the times | Tuesday October 20 2020 2GM 35
Wo r l d
A grand century-old sultan’s palace
built from mud bricks in Yemen is at
risk of collapse after years of neglect
and recent flash flooding.
The Seiyun Palace, one of the largest
mud-brick buildings in the world, was
finished in the 1920s when the central
Hadhramaut province was part of the
British protectorate in Aden.
The seven-storey mansion was the
seat of the Sultan of Kathiri, an ally of
the British, before becoming a tourist
attraction and museum in the 1980s.
Engineers say the foundation and
structure of the palace has been crack-
ing during Yemen’s six-year civil war
and have appealed for international
help to save it.
Abdullah Barmada, an engineer who
specialises in the restoration of historic
buildings, said the palace was one of
several structures damaged by heavy
rains in August and parts of the roof
were now falling in.
“It is dangerous and, if not quickly re-
stored, it is at risk of collapsing,” he said,
adding that the mud and rock founda-
tions of the palace needed constant
maintenance.
The conflict between Yemen’s Saudi-
backed government, Houthi rebelsFrench culture has been enriched by
some of the world’s finest writers over
the centuries, from Voltaire to Victor
Hugo and Marcel Proust.
Now a new figure has emerged at the
forefront of the country’s literary scene:
a 22-year-old internet star whose first
book is a self-help guide that is outsel-
ling all of France’s most eminent au-
thors to the dismay of the nation’s intel-
ligentsia. Toujours Plus (Always More)
by Léna Mahfouf, who uses the pen
name Léna Situations, combines the
author’s own experiences with ad-
vice to adolescents on
such issues as avoiding
toxic friends and com-
ing to terms with their
own bodies.
It has sold 62,000
copies since its public-
ation three weeks ago
and Robert Laffont, the
publisher, is printing a
further 150,000. No
other book has done so
well this autumn, not
even the critically
acclaimed Yo g a, an
intense and lofty work
on meditation by Emma-
nuel Carrère.
Mahfouf is what most commentators
call an influencer, although she prefers
the term “creator of content”. Born in
Paris to parents from Algeria, she
earned celebrity by posting photo-
graphs and videos of herself online.
Some involve tips on make-up or hair
dye; others feature self-help recom-
mendations (how to avoid procrastin-
ation being a recent example) or
insights into her own life.
One video shows her on holiday in
Mykonos. Another is entitled: “We
went shopping and it was madness.”
One Parisian bookshop owner, who
asked not to be named, said: “It’s com-
Internet starlet’s
self-help guide
has literary Paris
at loss for words
France
Adam Sage Paris
plete rubbish. It’s just a marketing gim-
mick. There’s nothing in it at all.”
Mahfouf has 1.6 million followers on
YouTube, 2.3 million on Instagram and
800,000 on TikTok. Most of her fans
are female and 55 per cent are aged
between 18 and 24. The French daily
Libération said she was popular because
she came over as sincere and warm-
hearted but also because she had stood
up against online hate speech.
Her online success has earned her
contracts with the likes of Dior, Bal-
main, Prada, Disney and Canon. Some
brands pay her to use their products,
others send her items free of charge. In
an interview she refused
to say how much her
deals earned her but
added that it was
“enough to enjoy
myself; not enough to
buy a flat [in Paris]”.
Her 149-page book
reads like a printed ver-
sion of her internet
posts. She advises
readers to believe in
their dreams, to weed
out toxic friends and
to accept themselves
as they are. One chap-
ter focuses on the six
months she spent
studying marketing in
New York, where she learnt about the
“American mindset”, which she
explains in a section entitled: “Be at
ease with success.”
Not everyone, though, is comfort-
able with Mahfouf’s success. Marie-
Rose Guarniéri, owner of the renowned
Abbesses bookshop in Paris, said that
YouTube stars were “false prophets
offering false wellbeing”. Ms Guarniéri,
who said she had not read Toujours
Plus, added: “We have got rid of religion
but created idols that are worse than
anything that went before. It’s a symp-
tom of our times that such people are
being carried to the pinnacle.”Ex-military
bunker was
key centre
for dark web
Germany
Oliver Moody BerlinA gang of cyberexperts turned a former
German military bunker into one of
Europe’s biggest hubs for the “dark
web” and a superhighway for at least a
quarter of a million offences, including
drug trafficking and the falsification of
identity papers, a court has been told.
Four people from the Netherlands,
three Germans and a Bulgarian are
accused of creating a digital safe haven
in which criminals could operate with
impunity.
The “cyberbunker” trial is a land-
mark for the authorities as they seek to
dismantle the physical infrastructure
that underpins online criminal activity.
In 2013 the group took over the
heavily fortified site of a former car-
tography centre for the German armed
forces in Traben-Trarbach, a town on
the river Mosel near Koblenz.
Prosecutors told a court in Trier yes-
terday that a Dutchman called Herman
Johan Xennt, 60, converted the facility
into a “bulletproof” server farm that
rented out computing resources.
Over the next six years the cyber-
bunker’s 400 servers were allegedly
used by its customers to trade every-
thing from heroin to stolen credit card
details and fake identity cards. Reports
in the German media have also sug-
gested the complex allowed some
clients to advertise contract killings
and videos of child abuse.
The facility was eventually infiltrated
by a police mole posing as a gardener.
Last September some 650 officers
raided the bunker, seizing two million
gigabytes of data.
Securing convictions will be arduous.
It is not yet clear what evidence would
suffice to prove that Mr Xennt and his
fellow defendants knowingly abetted
the cybercrimes. Mr Xennt has main-
tained that the cyberbunker told all of
its clients to refrain from any illegal
activities. “We had a clean conscience... and were all convinced that we were
acting legally and correctly,” he told
Der Spiegel magazine in May.
Michael Eichin, for the defence, said
there was no question that the cyber-
bunker’s servers had been abused but it
was “absurd” to suggest that Mr Xennt
had known about the crimes.
Sultan’s mud palace at risk of collapse
supported by Iran, and separatists in
the south of the country has killed more
than 100,000 people and left millions at
risk of starvation and disease.
Last week the United Nations
spokesman Mark Lowcock warned
that aid agencies could no longer reach
nearly one in three of the 13 million
civilians considered at risk of famine.
“What is to be the fate of the four mil-
lion we no longer have the money to
help?” he said.
Said Baychout, director of the Seiyun
Palace museum, which features on
Yemen’s banknotes, said that precious
artefacts from the palace including
Stone Age tombstones, Bronze Age
statues and pottery had been hidden
since the start of the conflict in 2014,
“over fears of looting, pillaging and
damage”.
Unesco has channelled EU dona-
tions worth £9.2 million to save build-
ings in the historic capital, Sanaa, and
the 7th-century coastal town of Zabid.Yemen
David Rose
A Nazi torpedo test station in the Baltic
Sea may have a future as a retreat for
Franciscan monks.
Set on sunken caissons more than
300 metres off the Polish coast, the
ghostly skeleton is all that remains of a
German station opened in 1942 to test
torpedoes.
Now, a bold architectural project has
won Poland’s leading student prize for
recasting the wartime construction off
the city of Gdynia as a sea-bound oasis
for monks to live and worship.
The monastery, designed by Pawel
Lisiak, an architecture graduate from
Wrocław University of Technology, was
chosen as this year’s top student project
by the Association of Polish Architects,
who lauded it for “confronting the sacredNazi torpedo test site could
become floating monastery
with the profane”. The project recalls
the medieval practice of Franciscan
monks rehabilitating abandoned spaces,
such as hospitals or chapels, often in
secluded places.
The minimalist white arrangement
includes a floating church, monastic
house, guest house, fraternity house,
patio and a pier, with few features other
than big windows offering unobstructed
sea views. The project also includes a
baptistry in a former torpedo hatch,
with light coming in through the two
projectile openings. It would be built in
thermoplastic bricks recycled from
plastic bottles, which would be resistant
to the salt, wind and humidity.
Called Laudato si, meaning “praise be
to you”, the project was inspired by a
book written by Pope Francis calling
for local solutions to the global issues of
climate change and inequality.Poland
Maria Wilczek Warsaw
The YouTube influencer Léna Mahfouf is outselling established authors with her
book advising readers to believe in their dreams and to be at ease with successmmentat
t d a “ m b r s p r
th
o t a t m s NJ M HAEDRICH/SIPA/REXThe Seiyun Palace, which features on
Yemeni currency, has been hit by floods