Professional mountain climbers were hired to install synthetic, waterproof tarps over the gutted, exposed exterior of Notre Dame Cathedral, as authorities raced to prevent further damage ahead of storms that are rolling in toward Paris.

The looming bad weather threatens to further damage the 850-year-old cathedral whose roof was destroyed by the April 15 blaze, leaving the church to the mercy of the elements.

Architect-in-chief Philippe Villeneuve said he had to rush the installation of the protective covers that started Tuesday.

“The climbers, since it will be climbers who will do that, and the scaffolders, are ready,” Villeneuve told BFMTV on Tuesday. “The beams are there, the tarpaulin on its way …. The highest priority is to protect the cathedral from the rain to come.”

Some of Notre Dame’s remaining statues were removed by crane before the tarpaulins were hoisted up. Workers in the afternoon began dragging them over to cover vulnerable parts of the structure.

Parts of the cathedral, including its partially-destroyed vaulted ceiling, had already been soaked with water after firefighters desperately fought the blaze for over 12 hours that day.

Notre Dame’s vaulted ceiling was also badly damaged after the cathedral’s 19th-century spire burnt up and collapsed.

Notre Dame isn’t expected to reopen to the public for five or six years, according to its rector, although French President Emmanuel Macron is pushing for a quick reconstruction.

So far, investigators think the devastating fire was an accident, possibly linked to the cathedral’s renovation work.
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Greece’s budget performance in 2018 was better than expected following some revenue-boosting measures by the government.

According to the country’s statistical agency, Greece recorded a primary budget surplus, which excludes the cost of servicing the country’s vast public debt, of 4.4 percent of its annual output. That’s ahead of government projections of 4.1 percent.

 

The agency also said Tuesday that the country’s debt mountain rose to 181 percent of GDP in 2018, from 176 percent in 2017.

 

Greece’s debt dynamics have been shaken by a debt crisis that led to a deep recession and forced Athens in 2010 to seek a massive international bailout. In exchange for the loans, successive governments implemented strict austerity measures.

 

Though Greece ended its bailout era last summer, it still has to post surpluses for years to come.

 

 

 
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Every month, when his respiratory medicine runs out, Dionysis Assimakopoulos heads to the most unlikely pharmacy in Athens.

Amid derelict stadiums dating from the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, the volunteer-staffed social pharmacy of Hellinikon has handed out free medicine to hundreds of poverty-stricken patients, keeping some of them out of death’s reach.

“My wife and I have been unemployed for over two years. We need about 150 euros for medicine every month,” says Assimakopoulos, a former baker.

Established at the height of the crisis in 2011, the pharmacy runs on donated medicine and disposables. Some 40,000 people have brought medicine, many from abroad, says on-duty pharmacist Dimitis Palakas.

Another patient waiting in line is Achilleas Papadopoulos, a retired tenor. His pension of 700 euros is not enough to cover the antibiotics he has come for.

During nearly a decade of cuts imposed as Greece struggled to avert national bankruptcy, public education and health were among the sectors hit the hardest as the country lost a quarter of its national output.

Amid sweeping layoffs, wage cuts and tax hikes, many could not maintain their social insurance contributions and were pushed out of state-provided health support.

“Only 11 percent of Greeks can currently afford private insurance giving full health coverage,” says Grigoris Sarafianos, head of the association of private Greek health clinics.

According to the national statistics service, Greeks paid 34.3 percent of their medical expenses out of their own pocket in 2016.

The crisis exposed “huge state shortages,” says Petros Boteas, a member of the Hellinikon health team, which serves over 500 patients every month.

“There are fewer doctors and hospital staff. Money for medicine has been cut. There is a long waiting list for doctor’s appointments…we had a cancer patient given an appointment in three months,” he told AFP.

To avoid a long wait — especially in an emergency — many are forced to seek private healthcare, regardless of the cost. There are currently over 120 private clinics in the country.

‘Go to a better school’

A similar scenario casts its shadow over education.

When Aspasia Apostolou’s son was 11 years old and finishing Greek public primary school, his class teacher did something unexpected.

“He told us our son is bright and that he should be in a better school,” reminisces Apostolou, a 44-year-old lawyer.

According to the government, public funding for education fell by about 36 percent during the crisis.

Thousands of trained staff including teachers and doctors emigrated — part of an exodus of some 350,000 people — or opted to retire.

A recent study by the London School of Economics found 75 percent of Greek crisis emigrants hold university degrees.

The OECD in a 2017 study — prepared at Greece’s request — said austerity cuts had “a major impact on the demands on the Greek education system, and on those working within it.”

It said that in 2015, there were approximately 25,000 posts vacant for teachers in primary and secondary education schools.

Apostolou now pays 5,800 euros ($6,500) a year in tuition fees at a private school where her son can be assured of a well-structured curriculum.

“At our old school, the children usually come home early. So many school hours are lost because of teacher shortages during the year,” she says.

“There is no evaluation, no reward for effort in a public school. You wallow in mediocrity.”

Between 2011 and 2014, the state cut education wages and expenses by 24 percent, the OECD study said.

While school books are provided by the state free of charge, the cuts continue to impact other essential resources including computers and petrol for heating.

It’s not uncommon for schools to be shut down for lack of heating. The last instance was in February at the Athens school complex where Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras himself was a pupil.

In public schools, much now relies on private initiative and personal goodwill, what Greeks call ‘filotimo’, says Athanassia, a veteran public school teacher.

“I’ve worked in schools where the principal or teachers or parents paid out of their own pocket for essentials…or discreetly brought food to needy families,” says Athanassia, who has worked in 20 public schools as teachers are shared out to plug staffing gaps.

“Whatever works is based on filotimo,” she adds. “If funding were better, it would be totally different.”

According to the Greek statistics agency, around 12 percent of the country is near the poverty level.

In response, Tsipras’ government in 2016 began a program giving out free school meals at hundreds of schools in poorer regions.

Similarly, the government allowed access to public hospitals to long-term jobless with Greeks without health insurance.

“It’s a step forward, but inequalities persist,” says Petros at the Elliniko clinic.

“Without health insurance, securing a public hospital appointment might take six months, even for critical examinations,” he adds.
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The main candidates in Spain’s general election on Monday clashed over how to handle Catalonia’s independence drive, accusing each other of lying in a tense television debate that left questions open on what coalition deals could be struck.

Spain’s parliamentary election on April 28, one of the country’s most divisive since its return to democracy in the late 1970s, is being fought more on emotional and identity issues, such as Catalonia’s botched independence bid than on the economy.

No clear winner

None of the four candidates emerged as a clear winner from the late-night debate during which all except the anti-austerity Pablo Iglesias appeared quite tense, trading barbs and accusing the others of lying, being out of touch with reality and not doing enough to handle corruption cases within their respective parties.

Pablo Casado, of the conservative People’s Party, and Albert Rivera, from the center-right Ciudadanos, repeatedly accused outgoing Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the election front-runner, of working against the country’s interest.

“The unity of Spain is at risk because of the Socialist government of Pedro Sanchez … those who want to break Spain apart have Sanchez as their favorite candidate,” said the right-wing Casado.

“Do we want the future of Spain to remain in the hands of those who want to liquidate Spain?,” the center-right Rivera said in the late-night televised debate.

Rivera also kept pointing to a picture of Sanchez meeting with Catalonia separatist leader Quim Torra, which he put on his podium for much of the debate.

Shockwaves

The October 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia — declared illegal by Spanish courts, but followed by a short-lived declaration of independence — has sent shockwaves through Spanish politics, which are weighing on Sunday’s vote.

Sanchez, who became prime minister in June of last year and has been more open to dialogue with Catalan separatists than his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy, responded by saying he was in favor of dialogue, but was opposed to independence for the region located in the country’s northeast.

He said several times throughout the debate that his two right-of-center opponents, who both accused him of lying, might need “a truth detector to see if they tell any truth.”

Sanchez’s Socialists are seen as ahead in opinion polls, but without enough seats to rule on their own. The same polls show they will likely need more than the support of the anti-austerity Podemos to rule, and may need the support of nationalist parties, including those from Catalonia.

What coalition deal?

The polls show it will be even harder for the three right-wing parties to win enough seats to rule.

But the number of undecided voters is so high that all possible outcomes are within the margin of error and could still change on Sunday, pollsters say, all the more so because of how hard it is to predict how many seats the upstart far-right Vox party will get.

Opinion polls show a possible coalition deal would be between the Socialists and Ciudadanos, but Rivera has repeatedly ruled it out and did so again on Monday.

Sanchez, however, did not respond when Podemos leader Iglesias repeatedly asked him if he was ruling out a deal with Ciudadanos, indirectly keeping the door open to such an option.

Vox isn’t invited 

Vox was not invited to the debate and was not mentioned by name by any of the candidates, with only Sanchez mentioning its leader Santiago Abascal by name, to try and rally left-wing voters against the possibility of seeing a right-wing government backed by the far right.

Vox is forecast to be the far-right party to get seats in the national parliament in nearly four decades, marking a watershed in the country’s modern democratic history.

Another TV debate among the same four candidates will follow on Tuesday, giving them another chance to differentiate themselves ahead of the election.
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will visit Russia for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean state media confirmed.

With his Russia visit, North Korea’s Kim is seen working to build up foreign support for his economic development plans, since the breakdown of the second U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi in February led to stalled talks with Washington on the sanctions relief Pyongyang had sought.

State media Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the visit will happen “soon,” but did not elaborate the time or the venue.

Putin and Kim are on track to meet by the end of April, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday.

Kim Jong Un’s chief aide, Kim Chang Son, was seen in Vladivostok on Sunday according to South Korean news agency Yonhap, leading to speculation that the Putin-Kim summit will be held in the city around April 24-25.

NK News, a group that follows North Korea, showed photos on its website on Monday of preparations underway at Vladivostok’s Far Eastern Federal University, likely to host part of the summit, with workers installing North Korean and Russian flags.

After the diplomatic failure at the Hanoi summit, Kim is likely looking to prove that he is still being sought after by world leaders, and that he has more options, said Artyom Lukin, a professor at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok.

“Kim does not want to look too dependent on Washington, Beijing and Seoul,” he said. “As for Russia, the Putin-Kim summit will reaffirm Moscow’s place as a major player on the Korean Peninsula. This meeting is important for Russian international prestige.”
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As spring flower fields around the Netherlands burst into bloom, painting the countryside with dazzling swaths of red, white, and blue, a modern day tulip bubble may be forming: tourists.

More than a million foreign sightseers are expected to visit this country of 17 million people on Easter weekend, a record, the Dutch Tourism Bureau said on Thursday.

Director Jos Vranken said he expects them to spend 300 million euros — a boon for the national economy. Many are attracted to the country’s museums and other cultural offerings, but in April, the flower fields and Keukenhof flower show in Lisse top many “must see” lists.

While flower lovers and the photographs they share on social media are free advertising for the country’s tourism, cut flower and bulb industries, it isn’t all a bed of roses.

“That has a downside,” Vranken said. “Farmers are having increasing damage to their fields from tourists taking photos.”

Foreign and Dutch tourists alike have learned to use “Flower Radar” websites to identify where fields are in bloom, especially in the main bulb-growing center known as the “Bollenstreek” along the coast between Haarlem and Leiden.

Do Not Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Signs and barricades — now printed in Chinese and English — saying “Enjoy the Flowers, Respect Our Pride” have gone up at the edge of many fields.

They illustrate the concept that taking photos at the edge of a field is okay, but actually walking among the flowers to take pictures ruins them.

Meanwhile, farmers in less-promoted areas of the country sense an opportunity.

In Creil, northwest of Amsterdam, one enterprising group has set up a “Tulip Experience” complete with designated selfie area, hundreds of tulip varieties on display, helicopter tours, food and drinks, and bouncy castles for kids.
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Sunday’s landslide runoff election win in Ukraine by TV comic Volodymyr Zelenskiy over incumbent President Petro Poroshenko is being hailed by the entertainer’s supporters as a fresh start for Europe’s poorest country.

But the 41-year-old’s critics, who dubbed him the “hologram candidate” during the campaign, say it remains unclear how he’ll end the war against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, something he’s promised to do, and fear the last laugh could be on Ukrainians for entrusting the presidency to a man without government experience.

Nor is it clear how he’ll guide Ukraine to prosperity and free it of endemic corruption.  The entertainment-based campaign of the savvy showman-turned-candidate, which relied on his popular weekly TV show, Servant of the People, and Instagram to reach voters, provided few clues.  

All Zelenskiy has said when it comes to the long-running conflict in the east is that he won’t cede the territory seized by Moscow-directed separatists but is prepared to negotiate directly with Russia’s vastly more experienced leader, Vladimir Putin, who has been determined to keep Ukraine within Moscow’s sphere of influence.

A fresh face

Five years after the Euro-Maidan protests led to the ouster of a corrupt pro-Russian president who turned his back on Europe, Ukrainians yearned for a fresh face, say pollsters, hence Zelenskiy’s emphatic win. And they were willing to discount the risk of backing a political newbie with alleged ties to an oligarch, Igor Kolomoisky, to get something new.  

“They had five years of Poroshenko, and want something (anything) different to that – and are willing to take a risk with Zelenskiy, and even with Kolomoisky potentially in tow. But it’s the fact that Zelenskiy himself is neither an oligarch nor a politician, which offers the prospect of something different,” noted academic and writer Timothy Ash on the eve of voting.

Zelenskiy, best known for his role in a TV series about a schoolteacher who vaults to the presidency on the wave of anti-corruption disgust, is untarnished (so far) by Ukrainian politics. And that was sufficient for many voters disillusioned with the oligarch-politician Poroshenko, who on Friday was jeered during a face-to-face debate with the comic, especially when Poroshenko warned his opponent wouldn’t be able to stand up to Putin. Zelenskiy attracted cheers for saying, “I am the result of your mistakes. I am a verdict on you.”

Zelenskiy launched his candidacy with a surprise New Year’s Eve announcement and soon gained a strong following of hopeful voters. Unusually, he attracted support from all of Ukraine’s regions, but his strongest backing came from eastern and southern Ukraine, where many speak Russian. Zelenskiy was born in the southeast and speaks Russian. Poroshenko tried to use those facts to cast his challenger as a Putin pawn.

But fatigued by the war in the east that has left so far more than 13,000 people dead, most Ukrainians cared more about their daily economic struggle to make ends meet than foreign policy. They also felt let down, say analysts, by what they saw as the slow pace of change and reform under Poroshenko, especially in the effort to rid Ukraine of endemic corruption. Maidan had prompted high hopes, which for many Ukrainians remain frustratingly unfulfilled.

Focus of hopes

Now Zelenskiy is the focus of hopes, but playing the president on TV will be very different from doing the job for real and blurring make-believe and reality could prove dangerous. His mantra has been,“No promises, no disappointment.” His opponents say he has turned ignorance into a virtue.

Last week, he said, “I will do everything I can,” adding, “If I fail, I will leave.” But to do what exactly? His side-stepping of questions during the campaign and lack of detailed policy has meant that people voted for him for contradictory reasons. Some of his Russian-speaking supporters see him as the man who will restore ties with neighboring Russia; those voters more oriented to the West believe he will be the one who takes the country into NATO, advancing the aims of the Maidan revolt.

Some of his voters inevitably are going to be disappointed.

Zelinskiy’s election left many blinking in the Western diplomatic community. While voicing frustration with Poroshenko, and criticism of his efforts to move fast enough to curtail large-scale corruption, they say at least he was a known quantity. Western diplomats based in Kyiv have told VOA they don’t worry Zelinskiy has a secret anti-Western agenda.

And they argue the debate about whether Ukraine should look west or east toward Moscow appears to be over, at least for now. It is the first, they say, since the Soviet era that has not been dominated by fierce debate about whether Ukraine’s best prospects rest with the West or Russia. The inexperienced Zelinskiy, however, “could be tripped up by the shrewd guys running the Kremlin,” a French diplomat told VOA.

From the perspective of Moscow, Zelinskiy must have been preferable to the hardline Poroshenko, according to many analysts. But Vladimir Frolov, a Russian political analyst, though, argues the Kremlin may have wished for a Poroshenko win but one that left the incumbent battered and diminished and ill-equipped to block pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians from securing control of Ukraine’s parliament in elections scheduled for later this year.

In an op-ed in the magazine Republic, Frolov says Zelinskiy’s election could well turn out to be a “mixed bag” for Moscow — and he predicts it won’t usher in any breakthroughs when it comes to the conflict in the east.

Spurning closer ties with Brussels in favor of Moscow sparked the street protests that ultimately led to the Maidan ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. It seems unlikely that Zelinskiy will want to go down that path, especially as he needs greater integration with the West, and greater assistance from the United States and western European states, to kickstart Ukraine’s economy.
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Spanish politicians are swapping campaign buses for tractors, buddying up with hunters and inspecting home-grown tomatoes in Spain’s often-neglected rural regions as they hunt for votes in Sunday’s general election, one of the country’s most polarized votes in decades.

The ballot comes as Spain’s traditional bipartisan political landscape — which used to revolve around the center-left Socialists and the conservative Popular Party — has fractured into five main political parties, including a far-right populist newcomer. That has spurred a race for votes in Spain’s overrepresented hinterland, where nearly one-third of the seats in parliament’s lower house are up for grabs.

Spain’s electoral rules grant a bigger say in parliament’s lower house to provinces with shrinking populations. A few thousand votes in these areas can swing a win for one party or another, turning the “every vote counts” cliché into a reality for candidates far from the big cities.

That doesn’t mean these politicians are getting a warm welcome.

Marcy Jurado, 64, lives in central Spain’s Alcudia valley, surrounded by pastures dotted with holm oaks, with her husband and son, the only remaining residents in the village of La Bienvenida. She’s wary of politicians knocking on farmers’ doors.

“All I wish is that they don’t forget about us once the elections are over,” she said.

Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is the politician most favored by the splintering of Spain’s right wing into three parties. But his ability to stay in office hinges not just on how well the front-running Socialist party does in the national vote but also on how his divided opposition performs. Sánchez or others will likely need the backing of other parties to form a coalition government, making the race for rural votes even more critical.

Spanish politicians across the political spectrum are seeking both photos of themselves in muddy boots and headlines promising more investments for rural jobs, better internet access and more local schools and health care centers.

Nestled at the top of a hill, La Bienvenida has gone from having 50 families only 20 years ago to seeing “for sale” signs on house after house. A 37-year-old dairy farmer is the breadwinner in the only inhabited house, and also Jurado’s only reason to stay.

“If my son loses his job, I’m done with it, I’ll leave,” said the retired truck driver. “The days are hard and long enough for somebody who enjoys company.”

Her wish list for lawmakers has two items: Make sure pensions keep up with inflation and create more jobs for the young.

At a state-of-the-art game preserve down the road, a provincial candidate from the far-right Vox party was telling people that his upstart party will unapologetically defend hunting against “lefties, ecologists and animalists who tell rural dwellers how to live their lives.”

Ricardo Chamorro, a lawyer, fell out with the Popular Party and embraced the nationalist populism of Vox, whose program echoes the “take back control” mantra of populist movements across the globe. The party vows to defend Spain from Muslims, communists and Catalan separatists, who held a defiant secession referendum in 2017, unleashing a wave of Spanish nationalism.

“We are committed to rural Spain, which sees the money flowing to richer areas that are being disloyal to the nation,” Chamorro said to applause from three dozen farmers who gathered under stuffed boar and deer trophies at a bar in Brazatortas, on the edge of the Alcudia valley.

Barring any last-minute surprises, Vox is poised to grab 29 to 37 deputies in Spain’s 350-seat national parliament on Sunday, a big splash for a party that only last year made its first big advance with a win in the regional election in Andalusia, a Socialist stronghold.

With nearly 400,000 voters in a country of 37 million, the rural Ciudad Real province is a mirror of national politics. In the last general election in 2016, three of the five deputies chosen here went to the Popular Party and two to the Socialists. This year, polls are predicting at least two seats for the Socialists and one for the Popular Party, with the remaining two up for grabs among four parties, including the center-right Citizens Party and the Vox party.

Only the anti-austerity Unidas Podemos party seems to be left out in the province, according to the latest polls. At the national level, Podemos could lose up to 15 deputies from rural areas in Sunday’s vote.

Blanca Fernández, Ciudad Real’s 41-year-old Socialist candidate, said politicians and the media are victimizing the countryside.

“It bothers me deeply when people (politicians) climb onto tractors in a forced manner,” she said. “It’s an insult to those who live here.”

What the Socialists want, she said, “is for anybody in Spain to have access to services in comparable quality conditions, no matter where they live. And that means more opportunities in rural areas.”

“It all comes down to how much taxes we want to pay and what are the services we want to have,” she said as she inspected a Manchego cheese business that exports to the U.S.

Fernández wants to boost women’s roles in the countryside, subsidize young farmers taking over old operations and ensure that farmers have access to water.

“There’s no future for the farmland without women or schools,” she said.

During two straight days of campaigning, Fernández and Chamorro listened to similar concerns. Tuberculosis tests were seen as too strict, forcing farmers to cull herds and lose money. Sheep ranchers had conflicts with laws on preserving natural spaces. The swelling numbers of wild boars and vultures were hurting livestock operations. All residents complained about too much administrative red tape, poor infrastructure, schools and clinics that were too far away, limited phone and internet services.

While Chamorro visited cattle farms and met with retirees, Fernandez toured a solar panel farm and a madeleine factory where three siblings have returned with university degrees to take over the family business.

“There was a time when all I wanted was to be away,” said Julián Arenas, whose muffin-making plant is now the biggest employer in Corral de Calatrava, a village of 1,200. “I’ve seen what’s out there and now I realize that, given the right setup, there are also plenty of opportunities here as well.”
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