adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

News

The new French prime minister says the country’s ‘colossal’ debt is the ‘sword of Damocles’

Published

 on

 

PARIS (AP) — In his inaugural address to parliament, the new French Prime Minister Michel Barnier warned Tuesday that “colossal” and spiraling debts are a “sword of Damocles” hanging over the finances of the European Union’s second-largest economy and announced belt-tightening and more taxes to reverse the trend.

Tuesday’s opening of parliament and Barnier’s address kicked off what promised to be months of tumult in the National Assembly — which is sharply divided from surprise elections three months ago that produced no clear winner.

Barnier’s speech laying out his policy intentions represented a crucial early test for his new minority government, which has no clear majority in the parliament. The mood in the chamber was closely watched for signs of how difficult opposition lawmakers intend to make it for the 73-year-old veteran conservative and EU Brexit negotiator to get things done and keep power. From the outset of his address, left-wing lawmakers who have vowed to try to bring down his government as soon as they can heckled him with shouts.

Barnier made a priority in his address of remedying France’s indebted public finances. He made clear that he aims to curb spending, saying France has “much to do” but adding: “We must make do with little.” Barnier announced an “exceptional” tax on France’s wealthiest individuals — but did not specify who, exactly, falls into that tax bracket. He also said an extra contributory “effort” will be asked of large companies making big profits.

“The true sword of Damocles is our colossal debt,” Barnier said. “If we are not careful, it will take our country to the edge of the precipice.”

France is under pressure from the European Union’s executive arm to reduce its debt.

Still, tax hikes would go against the fiscal philosophy of French President Emmanuel Macron, who consistently cut taxes when he still had a government with a clear majority in parliament.

Barnier said his government will seek to reduce France’s deficit from an estimated 6% of Gross Domestic Product now to 5% next year and under 3% by 2029.

To do so, he promised to cut state expenses, spend money more “efficiently” and fight tax evasion and other frauds.

Barnier, who had pledged a hardline stance on migration, said he wanted to “better control” the numbers of people coming to France.

He proposed to “facilitate” the detention of foreigners who are staying illegally in the country pending the implementation of deportation orders.

He said France will continue “as long as needed” to implement controls at its national borders in the passport-free area in Europe.

In addition, Barnier suggested that the number of visas granted would be conditional on other nations’ ability to provide consular documents for their citizens being deported from France after arriving illegally. A similar move by Macron prompted a year-long dispute with Morocco in 2022.

Barnier’s wide-ranging speech covered his plans to tackle problems as diverse as mental health and aid for farmers to wind power and sexual violence.

Left-wing lawmakers kept up a steady drumbeat of shouted comments throughout but failed to throw the veteran politician off his stride. He responded to the heckling with flashes of wry humor and said he aims to listen to and respect all lawmakers “even if this respect is not always reciprocal.”

June-July legislative elections left the National Assembly split between three main blocs, none of them with enough legislators to govern alone. Barnier, appointed by Macron last month in a hoped-for unifying role, will have to build alliances for policy proposals as he goes and tiptoe through the changed political landscape, overcoming opposition lawmakers’ promised efforts to topple him. Barnier primarily recruited ministers from Macron’s centrist alliance and the conservative Republicans to form his government.

Most sharply opposed to Barnier is a loose grouping of left-wing parties, the New Popular Front. As a coalition, it secured the most seats in the June-July parliamentary elections but fell short of a majority. To bring down the new government with a no-confidence vote, the New Popular Front would need support from legislators on the far right who, for the moment, are adopting more of a wait-and-see attitude toward Barnier.

Barnier described his address as a roadmap “for the 2 1/2 years ahead of us” to the next presidential election scheduled in 2027. “Never!” a lawmaker shouted back — reflecting widespread expectations that his government won’t last that long.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

One man dead, two injured after shots fired in Mississauga, Ont., break-in: police

Published

 on

 

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Police say one man is dead and two others were injured after shots were fired during a break-in at a home in Mississauga, Ont.

Peel regional police say they responded to a call around 3:45 a.m. Tuesday near Joan Drive and Central Parkway.

Police say it’s believed three suspects broke into the house and an altercation took place before shots were fired.

Investigators say they believe the man who died was shot, while the other two injured men were not.

Police say those two men were sent to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Police did not immediately offer any description of the three suspects who they say fled the scene.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 1, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

Salman Rushdie, Percival Everett and Miranda July are National Book Award finalists

Published

 on

 

NEW YORK (AP) — Salman Rushdie’s memoir a bout his near-fatal stabbing, “Knife,” and Percival Everett’s revisionist historical novel, “James,” are among the finalists for the 75th annual National Book Awards. Others nominated include author-filmmaker Miranda July for her explicit novel on middle age, “All Fours,” and the celebrated Canadian poet Anne Carson for “Wrong Norma.”

On Tuesday, the National Book Foundation announced finalists in fiction, nonfiction, young people’s literature, poetry and books in translation. Judges in each category pared long lists of 10 unveiled last month to five final selections. Winners will be announced during a Nov. 20 dinner ceremony in Manhattan, when honorary prizes will be presented to novelist Barbara Kingsolver and publisher-activist W. Paul Coates.

In fiction, nominees besides “James” and “All Fours” are Pemi Aguda’s debut story collection, “Ghostroots”: Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, “Martyr!,” Hisham Mayar’s “Friend,” a novel by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “The Return.”

Four of the five fiction books, including “James,” were published by Penguin Random House. Everett’s novel, which re-tells “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the enslaved man Mark Twain had named Jim, is also a Booker Prize finalist and among the year’s most acclaimed works. Among the books on the fiction long list that judges left out of the final choices was Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake,” another Booker finalist.

Rushdie’s “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” is a nonfiction finalist, along with Jason De León’s “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” Eliza Griswold’s “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church,” Kate Manne’s “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia” and Deborah Jackson Taffa’s “Whiskey Tender.”

“Knife” is the first National Book Award nomination for the 77-year-old Rushdie, who was living overseas and ineligible at the time he published the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children’s” and other works. A native of India who lived for years in London, Rushdie became a U.S. citizen in 2016. The prolific Everett, author of more than 20 books and the recipient of several awards, is also a first-time nominee.

The poetry list includes Carson’s “Wrong Norma,” Fady Joudah’s “(…),” m.s. RedCherries’ debut collection “mother,” Diane Seuss’ “Modern Poetry” and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Something About Living.” In young people’s literature, the finalists are Violet Duncan’s “Buffalo Dreamer,” Josh Galarza’s “The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky,” Erin Entrada Kelly’s “The First State of Being,” Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s “Kareem Between” and Angela Shanté’s “The Unboxing of a Black Girl.”

Two books originally written in Arabic are on the translated works list: Bothayna Al-Essa’s “The Book Censor’s Library,” translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, and Samar Yazbek’s “Where the Wind Calls Home,” translated by Leri Price. The other finalists are Linnea Axelsson’s “Ædnan,” translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s “The Villain’s Dance,” translated from the French by Roland Glasser, and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s “Taiwan Travelogue,” translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King.”

Judging panels in each category made their selections from hundreds of submissions, with publishers nominating more than 1,900 books in all.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, looks back in memoir ‘Be Ready When the Luck Happens’

Published

 on

 

NEW YORK (AP) — Long before Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa mini-empire of bestselling cookbooks and TV shows ever took off, she found herself at an airport, wanting to learn to fly.

It was the late 1960s and she was a newlywed in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She and her soldier-husband, Jeffrey, would often pass a small private airport and Garten was intrigued.

She marched into the terminal to find out about taking flying lessons. “I’m really sorry,” the guy at the desk told her, “but we don’t have anybody who’ll teach a girl how to fly.”

Do you think that stopped Ina Garten?

The story of how she refused to budge until she got lessons in a cockpit is included in her new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” which distills stories from her life into lessons for foodies and non-foodies, alike.

“I wanted it to be fun to read because otherwise nobody would read this,” she tells The Associated Press. “I wanted it to be stories from my life, but I also wanted each story to have a point — in the way you could take a recipe away and make a chocolate cake, I want you to take the idea away and be able to use it in your life.”

Revisiting key moments and her marriage

The memoir — written with help from writer Deborah Davis — is packed with stories of Garten pushing for her vision, not least when in 1978 she spotted an ad in The New York Times and on a whim bought a little specialty food store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa.

At the time, she was 30, writing policies on nuclear energy at the White House and had never worked in food, outside of re-selling Dunkin’ Donuts to hungry students in her dorm room in college.

“It sounded a little crazy, but I was out of my mind with excitement. I didn’t know if it would be the best decision or the worst mistake I ever made,” she writes of the store, named after a 1954 Ava Gardner movie but perfectly summing up her philosophy of both elegant and earthy.

Garten would, of course, turn it into a global, inviting brand thanks to her keen eye for quality and dedication to sourcing the finest ingredients. She also put in the long hours, learning each dish and even sleeping in the store.

“The process of writing the book really kind of gave me confidence that this wasn’t just luck — that I had actually worked really hard for it with determination and vision,” she says “I stuck with what I wanted. And my life has turned out so much better than I could have even dreamed.”

Fans know much of her story already since her cookbooks are filled with personal anecdotes, but they may not know about her chilly childhood in Connecticut.

She describes her father as abusive at times, a man who told her when she was 15 that no one would ever love her. Her mother was distant and used food as a source of control, serving broiled chicken or fish with canned peas and carrots. “I spent my early life searching — no, begging — for flavor,” she writes.

That early nightmare helped her down the road. “My childhood, because it was so painful, it gave me enormous empathy for people,” she says. That meant she could read customers, putting herself in their shoes.

Readers will also learn for the first time about her six-month separation from Jeffrey, which took them to the brink of divorce. Their relationship has lately been heralded on social media — #couplegoals or #relationshipgoals — as an ideal partnership, but Gartner reveals it took work.

After finding her new career path, Garten rebelled at the traditional domestic chores expected of her — cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing. “When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles — took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces,” she writes. Following some time apart, the couple agreed to meet each other halfway.

“There are lessons that any reader can find throughout, specifically about persistence and trusting yourself and your instincts and also taking chances,” says Gillian Blake, executive vice president, publisher and editor-in-chief of Crown & Currency.

“I think there’s a thematic resonance between the way she’s taught people how to cook and the way she teases out these inspirational lessons for larger life questions.”

Taylor Swift, Elmo and courage

Garten may be known for her approachability, but she admits to having a stubborn streak — “a barrier to me isn’t a stop sign; it’s a call to action,” she writes — and she isn’t a blushing flower. She once worked in the backroom of a strip club.

She writes that she faced off both a robber at gunpoint who wanted $50 and a bank officer who wouldn’t make a loan to her business because she was a woman and likely would soon have babies.

There are also lighter stories about a memorable lunch with Mel Brooks, and meeting Elmo, Jennifer Garner and Taylor Swift, plus a boozy tale of playing beer bong with soccer star Abby Wambach.

There are practical lessons — like standing up for yourself, even when it’s hard or taking a risk. Find just one person who really believes in you, she argues.

“People who are well known and successful aren’t there because they are smarter, more creative. It’s because they hit a wall and they just said, ‘I don’t even see the wall. I’m going to get around the wall. I really want to do this and I’m going to figure it out,’” she says.

“One thing I learned by doing the book, which surprised me, is I had a lot more courage than I thought I had. And I realized that those things that I did with courage were the making of my life.”

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending