分类： society

For millions of vacationers chasing sun and relaxation by the pool, the frustrating ritual of the ‘dawn dash’ for unreserved sun loungers is a familiar holiday headache. Now, that common travel grievance has resulted in a landmark legal ruling, after a German tourist secured a court-ordered refund of more than €980 (£850) over his ruined sunbathing access on a Greek island getaway.

The unnamed tourist traveled to the popular Aegean island of Kos with his wife and two children on a package holiday in 2024, paying a total of €7,186 (£6,211) for the trip. What should have been a relaxing family break quickly turned into a daily battle for poolside space, he told the court. Even when the family rose as early as 6 a.m. to claim a spot, all usable sun loungers were already blocked off by other guests who reserved them with towels, leaving the tourist to spend 20 minutes every day hunting for free space. His children were even forced to lie on the hard ground when no loungers could be found, he added.

Frustrated by the unaddressed issue, the tourist launched a legal case against his tour operator, arguing the company failed to uphold its obligations to guests. In his claim, he emphasized that the resort already had an official ban on towel-based sunbed reservations, but the tour operator did nothing to enforce the rule or intervene to stop guests from misappropriating loungers.

After hearing the case, judges at the Hanover District Court ruled in the tourist’s favor, finding the package holiday experience was legally ‘defective’ and the family was owed a larger compensation payout. The tour operator had already issued a partial refund of €350 (£302) before the trial, but the court ordered an additional payout, bringing the total refund to €986.70 (£852.89).

In their ruling, the judges acknowledged that the travel company did not directly manage the hotel’s facilities and could not guarantee every guest access to a sunbed at any time of day. Even so, they confirmed the operator had a clear contractual obligation to ensure a reasonable organizational system was in place to maintain a fair ratio of sunbeds to registered guests, a requirement the company failed to meet.

The ‘sunbed wars’ phenomenon is far from an isolated issue at Mediterranean resorts, with thousands of tourists sharing their frustrations about the practice every year. In 2023, viral social media videos showed extreme measures taken by holidaymakers in Tenerife, where some guests slept overnight on sun loungers to hold onto their poolside spots for the following day.

Faced with widespread frustration over the issue, travel and hospitality operators have trialed different solutions to curb unauthorized reservations. Major tour operator Thomas Cook, for example, now offers guests the option to pre-book poolside sun loungers for an extra fee to eliminate informal last-minute scrambling. In some regions of Spain, local authorities have introduced strict penalties, threatening tourists with fines of up to €250 if they reserve a lounger with a towel then leave the spot unused for hours at a time.

A years-long academic hoax involving a completely fabricated prestigious prize has shaken the French higher education system, leaving a veteran scholar under criminal investigation and suspended from his longtime position. Florent Montaclair, who taught for two decades at a university in Besançon, eastern France, stands accused of inventing a Nobel-equivalent award in philology — the study of language through historical texts — and then awarding the top honor to himself to bolster his professional credentials.

The elaborate scheme dates back to 2015, when local press in Besançon published a story touting Montaclair as a finalist for the Nobel Prize. By the end of that year, reports claimed he had claimed the Gold Medal of Philology, a fictional award tied to a fake governing body: the International Society of Philology. In June 2016, the self-styled laureate held an official award ceremony at France’s National Assembly in Paris, an event attended by sitting government ministers and even Nobel Prize winners. Later that same year, Montaclair expanded his hoax by presenting an honorary version of his fake medal to 88-year-old legendary American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky at a public event in Brussels, with footage of the ceremony still accessible online.

The fake International Society of Philology even maintains a public website that lists supposed prize winners dating all the way back to 1967, including iconic Italian writer Umberto Eco. Observers have since noted that the unpolished, low-budget design of the site should have raised red flags early on. Beyond the invented prize and society, Montaclair also added a falsified academic credential to his resume: a doctorate in French literature and grammar from an institution called the University of Philology and Education in Lewes, Delaware. Public records confirm no such university has ever existed.

The hoax went undetected in France for years, even after it was exposed in 2019. That year, after Montaclair named Romanian philologist Eugen Simion as the next Gold Medal recipient, the announcement triggered a firestorm of interest in Romania, where skeptical local journalists launched an investigation that quickly uncovered the entire fraud. Despite the revelation, the truth never spread to French academic circles, and Montaclair continued teaching at his university for several more years.

The full scope of the fraud only came to light last year, when Montaclair was scheduled to lead an academic panel on disinformation and fake news. A colleague, recalling the old rumors from Romania, flagged the issue to university leadership, prompting an official probe. When French law enforcement searched Montaclair’s home in February of this year, the scholar immediately acknowledged the hoax, investigators report. He told officers he had personally ordered the gold medal from a Paris-based jeweller just weeks before the 2016 ceremony, paying just €250 (approximately £215) for the award.

In his defense, Montaclair has denied the fraud amounts to criminal conduct. He claims the invented award was simply a failed attempt to establish a new academic distinction, not a con. He also notes that the local media that originally covered his “Nobel shortlist” nomination were responsible for framing the fake award as a Nobel-equivalent honor, rather than making that claim himself.

Investigators from the Besançon public prosecutor’s office are currently examining whether the fake credentials helped Montaclair advance his academic career or gain unfair professional or financial benefits. Prosecutor Paul-Edouard Lallois, who is leading the probe, called the affair “such an unlikely tale, it could be out of a film.” If investigators cannot prove the hoax resulted in illegal gain, prosecuting Montaclair on criminal charges may prove impossible. Currently, Montaclair has been suspended without restriction from his university position, pending the outcome of the ongoing investigation.

WASHINGTON — A new annual audit released Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has found that the total number of antisemitic incidents across the United States fell sharply in 2025, marking the first decline in five years. The decrease was led by a dramatic 66% drop in incidents on U.S. college campuses, a shift that came after widespread pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 and subsequent administrative pressure from the White House under the Donald Trump administration.

The organization’s 2025 audit counted 6,274 total incidents of antisemitic assault, harassment, and vandalism nationwide, a 33% pullback from 2024’s all-time record of 9,354 incidents. On college campuses alone, the numbers dropped even more steeply: after recording 1,694 antisemitic incidents in 2024, when pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist protests spread across campuses amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, that figure fell to just 583 in 2025. The decline followed coordinated action from hundreds of colleges and universities, which implemented new protest restrictions and policy changes under pressure from the Trump administration and advocacy from the ADL.

When broken down by state, New York recorded the highest number of total antisemitic incidents in 2025 at 1,160, followed by California with 817 and New Jersey with 687.

Even with the overall drop in incidents, the report confirms that 2025 was one of the most violent years on record for Jewish communities in the U.S. The audit counted 203 physical assaults, a new annual high, and three separate fatal attacks targeting Jewish people. These included a May shooting outside Washington D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum that killed two people, and a June firebombing attack at a hostage awareness event in Boulder, Colorado that left an 82-year-old Jewish woman dead from her injuries.

Speaking to the Associated Press, ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt emphasized that even the reduced 2025 numbers remain far above pre-war baseline levels. “Numbers that would have shocked us five years ago are now our floor,” Greenblatt said. “People are being murdered because of antisemitism on American soil, and thousands more are threatened.” He added that while any reduction in antisemitic harm is a welcome development, the current moment does not allow for complacency: even with the 66% drop, campus antisemitic incidents remain nearly four times higher than they were in 2021, before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

The shifting share of Israel-linked antisemitic incidents reflects the changing landscape of hate speech and bias over the past two years. In 2024, 58% of all recorded antisemitic incidents were tied to criticism of Israel or Zionism, marking the first time since the annual audit launched in 1979 that Israel-related incidents made up a majority of total cases. That share fell to 45% in 2025, with the ADL recording an overall 67% drop in anti-Israel rallies that crossed into antisemitic rhetoric, and an 83% drop on campuses specifically.

The ADL’s counting methodology has long remained at the center of a fierce, ongoing debate about where to draw the line between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and antisemitic hate speech. The organization says it explicitly distinguishes between general criticism of Israeli government policy and antisemitic speech, but classifies vilification of Zionism — the ideological movement supporting a Jewish state in Israel — as a form of antisemitism. This framing has drawn criticism from a range of groups, including some Jewish and anti-Zionist activists, who argue the ADL’s criteria are overly broad and penalize protected political speech.

Aryeh Tuchman, a former head of the ADL’s Center on Extremism who now directs the Nexus Center for Antisemitism, which promotes a more nuanced definition of antisemitism, noted that the ADL’s approach grows from legitimate concern for the safety of American Jewish communities, but that disagreement over the framework is valid. “There are a lot of people who would disagree with that. … It’s important that there be room for multiple approaches,” Tuchman said.

In response to pressure from the ADL and the Trump administration on college campuses, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) launched its Unhostile Campus Campaign, which advocates for protecting free speech and academic freedom for pro-Palestinian students, faculty, and staff. In CAIR’s recent reporting, the group named Columbia University, the City University of New York, and the University of Michigan as the schools it considers most hostile to pro-Palestinian viewpoints.

The ADL’s new report comes amid a global surge in concern over rising antisemitism tied to the Israel-Hamas war. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for stricter action against antisemitic chants at pro-Palestinian protests, after two Jewish men were stabbed in London in a recent attack. Senior British law enforcement officials have called the current moment the greatest ongoing threat to British Jewish communities in modern history, blaming social media platforms for normalizing antisemitic rhetoric. The UK has also seen a string of recent attacks targeting Jewish sites, including multiple arson attempts at London synagogues, and has raised its national terror threat level in response.

In Australia, a national public inquiry into antisemitism is currently hearing testimony from Jewish communities after a December 2024 mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach that killed 15 people. Witnesses have described growing fear and vulnerability amid a sharp nationwide rise in antisemitic incidents that dates back to the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023.

A recent analysis from Tel Aviv University confirms that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks globally since 1994, when a bombing at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina killed 85 people. Combined, fatal attacks in the U.S., UK, and Australia claimed 20 lives in 2025, the highest annual death toll from antisemitic violence in more than three decades.