French prosecutors in February also searched the Paris offices of X, in what the social media giant — which has denied any wrongdoing — slammed as “politicized” raids and an “abusive judicial act.” At the time, Paris prosecutors also summoned Musk and then-CEO Linda Yaccarino for voluntary interviews as the “de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,” a move Musk called a “political attack.” Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X in July last year after two years at the helm of the company.

In February, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau indicated that employees of the company had also been summoned to appear between April 20 and 24 “to be heard as witnesses.” However, whether they turn up for voluntary questioning would not be “an obstacle to the continuation of the investigation,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Saturday. Officials have not offered any details on the location or time of Musk’s scheduled interview.

The French investigation focuses on several suspected criminal offenses, including complicity in possessing child sexual abuse material and denial of crimes against humanity. The social media company in July called the probe “politically motivated.” Its complaints were echoed Monday by Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov, himself the subject of a French probe into illegal activity on his platform. “Macron’s France is losing legitimacy as it weaponises criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy,” read an X post by Russian-born Durov, who also holds French nationality.

The French investigation comes as part of a broader international backlash against Grok after it emerged that users could sexualize images of women and children using simple text prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes.” It generated an estimated three million sexualised images — mostly of women, though also 23,000 that appeared to depict children — in 11 days, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit watchdog, said in late January.

In a separate investigation, Britain’s data regulator in February launched investigations into Musk’s X and xAI over “serious concerns” regarding whether the companies complied with personal data laws when it came to Grok’s generation of sexualized deepfakes. In January, the European Union also hit X with a probe over Grok’s generation of sexualized deepfake images of women and minors.

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“What we’re talking about are documents that are relevant to the question of whether a Nazi had an account or didn’t have an account at Credit Suisse,” said Barofsky. The former prosecutor has documented numerous previously unknown Credit Suisse accounts linked to Nazi officials and unearthed the financial trajectory of many Nazis who fled to Argentina.

The clash over documents represents the latest hurdle in the probe after Barofsky was ousted by Credit Suisse in 2022, before being reinstated by UBS in 2023. Barofsky said the dispute began in November. “Up until that point UBS cooperation has been picture perfect,” he said. He suspects the contested papers include information listing German clients, info on looted art and valuables, and other matters that are “very very core to the heart of our investigation.”

UBS General Counsel Barbara Levi told the Senate Judiciary Committee the bank was committed to openness over past actions, but said it faced an “active threat” of litigation from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and other NGOs. “We believe that bringing to light this information is extremely important,” Levi said. “But at the same time, if the same organization threatens us of litigation, we are put in a very difficult situation.”

Both UBS and Credit Suisse were part of a longstanding $1.25 billion settlement between Swiss banks and more than a half-million plaintiffs over looted assets from the Holocaust. Levi described the accord as providing “final closure to the parties,” covering both known and future claims. “It cannot be that for every piece of information that comes to light, we get under the threat of litigation,” Levi said. “Where is the incentive then for any financial institution or any other institution to look into the past and bring this information to light?”

UBS on January 28 asked US District Judge Edward Korman for an order “clarifying the scope of the settlement.” Korman — who approved the $1.25 billion Swiss bank settlement in 2000 — set a hearing for March 12. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said the dispute “seems like an unnecessary quarrel that is tainting both Mr. Barofsky’s ability to proceed and the reputation of the bank, which I think wants to be seen as cooperative and in good faith.” Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who chaired the hearing, called UBS’s conduct an “historic shame that’ll outlive today’s hearing.”

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The opera tells the fictitious tale of Joe Kavalier’s escape from Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939 to Brooklyn, where he joins forces with cousin Sam Clay to try to raise funds to attempt to save Kavalier’s family. Their money-making venture? A comic strip featuring a superhero called “The Escapist,” who fights fascists. Tenor Miles Mykkanen, who plays Clay, calls the work “a 21st century opera with stories that we want to hear nowadays and stories that affect our lives, which I don’t think we can say about a lot of the standard repertoire.”

– ‘Never done with fascism’ –

The ambitious piece, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel published in 2000 by Michael Chabon, alternates in music and sets between Prague, Brooklyn, and the fantastic world of The Escapist. The meditation on love, loss, family, and the necessity of art comes on the heels of other recent Met productions that have sought to reinvent the medium. The world of professional boxing, a magical realist universe evocative of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the debate over the death penalty in America, and the ravages of the AIDS era have all been handled on the Met’s stage.

But “Kavalier & Clay” represents the first work in the Met’s 142-year history that revolves around a comic book superhero — a pop culture mainstay that may provide an entry point for those who may not usually try opera. Chabon’s book was the first time “a big serious art form like the novel had taken comic books so seriously,” said composer Mason Bates. “We still embrace superheroes because we are never done with fascism and authoritarianism,” he said. “We long for the simplicity of a good guy to fight back.”

– ‘The stuff of opera’ –

With a huge symphonic burst, the opera starts in the ominous fog of Nazi-occupied Prague at night before shifting to Clay’s Brooklyn brownstone and his bustling office. The novel was published at more than 650 pages, necessitating a heavy streamlining by librettist Gene Scheer. Choruses and dancers come and go in a quickfire staging that includes frequent jolts of animation beamed to a busy stage. Some moments link worlds, as when Kavalier reads a letter from his mother, who is shown as he imagines her in Prague. New York is “the city of freedom and hope,” she tells her son, who is played by baritone Andrzej Filonczyk, before the tone shifts. “I want you to forget us,” she adds, leaving a crestfallen Kavalier as Prague inevitably darkens further.

Bates, who is known for works that combine symphonic and electronic music, said he immediately thought “Kavalier & Clay” would work as opera, a medium of “storytelling on a grand scale.” He said, “You’ve got desperation, passion, art, Nazis, and superheroes. Mix all that together. That’s the stuff of opera.” Bates pitched the idea to Met General Manager Peter Gelb, who greenlighted the commission in 2018.

For director Bartlett Sher, the opera is landing at a moment when the rise of fascism in World War II and the response of artists to that calamity feels particularly resonant. People go to theater and opera “to learn from our own history who we are,” said Sher. He said he is especially moved when characters “talk about what it means to be an immigrant fleeing a country politically and the refuge you seek in the United States.” That allows the audience to “think to ourselves, ‘Well, is that who we are?'” Sher added.

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“Dedee, it’s funny to see you after all these years. We’ve become old girls!” Guette said, using Dupont’s nickname. “Seeing you again fills me with emotion,” said Dupont, her voice trembling. “I give you a big kiss, my darling,” she added, blowing a kiss to the screen during the call, which was witnessed by AFP. “Are the memories coming back for you too?” Dupont asked. “Oh yes!” Guette said. “But they are not coming out of my head. There are too many things we can’t explain.”

As the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, marking the end of World War II on the continent, approaches, the women shared their emotional story of wartime sacrifice and suffering. Dupont and Guette were both born in 1927 and grew up in French villages around 350 kilometers (220 miles) apart. After World War II broke out and Nazi Germany invaded France, both women — aged just 16 — joined the resistance networks in their villages in 1943.

Dupont became a “liaison officer” transmitting messages — and sometimes weapons — across the western Sarthe region using only her bicycle. One day, she recalled, “I had a towel with a dismantled revolver inside, and I smiled as I passed the Germans.” Guette was a postal worker who smuggled ration coupons and messages to resistance fighters.

In April 1944, disaster struck as Dupont was arrested along with other members of her village’s resistance network — 16 people in all, including her father and aunt. “I was folding the laundry at around 10 at night. I heard knocking on the doors and knew what was happening right away,” she said. Guette was caught four days later by a French agent of the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany. “He told me, ‘So, a young girl from a good family who took a turn for the worst,'” Guette remembered. “And I told him that he hadn’t turned out any better. And he slapped me!”

The two teenagers met at a prison in Romainville close to Paris. They learned about D-Day — the Allied invasion of France in June 1944 — but the glimmer of hope the news offered was soon crushed. “We thought we were saved! But the Germans needed us to work in the war factories,” explained Guette. On June 25, 1944, Guette — prisoner 43,133 — was transferred to the HASAG Leipzig sub-camp linked to Buchenwald. It held 5,000 women forced to manufacture weapons. Dupont was prisoner 41,129.

The pair recalled working at night with newspaper shoved under their clothes to protect against the cold, their hair being infested with lice, and beatings from German guards. They also described the naked bodies of those who did not survive, piled up and waiting to be moved to the crematorium. “They did a lot of nasty things to us,” said Guette.

By mid-April 1945, weeks before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender, the Nazis evacuated the Leipzig camp, and inmates began the so-called “death marches,” designed to keep large numbers of concentration camp prisoners out of Allied hands. Guette told of walking all day and night with bloody feet, surviving only off rapeseed and potatoes. She recalled washing for the first time in months in the Elbe, one of central Europe’s largest rivers, and also a bullet whizzing past her left ear during fighting between the “Boche” — a derogatory term for Germans — and American soldiers.

Victory in Europe was formally declared on May 8, 1945, and the pair found themselves back in France. In Paris, Dupont found her mother, and her father did return from the camps. But her aunt was killed in the gas chambers. Guette headed home on the train. “You know what, Dedee. When I got there, I was not even sure I was home. Did that happen to you?” Guette asked. Dupont replied: “I knew I was home when I saw the village clock tower.”

Guette, who has lived in the United States since the 1970s, no longer travels to her home country but said she would like to see Dupont again, even if it means getting there “on all fours.” “Lots of love, Dedee, perhaps we’ll find each other again up there,” Guette said before the women ended their call.

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“Let me be clear: Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized,” Emhoff, who is Jewish, posted on Tuesday, confirming his dismissal. “To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous — and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”

Since taking office, Trump has looked beyond politics to impose his brand of right-wing populism on cultural and educational institutions such as Washington’s prestigious Kennedy Center and Harvard University. He has also sought to settle scores with perceived adversaries — targeting law firms associated with his political foes, such as Emhoff’s employer, Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

Several other former officials removed from the Holocaust board include Biden’s White House chief of staff Ron Klain, domestic policy advisor Susan Rice, and an aide to former first lady Jill Biden, The New York Times reported. The White House Presidential Personnel Office sent an email to council members early Tuesday, according to the Times, which read: “(On) behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council is terminated, effective immediately.”

The council was established by Congress in 1980 to lead the country in commemorating the Holocaust, launching the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. Emhoff said his commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education, as well as to combating hate and anti-Semitism, remained undiminished. “I will continue to speak out, to educate, and to fight hate in all its forms because silence is never an option,” he said.

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“Let me be clear: Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized,” Emhoff, who is Jewish, posted on Instagram, confirming his dismissal. “To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous — and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”

Since taking office, Trump has looked beyond West Wing politics to impose his brand of right-wing populism on cultural and educational institutions such as Washington’s prestigious Kennedy Center and Harvard University. He has also sought to settle scores with perceived adversaries — targeting law firms associated with his political foes, such as Emhoff’s employer, Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

Several other former officials removed from the Holocaust board include Biden’s White House chief of staff Ron Klain, domestic policy advisor Susan Rice, and an aide to former first lady Jill Biden, The New York Times reported. The White House Presidential Personnel Office sent an email to council members early Tuesday, according to the Times, which read: “(On) behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council is terminated, effective immediately.”

The council was established by Congress in 1980 to lead the country in commemorating the Holocaust, launching the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. Emhoff said his commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education, as well as to combating hate and anti-Semitism, remained undiminished. “I will continue to speak out, to educate, and to fight hate in all its forms because silence is never an option,” he said.

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This time, he bested Timothee Chalamet in Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” Ralph Fiennes in papal thriller “Conclave,” Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump in “The Apprentice,” and Colman Domingo as a wrongfully convicted inmate in “Sing Sing.” “Acting is a very fragile profession. It looks very glamorous and at certain moments, it is,” an emotional Brody told the audience. “No matter where you are in your career, no matter what you’ve accomplished, it can all go away. And I think what makes this night most special is the awareness of that and the gratitude that I have to still do the work that I love.”

Winning the golden Oscar statuette caps an extraordinary awards season for the 51-year-old Brody, during which he captured nearly every major award for his work as Holocaust survivor Laszlo Toth, a Bauhaus-trained Jewish architect seeking a new life. In “The Brutalist,” Toth arrives alone in New York and relocates to Pennsylvania, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) lives. But that arrangement is short-lived, as Toth doesn’t fit in with Attila’s new life married to a Catholic woman.

As he tries to adjust to life in the United States, viewers see Toth struggling to learn English as he battles the demons of his past and the challenges of trying to work in an adopted homeland. Everything changes when he meets industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Oscar nominee Guy Pearce), who commissions him to build a monolithic memorial to his mother — but also insists on controlling his designs. His family life also morphs with the arrival of his wife Erzsebet (Oscar nominee Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy).

“The Brutalist,” which runs for three and a half hours, earned 10 Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and another for director Brady Corbet. “If the past can teach us anything, it’s a reminder to not let hate go unchecked,” Brody said Sunday.

To put himself into Toth’s shoes, Brody drew inspiration from his own family history. Brody was born on April 14, 1973, to Sylvia Plachy, a photographer of Hungarian descent, and professor Elliot Brody, who is Jewish with Polish roots. Plachy moved from Budapest to New York in the 1950s. “The character’s journey is very reminiscent of my mother’s and my ancestral journey of fleeing the horrors of war and coming to this great country,” Brody said as he accepted a Golden Globe award in January. “I owe so much to my mother, my grandparents for their sacrifice.”

Brody started taking acting classes as a teenager and attended both a special arts summer camp and a prestigious high school for the arts in New York. After a series of small roles, his breakthrough came in Spike Lee’s 1970s crime thriller “Summer of Sam” (1999). Just a few years later, “The Pianist” hit cinemas — Brody took hours of piano lessons to be able to do justice to the role of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a real-life Polish Jewish musician who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw during World War II.

His 2003 Oscar win was remembered for him planting a huge kiss on presenter Halle Berry that became controversial when she later admitted it took her by surprise. Brody has said his work on “The Pianist” helped inform his portrayal of Toth two decades later. After “The Pianist,” Brody took on varied roles, from a youth with an intellectual disability in M. Night Shyamalan’s horror flick “The Village” to writer Jack Driscoll in the 2005 remake of “King Kong,” his biggest commercial success.

He played Salvador Dali in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” featured in Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch,” and even had a small role in the hit British television series “Peaky Blinders.” He walked the catwalk for Prada, embraced humanitarian causes, and even starred in a music video for reggaeton singer Rauw Alejandro. In his personal life, after a relationship with Spanish actress Elsa Pataky, Brody has been dating fashion designer Georgina Chapman — the woman behind the Marchesa label and the ex-wife of disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein — since 2020.

© 2024 AFP

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In another part of the building, the Vances were shown the badges that were used to identify different kinds of prisoners, including immigrants and homosexuals. Outside, they laid a wreath next to a section of wall bearing the dates 1933-1945, the years in which the camp operated. Naor also accompanied them to a gravestone with the ashes of an unknown prisoner, in front of a wall with the inscription “never again” in five languages.

The Nazis opened Dachau as a concentration camp for political prisoners in March 1933, just weeks after Adolf Hitler took power. It was the first such site in Germany and served as a forerunner for other camps. More than 200,000 people from over 40 nations were held there and at least 41,500 died. The camp was liberated by the US Army on April 29, 1945.

Earlier on Thursday, Bavaria’s state premier Markus Soeder greeted Vance and his family on their arrival at Munich airport. Vance is set to meet Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelensky on Friday on the opening day of the Munich Security Conference for talks.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump stunned Ukraine and European allies by saying he planned to start peace talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin after a call with the Kremlin chief.

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Artificial intelligence will be used to interpret questions from members of the public, who will be played a fixed set of pre-recorded responses to “answer” their questions. “Somebody will survive because we have to tell the world what happened — and maybe it’s us,” said Toby Levy, in her 90s, who was born in a region of Poland in 1933 that is now Ukraine. “I remembered (my father’s) words, ‘you will be the one who will have to tell the world.’ Seventy-five years later, here I am in the United States.”

Levy looked at herself on a screen as the technology was demonstrated at the museum, located on Manhattan’s southern tip, in view of Ellis Island where many Holocaust survivors first arrived in the United States by sea. She was among 200 Holocaust survivors who gathered Monday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. They assembled to watch the live commemoration ceremony in front of the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland, and several denounced the resurgence of anti-Semitic hatred around the world.

“We all survived,” said Levy, who arrived first in New Orleans before building a life in New York. “Let’s do our share, what we have to do.” The project will protect the memories of the survivors forever, said Mike Jones, the brains behind the project, a collaboration between the University of Southern California Libraries and the MJH. “There’s a timelessness that it’s always going to be important and urgent until the day that there’s simply just peace on Earth,” he said.

The ten survivors underwent extensive video interviews in the summer of 2024, touching on their childhoods prior to the Holocaust, survival in the camps, and their recollection of liberation and resettlement. Visitors to the museum or its website can then “converse” with them on screen, and the survivors respond interactively according to the pre-recorded answers.

Alice Ginsburg, born in 1933 in what was then Czechoslovakia, now Hungary, recounted her deportation in 1944 to Auschwitz where she almost died from hunger and forced labor before the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. She arrived in the United States two years later. “It’s important to publicize it so it should never happen again,” she told AFP. “This is man’s inhumanity to man.”

Eighty years on from the horrors of the Holocaust, Ginsburg said she worried about the increase “of Holocaust deniers, which is a form of anti-Semitism.” Jerry Lindenstraus, who was born in Germany in the early 1930s and has lived in New York since 1953 after exile in Shanghai and South America, said he wanted to speak out “so that we never forget what happened.” “I give talks here to high school students who have no idea what happened,” he said.

© 2024 AFP

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“They live in a different world. They have a very different media landscape around them. They are still very interested in the topic — but know less about it,” said Anne Frank House executive director Ronald Leopold. Unlike the Amsterdam museum, set in the building where Anne Frank hid from Nazis and wrote her diary during the Second World War, the New York iteration is furnished as it would have been in the 1940s. Visitors are led through a bookcase like the one behind which Anne and her family hid from the Nazi occupiers after Anne’s sister Margot received orders to go to a labor camp in July 1942. The exhibition is brought to life largely with visual installations and uses minimal text narration.

It relies instead on audio guides tailored to different age groups and interactive displays like a giant underfloor map of Europe and the Nazi Holocaust machinery. “This is how we think, at this moment in time, you could bring the memory of the Holocaust across towards these young generations,” Leopold said.

Mockups of the rooms used by Anne Frank and her family were recreated by an exhibition designer with experience of theater and opera using two scale models commissioned by Anne’s father Otto Frank in the 1960s. The daily struggle of living in hiding is illustrated with ordinary objects and photos including artifacts that belonged to Anne Frank, like the first diary book gifted to her on her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942. Her diary has since been published in more than 70 languages with millions of copies sold. It recounts her life as an ordinary teenager living in extraordinary circumstances up until her arrest along with everyone in the annex in August 1944 after 25 months in hiding. She died along with Margot in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945.

“Now young people (can) come here in this exhibition and get to know what it means to be in hiding, what it means to be persecuted,” said Hannah Elias, granddaughter of Anne Frank’s cousin Buddy Elias. “This has a strong connection to the present, because there are still a lot of people that are persecuted or that might go into hiding, and to know that it’s not just a thing in the past. It’s not something that we can close a chapter and then not look at it again.”

The exhibition opens to the public Monday to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp. “The Anne Frank House feels that our responsibility has never been greater,” said Leopold. “This story is not just about the past. It’s a reminder that is also very much a call to action for the present and for the future — stand against anti-Semitism, stand against other forms of hate.”

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