Суспільство

A severe egg shortage in the U.S. is prompting a flood of unusual contraband at the U.S.-Mexico border: fresh eggs. Cesar Contreras reports this story, narrated by Veronica Villafañe.
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New nationwide strikes disrupted public transport and schools, as well as power, oil and gas supplies in France Tuesday, while tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in a third round of protests against planned pension reforms.

The protests came a day after French lawmakers began debating a pension bill that would raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64. The bill is the flagship legislation of President Emmanuel Macron’s second term.

Tens of thousands marched in the cities of Nice, Marseille, Toulouse, Nantes and elsewhere, as well as in Paris. Protesters in the French capital, many of whom were young, marched peacefully from the Opera area carrying placards reading “Save Your Pension” and “Tax Billionaires, Not Grandmas.”

France’s current pension system “is a democratic achievement in the sense that it is a French specialty that other countries envy,” said one protester, media worker Anissa Saudemont, 29.

“I feel that with high inflation, unemployment, the war in Ukraine and climate change, the government should focus on something else,” she added.

Last week, an estimated 1.27 million people demonstrated, according to authorities, more than in the first big protest day on Jan. 19. More demonstrations, called by France’s eight main unions, were planned for Saturday.

Rail operator SNCF said train services were severely disrupted Tuesday across the country, including on its high-speed network. International lines to Britain and Switzerland were affected. The Paris metro was also disrupted.

Saad Kadiui, 37, a consulting cabinet chief who had to go through a disrupted Paris train station Tuesday, said he did not support the “wearisome” strikes. “There are other ways to protest the pension reform,” he said.

Kadiui said he supported the principle of the pension reform but wanted the bill to be improved in parliament. “I think that for some jobs, 64 is too late,” he said.

Power producer EDF said the protest movement led to temporarily reduced electricity supplies, without causing blackouts. More than half of the workforce was on strike at the TotalEnergies refineries, according to the company.

The Education Ministry said close to 13% of teachers were on strike, a decrease compared to last week’s protest day. A third of French regions were on scheduled school breaks.

Macron vowed to go ahead with the changes, despite opinion polls showing growing opposition. The bill would gradually increase the minimum retirement age to 64 by 2030 and accelerate a planned measure providing that people must have worked for at least 43 years to be entitled to a full pension.

The government argues the changes are designed to keep the pension system financially afloat. France’s aging population is expected to plunge the system into deficit in the coming decade.

The parliamentary debate at the National Assembly and the Senate is expected to last several weeks.

Opposition lawmakers have proposed more than 20,000 amendments to the bill debated on Monday, mostly by the left-wing Nupes coalition.

Philippe Martinez, secretary general of the powerful CGT union, called on the government and lawmakers to “listen to the people.” Speaking on French radio network RT, he denounced Macron’s attitude as “playing with fire.”

Macron wants to show that “he is able to pass a reform, no matter what public opinion says, what the citizens think,” Martinez asserted.

The head of the CFDT union, Laurent Berger, also called on the government to “listen” to the crowd that took to the streets. “One can only respond to social tension through the democratic exercise of power,” he told French newspaper La Croix.

Rancor over the pension plan went beyond parliament’s raucous debate. The speaker of the lower house, the National Assembly, reported that the bill had triggered anonymous voicemails, graffiti and a threatening letter to the head of the chamber’s Social Affairs Committee.

“That’s enough,” Yael Braun-Pivet tweeted. “These acts are an attack on our democratic life. … We won’t tolerate it.”

Several lawmakers from the far-right National Rally party received voicemails during Monday’s debate saying that loved ones were hospitalized, in an apparent ploy to make them leave the assembly. The group’s leader, Marine Le Pen, said she was filing a legal complaint.
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Boeing plans to make staffing cuts in the aerospace company’s finance and human resources departments in 2023, with a loss of around 2,000 jobs, the company said.

“We expect about 2,000 reductions primarily in Finance and HR through a combination of attrition and layoffs,” Boeing said in a statement Monday. “While no one has been notified of job loss, we will continue to share information transparently to allow people to plan.”

The company, which recently relocated its headquarters to Arlington, Virginia, said it expects to “significantly grow” the overall workforce during the year. “We grew Boeing’s workforce by 15,000 last year and plan to hire another 10,000 employees this year with a focus on engineering and manufacturing,” the statement said.

Boeing’s total workforce was 156,000 employees as of Dec. 31, 2022, the company said.

The Seattle Times reported Boeing, which has been one of the largest private employers in Washington state, plans to outsource about a third of the eliminated positions to Tata Consulting Services in Bengaluru, India.

Mike Friedman, a senior director of communications, told the Times the other positions will be eliminated as the company makes reductions in finance and human resources support services.

“Over time, some of our corporate functions have grown quite large. And with that growth tends to come bureaucracy or disparate systems that are inefficient,” Friedman said. “So we’re streamlining.”

The Times reported about 1,500 of the company’s approximately 5,800 finance positions will be cut, with up to 400 more job cuts in human resources, which is about 15% of the department’s total staff.
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U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Monday that the world needs to wake up and take urgent action to change the trajectory on conflicts and geopolitical divisions, the climate crisis, and economic inequality.

“We need a course correction,” Guterres said as he laid out his 2023 priorities to the U.N. General Assembly.

“The good news is that we know how to turn things around — on climate, on finance, on conflict resolution, on and on,” he added. “And we know that the cost of inaction far exceeds the costs of action. But the strategic vision — the long-term thinking and commitment — is missing.”

He cited the recent announcement by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the so-called Doomsday Clock 10 seconds closer to global catastrophe as a “wake-up call.”

On January 24, the organization’s board, citing Russia’s war in Ukraine and the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, said the planet is now “90 seconds to midnight.”

“This is the closest the clock has ever stood to humanity’s darkest hour, and closer than even during the height of the Cold War,” Guterres warned.

The organization of scientists, of which Albert Einstein was a founding member, created the clock in 1947 as an indicator of how close the world is to manmade global catastrophe.

Adding to the growing list of crises and concerns was Monday’s deadly 7.8 earthquake that struck parts of Turkey and Syria. Guterres said the United Nations is mobilizing to support the emergency response.

“Let’s work together in solidarity to help those hit by this disaster, many of whom are already in dire need of humanitarian aid,” he said.

The quake’s epicenter was in parts of Turkey and Syria with large populations of refugees and people affected by more than a decade of civil war in Syria.

Russia’s war

Guterres has been clear in condemning Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the U.N. Charter and international law. He told the General Assembly that it has inflicted “untold suffering” on the Ukrainian people and had “profound” global implications. He voiced pessimism about the prospects for peace.

“The chances of further escalation and bloodshed keep growing,” he warned. “I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open.”

He criticized the “tactical” use of nuclear weapons as an “absurdity.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned he is ready to draw on his country’s entire arsenal, which includes nuclear weapons, to defend Russian territory. On Thursday, he repeated the threat in a speech criticizing Germany for helping to arm Ukraine.

“We are at the highest risk in decades of a nuclear war that could start by accident or design,” Guterres said. “We need to end the threat posed by 13,000 nuclear weapons held in arsenals around the world.”

The U.N. chief said the world needs peace, not just in Ukraine, but also in many corners of the planet. He said conflicts and political crises in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Africa’s Sahel region, Haiti, the Middle East and elsewhere are driving the suffering of two billion people.

“If every country fulfilled its obligations under the [U.N.] Charter, the right to peace would be guaranteed,” Guterres said. “When countries break those pledges, they create a world of insecurity for everyone.”
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Global airline traffic rose to over half of pre-pandemic levels in 2022 according to data released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) Monday.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, airlines saw a sharp decline in travel in 2020 and 2021 and lost tens of billions of dollars. Profits started to return in 2022 as traffic picked up again.

Global traffic grew to 68.5% of pre-pandemic (2019) levels in 2022, and 64.4% from 2021.

In 2022, international traffic rose 152.7% in comparison to 2021, and 62.2% compared to 2019. As for domestic travel, it rose 10.9% compared to the previous year and 79.6% of pre-pandemic levels.

China recently reopened its borders after three years on January 8. Analysts emphasize that full recovery to pre-pandemic levels depends on how quickly travel to and from China can return.

Willie Walsh, IATA’s director general, is hopeful that traffic will continue to rise in 2023.

“The industry left 2022 in far stronger shape than it entered, as most governments lifted COVID-19 travel restrictions during the year and people took advantage of the restoration of their freedom to travel. This momentum is expected to continue in the New Year, despite some governments’ over-reactions to China’s reopening,” he said.

“It is vital that governments learn the lesson that travel restrictions and border closures have little positive impact in terms of slowing the spread of infectious diseases in our globally inter-connected world.”

Some information for this report came from Reuters.
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