Six weeks before the end of the year holidays, special concrete safety barriers were installed on the Essen Christmas market. The green blocks in the shape of a Christmas tree are deployed to protect the stands from possible attacks.

 

Learn more about RT France: https://francais.rt.com/videos/67974-germany-trees-noel-beton-protegent

 

It's unfortunate that Gus the macronphobe agrees with Macronleon on NATO...

More organisations in France are planning to join the planned strike on December 5, as President Macron has said that “there is no freedom without public order”.

 

So far, unions from train company SNCF, transport firm RATP, heavy goods lorry drivers, airline Air France, public hospitals, and electricity giant EDF have added their support to the planned strike.

The movement’s major grievance is against pension reform, but other issues are likely to be highlighted on the day.

SNCF

On the train lines, four unions at SNCF have called for strike action. These include CGT-Cheminots, Unsa and Sud-Rail, who have all signed a call to “defend the retirement of most workers”, as, they said,“special arrangements [such as those held by the cheminots] are being targeted by the government”.

The unions have said that the public will be able to find out which trains will be running on December 5, by the afternoon of December 3.

The CFDT-Cheminot union has also announced plans to join the strike. Secretary general Didier Aubert said: “The government has underestimated the cheminots’ expectations [and we] need to be reassured.”

Head of the CGT-Cheminots, Laurent Brun, said: “We will start [the strike] on December 5, and continue on the 6. This will be a huge day of action, everyone mixed up together. [There is] very high dissatisfaction about retirement.”

RATP

Paris transport company RATP has also confirmed it will join on December 5, with the CFE-CGC, the CGT, and Unsa adding their voices to the movement. They have promised action on a par with the September 13 strike, which has been described as “bringing Paris to a standstill”.

Fabrice Ruiz, from the CFE-CGC, said: “December 5 will be as large as September 13,”; while Bertrand Hammache, from the CGT, said: “This will be a big day.”

Transport unions across France

The FO and CGT unions have called for an “unlimited” strike among their workers, across urban and cross-country services. This will also include ambulance drivers, taxis, and even removal van workers, and affect major cities including Lyon, Montpellier, and Bordeaux.

Patrice Clos from FO Transports and Logistique, said: “We are doing what we need to ensure it happens. For urban transport and road transport, fairly numerous notifications of strike action have been confirmed.”

Air France

At the national airline, the strike call has applied to ground staff only. So far the pilot and stewards’ unions have not joined.

Individual ground staff members will need to declare their strike intentions 48 hours before December 5, to allow the company to organise around them, and inform passengers of any disruption.

Similarly, the major air traffic control union SNCTA has not joined the strike, in contrast to the second-largest union, USAC-CGT. A minimum service is set to go ahead, but action could cause delays or flight cancellations.

Barristers

National barristers’ union Le Conseil National des Barreaux (CNB) has also joined the action, branding December 5 “a day for dead justice”.

In an open letter to the justice minister, it said that it was showing “solidarity with those who are suffering from the lack of listening by the government, and its dogmatic reforms”. It added that relations between the government and lawyers were at a “historically critical point”.

The letter also said that it was opposed to the government’s pension reform, which it said was calculated on the assumption that a barrister’s career would start at the age of 23, when in fact, the “average age of entry into the profession is 28, and that in 2018, no lawyer entered the profession at the age of [23]”.

EDF

Unions of workers at the electricity giant have also joined, including the CGT, Force Ouvrière and Sud; but the CFDT Chimie-Energie has said it has no plans to call for strike action.

Yet, the CGT has called for “a drop in electricity production, and power cuts to public State buildings (except healthcare establishments)”, and to increase supply to those who have been “unfairly cut off”.

Police

Some police stations are likely to close, after unions Alliance and UNSA said that they would join the strike if the minister for the Interior “does not reply to our wishes”.

On strike day, they plan to launch “action from 10h to 15h in all police services”, especially the “symbolic closure of stations” and “refusal to take part in extra check at airports on at motorway péages”.

Education

Three education unions have announced they will join: SNES-FSU, SUD-Education and Unsa-Education, as well as others as part of the wider union group Education.

Hospitals

At least one nurses’ union has said it will join on December 5. Some staff remain unconvinced by the government’s recent budget announcements on healthcare, and will join the movement.

A statement from the CGT, FO and CFDT said that the government is “not replying to the gravity of the situation”.

Hospital staff have also stated plans to strike on November 30, and again on December 17, with interns and other staff also on strike on December 10.

 

Read more:

https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/December-5-strike-grows-acro...

Picture above by Gus Leonisky. Read from top. See also:

the troops revolt in anger, as the job of hitting yellow vests loses its cachet while the rich get tax breaks...

 

Donald Trump has arrived in London for a two-day NATO summit which marks the 70th anniversary of the alliance. Previously, he has repeatedly criticised what he calls the lack of equal 'burden-sharing' by NATO's European members. 

US President Donald Trump has launched a scathing attack on France as he arrived for a NATO summit in the UK. 

Trump said that French President Emmanuel Macron's words about NATO's 'brain death' are 'very nasty'. 

Mr Trump also believes that nobody needs NATO more than France, adding that the US is the one that 'benefits the least' from it. He added that he sees France breaking off from the alliance. 

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201912031077470593-very-nasty-president-tr...

 

If Macronleon is not the favourite son on this Gus's bizoblog, he is redeeming himself a tad by shaking NATO to the core... Let's hope he's genuine and not just playing games or will be forced to bend the knees... NATO is a nasty blot on the planet, forcing others like Russia and China to plan defensively and offensively as well. Brain-dead is correct. Macronleon is emulating general de Gaulle here: throw the Yanks out...

 

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by Finian Cunningham

 

The splits and rancor at the NATO summit this week could not be concealed, even by strained calls for “unity”. The US-led military alliance is a dinosaur well past its extinction date.

Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, did his best to rally a sense of unity as the two-day summit hosted by Britain came to a close. The event was supposed to be a celebration, marking the 70th anniversary of NATO’s founding.

Far from being a “happy birthday” party, the NATO gathering descended into embarrassing farce with bickering and jibes. Video footage appeared to show the French, British and Canadian leaders making fun of American President Donald Trump over his rambling press conferences. Trump then hit back, accusing Canada’s Justin Trudeau of being “two-faced”.

There were other spats, between France and Turkey over Ankara’s military incursion into northern Syria against Kurdish militants, whom France and the US regard as allies. Turkey was also chided for buying the S-400 air defense system from Russia.

However, the biggest clash came between Trump and France’s Emmanuel Macron, who was taken to task by the American leader for his recent media remarks about NATO being “brain dead”. Trump said those comments were “very, very nasty” and “disrespectful”. Macron bridled at their joint press conference, saying he stood by his earlier critical comments.

It was toe-curling stuff, especially the lecture on politeness coming from Trump who himself has several times in the past disparaged NATO as “obsolete”.

Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian secretary-general, tried to smooth over the ruffled relations by claiming: “NATO is the most successful alliance in history because we’ve changed at the world has changed.” He went on to describe the 29-nation military bloc as “agile, active… adapting.”

That was after he pointed out that the combined NATO military spend was set for massive increases. An extra $400 billion will be forked out by the alliance by 2024, said Stoltenberg, on top of the current $1 trillion.

Already NATO’s total budget is 20 times that of Russia and five times that of China.

This is not about being “agile” or “adapting”. It’s about what NATO has always done: actively expand its military forces on a global scale in a way that deliberately destabilizes security and thus creates “challenges” that “need” to be responded to.

At this year’s summit, the NATO leaders have “for the first time” discussed China as a collective security challenge. They also discussed making “space an operational domain” for military technology.

And, of course, Russia featured as the time-honored “bogeyman”, with Stoltenberg talking about increasing battalions on Russia’s borders to “protect Poland and the Baltic region”.

There were also a few token statements about “fighting terrorism” thrown into the mission mix during the two-day summit near London.

But the “anti-terror” platitudes can’t hide the fundamental purpose of NATO which is expansionism and the creation of international tensions, conflicts and enemies, or more politely “adversaries”.

When NATO was founded in 1949 until 1991 it comprised 12 members. The organization was supposed to “defend” Europe from attack by the Soviet Union. That was always a much-overblown claim even back in the Cold War decades. Since the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact dissolved, NATO has more than doubled its size with 17 new member states, most of them proximate to Russia’s borders. The recruitment goes on, with talk of Georgia and the Ukraine joining in the future. Yet NATO inverts Russia’s legitimate concerns over an increasing security threat, by absurdly claiming that Russia is threatening Europe.

It wasn’t Russia that attacked the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans in the late 1990s, nor conducted regime-change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. It wasn’t Russia that oversaw a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. In all the mayhem over the past three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has relentlessly ramped up foreign wars, destabilizing the entire globe.

Adding China and the militarization of space as new remits to its mission, this is NATO seeking to expand its real “insecurity agenda”, in contrast to its official claims of maintaining global security.

The truth is NATO is a front organization for the military-industrial complex that drives the corporate-capitalist economies in North America and Europe, but primarily in the US. Without NATO’s annual $1 trillion spend – soon to escalate further – the militarized economies of the US and its allies would flounder from the lack of massive public subsidy year after year.

If NATO were disbanded and the war economies of the US and its allies were to cease, then more civilized economies would lead to greater social equality and democracy, which would not be tolerated in Western plutocracies.

The NATO dinosaur plods on… for now. But the disaster of poverty and unsustainable international tensions that it leaves in its wake suggest that the beast is soon heading for long-overdue extinction. Either that, or the planet could very well be made extinct from its reprehensible rampaging.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201912041077485379-nato-dinosaur-plod...

 

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Brexit has been “one of the most spectacular mistakes” in the history of the EU and followed a campaign marked by “an unprecedented readiness to lie”, Donald Tusk has said.

In his first interview since standing down as European council president last week, Tusk said Brexit was “the most painful and saddest experience” of his five years in office, a tumultuous period marked by the Greek eurozone crisis, bitter rows over migration and the election of Donald Trump.

He also criticised the French president, Emmanuel Macron, for branding Nato “brain-dead” and refusing to open EU membership talks with North Macedonia and Albania.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/05/brexit-one-of-most-spectac...

 

Brexit is complicated by the UK special relationship with the USA and by the Pound Sterling. Having some special privileges in the EU, the UK also engaged in spying on European leaders on behalf of the Yanks. The election on December 14 will decide one way or the other the mood of the Poms who are the ONLY PEOPLE who can choose Brexit or not. General de Gaulle was correct in not allowing the UK to join the EU, until the UK had come to a less rabidly mercantile status.

 

In regard to NATO, Macron is emulating the good General's "throw the Yanks out" mantra which of course the CIA protégé Sarkozy changed into kiss the Yanks' butt...

 

In regard to Europe admitting new members, the maths do not work out. Without going into details, the numbers of countries in the EU should be limited to 27. Presently the UK is number 28. Tada, see-you-later, au revoir, Auf Wiedersehen, hasta la vita, baby....

 

Tusk is president of European People’s Party, which of course could misunderstand everything more subtle than boots and all...

 

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