GOOD THURSDAY MORNING. We’ve all got a long list of things we could have achieved if we wanted to, “mais j’ai pas voulu.” In François Hollande’s case: being French president for a second term. “I could have beaten Emmanuel Macron, but I didn’t want to,” Hollande said in an interview with French broadcaster France 2 (he also gently reminded Macron that the French have that unpleasant tendency to behead their kings). He’s got more in a tell-all autobiography of sorts that’s just been released.

Macron, who is preparing a media blitz of his own, is scheduled to give a lengthy interview to French broadcaster TF1 today as he nears the one-year mark of his time in office. He might talk about lessons of power (coincidentally the title of Hollande’s book), but also about a possible military intervention in Syria.

Trump’s latest surprise to Western partners: U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement on Twitter on Wednesday that missiles will soon be fired on Syria — something that didn’t appear to be coordinated with his aides, let alone partners — has him on a collision course with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria,” Trump tweeted. “Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!” Trump was responding to comments made by Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, who said any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down “and even the sources from which the missiles were fired.” The face-off is being viewed in both Russia and the West as the worst moment since the Cuban missile crisis.

May on board: Theresa May is set to throw the U.K.’s lot in with Trump, without first seeking MPs’ consent, according to the BBC.

Not so fast: The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said it will meet on Monday to discuss whether chemical weapons were indeed used in Syria and to thereby certify — if that’s a yes — that red lines were crossed. British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson was otherwise engaged on Wednesday, learning about hedgehogs.

Yulia statement: Yulia Skripal, the daughter of poisoned Russian ex-spy Sergei released a statement Wednesday night asking for space from the media and taking (somewhat gentle) aim at the Russian embassy. She said: “I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can. At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.”

HUNGARY, MEN AND MANNERS

Notes on a scandal: It is a brief letter, but gives an insight into the internal tensions stoked in the European People’s Party by the Hungarian election (or to be precise, the victory of their own Viktor Orbán). “Dear Mr. Hökmark,” Hungarian MEP József Szájer wrote jauntily to Gunnar Hökmark (copying all other fellow EPP MEPs), to teach him a lesson on manners: “I do not know how is it in Sweden, but in my part of the world we customarily congratulate the winner even when we lose elections. Not to speak about our party-fellows … Yours, József Szájer.”

Hökmark had earlier written to group Chairman Manfred Weber to criticize him for his “devoted congratulations” to Orbán, on “a victory won on a platform of populism and anti-European, anti-Semitic and xenophobic rhetoric.” Playbook has seen the email exchange. Included in it is an explainer by Szájer, in a separate 1,900-word email, to his conservative colleagues of why Orbán won, how great this was for the EPP and why neither the prime minister nor his Fidesz party are either anti-Semitic or xenophobic, let alone anti-European. These claims were quickly rebutted by Socialist Hungarian MEPs Péter Niedermüller and Csaba Molnár in yet another email to the whole chamber.

Szájer’s thanked “those EPP colleagues who considerably helped us to score this success,” praising in particular “our Chairman Manfred Weber, who came two weeks ago to Budapest to support our campaign, to stand firm besides us, and Joseph Daul, our president.” The debate about whether Fidesz is in good standing among the members of the party family was debated again during a group meeting on Wednesday, participants told me. There are two camps, of course.

MEP Pascal Arimont, head of Belgian Christian Democratic Party CSP (from the German-speaking part of the country) didn’t take part in the exchange of emails but went on air on Belgian RTBF Wednesday to say that “if we want to respect our values, we need to exclude Fidesz” — before admitting there’s a very small chance that will actually happen because the “other part of the group, which is in the majority for the time being, says that Fidesz must be left within the EPP because it is the only way to control Mr. Orbán a little.”

CHECK YOUR MACRO: The British Conservative Party Wednesday had to apologize for a letter mail-out gone terribly wrong.

MEN, ROBOTS, AND THEIR LEGAL STATUS

Autonomous robots with humanlike, all-encompassing capabilities might still be decades away, but lawmakers, legal experts and manufacturers are already locked in a high-stakes debate about their legal status: whether it’s these machines or human beings who should bear ultimate responsibility for their actions. Last year, Luxembourgish MEP Mady Delvaux kicked a hornets’ nest when the Legal Affairs Committee suggested that self-learning robots could be granted some form of “electronic personality,” so they can be held liable for damage they cause if they go rogue.

The committee wrote that from “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster to the classical myth of Pygmalion, through the story of Prague’s Golem to the robot of Karel Čapek, who coined the word, people have fantasized about the possibility of building intelligent machines, more often than not androids with human features.” Still, poetic or not, the report prompted harsh backlash across the Continent.

No thanks: The opposition has galvanized. In a letter to the European Commission, seen by POLITICO, 156 artificial intelligence experts hailing from 14 European countries, including computer scientists, law professors and CEOs, warn that granting robots legal personhood would be “inappropriate” from a “legal and ethical perspective.” And as each side turns up the volume on its advocacy and lobbying, one thing is clear: Money is pouring into the field of robotics, and the debate is only set to turn louder. POLITICO’s Janosch Delcker has the full story.

INTER-INSTITUTIONAL MATTERS

SELMAYR LATEST: The College of Commissioners now appears to have officially spent more time discussing Martin Selmayr’s appointment to the secretary-general post after they approved it than they did in the few minutes before they voted to put him there.

Commissioners on Wednesday considered Parliament’s draft resolution on the Selmayr case and focused on two issues, sources inside the room told me. First, they reconsidered — and reaffirmed — a policy in place since 2004 that equates commissioners’ heads of cabinet to directors in the civil service, and the president’s cabinet chief to a director-general; there was evidence at hand that a court has previously confirmed that heads of cabinet do lead, albeit small, administrative units, and can qualify as being able to run a major department. And second, commissioners again scoured the staff regulations and — unsurprisingly — found everything in order with Selmayr’s two-step blitz appointment.

Key points: Commissioners agreed they want to preserve “autonomy” and a “margin of discretion” that comes with having two mechanisms for promoting staff within the civil service; and they said they were open to discussions with the Council and Parliament to “further develop and strengthen” staff policies — for all three institutions.

FOLLOWING UP: Parliament’s trade unions echoed the message that the staff committee delivered to President Antonio Tajani. They noted that as counter-intuitive as it seems, the external advertising of top positions leads to less transparency — “some top jobs (even those requiring extensive in-house knowledge) were published externally and — surprise, surprise! — these were the very same posts where the ‘favored’ candidate did not have the necessary experience to apply internally,” the unions wrote in an email to all staff. POLITICO’s Maïa de la Baume has more.

WHO’S TO BLAME FOR GDPR? On an unrelated note: “As tech companies across the globe scramble to adapt to the EU’s new digital privacy law, they have one person they should thank,” writes Playbook alum Ryan Heath, looking behind the scenes of the making of the General Data Protection Regulation, or “the most radical update of privacy protections in more than a generation,” that enters into force next month. One of its architects: Selmayr, “the world’s most powerful tech regulator,” as Ryan writes.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT BOMBSHELL: POLITICO’s Ginger Hervey has the story of a trainee working for the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), an EU body charged with promoting equality between the sexes across the Continent, who experienced sexual harassment from her first day in her new job. “He asked her to lunch and dinner, invited her on a road trip, and kept inquiring about her sleeping arrangements, always with a smile she registered as flirty, bordering on malicious: ‘How was the bed?’ … He started to get drunk at a work dinner … asked if she was a lesbian … ‘begged’ her to walk him home. She refused, and as she walked away at 3:30 a.m. down a dark street in Vilnius, Lithuania, she heard him calling after her: ‘Are you refusing me? Are you refusing me?’” And it is not the only case of its kind at the agency, Ginger’s investigation revealed.