Winds of climate change in France as Macron hosts global finance summit

Image of the week: European heat

Summer in Europe, traditionally illustrated by wilting ice-creams, festival delirium and fearless teenagers bombing into water, now has another regular tradition to add to its calendar: climate protests.

Activists this week transformed the Eiffel Tower into an apparent giant wind turbine – through the illusory magic of a strategically placed net – ahead of an Emmanuel Macron-hosted international summit in Paris on the financial challenges of climate change for developing countries.

The French government has, meanwhile, declared it will shut down a climate protest umbrella group called Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Uprising), which has led a number of more radical direct actions against big business, state projects and large-scale farming, including a controversial irrigation project in Sainte-Soline in western France where protesters clashed with police in March.

Its crackdown comes as the World Meteorological Organisation confirms that European heatwaves, such as that suffered last summer, will become more common, with Europe taking the dubious title of fastest-warming continent on the planet. As for the Eiffel Tower, it has since 2015 contained two actual wind turbines camouflaged against its brown-painted iron structure.

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In numbers: Carlos Ghosn’s legal drive

$1bn

Eye-watering sum (€915 million) that former Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn is suing the car maker for in a defamation and libel lawsuit filed in Lebanon, where he now lives. “We have a long battle in front of us. We are going to fight it to the end,” he told Reuters.

5

Years since Ghosn was ousted from the car giant and arrested in Japan on charges of financial misconduct. In December 2019 he notoriously fled Japan in a box, saying he had been the victim of a conspiracy.

5%

The damages sought by Ghosn represent more than this proportion of Nissan’s market value. He says Japan’s justice system is “rigged” and that the charges brought against him will “linger in people’s minds for years”.

Getting to know: Do Kwon

Crypto boss Kwon Do-Hyung – or Do Kwon as he is better known – has officially been disgraced former crypto boss Do Kwon since last September, which is when he was placed on an Interpol red notice list.

Kwon (31) and Han Chang-joon, the former finance officer at his Singapore-based company Terraform Labs, were arrested in March when trying to board a flight from Montenegro to Dubai and this week sentenced to four months in jail in the Balkan country after being found guilty of forging official documents. That is unlikely to be the end of their legal woes, however.

Do Kwon is wanted in the US and his native South Korea over the collapse of the terraUSD and Luna crypto-tokens. For its part the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged him with “orchestrating a multibillion dollar crypto asset securities fraud”. This, by now, is a category of fraud with which the SEC is all too familiar.

The list: Murphy’s move

Superstar television producer Ryan Murphy is poised to sign a contract with Disney five years after he agreed a $300 million mega-deal with Netflix. But did that deal, poised to expire at the end of this month, deliver bang for Netflix’s buck? The jury is out, based on these titles.

1. The Politician: Murphy’s first effort for Netflix, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Platt, lasted for two seasons, just about, before entering an uncertain limbo between renewal and cancellation.

2. Hollywood: The ensemble series, which rendered the golden age of Tinseltown more golden than it actually had been, was greeted by scathing reviews and viewer indifference.

3. Ratched: Under pressure to replicate the sort of success he had achieved earlier in his career with Glee and American Horror Story, Murphy started to hit the sort of numbers Netflix was hoping for with this prequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next.

4. The Watcher: The stalker thriller, based on a real-life case, has been renewed by Netflix, which in these cost-conscious days is much more of a rarity at the streamer.

5. Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: Proving there’s no business like serial killer business, the true crime drama became only the third Netflix title to cross the viewing mark of one billion hours within 60 days.