France on strike: Power cuts, schools shut, no Eiffel Tower
PARIS — French union activists cut electricity to nearly 100,000 homes or offices. Eiffel Tower staff walked off the job. Even Paris opera workers joined in Tuesday’s nationwide protests across France, singing an aria of anger as workers rallied against the government’s plan to raise the retirement age to 64.
Despite 13 days of crippling train and subway strikes, French President Emmanuel Macron and his government stayed firm. The prime minister declared his “total” determination to reshape a pension system that unions celebrate as a model for the rest of the world but that he calls unfair and destined to collapse into debt.
Lighting red flares and marching beneath a blanket of multi-colored union flags, thousands of workers snaked through French cities from Brittany on the Atlantic to the Pyrenees in the south.
Hospital workers in scrubs, Air France staff in uniforms, lawyers wearing long black robes — people from across the French workforce joined in the strikes and protests in higher numbers than the last cross-sector walkout last week.
The retirement reform that has brought them together is just one of their many gripes against Macron, a business-friendly centrist they fear is dismantling France’s costly but oft-envied welfare state.
Workers from the hard-left CGT union on Tuesday carried out what they called “targeted” blackouts on electricity networks around Lyon and Bordeaux to call attention to their grievances, and their power.
Several European countries have raised the retirement age or cut pensions in recent years to keep up with lengthening life expectancy and slowing economic growth. Macron argues that France needs to do the same.
Tourists canceled plans and Paris commuters took hours to get to work Tuesday, as train drivers kept up their strike against changes to a system that allows them and other workers under special pension regimes to retire as early as their 50s.
House passes $1.4T government spending bill amid impeachment
WASHINGTON — The Democratic-controlled House voted Tuesday to pass a $1.4 trillion government spending package, handing President Donald Trump a victory on his U.S.-Mexico border fence while giving Democrats spending increases across a swath of domestic programs.
The hard-fought legislation also funds a record Pentagon budget and is serving as a must-pass legislative locomotive to tow an unusually large haul of unrelated provisions into law, including an expensive repeal of Obama-era taxes on high-cost health plans, help for retired coal miners, and an increase from 18 to 21 in the nationwide legal age to buy tobacco products.
The two-bill package, some 2,371 pages long after additional tax provisions were folded in on Tuesday morning, was unveiled Monday afternoon and adopted less than 24 hours later as lawmakers prepared to wrap up reams of unfinished work against a backdrop of Wednesday’s vote on impeaching Trump.
The House first passed a measure funding domestic programs on a 297-120 vote. But one-third of the Democrats defected on a 280-138 vote on the second bill, which funds the military and the Department of Homeland Security, mostly because it funds Trump’s border wall project.
The spending legislation would forestall a government shutdown this weekend and give Trump steady funding for his U.S.-Mexico border fence, a move that frustrated Hispanic Democrats and party liberals. The year-end package is anchored by a $1.4 trillion spending measure that caps a difficult, monthslong battle over spending priorities.
Halting 737 Max production will hit suppliers, airlines
As Boeing prepares to shutter much of a huge factory near Seattle that builds the grounded 737 Max jet, the economic hit is reverberating across the United States in places such as Wichita, Kansas, Stamford, Connecticut, and Cincinnati.
Those cities are home to some of 900 companies worldwide that supply parts for the troubled plane, which analysts say is the largest manufactured product exported from the U.S.
Boeing does not currently plan to lay off any of the 12,000 workers at its factory in Renton, Washington. But smaller parts companies like Wichita-based Spirit AeroSystems might not have that luxury. They could be forced to cut employees, and some might even get pushed out of business.
With 13,500 workers, Spirit is the largest employer in Kansas’ biggest city. It gets half of its revenue from making fuselages for the 737.
Even though Max production had slowed earlier in the year, Spirit and other suppliers continued to crank out parts, putting many of them in storage. As of Friday, Spirit had 90 fuselages on a ramp adjacent to nearby McConnell Air Force Base.
Pope removes shroud of secrecy from clergy sex abuse cases
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis abolished the use of the Vatican’s highest level of secrecy in clergy sexual abuse cases Tuesday, responding to mounting criticism that the rule of “pontifical secrecy” has been used to protect pedophiles, silence victims and prevent police from investigating crimes.
Victims and their advocates cheered the move as long overdue, but cautioned that the proof of its effectiveness would come when the Catholic hierarchy is forced to respond to national inquiries, grand jury subpoenas and criminal prosecutors who are increasingly demanding all internal documentation about abusers.
“The carnival of obscurity is over,” declared Juan Carlos Cruz, a prominent Chilean survivor of clergy abuse and advocate for victims.
In a new law, Francis decreed that information in abuse cases must be protected by church leaders to ensure its “security, integrity and confidentiality.” But he said the rule of “pontifical secrecy” no longer applied to abuse-related accusations, trials and decisions under the Catholic Church’s canon law.
By wire sources
