People in Lebanon are angry. Why? Well, piles of uncollected rubbish have been left and rot on the streets of Beirut and else where since Lebanon’s largest landfill
shut down last month. And daily protests have been taking place.
As far as I can see, people are getting angrier and angrier. What we are trying to do is to basically tell the government that we are willing to do our best to keep
things under control and you have to work with us in order to avoid very, like terrible scenarios which we don’t want to happen. We do not want violence. We do not
want any of these things, whatsoever.
Well, after more than five hours of talks, the Cabinet decided to reject a list of tenders for waste management contracts saying they were too expensive and referring
the problem to a ministerial committee. Can it be resolved?
A lot of people are using this protest to express their general frustration. Really, there is no government in Lebanon. The country has been facing a political vacuum
for a number of years. Parliamentary elections have been indefinitely postponed. And therefore there has only been a caretaker Cabinet. There have been political
divisions within the Cabinet between the two key political blocks in Lebanon, which means that most Cabinet meetings do not have a quorum. And in addition, Lebanon has
not had a President for more than a year. Unfortunately, even this populist movement is very fragmented. So all this is obviously having a very visible impact.
Now after a second day of heavy loses on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, China’s Central Bank cut interest rate to hold the dramatic slide in share prices. The collapse
of Shanghai Stock Exchange is now close to being the worst in its history. Our correspondent in New York Michelle Fleury gave me this update.
It was another day of wild swings on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But by the end of the trading day, it actually finished down to a hundred points. So you are
looking at swings of nearly four hundred points over the day, the biggest reversal people have seen since the financial crisis. All in all, the Dow Jones Industrial
Average finished down over one percent.
Does anyone understand that, why the markets are down in China, up in Europe, down just a little bit in America at the end of trading?
Well, I think people have been caught by surprise here in the United States for a couple of reasons. There had been a lot of hope that China’s policy makers would
take some kind of action that might help prop up the stock market.