France ‘still far’ from Covid-19 infection target, threatens relaxing measures by Xmas
The rate of coronavirus infections remains worrying, the French government said on Monday, calling into question a target of 5,000 infections per day. The target had been a key part of lifting restrictions on 15 December ahead of the Christmas and New Year holidays.
“The daily infection rate isn’t dropping any more and remains particularly high amongst older people aged 65 or over,” Jérôme Salomon, the government’s director general of health, told a briefing on Monday.
“We’re still far from the objective of getting under 5,000 cases per day”, Salomon added.
France’s government set a date of 15 December for further relaxing of Covid-19 restrictions if the rate of infection was within certain limits. This would allow for travel between different regions during the festive period.
Most Republican officials and lawmakers have publicly supported President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results via a series of lawsuits filed in individual states, following the president’s unfounded claims of widespread voting fraud.
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Biden, meanwhile, has been moving ahead with the work of preparing to govern, and spoke with Pope Francis as his fellow Democrats in Congress blasted Republican election “shenanigans” and urged action on the coronavirus pandemic.
With a few states still counting ballots, Biden has won enough election battleground states to surpass the 270 electoral votes needed in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the next president. Biden is also winning the popular vote by more than 5.2 million votes, or 3.4 percentage points.
A growing number of Republican senators, including John Cornyn, Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, urged Trump’s administration to allow Biden access to presidential daily intelligence briefings.
The president-elect traditionally receives such briefings from the intelligence community to learn of threats facing the United States before taking office.
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“I don’t see it as a high-risk proposition. I just think it’s part of the transition. And, uh, if in fact he does win in the end, I think they need to be able to hit the ground running,” Cornyn told reporters. He refused to say that Biden had won, however.
When reporters asked Graham, a vocal Trump defender, if the briefings should proceed, he responded, “I think so, yeah.”
The top House Republican, Kevin McCarthy, opposed the idea.
“He’s not president right now. I don’t know if he’ll be president January 20th,” McCarthy said, refusing to acknowledge Trump’s defeat.
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The two top Democrats in Congress — House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — on Thursday decried the Trump administration’s refusal to engage with Biden’s transition team.
The Democratic leaders also urged Republicans to join them in passing legislation to address the pandemic and buttress the battered economy.
“The Republicans should stop their shenanigans about an election that President Trump has already lost and focus their attention on the immediate issue at hand — providing relief to a country living through the COVID health and economic crisis,” Schumer said.
Biden, who is set to become the first Roman Catholic U.S. president since John Kennedy in the 1960s, spoke with the pope on Thursday, thanking him for his “blessing and congratulations,” his transition team said.
Biden told the pontiff he wanted to work together on issues including caring for the poor, addressing climate change, and welcoming immigrants and refugees, it said.
Pandemic in focus
Biden has focused on planning his administration, with attention expected to shift to his selections for key Cabinet posts ahead of taking office. His team said Biden was meeting with transition advisers on Thursday in Delaware.
He named longtime adviser Ron Klain on Wednesday as White House chief of staff, his first major appointment. Klain is expected to take a leading role in Biden’s response to the intensifying pandemic that has killed more than 242,000 Americans, with a record 142,000 new COVID-19 cases registered on Wednesday.
Trump, who has flouted public-health recommendations on mask-wearing and social-distancing, was hospitalized with COVID-19 last month. Many Trump associates have become infected, with close adviser Corey Lewandowski on Thursday becoming the latest.
On Thursday, Pennsylvania officials asked a federal judge to throw out a Trump lawsuit seeking to block the state from certifying its results. Biden leads Trump in the swing state by more than 53,000 votes.
The Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits challenging the vote counts in individual states. Legal experts have said the litigation stands little chance of altering the outcome, and state election officials have said they saw no evidence of serious irregularities or fraud.
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In a sign of weakening support for Trump’s efforts to claim widespread election fraud, Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican who endorsed Trump, on Thursday told CNN “we need to consider the former vice president as the president-elect.”
The Las Vegas Review-Journal, owned by major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, ran an editorial saying Trump “seeks to delay the inevitable.”
“There is no evidence that fraud cost Mr. Trump the election, no matter how much the president tweets the opposite and his supporters wish it,” the editorial said.
Karl Rove, White House deputy chief of staff to Republican former President George W. Bush, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “once his days in court are over, the president should do his part to unite the country by leading a peaceful transition and letting grievances go.”
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Around 100,000 Armenian civilians have fled their villages, homes and even their loved ones in the wake of a Moscow-backed truce that called for Armenia to hand over control of some areas it holds around the Nagorno-Karabakh region. FRANCE 24’s Luke Shrago filed this report.
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Some refugees have found their way to makeshift centres where volunteers and aid workers offer support.
“They had to leave everything behind in the disaster,” said one woman who offered assistance. “They need everything — food, hygiene kits, even clothes — because winter’s on the way.”
Many are still searching for missing family and fear the worst.
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One woman, Alla, told FRANCE 24 she had four children at the frontline. The most important thing, she said, was to find them.
“After that, we’ll see what life has in store and how we’ll continue to live.”
She fled with her daughter while she could, but her husband and their other children remained in Nagorno-Karabakh. Like many others she found Armenians waiting across the border with open arms.
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Among them a woman who has opened up her home to the refugees: “They’ve been with us since October 3. It’s not very comfortable for sleeping, it’s no five-star hotel, but they want for nothing.”
“We all live together. If we were in their position, they’d do the same for us,” she said.
The fate of Alla’s sons is ever in mind as is that of their hometown Shushi, which is now under Azerbaijani control.
“We’ll hope we can go back to Stepanakert, maybe,” she said.
Russia brokered a ceasefire deal on Monday that secured territorial advances for Azerbaijan in the ethnic Armenian breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh. But some analysts say that Azerbaijan, Turkey and Russia all benefit from the agreement while protests have sprung up in Armenia accusing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of betraying the national interest.
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The Russian-brokered ceasefire deal on November 9 ended six weeks of conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces — and envisages the use of Russian troops as peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The agreement, which entails Armenia accepting Azerbaijani gains in the region, has prompted demonstrations in Armenia calling for Prime Minister Pashinyan’s resignation and accusing him of “betrayal”. Russia is a longstanding Armenian ally, leading many Armenians to see the ceasefire deal Moscow arranged as another betrayal.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin made the announcement himself at midnight from Monday to Tuesday, emphasising that the deal enshrines “a total ceasefire” and “cessation of military hostilities” in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Russia deployed some 2,000 troops as soon as the ceasefire came into effect. According to the treaty signed by Yerevan, Baku and Moscow, they will be deployed as Armenian forces leave areas under Azerbaijan’s control — that is to say, seven districts around Nagorno-Karabakh and a small part of the region itself. The now diminished self-proclaimed republic will remain under the protection of Russian soldiers. These troops will play a notable role in protecting the Lachin corridor, the only supply route connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.
A win for Azerbaijan — with Putin’s blessing?
Azerbaijan looks like the big winner in this conflict with its neighbour and bitter rival. Significantly, the territories it has gained include the historic and strategic city of Shushi, which is located on the road linking Armenia to the separatist capital Stepanakert. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliev was certainly keen to present this as a triumph for his country — hailing Armenia’s “surrender” and calling Pashinyan a “coward” for not signing the deal in front of the cameras, adding that he said “we would chase them off our land like dogs, and we did”.
Galia Ackerman, a Paris-based historian specialising in Eastern Europe and author of Régiment Immortel: La Guerre sacrée de Poutine (“Immortal Regiment: Putin’s Sacred War”), argued that Azerbaijan has enjoyed Putin’s “tacit” backing: “Regardless of whether it’s under Armenian or Azerbaijani control, Nagorno-Karabakh is not a priority for Putin,” she told FRANCE 24. “The way he sees it, letting the war take its course was a means of trying to get rid of Pashinyan and change the political situation in Armenia.”
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“Pashinyan was elected after a popular uprising in 2018 and was starting to look a bit too independent, as far as Moscow was concerned,” Ackerman added. “Notably, he got rid of a few people from his pro-Russian security services.”
For his part, Pashinyan acknowledged that the ceasefire terms are a blow to Armenian national pride, describing the deal on his Facebook page as “incredibly painful for me and my people”.
‘Everyone benefits except Armenia’
Despite the arrival of French and American diplomats in Moscow on November 12, Paris and Washington did not play a role in the ceasefire accord. France and the US, along with Russia, co-chair the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is tasked with ensuring peace in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“What is very important for the Kremlin is the diminished role of the West, which was mainly self-inflicted by the lack of focus” under US President Donald Trump, Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told AFP.
Salomon described how the impact on hospitals remained “major”, with heightened pressure on intensive care facilities.
The health ministry’s top official described how the government was particularly worried about the Christmas and New Year period given conditions that are favourable to the virus, notably, gatherings in closed spaces.
Salomon said people in France have made a “big effort” both on an individual and collective basis, and the lockdown measures have had a significant impact on the spread of Covid-19.
But he would not be drawn on whether the previously outlined loosening of restrictions would remain the same or if lockdown measures would remain in place for the holidays.
“If the current conditions continue, it will effectively be very difficult to obtain this objective,” said Salomon, referring to the 5,000 daily cases target.
11,022 daily cases were registered on Sunday, with the number hovering around 11,000 to 12,000 for the past four days.
