PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that the United States was “breaking free from international rules” and “gradually turning away” from some of its allies.
Macron delivered his annual speech to French ambassadors at the Elysee Palace as European powers scrambling to come up with a coordinated response to US assertive foreign policy in the Western hemisphere following Washington’s capture of Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro and Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland.
“The United States is an established power, but one that is gradually turning away from some of its allies and breaking free from international rules that it was still promoting recently,” Macron told ambassadors at the Elysee Palace.
“Multilateral institutions are functioning less and less effectively,” Macron added. “We are living in a world of great powers with a real temptation to divide up the world.”
Macron said Europe must protect its interests and urged the “consolidation” of European regulation of the tech sector.
He stressed the importance of safeguarding academic independence and hailed “the possibility of having a controlled information space where opinions can be exchanged completely freely, but where choices are not made by the algorithms of a few.”
Brussels has adopted a powerful legal arsenal aimed at reining in tech giants — namely through its Digital Markets Act (DMA) which covers competition and the Digital Services Act (DSA) on content moderation.
Washington has denounced the tech rules as an attempt to “coerce” American social media platforms into censoring viewpoints they oppose.
“The DSA and DMA are two regulations that must be defended,” Macron said.
Macron accuses US of ‘turning away’ from allies
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Macron accuses US of ‘turning away’ from allies
- The United States is “breaking free from international rules that it was still promoting recently,” Macron told ambassadors
- He said Europe must protect its interests and urged the “consolidation” of European regulation of the tech sector
Sequestered Suu Kyi overshadows military-run Myanmar election
- Suu Kyi’s reputation abroad has been heavily tarnished over her government’s handling of the Rohingya crisis
YANGON: Ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been siloed in military detention since a 2021 coup, but her absence looms large over junta-run polls the generals are touting as a return to democracy.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was once the darling of foreign diplomats, with legions of supporters at home and a reputation for redeeming Myanmar from a history of iron-fisted martial rule.
Her followers swept a landslide victory in Myanmar’s last elections in 2020 but the military voided the vote, dissolved her National League for Democracy party and has jailed her in total seclusion.
As she disappeared and a decade-long democratic experiment was halted, activists rose up — first as street protesters and then as guerrilla rebels battling the military in an all-consuming civil war.
Suu Kyi’s reputation abroad has been heavily tarnished over her government’s handling of the Rohingya crisis.
But for her many followers in Myanmar, her name is still a byword for democracy, and her absence on the ballot, an indictment it will be neither free nor fair.
The octogenarian — known in Myanmar as “The Lady” and famed for wearing flowers in her hair — remains under lock and key as her junta jailers hold polls overwriting her 2020 victory. The second of the three-phase election began Sunday, with Suu Kyi’s constituency of Kawhmu outside Yangon being contested by parties cleared to run in the heavily restricted poll.
Suu Kyi has spent around two decades of her life in military detention — but in a striking contradiction, she is the daughter of the founder of Myanmar’s armed forces.
She was born on June 19, 1945, in Japanese-occupied Yangon during the final weeks of WWII.
Her father, Aung San, fought for and against both the British and the Japanese colonizers as he sought to secure independence for his country.
