Russia at the head of the UN Security Council, introduction of the mandatory energy audit… All the news of this day.
By Martin Pereira (with AFP)
© MAXIM SHIPENKOV / POOL / AFP
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Diplomacy. Russia, in full invasion of Ukraine, will take the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council, following Mozambique. The last time Moscow was in this position was in… February 2022. A few weeks later, Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on his neighboring country. And Russia intends to use this seat to have a strong diplomatic impact in New York, under the nose and beard of its Western opponents.
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Relationships. Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi visits Beijing. This is the first visit by Japan’s top diplomat to China since 2019. While Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to maintain diplomatic relations at the highest level on the sidelines of a summit in Bangkok, relations between the two countries have become considerably strained since China significantly increased its military power.
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Housing. The mandatory energy audit in the event of the sale of a house or a single-ownership building, to fight against “thermal sieves”, comes into force. France has 5.2 million “energy sieves” out of 30 million main residences, more than in the previous estimate, in 2018 (4.8%), according to a study by the National Observatory for Energy Renovation (ONRE ). This audit only concerns sales of houses or single-ownership buildings.
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Olympic Games. The debate on the participation of Russians and Belarusians begins this Saturday. A heated discussion. As a reminder, the International Olympic Committee recommended on Tuesday to authorize, under certain conditions, the return to competition of Russian athletes, excluded since the invasion of Ukraine, which did not fail to trigger a number of reactions. Regarding the Olympics, “the IOC will take this decision at the appropriate time, at its sole discretion, and without being bound by the results of qualifying competitions”, decreed its boss, the German Thomas Bach, on Tuesday. Virulent as rarely, he considered it “deplorable” that several European governments interfere with the Russian presence in competition. And he castigated their “double standards”, referring to the some “70 ongoing armed conflicts in the world” which, unlike the war in Ukraine, do not invite themselves into the Olympic sphere.
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