PARIS (Al Jazeera) – The French Senate has approved President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform plan as hundreds of thousands of protesters rallied in cities across the country to oppose the changes. Senators voted late on Saturday to adopt the reforms by 195 votes to 112, bringing the package — whose key measure is raising the retirement age by two years to 64 — closer to becoming law. “After hundreds of hours of discussions, the Senate adopted the pension reform plan. It is a key step to make a reform happen that will guarantee the future of our pension system,” Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne wrote on Twitter. She added she was “totally committed to ensure the text will be definitively adopted in the coming days”. Now that the Senate has adopted the bill, it will be reviewed by a joint committee of lower and upper house legislators, probably on Wednesday. If the committee agrees on a text, a final vote in both chambers is likely to take place on Thursday. But the outcome of that still seems uncertain in the lower chamber, the National Assembly, where Macron’s party needs allies’ votes for a majority. If the government fears it will not have enough votes in the lower house, it is still possible for it to push the text through without a parliamentary vote via a rarely used and highly controversial constitutional tool known as article 49:3.

 

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PARIS (AFP) – Thousands of tons of garbage has piled up on streets across the French capital after a week of strike action by dustbin collectors against government pension reforms, city hall said Sunday. Three incineration plants outside the capital have been hit by the work stoppages that have left entire pavements covered in black bags and overflowing bins. The capital’s household waste agency Syctom said it has been re-routing dustbin lorries to other storage and treatment sites in the region and has yet to resort to calling in the police. City hall employees have for the last week been picking up rubbish in just half of Paris’s districts. The strike has hit some of the most exclusive areas including the 5th, 6th and 16th districts.  Other districts are served by private firms which have not gone strike. According to the hard-left CGT union, refuse collectors and drivers can currently retire from 57 years of age, but would face another two years of work under the reform plans which still grant early retirement for those who faced tough working conditions. Life expectancy for the garbage workers is 12-17 years below the average for the country as a whole, the CGT says.

 

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BEIJING (AP/RT) – China on Sunday reappointed Yi Gang as head of the central bank in an effort to reassure entrepreneurs and financial markets by showing continuity at the top while other economic officials change during a period of uncertainty in the world’s second-largest economy.  His official duties lie in “implementing monetary policy,” or carrying out decisions made by a policymaking body whose membership is a secret. But the central bank governor acts as spokesperson for monetary policy, is the most prominent Chinese figure in global finance and is in charge of reassuring bankers and  investors at a time when China’s economy is emerging from drastically slower growth. At the March 5 opening of the annual session of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, China announced plans for a consumer-led revival of the struggling economy, setting this year’s growth target at “around 5%.”

China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) also appointed General Li Shangfu, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. for dealings with Russia, as the country’s new defense minister on Sunday. In 2018, the U.S. blacklisted Li as the then-head of the Equipment Development Department for “significant transactions” involving the transfer of Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 air defense systems-related materiel from Russia to China.

 

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GENEVA (Reuters) – Discovering the origins of COVID-19 is a moral imperative and all hypotheses must be explored, the head of the World Health Organization said, in the clearest indication yet that the UN body remains committed to finding how the virus arose. A U.S. agency was reported by the Wall Street Journal to have assessed the pandemic had likely been caused by an unintended Chinese laboratory leak, raising pressure on the WHO to come up with answers. Beijing denies the assessment which could soon become public after the U.S. House of Representatives voted this week to declassify it. “Understanding #COVID19’s origins and exploring all hypotheses remains: a scientific imperative, to help us prevent future outbreaks (and) a moral imperative, for the sake of the millions of people who died and those who live with #LongCOVID,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Twitter late on Saturday. He was writing to mark three years since the WHO first used the word “pandemic” to describe the global outbreak of COVID-19. 

 

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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Cyclone Freddy battered central Mozambique on Sunday after making landfall for a second time in a month, breaking records for the duration and strength of tropical storms in the southern hemisphere.

Communications and electricity supply in the storm area have been cut so the extent of the damage and number of casualties were not clear. More than 171,000 people were affected after the cyclone swept through southern Mozambique last month, killing 27 people in Mozambique and Madagascar. More than half a million are at risk of being affected in Mozambique this time, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). After passing the port town of Quelimane, the storm was continuing inland towards the southern tip of neighboring Malawi, satellite data showed. However, the national power company Electricidade de Moçambique said that by mid-afternoon electricity had been restored in most areas, with the exception of Milange, Lugela, Maganja da Costa, Namanjavira and parts of the city of Mocuba. Meanwhile, at least six people have died in Peru over the last few days as a powerful cyclone unleashed torrential rain, battering hundreds of homes and causing major disruptions in northern areas of the Latin American country, the authorities said.  The government has declared a state of emergency as it seeks to bring relief to regions of Peru hard hit by Cyclone Yaku. They include Lambayeque, Piura and Tumbes. The National Institute of Civil Defense (Indeci) said flooding caused by the cyclone had claimed six lives, Reuters reported.