U.S. authorities are seeking to strip the citizenship of a former South Florida mayor accused of entering the country with a false passport, lying about his identity for 30 years, and committing bigamy to obtain legal status. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit last week in a Miami federal court to denaturalize Philippe Bien-Aime, a Haitian national, who served as mayor of North Miami from 2019 until he ran for a County Commission seat in 2022.
In total, 19 dual nationals were stripped of their French passports in 2025, according to figures published in the police gazette l'Essor de la gendarmerie. The process followed convictions in the French courts, all for terrorism-related offences. The figures represent a fall on the previous year, when 41 people had their French passports removed. In 2023, 11 dual nationals lost their French citizenship, in 2022 six did, and four each in 2021 and 2020.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah came to global attention because he was a leading figure in the 2011 pro-democracy revolution that turned Cairo's Tahrir Square into a surging sea of young people. The demonstrators chanted Down with corruption, Down with autocracy and Down with dictators. When the uprising succeeded in toppling Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak, the world rejoiced, including Europe and North America. Abd el-Fattah was all over the media, a voice for the part of the movement that was committed to building an accountable, participatory democracy
Abd el-Fattah, who landed in London from Egypt on Boxing Day, has been at the centre of a political storm over social media posts he published more than a decade ago, including tweets in which he called for Zionists to be killed. Keir Starmer said he was delighted by Abd el-Fattah's arrival on Friday after the British government helped secure the activist's release from years in an Egyptian jail. However, the prime minister has since condemned the tweets and said he was unaware of them.
Russian could strike deep into Europe, Poland's foreign minister warned in London as he unveiled a Russian-flown Shahed-136 drone downed in Ukraine. Radoslaw Sikorski said it would be irresponsible not to build defences such as a drone wall on Europe's eastern flank and said he hoped the US would supply long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine for strikes into Russia. Sikorski urged Europe to also plan to support Ukraine for three more years.
