retinal vein in his right eye, known as a central retinal vein occlusion. If left untreated, the condition can cause permanent damage to eyesight. “According to medical experts who reportedly checked him in jail, this is an extremely sensitive and serious medical condition which, if not treated promptly and properly, carries a high risk of permanent damage to his eyesight,” the PTI said. Khan reportedly already has blurred vision because of the condition. The party said the prison authorities had not allowed his personal doctor to examine him for months, which they said was “reckless” and putting Khan’s health in “grave danger”. For the past three months, lawyers and senior party figures as well as Khan’s sisters, have been protesting over their lack of access to Khan in Adiala prison. Their demonstrations have been met with teargas and water cannon. A court order stated Khan should be allowed visits by family and lawyers twice a week. However, he last met his lawyers 100 days ago and a legal petition by his party leaders to get access to him in prison was rejected this week. Gohar Ali Khan, a barrister and PTI chair, said the party had significant concerns about Khan’s health and his conditions in prison. “Despite the court orders, we could not meet Khan,” he said. “He is incommunicado and in solitary confinement, which is against his fundamental rights. After the reports on Khan’s health, we and his physicians should be given immediate access.” After concerns over his condition late last year, Khan was allowed to briefly meet his sisters in early December, who reported that his health was fine. “Presently, we don’t know anything about the condition of his eye as we are not allowed to meet him,” said his sister Uzma Khanum, speaking on Wednesday as she took part in a sit-in outside the jail to demand access to her brother. Khan served as prime minister between 2018 and 2022 before he was toppled in a vote of no confidence after he fell out with the powerful military establishment. He was arrested in August 2023 on more than 100 charges he claimed were made up by the military and government in order to disqualify him from politics. Khan was first sentenced to three years for “selling state gifts”, and in January 2025 was sentenced to a further 14 years in prison on corruption charges. His wife, Bushra Bib, was sentenced to seven years in the same case and remains in jail.