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PARIS: Protests and strikes against unpopular pension reforms kicked off again Tuesday across France, with police security ramped up amid government warnings that radical demonstrators intended “to destroy, to injure and to kill.”
Concerns that violence could mar the demonstrations prompted what Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin described as an unprecedented deployment of 13,000 officers, nearly half of them concentrated in the French capital.
After months of upheaval, an exit from the firestorm of protest triggered by President Emmanuel Macron ‘s changes to France’s retirement system looked as far away as ever. Despite fresh union pleas hat the government pause its hotly contested push to raise France’s legal retirement age from 62 to 64, Macron seemingly remained wedded to it.
The French leader previously used a special constitutional power to ram the reform past legislators without allowing them a vote. His move this month further galvanized the protest movement. Violence has since flared and thousands of tons of stinking garbage have piled up on Paris’ streets as sanitation workers strike.
“Everybody is getting madder,” said Clément Saild, a train passenger at Paris’ Gare de Lyon railway station, where tracks were temporarily invaded and blocked Tuesday by protesting workers.
He said he supports the strikes despite their impact on transportation and other services.
“I am 26, and I wonder if I will ever retire,” he said.
Another passenger, Helene Cogan, 70, said: “French people are stubborn and things are getting out of hand.”
The wave of protests Tuesday marked the 10th time since January that unions have called on workers to walk out and for demonstrators to flood the nation’s streets against Macron’s retirement changes, which are a key priority of his second term as president.
His government argues that France’s pension system will dive into deficit without reform, because of the lower birth rates and longer life expectancy in many richer nations. Macron’s opponents say additional funding for pensions could come from other sources, without having to make workers retire later.
Demonstrations got underway peacefully Tuesday morning, with large crowds in multiple cities. But police braced for violence later in the day. The interior minister said more than 1,000 “radical” troublemakers, some from overseas, could latch on to marches in Paris and elsewhere.
“They come to destroy, to injure and to kill police officers and gendarmes. Their goals have nothing to do with the pension reform. Their goals are to destabilize our republican institutions and bring blood and fire down on France,” the minister said Monday in detailing the policing.
Some protesters, human rights campaigners and Macron’s political opponents allege that police officers have used excessive force against demonstrators. A police oversight body is investigating multiple claims of wrongdoing by officers.
The striking railway workers outside Gare de Lyon marched behind a banner that alleged: “The police mutilates. We don’t forgive!”
Macron’s opponents are urging him to cool tempers by backing down. Union leader Laurent Berger appealed Tuesday for a pause in implementing the retirement reform and for mediation.
“If we want to avoid tensions — and I want to avoid them — — what the trade unions are proposing is a gesture to calm things down,” he said. “It must be seized.”
But government spokesman Olivier Veran said mediation wasn’t needed for unions and the government to talk to each other.
The latest round of protests prompted Macron to indefinitely postpone a planned state visit this week by King Charles III.
Veran insisted, however, that France remains a welcoming place for all non-royal visitors.
“Life goes on,” he said.
UNITED NATIONS: Russia’s UN ambassador on Monday dismissed US and European Union descriptions of its presidency of the Security Council this month as an April Fool’s joke and announced a meeting to be chaired by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on defending the principles of the UN Charter, which Moscow is widely accused of breaking by invading Ukraine.
US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters earlier Monday that the US expects the Russians will be professional but will use their presiding seat “to spread disinformation and promote their own agenda as it relates to Ukraine, and we will stand ready to call them out at every single moment that they attempt to do that.”
She and European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell both called Russia’s takeover of the council presidency an April Fool’s joke.
Under Security Council rules, the presidency rotates monthly in alphabetical order among its 15 members. Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters there will be no change in the rules of the council, which is charged with maintaining international peace and security, and he said Russia will be “an honest broker.”
The council president presides over meetings and gets to decide the topics of key sessions, often presided over by foreign ministers and sometimes presidents. Lavrov on April 24 will preside over a session on “effective multilateralism through the defense of the principles of the UN Charter.”
There are also required monthly meetings, including on the Middle East, which Lavrov will also preside over, Syria and other global hotspots, including Mali, Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Africa’s Great Lakes region and Colombia.
Nebenzia responded to the US ambassador’s expectation that Russia will spread disinformation about Ukraine by calling it “a Western narrative” and stressing that “we think just the opposite.”
He said Russia plans to hold an informal council meeting on Wednesday on what Moscow claims is disinformation being spread by Western officials and media about the Ukrainian children taken to Russia. He said the aim of the meeting is “to dispel this narrative” that they were abducted.
The issue was put in the spotlight when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last month for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his country’s commissioner for children’s rights, accusing them of war crimes for the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to Russia. Moscow called the warrants “outrageous” and “legally void.”
An Associated Press investigation first published in October found that the open effort to put Ukrainian children up for adoption in Russia was well underway. Ukrainian officials claimed at the time that nearly 8,000 children had been deported to Russia, but the exact number was difficult to pin down.
Britain’s deputy UN ambassador, James Kariuki, said Russia was in no position to talk about international law or UN values.
“It is waging a war of aggression against Ukraine, violating the most basic principle of the UN Charter — you don’t redraw borders by force — and its president has been indicted by the ICC for the systematic abduction of Ukrainian children,” he said.
“The UK will keep using our seat on the council to challenge their illegal war, expose their disinformation, and protect the council’s vital work tackling other threats to international peace and security, including across Africa and the Middle East.”
Russia’s assumption of the council presidency also drew strong criticism from Ukraine and Baltic nations.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the “bankruptcy” of the Security Council and reiterated his call for an overhaul of the UN body and other global institutions.
Estonia’s UN Ambassador Rein Tammsaar, speaking also on behalf of Latvia and Lithuania, called the Russian presidency “shameful, humiliating and dangerous” for the council’s credibility.
Under Security Council rules, a member directly connected to an issue should withdraw from participation, and Nebenzia was asked if Russia would recuse itself when Ukraine was discussed.
“No,” he replied, indicating that the US, Britain and France, which have been supporting Ukraine, would have to withdraw as well.
The Russian ambassador recalled that following the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the UK and US held the council presidency consecutively that September and October.
“Nobody raised the question of their legitimacy to hold the presidency,” Nebenzia said. “And nobody put on the table the question that they withdraw from discussing an issue that was perhaps the most hot and topical then.”
JAKARTA: Speaking in Japanese and bowing, 24-year-old Siti Maesaroh offers a tray with a mug and two bowls to a fellow student pretending to be an elderly person, before asking him if he wanted chopsticks and a spoon to eat with.
The role play is an example of the type of training being offered by vocational institutions across Indonesia catering to students seeking to fill job vacancies in Japan.
“I think the reason Japan chooses us is because Indonesian youths are very capable of caring for the elderly,” said Maesaroh, who is attending the Onodera User Run school in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.
The school, established in 2022, also offers Japanese language training for its students seeking to enrol in a Japanese government program to employ foreigners with special skills to work in sectors like care giving.
Japan is one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies, with people who are 65 or older now accounting for 28 percent of the population, according to UN data.
Births in Japan fell to fewer than 800,000 for the first time last year, according to official data, as Japan’s working-age population shrinks.
Hiroki Sasaki, labor attache at the Japanese embassy in Jakarta, estimates only about 130,000 of the 340,000 special skilled job vacancies in Japan have been filled.
A foreign workforce, therefore, is becoming increasingly necessary, he said.
As of December 2022, there were more than 16,000 Indonesians working under Japan’s special skilled worker scheme, the second-highest number behind Vietnam.
Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country with some 280 million people and Kamila Mansjur, the principal of the school, said sending workers to Japan to care for the elderly benefited both countries.
“In Indonesia every year we have an increase in the population of about three million. Yet here we have our own challenge which is a lack of jobs,” she said.
WASHINGTON: U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration said on Monday it could not confirm reports that China was able to collect real-time data from a spy balloon as it flew over sensitive military sites earlier this year, saying analysis was still ongoing.
NBC News on Monday reported that the Chinese balloon was able to transmit data back to Beijing in real time despite the U.S. government’s efforts to prevent it from doing so — a disclosure that could deepen Republican criticism of Biden for waiting for the balloon to reach a safe location before shooting it down.
NBC cited two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official.
The White House and the Pentagon told reporters that they could not confirm that account. The Pentagon said experts were still analyzing debris collected from the balloon after it was shot down on Feb. 4.
“I could not confirm that there was real-time transmission from the balloon back to (China) at this time,” said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh, adding, “that’s something we’re analyzing right now.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing and the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy vessel, spent a week flying over the United States and Canada before the U.S. military shot it down off the Atlantic Coast on Biden’s orders.
Reuters has reported that the U.S. officials believe the high-altitude balloon was controlled by Beijing and was able to maneuver as it flew over the United States, at times steering left or right.
Still, at the time, U.S. officials played down the balloon’s impact on national security, saying it took measures to limit its ability to collect information on sensitive U.S. sites. It also played down the idea that the balloon was much more capable of collecting information than Chinese spy satellites, while acknowledging the balloon’s ability to loiter longer over U.S. locations than a satellite.
The Chinese balloon incident prompted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing and further strained relations between Washington and Beijing.
The episode caused an uproar in Washington and led the U.S. military to search the skies for other objects that were not being captured on radar.
The FBI has taken the lead in analysis since the United States said on Feb. 17 it had successfully concluded recovery efforts off South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.
NEW YORK: Former President Donald Trump returned to New York on Monday to face his historic booking and arraignment on hush money charges related to allegations of sexual encounters. The nation’s largest city bolstered security and warned potential protesters it was “not a playground for your misplaced anger.”
Trump’s long day started with a motorcade ride from his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to his red, white and blue Boeing 757, emblazoned with his name in gold letters — all carried live on television. The mini-parade took him past supporters waving banners and cheering, decrying the case against him, which stems from payments made during his 2016 campaign, as politically motivated.
Already months into a third campaign to reclaim the White House he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020, Trump and his advisers seemed to relish the attention. Cable networks followed his plane at airports in Florida and New York with video from the air, and a small group of senior campaign aides were joined aboard by his son Eric Trump, who eagerly posted photos of the wall-to-wall coverage from his seat.
The scene was quite different in New York, where Trump will be arraigned Tuesday — facing a judge in the city where he built a national profile in business and entertainment but became deeply unpopular as he moved into politics. Prosecutors say their case against him has nothing to do with politics and have defended the work of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is leading it. City leaders urged calm.
“While there may be some rabble rousers thinking about coming to our city tomorrow, our message is clear and simple: Control yourselves,” said New York Mayor Eric Adams. “New York City is our home. … We are the safest large city in America because we respect the rule of law.”
Upon arrival at New York’s LaGuardia airport, Trump stepped off his jet alone and directly into a waiting black SUV, with no one greeting him. Only small, sparse groups of supporters lined the route as his motorcade used a police escort to whisk him into Manhattan. From the air, the procession conjured images of a current president on the move rather than a former one facing criminal charges.
Advisers said Trump spent the flight working. In New York, he was meeting with his attorneys, then spending the night at Trump Tower before surrendering to authorities at the courthouse.
The return to New York opened an unprecedented chapter in American history, with Trump the first former president to face criminal charges. He’s betting it could actually boost his chances at winning the presidency again next year and his team has boasted of raising $7 million since word of the indictment broke last week.
But even as Trump aims to find a political advantage, there appeared to be some limits to the publicity he’s seeking. In a Monday filing, Trump’s lawyers asked the judge overseeing the case to ban photo and video coverage of his arraignment.
Following his court appearance, Trump plans to return to Mar-a-Lago for a press conference Tuesday evening. At least 500 people have been invited, according to a Republican familiar with the planning and granted anonymity to discuss it. Invitees include members of Congress who have endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign as well as donors and other supporters.
The former president also bolstered his legal team Monday, adding a third high-profile attorney, Todd Blanche. A former federal prosecutor, Blanche has previously represented Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Security in and around Trump Tower was tight. There were few supporters for Trump or people protesting against him nearby, with a small group hanging “Trump 2024” banners.
“I know that Donald Trump knows that we’re out there fighting for him every day,” said Brooklynite Dion Cini, who had stretched two pro-Trump banners along police barricades lining Fifth Avenue.
Officials haven’t seen an influx of people coming into the city, as was the case in Washington in the days before a mob of Trump supporters overran the US Capitol in January 2021. Still, they warned that possessing a weapon in certain areas of the city, including near courthouses, is a crime.
One of Trump’s staunchest defenders in Congress, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, was helping organize a Tuesday morning rally at a park across from the courthouse where Trump will appear, and Mayor Adams took the unusual step of calling her out by name.
“Although we have no specific threats, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is known to spread misinformation and hate speech, she’s stated she’s coming to town,” Adams said. “While you’re in town, be on your best behavior.”
Trump is facing multiple charges of falsifying business records, including at least one felony offense, in the indictment handed down by a Manhattan grand jury last week. The investigation is scrutinizing six-figure payments made to porn actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Both say they had sexual encounters with the married Trump years before he got into politics. Trump denies having sexual liaisons with either woman and has denied any wrongdoing involving payments.
Arriving in Minnesota, where he was touring a factory to promote his administration’s economic policies, Biden was asked if he thought there would be unrest in New York.
“No, I have faith in the New York Police Department,” the president replied. He also said he trusted the nation’s legal system. About the same time Trump was touching down in New York, Biden contrasted his economic agenda with “the last guy who had this job.” Biden is expected to formally announce his reelection campaign in coming weeks.
Florida Trump supporters began gathering while the sun was still rising at a West Palm Beach shopping center on the way to the airport, hours before the former president was set to pass along the route.
Boca Raton firefighter Erik Solensten and his retired colleague, John Fischer, put up banners. One was 30 by 6 feet (9 by 2 meters), picturing police officers and firefighters saying, “Thanks for having our backs, President Trump.”
“We are fire-rescue. We are prepared and don’t like to wait for things to happen,” said Solensten, who took a vacation day to show support for Trump. “He needs morale just like everyone else needs morale. He’s done more for this country than any 10 presidents combined.”
MOSCOW: Russia on Monday detained a young woman after an explosion killed a top Russian military blogger and wounded dozens, claiming the bombing attack was orchestrated by Ukraine with the help of supporters of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Ukraine has blamed Russia’s domestic infighting for the blast in a Saint Petersburg cafe that on Sunday wounded more than 30 people and killed Vladlen Tatarsky, a high-profile supporter of Moscow’s assault on Ukraine.
The attack came after Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent ultranationalist intellectual, was last August killed in a car bombing outside Moscow that Russia also blames on Ukraine.
Russia’s Investigative Committee and the National Anti-terrorism Committee both said pro-Navalny activists were behind the latest attack.
The Investigative Committee released a video of the arrest of 26-year-old Darya Trepova, who it said “holds opposition views and is a supporter of the Anti-Corruption Foundation,” referring to Navalny’s banned organization.
Political observers said the bombing attack could be used to justify a further crackdown on critics of Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine.
Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said the attack could also be used to accuse the jailed opposition politician of new crimes.
“Alexei will soon be on trial for extremism,” Yarmysh wrote, adding that he faced 35 years in prison.
“The Kremlin thought: ‘It’s great to be able to add the terrorism charge’.”
The Kremlin condemned the “terrorist attack” and said “there is evidence… that the Ukrainian special services may be related to its organization.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told journalists he was too busy focusing on his own country to pay attention to the attack in Saint Petersburg.
Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, was reportedly killed after receiving a statuette rigged with explosives during a talk at “Street Food Bar No. 1,” located along the Neva River not far from the historic city center.
The 40-year-old, who hailed from the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, fought alongside pro-Kremlin separatists and then became a popular military blogger with half a million followers on social media.
At a Kremlin ceremony announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions last September Tatarsky recorded himself saying: “We will defeat everyone. We will kill everyone. We will rob everyone as necessary. Just as we like it.”
President Vladimir Putin posthumously bestowed a top award, the Order of Courage, on Tatarsky citing his “courage and bravery shown during professional duty,” said a Kremlin decree on Monday.
Russians placed flowers at a makeshift memorial in Saint Petersburg to honor the blogger, who served prison time before joining the pro-Kremlin separatists.
Igor Ivanov, an 18-year-old student, said he was shocked and added he closely followed Tatarsky. “This is a heavy loss,” he said.
Vladislav Andreev, 27, compared Tatarsky’s death to the bombing attack on Dugina.
“These people will stop at nothing,” he said.
The footage released by the Investigative Committee showed a young blond woman getting in an elevator with a suitcase and then cut to her being led into a room by men dressed in dark uniforms.
The Russian interior ministry also published a video of Trepova in which she was heard saying she had brought a statuette that exploded to the Saint Petersburg cafe.
Asked on camera who gave it to her, the Russian national said she would answer “later.”
“The terrorist attack was planned by Ukrainian security services with the help of agents working with the so-called Anti-Corruption Foundation,” said Russia’s National Anti-terrorism Committee.
At least 100 people reportedly attended the event when the bombing attack took place on Sunday.
Alisa Smotrova, who was at the cafe, told AFP:
“They put (the figurine) somewhere in the back without a second thought… and all of a sudden there was an explosion.
“There was blood and pieces of glass,” she added.
The head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said the venue used to belong to him.
Prigozhin said on social media that he “gave the cafe to patriotic movement Cyber Front Z and they organized various seminars there.”
Cyber Front Z, which refers to itself on social media as “Russia’s information troops,” said it had hired out the venue for the evening.
Prigozhin said his forces hoisted the Russian flag with an inscription honoring the deceased blogger over the city administration of frontline hotspot of Bakhmut, which Wagner claimed to have seized.
On Sunday evening Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak suggested that the attack had taken place as a result of infighting in Russia.
“The question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time,” he said on Twitter.
The Russian foreign ministry on Sunday paid homage to the blogger and his “service to the Fatherland, which aroused Kyiv’s hatred.”