French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire will meet retailers and insurers on Monday to assess the economic impact of nationwide protests against rising fuel costs, he said on Sunday.

Protesters clad in fluorescent jackets, dubbed “yellow vests,” have blocked highways across France since Nov. 17, setting up burning barricades and deploying convoys of slow-moving trucks, often denying access to shopping centers and some factories.

French retailers have warned that prolonged protests could hit the Christmas shopping season and threaten jobs, while President Emmanuel Macron has shown no sign of backing down on taxes introduced last year on diesel and petrol to encourage people to switch to cleaner forms of transport.

The unrest reached new heights in Paris on Saturday, when police clashed violently with thousands of demonstrators on the Champs-Elysees.

“Tomorrow I will bring together at the Economy and Finance Ministry representatives from retailers, merchants, craftsmen, chambers of commerce and employers federation Medef to assess the economic situation, its impact on sales and on our economy and the consequences we must draw,” Le Maire told BFM TV.

Police detained 101 people in Paris and there 24 people were injured in the clashes on the Champs Elysees.

“I saw a violence that is not acceptable. It is urgent to rebuild the nation’s unity and restart a dialogue,” Le Maire said.

Some yellow vests have called for a third weekend of protests on the Champs Elysees via a Facebook page called “Act 3 Macron resigns!”
…

It took Britain’s Theresa May and 27 other European Union leaders just 40 minutes to sign the Brexit deal after two years of tortuous negotiations, but the trials and tribulations of Britain’s withdrawal agreement approved Sunday in Brussels are far from over.

As they endorsed the 585-page the agreement, and a 26-page accompanying political declaration that sets out the parameters of negotiating a possible free trade deal between Britain and the European Union, powerful political foes in London plotted strategies to undo it.

There is little evidence Britain’s embattled prime minister will have sufficient support to win legislative endorsement of the deal in a House of Commons vote next month. That was clearly on the minds of European Commission officials Sunday as EU leaders gave their backing to the terms of Britain’s split from Brussels after 44 years of membership.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker warned that Britain cannot expect to get a better deal, if its parliament rejects the agreement. “Now it is time for everybody to take their responsibilities, everybody,” he said.

“This is the deal, it’s the best deal possible and the EU will not change its fundamental position when it comes to this issue, so I do think the British parliament — because this is a wise parliament — will ratify this deal,” he added.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte warned British lawmakers that no better deal was on offer from the European Union, urging them to back the agreements.

“If I would live in the UK I would say yes to this, I would say that this is very much acceptable to the United Kingdom,” Rutte said, because the deal “limited the impact of Brexit while balancing the vote to leave”. In a bid to help the prime minister, he said May had “fought very hard” and now there was “an acceptable deal on the table”.

“You know I hate [Brexit], but it is a given,” he told reporters. “No one is a victor here today, nobody is winning, we are all losing.”

Opposition in Britain

Maybe it is a “given” in Brussels, but in Britain that is another matter altogether.

Both Remainers and Leavers in the British Parliament are warning that May doesn’t have the necessary support with the all the opposition parties lined up against the deal and as many as 100 lawmakers, Remainers and Leavers among them, from May’s ruling Conservatives pledging to vote against it as well.

Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative leader, said he would continue to oppose the deal because it “cedes huge amounts of power” to the European Union.

In Scotland, first minister and leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party Nicola Sturgeon said, “This is a bad deal, driven by the PM’s self defeating red lines and continual pandering to the right of her own party. Parliament should reject it and back a better alternative.”

She wants a second Britain-wide referendum, like a majority of Britons, according to recent opinion polls.

The agreement calls for Britain to stay in the bloc’s customs union and largely in the EU single market, without the power to influence the rules, regulations and laws it will be obliged to obey for a 21-month-long transition period following formal withdrawal on March 29. The deal would allow an extension of “up to one or two years” should the negotiations over “the future relationship” not be completed by the end of 2020.

May is campaigning to sell the agreement to the British public, hoping she she can build enough support in the wider country to pressure the House of Commons to endorse the deal. European Parliament approval is almost certain.

May’s warning

In an open letter to the British public published Sunday, May promised to campaign “with my heart and soul to win that vote and to deliver this Brexit deal.” If she is unable to do so, Britain would be plunged into what May herself has called, “deep and grave uncertainty.”

Her aides say she is banking on the “fear factor,” daring the House of Commons to vote down a deal which if rejected would leave Britain most likely crashing out of the bloc, its largest trading partner, without any agreements, which would be costly economically and would almost certainly push the country into recession.

Ominously, the Northern Ireland party, the Democratic Unionist Party, whose 10 lawmakers May’s minority government relies on to remain in power, says it will vote against the deal. And DUP leader Arlene Foster warned Sunday she is ready to collapse the government to block a deal that would see Northern Ireland treated differently than the rest of Britain.

And a senior Labour lawmaker Tony Lloyd said there was a “coalition of the willing” in the Parliament ready to reject May’s deal and support a softer Brexit. So, if the deal is voted down, what then? A vote against could trigger a general election, a second Brexit referendum or even more negotiations, despite Brussels’ threat there can be no other deal.

 
…

Tens of thousands of Romanians gathered Sunday for the blessing of a grandiose Orthodox cathedral consecrated to mark 100 years since modern-day Romania was created in the aftermath of World War I.

Believers from all over the country and beyond stood outside the “Salvation of the People” cathedral to watch the service transmitted on giant screens on a misty morning in the capital.

The Ecumenical Istanbul-based patriarch Bartholomew I and Romanian Patriarch Daniel led the service, broadcast live on television, joined by 100 priests dressed in white and gold cassocks.

The 120-meter (394-feet) high cathedral towers over a giant palace nearby built by late Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu. Six bells rang out after the blessing.

The church says the unfinished building has cost 110 million euros ($125 million), three-quarters of which was public money. Critics say the money would have been better spent on churches and hospitals. The state pays priests’ salaries and for church building maintenance.

Some 86 percent of Romanians are believers in the Orthodox church, which enjoyed a revival after communism ended in 1989. But its popularity has declined in recent years, particularly in cities.

Builder Constantin Dumitrescu, 47, an Orthodox believer, said he believed the cathedral was “a much too big investment for a poor country.”

Building work began on the neo-Byzantine structure in 2010. It was voted Romania’s most kitsch architectural structure in Romania in a 2017 online survey.

The cathedral aims to “honor Romanian heroes of all times.” Romania’s King Carol I passed a law for the cathedral to be built in 1884, but two world wars and decades of communism meant it never happened.

A group of ethnic Romanians from Ukraine dressed in colorful popular costume also attended the event.

“This is our faith, our soul,” said Elena Nandris, mayor of the southern Ukrainian village of Mahala, with tears in her eyes. “This is a once in a lifetime event.”
…

A U.S.-owned broadcaster said it was the target of attempted intimidation by Polish authorities, describing how security agents appeared at the home of a cameraman who went undercover to film neo-Nazis and told him he must appear for questioning on suspicion of propagating fascism.

TVN, owned by Discovery, broadcast undercover footage in January that showed members of a Polish neo-Nazi group celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday in a forest in 2017.

It said that on Friday evening, agents with Poland’s Internal Security Agency visited the home of the cameraman who had gone undercover, Piotr Wacowski, and gave him the summons to appear in the investigation.

TVN said Saturday that its journalists have “acted in accordance with all standards of investigative journalism” and that it considers the state action “an attempt to intimidate journalists.”

The move against Wacowski comes amid rising concerns about the state of media freedom in Poland, where the populist ruling party has turned tax-funded public media into a propaganda tool and is looking for a way to limit foreign ownership of media companies. TVN has been critical of the government and is seen as particularly vulnerable.

The ruling party, Law and Justice, has faced international condemnation for a string of moves seen as un-democratic – from a Holocaust speech law passed this year seen as an attack on freedom of speech and academic inquiry, to attempts to take control of the courts.

The party has also been making conciliatory moves toward extremist rightwing groups. On the Nov. 11 Independence Day holiday, top officials marched in Warsaw with far-right groups. Government officials have also publicly attacked independent monitors of xenophobia who have noted a rise of hate speech over the past year.

Rafal Pankowski, the head of the Never Again association, which monitors extremism, expressed his concerns about the investigation into the reporter.

“It’s an example of a breakdown in democratic standards. On November 11, the highest level officials marched together with right wing extremists in Warsaw, now state institutions harass a journalist involved in exposing the problem of right wing extremism,” Pankowski told The Associated Press on Sunday. “It’s a clear case of shooting the messenger and really worrying.”

TVN was bought for $2 billion by the U.S. company Scripps Networks Interactive, making it the largest U.S. investment ever in Poland. Scripps has since been bought by Discovery, Inc., which is based in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Last year, Poland’s media regulator slapped TVN with a fine of nearly 1.5 million zlotys ($395,000 at today’s exchange rate) for what it alleged to biased overage of anti-government protests, a move some saw as an attack on media freedom. The regulator called it a “warning” to commercial TV stations, though in the end the fine was rescinded.

The U.S. Ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, warned Polish authorities last week that any attempt to restrict media freedom would harm the U.S.-Polish relationship.
…

French police clashed with demonstrators across the country for an eighth straight day Saturday as thousands protested rising fuel costs.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said more than 100,000 protesters took to the streets nationwide, with 8,000 on the famed Champ-Elysees boulevard of Paris. There were 130 arrests across the country.

Paris police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters who had built barricades and torn down traffic lights and street signs, evoking scenes reminiscent of the city’s 1968 civil unrest.

“Shame on those who attacked (police),” French President Emmanuel Macron posted on Twitter. “Shame on those who were violent against other citizens. … No place for this violence in the Republic.”

The French news agency AFP reports that some protesters commandeered highway toll booths, either allowing free passage or creating “go-slow” vehicle processions. The tactic was meant to bring attention to the demonstrators’ core complaint of escalating taxes on car fuel, especially diesel.

The diesel fuel tax has gone up nearly 8 cents per liter, and Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne says it will continue to climb in the coming years. The gasoline tax is set to rise, too. Gasoline currently costs $1.85 a liter, slightly more than diesel.

Macron insists the fuel taxes are needed to reduce France’s dependence on fossil fuels and to fund renewable energy investments. Next week, the president is scheduled to reveal new plans to make the “energy transition” easier.
…

So versatile were Leonardo da Vinci’s talents in art and science and so boundless his visionary imagination, he is known to the world as the universal genius.

But not to Italy’s nationalist-tilting government, which is livid about plans by the Louvre museum in Paris for a blockbuster exhibit next year with as many as possible Leonardo masterpieces loaned from Italian museums to mark the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance artist’s death.

“It’s unfair, a mistaken deal,” Italian Culture Ministry Undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni said of a 2017 agreement between a previous government and the Louvre. “Leonardo is an Italian genius,” she told The Associated Press this week.

Borgonzoni is a senator from the League, the “Italians-first” sovereignty-championing party in the nearly six-month-old populist government.

She was elaborating on comments earlier this month, in Italian daily Corriere della Sera, in which she said of Leonardo: “In France, all he did was die.”

Leonardo was born in 1452 in the Tuscan town of Vinci, Italy, and died in Amboise, France, in 1519.

Borgonzoni criticized how as part of the 2017 arrangement, Italy also pledged to program its own exhibits so they won’t compete with the Louvre mega-show.

The Louvre declined to comment on Italy’s objections, nor say which artworks it requested from Italy, noting it’s nearly a year before the four-months-long exhibit opens on Oct. 24, 2019.

Exhibit curator, Vincent Delieuvin, part of the Louvre’s staff, also serves on the Italian Culture Ministry’s committee which evaluated proposals from museums worldwide for the celebrations. He didn’t reply to an emailed request for comment.

“While respecting the autonomy of museums, national interests can’t be put in second place,” Borgonzoni told Corriere. “The French can’t have everything.”

And it appears they won’t get all they want.

The Uffizi Galleries in Florence is considering loaning the Louvre several Leonardo drawings. But director Eike D. Schmidt said his museum is nixing the Louvre’s request for its stellar trio of Leonardo paintings because “simply, these works are so extremely fragile. No museum in the world would ever lend them.”

Last summer, when the three Leonardos were moved one flight up in the Uffizi so they would have a room all to themselves, the transfer required preparations “like it was an expedition to Mount Everest, or a space trip to the Moon,” with restoration experts on hand just in case anything got damaged, Schmidt said in a phone interview.

One of the three paintings, “Adoration of the Magi,” only came back to the Uffizi last year, after five years of restoration work in Florence.

In 2007, when “Annunciation,” a painting on wood by a 20-year-old Leonardo depicting the Archangel Gabriel proffering a lily to the Virgin, was about to leave the Uffizi for a Tokyo exhibition, a senator from the conservative Forza Italia (Let’s Go Italy) party and several Florentines chained themselves to a museum gate in a vain attempt to thwart the precious masterpiece from being flown to Japan.

The Uffizi director at the time opposed that loan, but the then-culture minister decided that the painting’s transfer as good for Italy.

For the 2019 celebrations, the Uffizi will loan an early Leonardo work, “Landscape Drawing for Santa Maria Della Neve,” to the Leonardiano Museum in Vinci. Depicting the countryside near Vinci, the drawing is displayed only for a few weeks every four years because of fears prolonged exposure to light will damage it.

Schmidt sounded hopeful the Louvre would understand the Uffizi’s refusal.

“We fully understand why the ‘Mona Lisa’ cannot travel,” he said, referring to the Louvre’s star Leonardo painting.

But while the Louvre won’t ever let the portrait of the woman with the fascinating smile leave its confines, it did send two other Leonardo paintings to Milan for an exhibition during the 2015 Expo in that northern Italian city. In all, the Louvre has five of his paintings, the most of any one museum.

Anniversary committee head Paolo Galluzzi, who directs the Galileo Museum in Florence, insisted that nationalism wasn’t a factor in evaluating anniversary proposals.

“Many could claim him. He was born in Vinci, trained in Florence, and developed in Milan,” Galluzzi said by telephone. “Politicians have different optics,” but in the “world of culture and science we don’t bother with these things.”

Ultimately, he said, what is being celebrated next year is a “universal genius.”
…

European Council President Donald Tusk and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez agreed to a deal Saturday on the future of Gibraltar, removing a key obstacle one day before a European Union meeting intended to endorse the Brexit deal.

 

Spain had demanded changes to the agreement and an accompanying declaration on a new EU-Britain relationship to clarify that the future of Gibraltar, which was ceded to Britain in 1713 but still is claimed by Spain, be decided in direct talks between Madrid and London.

Sanchez had warned he could boycott the summit if London and EU member states did not confirm his country’s right to a veto over any future accord involving Gibraltar.

The deal was reached after British and Spanish negotiators talked through the night with EU officials.

Sanchez said the deal “is going to allow us to have direct negotiations with the U.K. regarding Gibraltar” and added Spain would vote in favor of Brexit.

EU head Jean-Claude Juncker said after meeting with Sanchez that solidarity and dialogue were “the European way of finding solutions.”

Spain does not currently have veto power on the Brexit agreement, which does not have to be approved unanimously, but it would prevent any free-trade deal between Britain and the European Union, which would require the approval of all 27 EU member states.

 

The Brexit package is also facing strong opposition in the British parliament, which must vote in favor for it to take effect. Otherwise, Britain would leave the bloc on March 29, 2019, without an agreement to mitigate economic disruption.

As negotiators from EU member nations attended a pre-summit meeting in Brussels Saturday, British Prime Minister Theresa May was scheduled to discuss the disputed British territory with Juncker and Tusk.

May warned on a radio talk show Friday a rejection of the deal would create “more uncertainty and more division” and even result in Britain leaving the bloc without an agreement.

“If this deal doesn’t go through, what happens is we end up back at square one,” May said.

Former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called Saturday for the appointment of a minister to oversee preparations for a “no-deal” British exit from the EU.

“It is very important that we show we are negotiating with confidence and conviction and we have a new secretary of state with powers …to make things happen and get this country ready if we have to go out on WTO (World Trade Organization) terms.”

EU diplomats were hopeful a draft of the clause would be approved by late Friday. And they were concerned Sanchez would want to discuss the issue with top-level officials on Sunday in an attempt to show determination and to curry favor with voters before December’s regional election.

The clause is seen by some experts as a major opportunity for Spain, one of whom is Ignacio Molina of the Elcano Royal Institute, a Madrid-based research organization.

“Madrid saw Brexit as an opportunity to reconfigure the status of the territory which is administered by the United Kingdom,” Molina wrote on the Agenda Publica’s website.

Molina wrote that Spain could go “all-out” and raise the issue of sovereignty or take a more modest approach to “resolve concrete problems in the areas of regulation, tax and cross-border freedom of movement.”
…

A prominent Saudi royal said Saturday that whether or not heads of state gathered in Argentina next week for the Group of 20 summit warmly engage with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he is someone “that they have to deal with.”

Prince Turki al-Faisal told The Associated Press the killing of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul last month is “an unacceptable incident that tars and mars the long record of Saudi Arabia’s own standing in the world.”

“We will have to bear that. It’s not something that should not be faced. And we do face it,” he said.

Intelligence officials and analysts say the operation to kill Khashoggi, who wrote critically of the crown prince for The Washington Post, could not have happened without Prince Mohammed’s knowledge. The kingdom, which has offered several conflicting accounts of the killing, denies the crown prince had any involvement.

The crown prince embarked late Thursday on his first foreign tour since the Oct. 2 killing with a visit to the United Arab Emirates. He’s expected to visit other Mideast countries before going to Buenos Aires Nov. 30 for the start of the two-day G-20 summit, where he’ll come face to face with world leaders.

President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has kept international pressure mounting on the kingdom, are among those expected to attend.

“Whether the leaders in that summit will warmly engage with the crown prince or not, I think all of them recognize that the kingdom as a country and King Salman and the crown prince are people that they have to deal with,” the prince said.

He said Saudi Arabia will continue to play a role on the world stage and that Trump’s statement of support for Saudi Arabia recognizes the importance of the kingdom.

Trump insists there’s not enough evidence to blame the crown prince for Khashoggi’s killing, despite a U.S. intelligence report’s assessment to the contrary. Trump says the kingdom is an important ally that has helped to lower oil prices.

“I thought President Trump was expressing what he felt was in the interest of the United States. He emphasized the strategic relationship between the two countries in the same statement and how Saudi Arabia has been helpful in many instances — not just oil,” said Prince Turki.

The prince also firmly dismissed the U.S. intelligence assessments that the crown prince had ordered Khashoggi’s killing, saying these same intelligence bodies had a “remarkably flawed assessment” in 2003 in the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“So we don’t take it as being, as I said, divine revelation,” he said of the U.S. intelligence reports.

Prince Turki, who led Saudi intelligence for more than two decades and served as ambassador to the U.S. and Britain, worked closely for years with Khashoggi before the writer became an outspoken government critic. The prince said Khashoggi worked under him as a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in London and later in Washington, and that he last spoke to him three years ago.

The prince’s father is the late King Faisal and his brother is Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the governor of Mecca.

Prince Turki said that reports of discontent within the ruling Al Saud family over the crown prince’s rapid rise to power do not reflect the “extraordinary support” that King Salman and his son, the crown prince, enjoy.

“I see no signs of such disquiet or uncertainty vis-a-vi the king and the crown prince,” he said.

The prince spoke Saturday during a policy briefing by the Beirut Institute Summit . The summit is the brainchild of Arab writer and columnist Raghida Dergham. The prince is a board member and supporter of the summit, which draws upon recommendations of its participants to put forth policy ideas for the Middle East.

Among its recommendations is support for the Arab Peace Initiative, a Saudi initiative dating back to the early 2000s that calls for east Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in exchange for Arab state recognition of Israel and normalized relations.

In the absence of peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis, Gulf Arab states have moved ahead with their own outreach to Israel .

The driving force appears to be shared concern over Iran’s expansion in the region. Oman, which has often played the role of regional mediator, welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a surprise visit last month.

Prince Turki, who himself appeared on a panel last year alongside a former chief for Israel’s Mossad spy agency, said such appearances do not represent a normalizing of relations with Israel.

“I don’t think it’s so much a rapprochement as, how can I put it, a shot by shot deal that rises as happened with the effort by the Sultan of Oman to push for a restart of the negotiations,” he said.

 
…

A leader of an al-Qaida-linked extremist group in central Mali may have been among the 30 militants killed by French soldiers in an overnight attack, France’s ministry of armed forces said Friday. 

Minister Florence Parly said in a tweet that Hamadoun Kouffa might have been killed in the operation, which started Thursday in the Mopti region and included airstrikes, helicopter assaults and French soldiers on the ground. 

Kouffa, a radical cleric, is head of the Katibat Macina, which is part of a larger group of al-Qaida-linked militants known by the acronym JNIM. 

“At this stage of the evaluation of the operation, it appears that about 30 terrorists were put out of action,” the army said in its statement. Kouffa, as well as other top militants, were likely among the dead, the statement said. 

France has more than 3,000 troops conducting a counterterrorism effort called Operation Barkhane against Islamist militants in the Sahel region, which includes Mali. 
…

The leader of the Northern Irish party propping up Britain’s government warned British Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday that it could abandon her if she got her Brexit divorce deal through Parliament. 

With four months left until Britain leaves the EU, the divorce treaty and accompanying political declaration are due to be rubber-stamped in Brussels on Sunday by May and the other 27 EU leaders so they can go to the respective parliaments. 

The biggest obstacle to the accord is the vehement opposition in the British Parliament from within May’s party and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which agreed to a “confidence and supply” deal last year to back her minority 

government after a snap election. 

‘Stop wasting time’

The party’s leader, Arlene Foster, flatly reiterated the DUP’s opposition to the deal “as it currently stands,” telling May to “stop wasting time” and seek a better one, while also warning of the consequences if she did not. 

“If she is successful in Parliament, and there is no evidence she is going to be, then of course we are going to revisit the confidence and supply agreement. That agreement was about giving national stability and delivering on Brexit,” 

Foster told BBC Radio Ulster. “But we’re not there yet, and we’re not going to jump ahead until we see what happens in Parliament.” 

The draft withdrawal treaty contains a “backstop” provision that could ultimately align Northern Ireland more closely with the EU than the rest of the United Kingdom. 

Under the terms of a 1998 agreement that largely ended years of violence between Irish republicans and pro-British unionists, border posts were removed and the province was given a power-sharing structure where both communities were represented. 

Foster’s pro-British unionist party fears that the backstop provision, if implemented, could one day threaten the province’s place in the UK altogether. 

She had already urged May to ditch the “backstop,” which negotiators had grappled with for months. She added that the draft political declaration that followed, on future relations, had not changed the DUP’s opposition. 

No better deal seen

May has responded by telling her critics that Britain will not get a better deal with the EU if it does not take this one. 

But Foster disagreed, saying the DUP did not accept that the current choice was a binary one between May’s deal and a “no deal” in which Britain would leave the bloc on March 29 without an agreement to mitigate economic and legal disruption. 

May’s finance minister Philip Hammond, who met Foster in Northern Ireland on Friday, said May had gone a long way in the Brexit negotiations to gain assurances that the deal would in no way threaten Northern Ireland’s place in the UK. 
…

France will return 26 works of art to Benin, Emmanuel Macron’s office said Friday, as the French president took delivery of a report recommending the widespread return of cultural artifacts removed from Africa during the colonial era. 

 

The report by Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and French art historian Benedicte Savoy marked a potential milestone in the fight by African countries to recover works pillaged by Western explorers and colonizers. 

 

Macron became the first Western leader to initiate a comprehensive review of colonial loot after telling Burkinabe students last year that “African heritage can’t just be in European private collections and museums.” 

 

Ninety percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is now believed to be in Europe. The Quai Branly Museum in Paris alone holds 70,000 African objects, as does London’s British Museum, Savoy told Reuters this year. 

 

Western museums have traditionally resisted appeals to return objects to their countries of origin, which they often argue lack the necessary resources to care for the works. 

 

Earlier this week, the governor of Chile’s Easter Island led a delegation to the British Museum to request the return of a prized sculpture. 

 

The French report calls for legislation to ease the return of artifacts from museum collections, according to newspaper reports. It identified about 46,000 objects at the Musee du Quai Branly museum in Paris that would qualify for repatriation. 

 

“We have sensed a real desire by the executive to act,” Sarr told the daily Liberation. “I was skeptical at the beginning. I am now convinced this is not just a publicity stunt.” 

 

The 26 artifacts to returned to Benin from Quai Branly were seized in 1892 as the spoils of war. They are among 5,000 works requested by the West African country. 

 

Several European museums agreed last month to lend works to a new museum in Benin City, Nigeria. British soldiers seized thousands of metal castings, including the iconic Benin Bronzes, from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. 

 

But other governments, such as Ethiopia and Greece, have rejected the idea of loans, saying they should not have to borrow back their own stolen property.  
…