Politics
Meet Ali Akbar, the last newspaper hawker in Paris
Ali Akbar knows everyone, and everyone knows him. The last newspaper hawker in Paris zigzags each day from cafe to cafe, shouting humorous headlines in the heart of the French capital.
“France is getting better!” he cries, just one of the headlines he invents to sell his wares around the upmarket streets of Saint-German-des-Pres.
“(Eric) Zemmour has converted to Islam!” he shouts, referring to the far-right candidate in the 2022 presidential elections.
Locals and tourists on the Left Bank, the intellectual and cultural heart of Paris, look on amused.
“Even the walls could talk about Ali,” smiled Amina Qissi, a waitress at a restaurant opposite the Marche Saint-Germain, who has known Akbar for more than 20 years.
Now 73, Akbar, a slim, fine-featured “character” with newspapers tucked under his arm, is a neighbourhood legend, she added.
“Even regular tourists ask where he is if they don’t see him,” she told AFP.
Hard life
French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to soon make Akbar a knight in the national order of merit in recognition of his “dedicated service to France”.
“At first, I didn’t believe it. Friends must have asked him (Macron) or maybe he decided on his own. We often crossed paths when he was a student,” said Akbar.
“I believe it’s related to my courage, because I’ve worked hard,” he added.
Akbar, who wears round spectacles, a blue work jacket and a Gavroche cap, mainly sells copies of the French daily Le Monde.
When he arrived in France at the age of 20, hoping to escape poverty and send back money to his family in Pakistan, he worked as a sailor, then a dishwasher in a restaurant in the northern city of Rouen.
Then in Paris, he bumped into Georges Bernier, the humourist also known as Professeur Choron, who gave him the chance to sell his satirical newspapers Hara-Kiri and Charlie Hebdo.
Akbar has been homeless, experienced extreme poverty and had even been attacked—but despite the hardships, he said he has never given up.
“Emmanuel Macron is going to put a bit of antiseptic on my wounds,” he told his son Shahab, who at 30 is the youngest of his five children.
Shahab, who describes himself as “very proud” of his father, enjoys cataloguing the numerous profiles dedicated to his father in the foreign press.
When he started out as a hawker in the 1970s, Akbar focused on the Left Bank of the river Seine, which was a university area “where you could eat cheaply”, he said.
On the rue Saint-Guillaume in front of the prestigious Sciences Po university, he recalled learning French from interactions with students like former prime minister Edouard Philippe and “many others who became ministers or lawmakers”.
‘A good mood’
Paris used to have about 40 newspaper hawkers—street vendors without a fixed newsstand— who were posted at strategic locations such as the entrances to metro stations.
Akbar stood out by choosing to walk around, selecting the Latin Quarter. In the 1980s, he started inventing sensational headlines.
“I want people to live happily. I do it to create a good mood, that’s all,” he said.
But he admitted that he is finding it increasingly difficult to come up with good jokes.
“Everything is such a mess,” he added.
Akbar, who receives a pension of 1,000 euros ($1,175) a month, still works from 3 pm until 10 pm each day.
When AFP met him on a recent afternoon, clients were few and far between. On average, he sells about 30 newspapers every day, compared to between 150 and 200 when he started.
“As long as I’ve got the energy, I’ll keep going. I’ll work until I die,” he joked.
On the terrace of one cafe, Amel Ghali, 36, said Akbar was “inspiring”.
“It’s good to see it in the digital age,” he said. “Unfortunately, our children won’t experience the pleasure of reading a newspaper with a coffee.”
- Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand witness large scale devastation.
- At least 176 people perish in Thailand and three in Malaysia.
- Indonesia’s death toll reaches 502 with 508 more still missing.
PALEMBAYAN: Rescue teams in western Indonesia were battling on Monday to clear roads cut off by cyclone-induced landslides and floods, as improved weather revealed more of the scale of a disaster that has killed close to 700 people in Southeast Asia.
Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have seen large scale devastation after a rare tropical storm formed in the Malacca Strait, fuelling torrential rains and wind gusts for a week that hampered efforts to reach people stranded by mudslides and high floodwaters.
At least 176 have been killed in Thailand and three in Malaysia, while the death toll climbed to 502 in Indonesia on Monday with 508 missing, according to official figures.
Under sunshine and clear blue skies in the town of Palembayan in Indonesia’s West Sumatra, hundreds of people were clearing mud, trees and wreckage from roads as some residents tried to salvage valuable items like documents and motorcycles from their damaged homes.
Men in camouflage outfits sifted through piles of mangled poles, concrete and sheet metal roofing as pickup trucks packed with people drove around looking for missing family members and handing out water to people, some trudging through knee-deep mud.
Months of adverse, deadly weather
The government’s recovery efforts include restoring roads, bridges and telecommunication services.
More than 28,000 homes have been damaged in Indonesia and 1.4 million people affected, according to the disaster agency.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto visited the three affected provinces on Monday and praised residents for their spirit in the face of what he called a catastrophe.
“There are roads that are still cut off, but we’re doing everything we can to overcome difficulties,” he said in North Sumatra.
“We face this disaster with resilience and solidarity. Our nation is strong right now, able to overcome this.”
The devastation in the three countries follows months of adverse and deadly weather in Southeast Asia, including typhoons that have lashed the Philippines and Vietnam and caused frequent and prolonged flooding elsewhere.
Scientists have warned that extreme weather events will become more frequent as a result of global warming.
Marooned for days
In Thailand, the death toll rose slightly to 176 on Monday from flooding in eight southern provinces that affected about three million people and led to a major mobilisation of its military to evacuate critical patients from hospitals and reach people marooned for days by floodwaters.
In the hardest-hit province of Songkhla, where 138 people were killed, the government said 85% of water services had been restored and would be fully operational by Wednesday.
Much of Thailand’s recovery effort is focused on the worst-affected city Hat Yai, a southern trading hub which on November 21 received 335 mm (13 inches) of rain, its highest single-day tally in 300 years, followed by days of unrelenting downpours.
Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has set a timeline of seven days for residents to return to their homes, a government spokesperson said on Monday.
In neighbouring Malaysia, 11,600 people were still in evacuation centres, according to the country’s disaster agency, which said it was still on alert for a second and third wave of flooding.
- Ex-Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina, sister Rehana also sentenced.
- Case relates to illegal allocation of a plot of land: local media.
- Prosecutors highlight political influence, collusion abuse of power.
DHAKA: A Bangladesh court sentenced British parliamentarian and former minister Tulip Siddiq to two years in jail in a corruption case involving the alleged illegal allocation of a plot of land, local media reported.
The verdict was delivered in absentia as Siddiq, her aunt and former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and Hasina’s sister Sheikh Rehana — all co-accused in the case — were not present in court.
Hasina was sentenced to five years in jail and Rehana to seven, the local media reports said.
Hasina, who fled to neighbouring India in August 2024 at the height of an uprising against her government, was sentenced to death last month over her government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators during the protests.
Last week, she was handed a combined 21-year prison sentence in other corruption cases.
Prosecutors said that the land was unlawfully allocated through political influence and collusion with senior officials, accusing the three powerful defendants of abusing their authority to secure the plot, measuring roughly 13,610 square feet, during Hasina’s tenure as prime minister.
Most of the 17 accused were absent when the judgement was pronounced.
Siddiq, who resigned in January as the UK’s minister responsible for financial services and anti-corruption efforts following scrutiny over her financial ties to Hasina, has previously dismissed the allegations as a “politically motivated smear”.
Britain does not currently have an extradition treaty with Bangladesh.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said his partner, Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, is half-Indian and that one of their sons has the middle name “Sekhar” after Indian-American physicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Speaking on Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamath’s “WTF is?” podcast, Musk said: “I’m not sure if you know this, but my partner Shivon is half Indian,” adding: “One of my sons with her, his middle name is Sekhar after Chandrasekhar.”
Musk also spoke about Zilis’s background when asked where she grew up, saying she was given up for adoption as a baby and raised in Canada. “She grew up in Canada. She was given up for adoption when she was a baby. I think her father was like an exchange student at the university or something like that… I’m not sure the exact details,” he said.
Zilis joined Musk’s AI company, Neuralink, in 2017 and is currently the Director of Operations and Special Projects. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Philosophy from Yale University. Zilis has four children with Musk — twins Strider and Azure, daughter Arcadia and son Seldon Lycurgus.
Earlier this year, in March, it emerged that Musk had another child, his 14th, with Zilis.
“Discussed with Elon and, in light of beautiful Arcadia’s birthday, we felt it was better to also just share directly about our wonderful and incredible son Seldon Lycurgus,” Zilis said in a post on X, without saying when the child was born. Musk responded with a heart.
Her announcement came two weeks after conservative influencer Ashley St Clair said that she also recently had a child with Musk.
Appearing on the latest episode of Kamath’s podcast, Musk also said that America has “been an immense beneficiary of talent from India, but that seems to be changing now”.
His comments come at a time when the American dream for thousands of Indians is turning sour due to rising US visa restrictions and policy unpredictability.
— With additional input from Reuters
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