PARIS (AP) — Paris police fired tear gas at demonstrators Thursday as the Eiffel Tower shut down, France’s high-speed trains came to a standstill and hundreds of thousands marched nationwide in a strike over the government’s plan to overhaul the retirement system.

At least 90 people were arrested in Paris by evening as the protests wound down.

Police said 65,000 people took to the streets of the French capital, and over 800,000 nationwide in often-tense demonstrations aimed at forcing President Emmanuel Macron to abandon pension reform.

The open-ended walkout by the country’s unions represents the biggest challenge to Macron since the yellow vest movement against economic inequality erupted a year ago.

Opponents fear the changes to how and when workers can retire will threaten the hard-fought French way of life. Macron himself remained “calm and determined” to push it through, according to a top presidential official.

In Paris, small groups of masked activists smashed store windows, set fires and hurled flares on the sidelines of a march that was otherwise peaceful. Demonstrators also shot firecrackers at police in body armor. Some journalists were mugged in the street.

The Louvre closed some of its galleries, and the Palace of Versailles shut down. Subway stations across Paris closed their gates, high-speed TGV trains canceled their runs, and nearly 20% of flights at Paris’ Orly Airport were reported grounded.

Many visitors, including the U.S. energy secretary, canceled plans to travel to one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations.

Some travelers showed support for the striking workers. Others complained about being embroiled in someone else’s fight.

“I had no idea about the strike happening, and I was waiting for two hours in the airport for the train to arrive, and it didn’t arrive,” said vacationer Ian Crossen, from New York. “I feel a little bit frustrated. And I’ve spent a lot of money. I’ve spent money I didn’t need to, apparently.”

Beneath the Eiffel Tower, tourists from Thailand, Canada and Spain echoed those sentiments.

Paris authorities barricaded the presidential palace and deployed 6,000 police officers. Police ordered all businesses, cafes and restaurants in the area to close and detained 71 people before the demonstration even started.

Authorities banned protests in the more sensitive neighborhoods around the Champs-Elysees avenue, the presidential palace, Parliament and Notre Dame Cathedral.

Health workers showed up to decry conditions in hospitals. Students pointed to recent student suicides and demanded government action. Environmentalists emphasized that climate justice and social justice are one and the same.

And young and old roundly condemned the new retirement plan, which they fear would take money out of their pockets and reduce the leisure period the French expect have come to expect in the last decades of their lives.

Skirmishes broke out between police firing tear gas and protesters throwing flares in the western city of Nantes, and thousands of red-vested union activists marched through cities from Marseille on the Mediterranean to Lille in the north.

Lacking public transportation, commuters used shared bikes or electric scooters despite near-freezing temperatures. Many people in the Paris region worked from home or took a day off to stay with their children, since 78% of teachers in the capital went on strike.

The big question is how long the walkout will last. Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne said she expects the travel troubles to be just as bad on Friday, and unions said they will maintain the Paris subway strike at least through Monday.

Joseph Kakou, who works an overnight security shift in western Paris, walked an hour to get to his home on the eastern side of town.

“It doesn’t please us to walk. It doesn’t please us to have to strike,” he said. “But we are obliged to, because we can’t work until 90 years old.”

The deeply unpopular Macron is expected to reveal the details of his plan next week. The government has promised not to touch the official retirement age — 62, though lower for certain physically demanding occupations — but the plan will encourage some people to work longer.

To Macron, the retirement reform is central to his plan to transform France so it can compete globally in the 21st century. The government argues France’s 42 retirement systems need streamlining.

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Story: Thomas Adamson and Claire Parker. Angela Charlton, Sylvie Corbet, Alex Turnbull, Nicolas Garriga, Mstyslav Chernov and Francois Mori in Paris contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal prosecutors are accusing singer R. Kelly of scheming with others to pay for a fake ID for an unnamed female a day before he married R&B singer Aaliyah, then 15 years old, in a secret ceremony in 1994.

The revised indictment, filed Thursday in New York, accuses Kelly of paying a bribe in exchange for a “fraudulent identification document” for someone identified only as “Jane Doe” on Aug. 30, 1994.

A day later, Kelly, then 27, married Aaliyah in a secret ceremony arranged by Kelly at a hotel in Chicago. The marriage was annulled months later because of her age. Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001 at age 22.

The U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment about who the fake ID was meant for, and the indictment didn’t mention the wedding, but a person familiar with the investigation confirmed the “Jane Doe” was Aaliyah. The person wasn’t authorized to discuss details of the new charge and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The new charges mark the first time that Kelly’s brief marriage to Aaliyah has been connected to any of the criminal cases against Kelly.

Kelly’s attorney, Douglas Anton, called the latest charge against his client “ridiculous and absurd.”

The Brooklyn prosecutors had already charged R. Kelly with racketeering, kidnapping, forced labor and sexual exploitation. They alleged he and his employees and assistants picked out women and girls at concerts and groomed them for sexual abuse.

The 52-year-old singer, who is being held without bond, is scheduled to stand trial in federal court in Chicago in April on child pornography and obstruction of justice charges before facing trial in Brooklyn. Kelly, whose given name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, was acquitted in 2008 on charges of videotaping himself having sex with a girl who prosecutors allege was as young as 13.

Kelly’s attorneys have long maintained that he was unaware of Aaliyah’s age when they married. The Illinois marriage license used for the wedding said she was 18.

The indictment didn’t identify the person who was paid the bribe in order to get the fake ID, except to say that the person was a public employee.

Aaliyah, whose full name was Aaliyah Dana Haughton, worked with Kelly, who wrote and produced her 1994 debut album, “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number.”

Kelly, was arrested in February on 10 counts in Illinois of sexually abusing three girls and a woman. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges.

Then on May 30, Cook County prosecutors added 11 more sex-related counts involving one of the women who accused him of sexually abusing her when she was underage.

Then in July, in federal court in Chicago, the R&B singer was indicted on charges of child pornography and obstruction of justice, with prosecutors accusing him of paying off potential witnesses in his 2008 trial to get them to change their story.

At the same time, Kelly was indicted in New York with exploiting five victims, identified only as “Jane Does.” According to court papers, they include one he met while she was a radio station intern in about 2004 and another at one of his concerts in 2015. Kelly has pleaded not guilty to the original New York charges.

Prosecutors allege Kelly sometimes arranged for some victims to meet him on the road for illegal sex. He had one victim travel in 2017 to a show on Long Island, New York, where he had unprotected sex with her without telling her “he had contracted an infectious venereal disease,” in violation of New York law, they say.

A defense filing said Kelly’s alleged victims were regulars at his shows who made it known they “were dying to be with him.” They only started accusing him of abuse years later when public sentiment shifted in the #MeToo era, his lawyers said.

The accusers “are groupies,” Anton said following an August court hearing on the charges. “There’s no way around it.” At the time, his client was merely “leading a touring musician’s life,” he added.

Story: Tom Hays

PARIS (AP) — French trains rolled to a halt Wednesday evening, kicking off massive nationwide strikes and protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to overhaul the retirement system, seen as an untouchable symbol of the French way of life.

Tourists canceled travel plans and Paris deployed thousands of police to cope with what was expected to be a challenging day Thursday.

The walkout was expected to hit transportation the hardest, as flights, trains and buses canceled service and most of the Paris subway system came to a halt. Workers at the national railway SNCF stopped work Wednesday evening, while other services planned to shut down Thursday morning for an indefinite period.

In Paris, where workers’ unions were planning a big march Thursday, police warned of possible violence and damages and ordered all businesses, cafes and restaurants along the protest route to close. Authorities also issued a ban on protests on the Champs-Elysees avenue, around the presidential palace, parliament and Notre Dame Cathedral.

Paris police chief Didier Lallement said that 6,000 police officers would fan out around the city, notably amid fears that protest groups and extremist troublemakers could join the action.

The Eiffel Tower warned tourists to delay a visit to the iconic monument because the strike would disrupt access on Thursday.

The Louvre Museum said its opening Thursday could be delayed, and some viewing rooms may be closed.

Hotels across Paris reported receiving numerous cancellations ahead of the strike, as wary tourists eyed closing transportation routes and decided to skip their Paris vacations.

The SNCF railway expected nine out of 10 high-speed trains to be canceled. International train lines were expected to be affected, too. No tickets were available on Eurostar trains across the English Channel until Tuesday.

Air France said about 30% of its domestic flights would be canceled.

The government said 55% of teachers would be on strike Thursday, and hospitals also would be affected.

Workers are angry at Macron’s plan to streamline the country’s 42 state pension systems, fearing they will have to work longer and earn less upon retirement.

For Amina Hamade, 17, who lives in the Paris suburb of Poissy and takes the train to her high school in the nearby town of Les Mureaux, the strike provides a good excuse to skip school Thursday and Friday.

Tarik Slimani, a butcher in Les Mureaux, sees the strike as a political stunt that will hurt the economy. Everyone who relies on public transportation to get to work will pay the price, he said.

At Montparnasse train station, Samira Quasan, a 28-year-old tourist from Chicago, described moving around her travel plans to and from Bordeaux because of the strike. Parisian Marie Boudal had to do the same for her grandchild’s baptism in Lyon.

Some travelers complained about the disruptions, while some showed support for the striking workers.

“They really are attacking something that was one of the few remaining things that we had” — the pension system, said Sylviane Charles, a 57-year-old school principal whose school was slated to close Thursday. “And so you end up with widespread despair.”

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Story: Angela Charlton and Alex Turnbull. Associated Press reporters Claire Parker and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (AP) — In these uneasy times, as we move along to a new decade, the Pantone Color Institute has reached back in time to calming, confident Classic Blue as its color of the year for 2020.

The color is an anchor offering stability, constancy and connection, said Laurie Pressman, vice president of the global purveyors of color consulting, trendspotting and analysis.

“It’s a reassuring presence,” she told The Associated Press ahead of Wednesday’s reveal.

Akin to maritime blue — not indigo and brighter than navy — Classic Blue evokes a feeling of vast expanse, Pressman said of the shade also known as Pantone 19-4052.

Pressman and her team scoured the worlds of art, fashion and home decor, along with commercial, graphic and industrial design, to come up with the pick, as they have since Cerulean became the inaugural color of the year for the milestone 2000.

But Classic Blue isn’t just about nostalgia, she said. Creators around the globe are putting out modern takes for runways, mobile phones, kitchen appliances and the paint of pricey, forward-looking cars and motorcycles.

At Wednesday’s launch event, Pressman insisted the color was in no way a nod to the hue associated with the Democratic Party, though she knew the question would surface.

“This was not a political move for us. This is global. We do not look at color through a political lens. We look at our life through a colorful lens,” she told the AP.

Pantone chose Living Coral for 2019 and Ultra Violet the year before that.

Whether as throwback or harbinger of things to come, Classic Blue harkens back to when things “seemed simpler, seemed more comfortable, but at the same time not suggesting that it be done in a way that it was then,” Pressman said.

Cerulean, which heralded the new millennium, is the color of the daytime sky, while Classic Blue is the sky at dusk as the new decade commences.

“It has depth to it, but it’s a color of anticipation because we’re looking ahead,” Pressman said. “The day is over. We’re looking forward to the evening. What’s going to come?”

Classic Blue is a vibrant yet non-aggressive and easily relatable color, she said. It’s also among nature’s anthocyanin pigments possessing antioxidant and other health-fostering benefits.

Think blueberries.

“Many of us feel stressed, completely overloaded,” Pressman said. “We live these 24/7 lifestyles. We’re anxious. There’s so much uncertainty and unrest, no matter where you are. With that we’ve seen this whole increased focus on wellness and self-care.”

The timeless color is also gender neutral and seasonless, mixing well with other shades throughout the spectrum yet making a strong statement on its own. It also works well in a range of textures.

“It’s a color that can take on different appearances through different applications, finishes and textures,” Pressman said, lending itself to everything from lustrous sheens to sparkly sequins.

The anointed blue also plays into the sustainability movement.

“We have all this focus on buy less, buy good, so people aren’t throwing things into a landfill,” Pressman said. “You read about buying things to last and this is a timeless blue shade. It’s always there and you’re comfortable with it, like blue jeans.”

For offices, it offers an air of security, she said. For kitchens, it’s a top accent color in appliances and walls. Classic Blue is a mainstay color in stemware, dishes and other tabletop staples as a trusted expression of elegance, she said.

“Everybody’s comfortable with blue,” Pressman said. “We know it. We like it.”

Story: Leanne Italie

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