France says Lebanon 'running out of time before total collapse

One year after the nation was brought to a near-standstill by the coronavirus, President Joe Biden used his first prime-time address Thursday night to announce his plan to make all adults vaccine-eligible by May 1 and “begin to mark our independence from this virus” by the Fourth of July. He offered Americans fresh hope and appealed anew for their help.

Speaking in the White House East Room, Biden announced moves to speed vaccinations, including lifting eligibility qualifications, deploying an additional 4,000 active-duty troops to support vaccination efforts and allowing more people — such as medical students, veterinarians and dentists — to deliver shots.

He is also directing more doses toward some 950 community health centers and up to 20,000 retail pharmacies, to make it easier for people to get vaccinated closer to their homes.

His aim: let Americans gather at least in small groups for July Fourth and “make this Independence Day truly special.”

Biden was marking one year since the onset of the pandemic that has killed more than 530,000 Americans and disrupted the lives of countless more.

“While it was different for everyone, we all lost something,” Biden said, calling the past year “a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice.”

Earlier Thursday, Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion relief package that he said will help defeat the virus, nurse the economy back to health and deliver direct aid to Americans in need. Some direct checks could begin arriving this weekend.

“This historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country,” Biden said as he signed the bill in the Oval Office.

Most noticeable to many Americans are provisions providing up to $1,400 in direct payments and extending $300 weekly emergency unemployment benefits into early September. Also included are expanded tax credits over the next year for children, child care and family leave — some of them credits that Democrats have signaled they’d like to make permanent — plus spending for renters, feeding programs and people’s utility bills.

In his Thursday night address, Biden said that as vaccine supplies continue to increase, he will direct states and territories to make all adults eligible for vaccination by May 1. The U.S. is expecting delivery of enough doses for those 255 million adults by the end of that month, but the process of actually administering those doses will take time.

Biden said his administration is launching a nationwide website to help people find doses, saying it would address frustrations so that there would be “no more searching day and night for an appointment.”

Even as he offered optimism, Biden made clear that the July 4 timetable applied only to smaller gatherings, not larger ones, and requires cooperation from Americans to continue to wear face coverings, maintain social distancing and follow federal guidelines meant to slow the spread of the virus in the near term. He also called on them roll up their sleeves to get vaccinated as soon as they’re eligible.

This is “not the time to not stick with the rules,” Biden said, warning of the potential for backsliding just as the nation is on the cusp of defeating the virus. “I need you, the American people,” he added. “I need you. I need every American to do their part.”

The House gave final congressional approval to the sweeping package by a near party line 220-211 vote on Wednesday, seven weeks after Biden entered the White House and four days after the Senate passed the bill. Republicans in both chambers opposed the legislation unanimously, characterizing it as bloated, crammed with liberal policies and heedless of signs the crises are easing.

Biden originally planned to sign the bill on Friday, but it arrived at the White House more quickly than anticipated.

“We want to move as fast as possible,” tweeted chief of staff Ron Klain.

The enrolled bill arrived last night — so @POTUS is signing it today — we want to move as fast as possible. We will hold our celebration of the signing on Friday, as planned, with Congressional leaders!

Biden’s initial prime-time speech was “a big moment,” said presidential historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley. “He’s got to win over hearts and minds for people to stay masked and get vaccinated, but also recognize that after the last year, the federal government hasn’t forgotten you.”

Biden’s evening remarks in the East Room were central to a pivotal week for the president as he addresses the defining challenge of his term: shepherding the nation through the twin public health and economic storms brought about by the virus.

On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released initial guidance for how vaccinated people can resume some normal activities. On Wednesday, Congress approved the president’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan,” aimed at easing the economic impact of the virus on tens of millions of people. And the nation was on pace to administer its 100 millionth dose of vaccine as soon as Thursday.

Almost exactly one year ago, President Donald Trump addressed the nation to mark the WHO’s declaration of a global pandemic. He announced travel restrictions and called for Americans to practice good hygiene but displayed little alarm about the forthcoming catastrophe. Trump, it was later revealed, acknowledged that he had been deliberately “playing down” the threat of the virus.

For Biden, who has promised to level with the American public after the alternate reality of Trump’s virus talk, the imperative is to strike the correct balance “between optimism and grief,” said Princeton history professor and presidential scholar Julian Zelizer.

“Generally, the country likes optimism, and at this particular moment they’re desperate for optimism, but you can’t risk a ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment,’” he said, warning against any premature declaration that the threat has been vanquished.

Thousands of people defied a night time curfew to take to the streets of Myanmar’s main city in support of the youths in the Sanchaung district, where they had been holding a daily protest against the Feb. 1 coup.

The army takeover and arrest of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi has plunged Myanmar into chaos. Security forces have killed over 60 protesters and detained more than 1,800 since then, an advocacy group said.

In Sanchaung, police firing guns and using stun grenades announced on Monday they would check houses for anyone from outside the district and would punish anyone caught hiding them.

Youth activist Shar Ya Mone said she had been in a building with about 15 to 20 others, but had now been able to go home.

“There were many free car rides and people welcoming the protesters,” Shar Ya Mone said by telephone, pledging to keep demonstrating “until the dictatorship ends.”

Another protester posted on social media that they had been able to leave the area at around 5 a.m. after security forces pulled out.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had earlier called for “maximum restraint” and the safe release of all protesters without violence or arrests, a call echoed by the U.S. and British embassies in Myanmar.

An advocacy rights group said around 50 people had been arrested in Sanchaung after police searched houses, though checks were still being made.

A junta spokesman did not answer calls requesting comment.

State television MRTV earlier said: “The government’s patience has run out and while trying to minimise casualties in stopping riots, most people seek complete stability (and) are calling for more effective measures against riots.”

Three protesters were killed in demonstrations in northern Myanmar and the Irrawaddy Delta on Monday, according to witnesses and local media.

Myanmar ambassador in London backs protests

Demonstrations have been held daily for more than a month to demand the release of Suu Kyi and respect for the election her National League for Democracy (NLD) party won last November.

The army took power citing fraud in the ballot – an accusation rejected by the electoral commission. It has promised another election, but without giving a date.

The military has brushed off condemnation of its actions, as it has in past periods of army rule when outbreaks of protest were bloodily repressed.

Battered by Covid and online sales, one of Paris’s best-known book sellers Gibert Jeune is to shut up shop in the city’s historic literary and intellectual heart, a stone’s throw from the banks of the Seine where the family-owned firm started out over 130 years ago.

The planned demise of the Gibert flagship shop in the Place Saint-Michel, as well as others nearby, follows the loss of the Boulinier shop last year.

On the Left Bank of the Seine, Paris’s Latin quarter houses the Sorbonne. It has been a haunt of scholars since the middle ages and boasts dozens of booksellers.

But today with its slew of franchised stores — Levi’s, Celio, Sephora — along the Boulevard Saint Michel running from the banks of the Seine to the Sorbonne, critics charge the area has become just another bland global retail strip.

The iconic Boulinier, a fixture on the same boulevard since the 19th century, was forced to move its main store to smaller premises last June due to rising rents.

Faced with competition from online sales and internet giant Amazon, 43 percent of the quarter’s bookstores have vanished in 20 years, according to figures from the urban planning agency Apur.

The Latin Quarter, the centre of a 1968 student revolt, remains a major university hub, although fewer than 10,000 students are now said to live there.

Gradually, the centre of Paris is becoming gentrified, dominated by tourists while university faculties “decentre”, increasingly gravitating toward the suburbs, says Francois Mohrt, a town planner at Apur.

Smallest buck the trend

As France’s first independent bookseller, the Gibert group’s flagship shop has been in the Place Saint-Michel for as long as anyone can remember.

It plans to close four of its six Gibert Jeune shops located not far from the Notre-Dame cathedral.

Surrounded by already half empty bookshelves, one of the 69 employees whose jobs are due to disappear told AFP: “It’s brutal, but we didn’t expect to last 10 years.”

In 2020, the pandemic emptied the Place Saint-Michel of tourists. Then Bruno Gibert, a former head of the group, sold the building housing the largest bookshop.

In an attempt to help, the city authorities via their semi-public company Semeast are proposing rents slightly below market rates and relocation with a focus on a model that works — small local bookshops that can also offer refreshments, according to official Olivia Polski.

The initiative is based on the discovery that in Paris, as in the rest of the country, it is local bookshops which are offering the sector a glimmer of hope.

According to the Union of French Bookshops (SLF), independent bookshops have since 2017 returned to growth, despite a slight decline in 2020, down 3.3 percent, due to three months of closures during the Covid lockdowns.

Small booksellers, with turnovers of less than 300,000 euros a year, are making the most progress with sales jumping by 15 percent in the past year.

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For the SLF’s Guillaume Husson “there is a social aspect which is essential today if you want your bookshop to work”.

And it’s that human relationship between the bookshop and its customers that is one of the most important things book lovers are seeking from “smallscale sellers”, he added.

The same lesson has not been lost on the Gibert group. It will keep its six-floor shop next to the Sorbonne but rules out any new opening in the Latin quarter.

And it is considering opening bookshops of “less than 150 square metres” in outlying Paris districts and possibly in the suburbs, although “the basic question of rents will have to be addressed first”, said general manager Marc Bittore.

Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the top religious authority for most Shiite Muslims, hosted the head of the world’s Catholics, Pope Francis, on Saturday in the shrine city of Najaf.

The two elderly, respected men of religion met at Sistani’s humble home in the shrine city of Najaf early on Saturday, the second day of the first-ever papal visit to Iraq.

The 84-year-old pontiff is defying a second wave of coronavirus cases and renewed security fears to make a “long-awaited” trip to Iraq, aiming to comfort the country’s ancient Christian community and deepen his dialogue with other religions.

He landed at the Najaf airport, where posters had been set up featuring a famous saying by Ali, the fourth caliph and the Prophet Mohammed’s relative, who is buried in the holy city.

“People are of two kinds, either your brothers in faith or your equals in humanity,” read the banners.

A convoy of cars carried him into the Old City, which was under extremely tight security. He stepped out in one of Najaf’s tiny alleyways and an AFP correspondent saw him cross the threshold into Sistani’s office.

No press were allowed inside the meeting as the 90-year-old grand ayatollah is highly reclusive and almost never seen in public.

The visit is one of the highlights of Francis’s four-day trip to war-scarred Iraq, where Sistani has played a key role in tamping down tensions in recent decades.

It took months of careful negotiations between Najaf and the Vatican to secure the one-on-one meeting.

“We feel proud of what this visit represents and we thank those who made it possible,” said Mohamed Ali Bahr al-Ulum, a senior cleric in Najaf.

Pope Francis, a strong proponent of interfaith efforts, has met top Sunni clerics in several Muslim-majority countries, including Bangladesh, Turkey, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.

Sistani, meanwhile, is followed by most of the world’s 200 million Shiites — a minority among Muslims but the majority in Iraq — and is a national figure for Iraqis.

“Ali Sistani is a religious leader with a high moral authority,” said Cardinal Miguel Angel Ayuso Guixot, the head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and a specialist in Islamic studies.

Sistani began his religious studies at the age of five, ascending through the ranks of Shiite clergy to grand ayatollah in the 1990s.

While Saddam Hussein was in power, he languished under house arrest for years, but emerged after the US-led invasion that toppled the repressive regime to play an unprecedented public role.

In 2019, he stood with Iraqi protesters demanding better public services and shunning external interference in Iraq’s domestic affairs.

On Friday in Baghdad, Pope Francis made a similar plea.

“May partisan interests cease, those outside interests who don’t take into account the local population,” Francis said.

Sistani has had a complicated relationship with his birthplace Iran, where the other main seat of Shiite religious authority lies: Qom.

France has been alarmed over recent weeks by a spate of killings of young people in gang violence in the Paris region during the school holidays. Experts say that the role of social media and the economic effects of the Covid-19 crisis are major factors behind this phenomenon.

This came just a few days after two 14-year-olds, a boy and a girl, were killed in the suburban county of Essonne to the other side of Paris. They were stabbed to death in two different brawls between young people from rival gangs.

“It’s not surprising that the most serious problems take place during the school holidays, because during this time they have to go without the forms of social support they usually rely on, such as sport clubs and youth centres,” Yazid Kherfi, a former robber who turned away from crime and has worked in youth crime prevention since 2012, told FRANCE 24.

In response to this spate of killings, the French interior, justice and education ministers convened on March 1 to officially put the government on alert against this phenomenon.

Gang warfare among young people is on the rise, interior ministry statistics show: France recorded some 357 incidents in 2020 compared to 288 the previous year. The interior ministry has identified 74 gangs throughout the country – including 46 in the Paris region.

These figures likely represent an underestimation of the scale of the problem, Thomas Sauvadet, a sociologist and author of a study on youth gang warfare, Le Capital Guerrier (“Our Warlike Capital”), told FRANCE 24: “The police only record the most serious incidents, while many victims shy away from filing complaints out of fear of reprisals.”

Sauvadet added that “about 10 percent of young men under 30 living in underprivileged areas in the Paris region belong to a gang”, according to statistics he collated. “These gangs are largely composed of young people who have known each other from an early age, sometimes from seven to 10 years old. Then they tend to have difficulties at school in adolescence, sometimes with family issues that they seek to flee – and often professional difficulties follow that. So these young people band together to form gangs and find themselves in a state of conflict with those around them, including social workers.”

“These young people come together in these gangs and they feel like it gives them a sense of identity as well as protecting them,” Kherfi added. “They often suffer from quite bad economic insecurity, because they tend to come from relatively poor families. But there is also a sense of physical insecurity, because social media make it much easier to relay threats.”

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Several other factors have also contributed to the increase in gang violence, notably the emergence of mass youth unemployment starting in the 1980s. “There are plenty of people in their twenties who still live with their parents, and many of them have been stuck in gangs since they were teenagers amid economic precarity,” Sauvadet said. “They become the network heads who influence those beneath them in the hierarchy, serving as role models for teenagers who turn to violence.”

A lack of social workers dedicated to preventing gang violence is another big problem, Kherfi and Sauvadet agreed.

“When you’ve got three working in a place where 5,000 people live, that’s seen as a luxury,” Sauvadet said. “We’d need 10 times the current budget for it to be effective.”

Even so, “social workers cannot by themselves solve all of society’s problems”, Sauvadet said. “We’ve also got to look ay the economic roots of drug consumption and trafficking, youth unemployment and housing problems.”

The government’s plan to fight gangs is scheduled to come into force on May 1. It includes measures focusing on beefing up policing as well as policies aimed at tackling the causes of gang violence – notably by increasing monitoring of truancy.

“People can hurl abuse at each other much more easily through the virtual network of social media,” Kherfi continued. “And the virtual violence of these insults can end up turning into actual physical violence when those involved meet face-to-face.”

Sauvadet agreed with this observation – adding that social networks have encouraged gang violence by making it easier to organise.

The French government is taking the role of social media seriously. It wants to use local networks of borough councils, the police and schools to monitor social networks to stop them being used as platforms engendering gang violence – one of several measures put forward by the interior and justice ministries.

But Sauvadet argued that this will not be enough, because social media accelerated a cultural phenomenon that had already taken root. “Powered by American popular culture, gang culture has become mainstream,” he said, adding that it has been trivialised by US rappers and influencers, and “has even been taken over by multinationals, such as a famous sports brand, which used a kind of gang aesthetic to sell a clothing line to young people”.

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France says Lebanon ‘running out of time before total collapse

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