Tag Archives: pilots

Rubbish piles up in Paris as pre-euro soccer protests go on

Rubbish piled up on streets in parts of Paris and other French cities on Wednesday as strikes and pickets by waste treatment workers

By Brian Love and Lucien Libert

PARIS (Reuters) – Rubbish piled up on streets in parts of Paris and other French cities on Wednesday as strikes and pickets by waste treatment workers took a toll in the country which hosts the Euro 2016 soccer tournament from Friday.

The protests were part of a wave of demonstrations and work stoppages led by the hardline CGT union against government plans to reform labor law to make hiring and firing easier and help lower the jobless rate from 10 percent.

Police removed blockades at some of the major incineration and rubbish collection depots around the capital but to little effect because workers inside the premises subsequently walked off work, the CGT said.

Despite signs that broader strike action is running out of steam, train services were disrupted for the eighth day running.

The SNCF state railway company said less than 10 percent of workers were on strike, considerably fewer than last week, with three out of four high-speed TGV trains running and six out of 10 slower inter-city connections.

Working to defuse the conflict, Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament the state could take over all or part of an SNCF debt of 50 billion euros ($57 billion), possibly hiving it off into a sinking fund to be paid down gradually.

The CGT was holding workplace meetings to decide whether to call off the rail strike.

As millions of foreign visitors and soccer fans prepared for the month-long tournament that kicks off on Friday evening, CGT activists also disrupted a pre-championship publicity event at Paris’s Gare du Nord train station.

About 200 protesters mobbed the station as a locomotive carrying the Euro soccer trophy arrived, a Reuters reporter at the scene said. Riot police protected the trophy.

Separately, the minister in charge of drafting the contested labor law, Myriam El Khomri, condemned a dawn protest outside her Paris home in which she said about 30 demonstrators yelled hostile statements through a megaphone.

Valls has refused to scrap the labor reform but, on top of the debt pledge, has agreed to protect existing rest and shift time quotas for workers in SNCF reorganization talks.

Pilots at Air France are also planning to strike over pay curbs from June 11 to 14.

“The (rail) strike is incomprehensible and the one planned by pilots is every bit as incomprehensible when France is about to start the Euros,” Transport Minister Alain Vidalies said.

(Additional reporting by Lucien Libert and Emmanuel Jarry; Editing by Paul Taylor)

U.S. Senate backs Arlington burial honor for female pilots

A man pauses at a grave during Memorial Day celebrations at Arlington National Cemetery

ASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate voted late on Tuesday to allow women pilots from World War Two to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the vast military cemetery just outside Washington.

The unanimous voice vote moved the legislation a step closer to becoming law. It would allow the cremated remains of about 1,000 women who served as Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, in the 1940s to be buried there.

The women performed training and transport missions in the United States during the conflict so male pilots could be sent overseas.

Unlike male veterans, however, they cannot be interred at Arlington, the best-known but very crowded U.S. military cemetery, because authorities have insisted their service was not the same as active duty.

The measure must now be sent to the House of Representatives for its approval before it can be sent to the White House for President Barack Obama to sign into law.

It is expected to pass the House easily and it contains only technical differences from legislation the House passed by a vote of 385-0 in March.

The bill was sponsored by Republican Representative Martha McSally, who was the first woman U.S. Air Force pilot to fly combat missions.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle, editing by G Crosse)