PARIS: The last time French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Donald Trump in France, it turned into a diplomatic fiasco which underlined how once warm relations between the men had chilled to the point of freezing.
As the two men prepare to hold talks on Thursday on the sidelines of D-Day commemorations, Macron and French diplomats are hoping for a smoother run.
Trump’s trip in November last year for the 100-year anniversary of the end of World War I culminated in a hail of bad-tempered tweeting caused by the US president’s bruised ego, a French diplomat told AFP.
During a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe, with Trump seated among 70 leaders in the French capital, Macron delivered a speech that included an open rebuke of his brand of “America First” nationalism.
“Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” the 41-year-old centrist French leader said in a 20-minute address that also criticized “saying our interests come first and others don’t matter.”
The diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the US real estate mogul had been angered by those lines and was also frustrated when a planned trip to an American military cemetery by helicopter was canceled due to bad weather.
“There was also the sense that he came and he was one among other leaders and not THE leader who would make the big speech,” the diplomat explained. “It was a difficult period to manage.”
Two days after leaving the French capital, Trump let his fury known, mocking Macron for his “very low approval ratings” and writing how the French “were starting to learn German in Paris before the US came along” in World War II.
The US role in liberating France will be commemorated on Thursday by Trump and Macron on the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings when 150,000 Allied troops began an invasion of Nazi-ruled France.
The two leaders will meet at the Colleville-sur-Mer American cemetery in northern France and then sit down for a working lunch in the town of Caen.
Their wives Melania and Brigitte, who have reportedly struck up a warm relationship, are to lunch together separately.
The French diplomat said that after the open hostilities in November, Macron and Trump had held several phone calls during which they rebuilt a relationship that had started surprisingly well after Macron’s election in 2017.
The US president was made a guest of honor of France’s National Day in July of that year and the two men referred to each other as “friends” and repeatedly patted each other on the back. The visit ended with a 25-second-long handshake.
“The relationship is still warm and direct,” the diplomat said. “Our approach has stayed the same: we continue to try to persuade and at the same time to cushion the impact when we haven’t succeeded.”
The problem for Macron is that his successes in persuading Trump and changing his thinking are few and far between, while the policy disagreements and gap between their visions of the world are becoming ever more glaring.
“Macron is not shy about saying the problem in the world is the populist nationalist movement,” Trump’s one-time adviser and campaign manager Steve Bannon told AFP in a recent interview.
“Macron is always looking to take a shot at the nationalists and I think sometimes he’s done it in inappropriate situations,” he added, saying that Trump in his view had been “very magnanimous” given the criticism.
He also recalled Macron’s speech to the US Congress in Washington in April last year, which he said included “several nasty lines” about the dangers of nationalism and isolationism.
The French leader, sometimes described as an “anti-Trump” on the world stage, has been a vocal critic of unilateral US decisions to pull out of the 2015 deal governing Iran’s nuclear program and the Paris climate accord.
On Monday, he again condemned Trump’s trade policies, which have led to tariffs on European steel and aluminum imports and a growing trade war with China.
“With the US, we have discussions because they decide to put tariffs with unreasonable scenarios and argumentation,” Macron told global bankers in Paris in comments delivered in English.
Macron also knows that being critical of the American president plays well domestically in France where Trump is widely unpopular.
A poll by the YouGov survey group released on Wednesday showed that only 17 percent of French people had a positive view of the former reality TV star.
And only 24 percent thought Macron should take a more cooperative approach with him.
“With every American administration, there are things we disagree on, different interests, but we express ourselves clearly,” a second French diplomatic source said.
A sign of how far the Trump-Macron relationship has turned comes from the front garden of the White House.
When Macron visited for a state visit in April 2018, still hoping to persuade Trump to respect the Iran nuclear deal and drop tariffs on European steel imports, the two leaders planted an oak tree together.
The sapling, taken from a battlefield in France where US soldiers had fought in World War I, has since withered and died, Le Monde newspaper reported Wednesday.
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Macron and Trump: ‘frenemies’ in open disagreement
Macron and Trump: ‘frenemies’ in open disagreement
- The two leaders will meet at the Colleville-sur-Mer American cemetery in northern France and then sit down for a working lunch in the town of Caen
- Macron and Trump had held several phone calls during which they rebuilt a relationship that had started surprisingly well after Macron’s election in 2017
Karachi mall inferno came after ignored warnings, delayed response
KARACHI: Muhammad Imran did not take the fire seriously at first, thinking it was another small spark at the Karachi mall that would be quickly extinguished by fellow shop owners.
But smoke seeped through ducts and blackened the air in seconds. The lights went out soon after and phone flashlights turned useless, people could no longer see their own hands, he said.
Imran, who has diabetes and has undergone heart surgery, managed only a few steps before nearly giving up. “It felt like doomsday,” he said. “You couldn’t see the person next to you.”
The blaze would rage for nearly two days and reduce Gul Plaza, a multi-story complex of 1,200 family-run shops selling children’s clothes, toys, crockery and household goods, to ash.
At least 67 people were killed, with 15 still missing and feared dead, police official Asad Ali Raza said, in the January 17 blaze, the Pakistani port city’s largest in over a decade.
Imran’s escape from the inferno, along with more than a dozen others who spoke to Reuters, was hampered by locked doors, poor ventilation, and crowded corridors. When they eventually got out, the survivors watched Gul Plaza crumble as rescue efforts faced delays and poor resources.
Police said the fire appeared to have started at an artificial flower shop and may have been caused by children playing with matches. They added that all but three of the 16 exits were locked, which was routine practice after 10 p.m.
Documents reviewed by Reuters showed Gul Plaza, located on a major artery in Karachi’s historic city center and built in the early 1980s, had violated building regulatory standards for over a decade, with authorities warning the situation was dire in the last review two years ago.
Gul Plaza’s management did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
LONG PAPER TRAIL
Records from the provincial Sindh Building Control Authority showed court cases filed over Gul Plaza’s lack of safety compliance in 1992, 2015 and 2021, as well as records of unauthorized construction.
The files reviewed by Reuters do not detail the outcomes of those cases, including whether fines were imposed or whether violations were fully remedied. SBCA did not respond to queries on enforcement action taken.
A Nov. 27, 2023, survey by the fire department, covering more than 40 commercial buildings in the area, cited inadequate firefighting equipment, blocked escape routes, faulty alarms, poor emergency lighting and a lack of fire safety training for occupants and staff.
A follow-up audit by the fire department in January 2024 placed Gul Plaza among buildings that failed to meet regulations, with inspectors marking key safety categories, including access to firefighting equipment, alarm systems and electrical wiring conditions, as “unsatisfactory.”
Separately, documents describing inspections by Karachi’s Urban Search and Rescue teams in late 2023 and early 2024 that were reviewed by Reuters also showed Gul Plaza was among several markets and commercial buildings flagged for deficiencies in one or more fire safety categories.
’PEOPLE WERE PANICKING’
“Young boys were crying. People were panicking,” Imran said, when they were confronted by locked exits.
Others smashed doors and locks as they moved through the darkness, holding hands and forming human chains to avoid getting lost.
With no way down, they ran to the roof, where 70 people, including families and children, were trapped for nearly an hour, survivors said. The smoke was even worse there, funnelled upward by the building’s design, making it impossible to see even the neighboring buildings.
Then the wind changed.
A sudden gust pushed the smoke aside, revealing Rimpa Plaza next door. Young men crossed first, found a broken ladder and began ferrying people across one by one.
“I was the last to leave. I wanted to make sure everyone was safe,” Imran said. An ambulance from the Edhi Foundation charity was waiting on the other side.
WATCHED IT BURN
Many survivors said the response by the fire brigade was delayed and inadequate. Imran and other shop owners said they had escaped from the building and watched Gul Plaza turn into a molten inferno as the first firefighters arrived.
The first emergency call came at 10:26 p.m. from a teenager, with two fire vehicles reaching the site within 10 minutes and classifying the blaze as a Grade 3 fire, “the highest category for an urban area,” said a provincial government spokesperson Sukhdev Assardas Hemnani.
A citywide emergency was declared by 10:45 p.m., triggering the mobilization of resources from across Karachi, he said.
Shopkeepers said the first engine soon ran out of water and left to refill but Hemnani said those allegations were inaccurate.
Firefighters used “water, foam, chemicals and sand,” he said, adding the blaze was difficult to control because the building contained more than 50 gas cylinders and flammable material such as perfumes, generator fuel and car batteries.
Many of the shops were stocked to the brim because of the holy month of Ramadan in February-March, Pakistan’s biggest shopping season.
The first fire truck was not delayed, Hemnani said, but later arrivals were slowed by heavy traffic on a busy Saturday night and a crowd of over 3,000 people that had gathered outside the mall.
The fire department did not respond to requests for comment.
’NO LONGER AMONG US’
Survivors said many of the missing were shop employees and traders who tried to help others escape — or went back inside looking for family members.
Abdul Ghaffar, a toy store employee who had worked in Gul Plaza for two decades, said one of his cousins was among those still unaccounted for after helping others flee.
His cousin’s mobile phone voice message, in which he can be heard apologizing to his family, was circulated widely on social media.
“He was helping people escape,” Ghaffar said. “That’s how he died.” Three other relatives remain missing, he said, with the family still waiting for identification through DNA testing.
Several shopkeepers said the losses have scarred the market’s tightly knit community.
“All of this keeps replaying in front of my eyes. People we saw daily are no longer among us. God was kind to us — our lives were saved — but I still cannot understand what kind of fire this was,” said Imran.
But smoke seeped through ducts and blackened the air in seconds. The lights went out soon after and phone flashlights turned useless, people could no longer see their own hands, he said.
Imran, who has diabetes and has undergone heart surgery, managed only a few steps before nearly giving up. “It felt like doomsday,” he said. “You couldn’t see the person next to you.”
The blaze would rage for nearly two days and reduce Gul Plaza, a multi-story complex of 1,200 family-run shops selling children’s clothes, toys, crockery and household goods, to ash.
At least 67 people were killed, with 15 still missing and feared dead, police official Asad Ali Raza said, in the January 17 blaze, the Pakistani port city’s largest in over a decade.
Imran’s escape from the inferno, along with more than a dozen others who spoke to Reuters, was hampered by locked doors, poor ventilation, and crowded corridors. When they eventually got out, the survivors watched Gul Plaza crumble as rescue efforts faced delays and poor resources.
Police said the fire appeared to have started at an artificial flower shop and may have been caused by children playing with matches. They added that all but three of the 16 exits were locked, which was routine practice after 10 p.m.
Documents reviewed by Reuters showed Gul Plaza, located on a major artery in Karachi’s historic city center and built in the early 1980s, had violated building regulatory standards for over a decade, with authorities warning the situation was dire in the last review two years ago.
Gul Plaza’s management did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
LONG PAPER TRAIL
Records from the provincial Sindh Building Control Authority showed court cases filed over Gul Plaza’s lack of safety compliance in 1992, 2015 and 2021, as well as records of unauthorized construction.
The files reviewed by Reuters do not detail the outcomes of those cases, including whether fines were imposed or whether violations were fully remedied. SBCA did not respond to queries on enforcement action taken.
A Nov. 27, 2023, survey by the fire department, covering more than 40 commercial buildings in the area, cited inadequate firefighting equipment, blocked escape routes, faulty alarms, poor emergency lighting and a lack of fire safety training for occupants and staff.
A follow-up audit by the fire department in January 2024 placed Gul Plaza among buildings that failed to meet regulations, with inspectors marking key safety categories, including access to firefighting equipment, alarm systems and electrical wiring conditions, as “unsatisfactory.”
Separately, documents describing inspections by Karachi’s Urban Search and Rescue teams in late 2023 and early 2024 that were reviewed by Reuters also showed Gul Plaza was among several markets and commercial buildings flagged for deficiencies in one or more fire safety categories.
’PEOPLE WERE PANICKING’
“Young boys were crying. People were panicking,” Imran said, when they were confronted by locked exits.
Others smashed doors and locks as they moved through the darkness, holding hands and forming human chains to avoid getting lost.
With no way down, they ran to the roof, where 70 people, including families and children, were trapped for nearly an hour, survivors said. The smoke was even worse there, funnelled upward by the building’s design, making it impossible to see even the neighboring buildings.
Then the wind changed.
A sudden gust pushed the smoke aside, revealing Rimpa Plaza next door. Young men crossed first, found a broken ladder and began ferrying people across one by one.
“I was the last to leave. I wanted to make sure everyone was safe,” Imran said. An ambulance from the Edhi Foundation charity was waiting on the other side.
WATCHED IT BURN
Many survivors said the response by the fire brigade was delayed and inadequate. Imran and other shop owners said they had escaped from the building and watched Gul Plaza turn into a molten inferno as the first firefighters arrived.
The first emergency call came at 10:26 p.m. from a teenager, with two fire vehicles reaching the site within 10 minutes and classifying the blaze as a Grade 3 fire, “the highest category for an urban area,” said a provincial government spokesperson Sukhdev Assardas Hemnani.
A citywide emergency was declared by 10:45 p.m., triggering the mobilization of resources from across Karachi, he said.
Shopkeepers said the first engine soon ran out of water and left to refill but Hemnani said those allegations were inaccurate.
Firefighters used “water, foam, chemicals and sand,” he said, adding the blaze was difficult to control because the building contained more than 50 gas cylinders and flammable material such as perfumes, generator fuel and car batteries.
Many of the shops were stocked to the brim because of the holy month of Ramadan in February-March, Pakistan’s biggest shopping season.
The first fire truck was not delayed, Hemnani said, but later arrivals were slowed by heavy traffic on a busy Saturday night and a crowd of over 3,000 people that had gathered outside the mall.
The fire department did not respond to requests for comment.
’NO LONGER AMONG US’
Survivors said many of the missing were shop employees and traders who tried to help others escape — or went back inside looking for family members.
Abdul Ghaffar, a toy store employee who had worked in Gul Plaza for two decades, said one of his cousins was among those still unaccounted for after helping others flee.
His cousin’s mobile phone voice message, in which he can be heard apologizing to his family, was circulated widely on social media.
“He was helping people escape,” Ghaffar said. “That’s how he died.” Three other relatives remain missing, he said, with the family still waiting for identification through DNA testing.
Several shopkeepers said the losses have scarred the market’s tightly knit community.
“All of this keeps replaying in front of my eyes. People we saw daily are no longer among us. God was kind to us — our lives were saved — but I still cannot understand what kind of fire this was,” said Imran.
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