France calls for 'rapid and coordinated' European front against terrorism Macron
French officials will later move the remains of wartime writer Maurice Genevoix into the country's Panthéon of national heroes, an honour championed by Macron to encourage remembrance of the conflict.
Genevoix wrote five memoirs of his time as a frontline soldier experiencing the horrors of trench warfare in the conflict, which he later collected into a single book "Ceux de 14" ("Men of 14").
The work is considered by many to be the single greatest literary work to have emerged in French from the 1914-18 war, with its raw insight into the experience of battle drawing comparisons with "Storm of Steel" by German writer Ernst Junger or the English poetry of Wilfred Owen.
Marking 102 years since the end of World War I, an installation by French composer Pascal Dusapin and German artist Anselm Kiefer, commissioned by the French presidency, will also be put in the Panthéon.
A host of other events are planned across France to mark Armistice Day.
Officials in the Limousin region will commemorate the deeds of a six-year-old boy who is hailed as the youngest French World War II hero for carrying messages under his shirt to leaders of the resistance against Nazi occupation.
The name of Marcel Pinte — known as Quinquin — will be inscribed on Wednesday into the war memorial in Aixe-sur-Vienne just west of the city of Limoges.
The statement added that Macron's policies were aimed at "fighting against radical Islamism, and to do so with the Muslims of France, who are an integral part of French society, history and the Republic."
"We will not give in, ever," Macron tweeted on Sunday. "We respect all differences in a spirit of peace. We do not accept hate speech and defend reasonable debate. We will always be on the side of human dignity and universal values."
Paty's death has sparked a security crackdown in France, where officials are targeting hate speech on social media and organizations and non-profits with possible links to Islamism.
The Mohammed caricatures that Paty used in his class originally appeared in Charlie Hebdo, and were cited as the motivation for a terror attack on the satirical magazine in 2015 that left 12 people dead. Macron fiercely defended the right to display such cartoons in France at the memorial event for Paty..
French Prime Minister Jean Castex has said his government would keep “fighting relentlessly” against “radical Islam” as he paid tribute to the three victims of a knife attack in the southern city of Nice last month.
“We know the enemy. Not only has it been identified, but it has a name, it is radical Islam, a political ideology that disfigures the Muslim religion,” Castex said in a speech during a ceremony for the victims on Saturday.
“(It is) an enemy that the government is fighting relentlessly by providing the necessary resources and mobilising all of its forces every day,” he added.
Concerns over security and immigration have increased in France after the knife attack at a church in Nice on October 29 saw three people killed.
The man suspected of carrying out the Nice attack – still in a critical condition after being shot by police – was a 21-year-old Tunisian born who had arrived in Europe on September 20, landing in Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunisia. He has been identified as Brahim Issaoui.
The attack came after the beheading of Samuel Paty, a school teacher in a Paris suburb who showed his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a discussion on free speech.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s subsequent defence of the right to draw the prophet drew the ire of Muslim communities across the world, with trade associations in several Muslim countries announcing a boycott of French products.
Joe Biden, the US president-elect, has cast himself as a moderate with the experience and empathy required to offset Donald Trump’s disruptive presidency. Having battled adversity throughout a career scarred by personal tragedy, he says he feels the pain of a nation unnerved by economic crisis, civil unrest and a deadly pandemic.
Slovak officials said the team included two Downing Street advisers and two people responsible for arranging the UK’s large-scale testing programme in Liverpool.
“They are interested in our lessons and in the details and results,” said Slovakia’s deputy defence minister, Marian Majer, who added that Slovakia has offered to send a planning team to London to help with UK preparations if required.
A No 10 spokesperson declined to comment on the visit except to say that “we are constantly seeking to evolve our testing system in order to control the spread of the virus and bring the R rate down”.
Among 302 such adults, 16 (5.3%) had antibodies, likely generated during infections with “common cold” coronaviruses, that reacted to a specific region of the spike protein on the new virus called the S2 subunit. Among 48 children and adolescents, 21 (43.8%) had these antibodies. In test tube experiments, blood serum from both older and younger uninfected individuals with cross-reactive antibodies could neutralise the new coronavirus. That was not the case with serum from study participants who lacked these antibodies.
“Together, these findings may help explain higher Covid-19 susceptibility in older people and provide insight into whether pre-established immunity to seasonal coronaviruses offers protection against SARS-CoV-2,” the publishers of the journal said in a statement. The findings also suggest that targeting the S2 subunit on the coronavirus spike protein might be the basis for a drug or vaccine that works on multiple types of coronavirus.
The woman worked election day as an election judge supervisor at Memorial Hall in Blanchette Park in the St Louis suburb of St Charles. Officials don’t yet know if the virus was the cause of death. County officials didn’t release her name, citing privacy laws.
Lost confidence
Good evening from London. I’m Lucy Campbell, I’ll be bringing you all the latest global developments on the coronavirus pandemic for the next few hours. Please feel free to get in touch with me as I work if you have a story or tips to share! Your thoughts are always welcome.
Kamala Devi Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, is to become the highest-ranking woman in the 244-year existence of the United States. She's been welcomed by women, by black activists and by a chorus of liberal voices – but she comes to the job after having publicly savaged Joe Biden in the first Democrat TV debate, and with a confused reputation from her time as California attorney general.
Kamala Harris was among the gang of Democratic contenders who slugged it out in the first of the party's televised debates, back in June, 2019. In the course of that frequently stormy discussion, Harris accused Biden of having sided with racial segregationists in the 1970s by opposing legislation on "bussing", the controversial use of federal transport to bring black kids to white schools.
Biden, when he was a Delaware Senator in 1975, did indeed describe bussing as "asinine". In the 2019 debate, Harris told the man who will become her boss next January that he had been wrong to oppose the system that gave her the start of an education that had made her career possible. "I was the girl on the bus," she said. Biden ran out of time before he could answer.
Worldwide, there have been 1,235,148 Covid-19-related deaths. The United States is the hardest hit country with 234,944 fatalities, followed by Brazil with 161,736, India 124,985, Mexico 93,772 and the UK 48,120.
The US has also recorded more than 120,000 new daily infections - breaking a record set the day before.
Europe’s number of coronavirus-linked deaths has surged past 300,000 and its number of infections surpassed 12 million, according to an AFP tally from official sources.
The region’s 300,688 recorded deaths is second only to the 408,841 in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The New York Times described Harris's assault on Biden as "perhaps the toughest attack he faced throughout the primary campaign".
That was then. Harris dropped out of contention before the first of the party's selection votes, running out of money.
When Joe Biden secured the Democrat nomination, he took the woman who had savaged him as his running-mate, and Kamala Harris was rocketing towards the glass ceiling with a clenched fist.
A long career of being first
Harris was born 56 years ago in Oakland, California, across the Bay from San Francisco.
In an interview last year with The New Yorker magazine, she summed up her career quite simply: “Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of colour. First woman. First woman of colour. Every time.”
She has been, successively, San Francisco district attorney in 2003, attorney general of California in 2010, senator in 2016, vice-president-elect in 2020, seconding the oldest man ever elected to the White House.
She has played several crucial roles in the Biden campaign, becoming a forceful voice for racial justice, meeting black activists nationwide and showing up at Black Lives Matter protests. She also clearly helped to boost voter participation by black women in places like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
A mixed political legacy
As a senator, Harris supported Medicare-for-all and other health care reform plans. She introduced bills aimed at reducing racial disparities in health care, the economy and the criminal justice system.
Critics have wondered why she did so little to change the criminal justice system when she was working inside it in California.
Her efforts to end school absenteeism in San Francisco have been criticised as punitive of poor households, with parents being sent to jail because their kids were needed at home to mind sick siblings. As a prosecutor, Harris is alleged to have asked for bail amounts five times higher than the national average. She is accused of having ignored the Black Lives Matter movements until it became politically useful.
“We will not give up cartoons,” President Emmanuel Macron earlier told a solemn ceremony at the Sorbonne university in Paris attended by Paty’s family, who was targeted for having shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed in a civics class discussion on free speech early this month.
The president gave France’s highest civilian award, the Legion of Honour, to Paty and said he had been slain by “cowards” for representing the secular, democratic values of the French Republic.
“He was killed because Islamists want our future,” Macron said. “They will never have it.”
