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- France suspends stun grenades at high school protests after serious injury
- Quebec’s anglophone community reacts with optimism and scepticism to PQ win
- Collins indicates she is not Trump’s preferred senator in Maine debate
- Williams F1 team in £1 million legal dispute over missing FW23 car in Telford
- Russia reports no new plague cases in Siberia following lab worker’s death
- Belgian virologist highlights ongoing plague cases in Africa
- US lawmakers advance bipartisan legislation to address gun violence prevention
- Libya’s parliament elects new speaker Al-Salhin Abdelnabi al-Obeidi, replacing Saleh after 12 years
Hunt for Tube hero who gave blind man his shoes after he lost one through the gap The hunt is on find an ‘absolute hero’
France suspends stun grenades at high school protests after serious injury
Police suspension
France has suspended the use of stun grenades by police during high school student protests following an incident where a 15-year-old lost a hand.
France has suspended the use of stun grenades by police during high school student protests following an incident where a 15-year-old lost a hand.
Operational significance
Suspending stun grenades amid ongoing protests addresses escalating concerns about police tactics, necessitating investigations into 18 alleged misconduct cases involving injuries to minors.
Suspending stun grenades amid ongoing protests addresses escalating concerns about police tactics, necessitating investigations into 18 alleged misconduct cases involving injuries to minors.
Official Response
“I am suspending their use in the high school student protests until the facts of the incident have been clarified,” said Interior Minister Laurent Nunez.
“I am suspending their use in the high school student protests until the facts of the incident have been clarified,” said Interior Minister Laurent Nunez.
France suspends police stun grenades at student protests after teenager loses hand
Published on
France has suspended police use of stun grenades at high school student protests, after a 15-year-old lost a hand and allegations of police brutality mounted.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez announced the move on RTL radio early on Wednesday. The teenager was injured on Monday after police fired a stun grenade.
“I am suspending their use in the high school student protests until the facts of the incident have been clarified,” Nunez said. He stressed that the suspension applied only to those protests and would last just long enough to establish what happened.
Police have opened 18 internal investigations into alleged misconduct since the protests began, he said. An officer was charged on Tuesday after a 14-year-old in northwest Paris was hit in the face by a tear gas grenade last week at such close range that he lost several teeth.
More than 6,500 people, most of them minors, have been arrested since the movement began in late September, when students started blockading high schools over dilapidated facilities and teacher shortages. Hundreds of students, police and teaching staff have been injured.
A quarter of a million people demonstrated across France on Tuesday, the interior ministry said, with at least 488 arrests and 43 members of the security forces wounded.
Lawyers for detained teenagers say their clients have faced violence and insults. Prisca Ancion of the Collective for Judicial Action told AFP that every high schooler arrested reported experiencing “an insult, a slap, having their head held down on the ground, chokeholds.”
“It took several children being maimed for life for Nunez to give up using grenades against high school students,” said Manuel Bompard, national coordinator of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI). The government has blamed LFI for stoking tensions.
President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency meeting with Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu and key ministers on Tuesday evening. Lecornu, who is due to speak on the protests later on Wednesday, wrote on X: “The voice of high school students is precious and must be heard.”
Several national education unions have called for new strikes and demonstrations on Thursday.
Additional sources • AFP
October 12, 2024
6:18 am
‘Cheer up, you caught the bad guy,’ says killer Virginia McCullough as she is arrested for murdering her parents
A woman who murdered her parents “in cold blood” before hiding them in makeshift tombs for four years told officers to “cheer up, you caught the bad guy” as she was arrested in her home.
Virginia McCullough, 36, poisoned her father John McCullough, 70, with prescription medication and fatally stabbed her mother Lois McCullough, 71, shortly afterwards in 2019.
She ran up large debts on credit cards in her parents’ names and after their deaths, she continued to spend their pensions until she was finally caught in 2023.
In body-worn video footage released by police, a handcuffed – and eerily calm – McCullough told officers: “I did know that this would kind of come eventually.
“It’s proper that I serve my punishment.”
She said she had slipped something into her father’s drink then put his body under a bed on the ground floor, and put her mother’s body in an upstairs wardrobe.
McCullough, having been arrested on suspicion of double murder, told an officer: “Cheer up, at least you’ve caught the bad guy.”
She added: “I know I don’t seem 100% evil.”
At the police station, she told officers where a kitchen knife was, which she described as a “murder weapon”, and a hammer which she said “will still have blood on it”.
McCullough, of Pump Hill, Chelmsford, Essex, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Friday with a minimum term of 36 years at Chelmsford Crown Court, after she admitted to their murders between 17 and 20 June 2019 at an earlier hearing at the same court.
Chelmsford Crown Court heard how she hid their bodies in makeshift tombs at the family home in Great Baddow in Essex, then told persistent lies to cover her tracks.
The court heard she cancelled family arrangements and frequently told doctors and relatives her parents were unwell, on holiday or away on lengthy trips.
But concerns over Mr and Mrs McCullough’s welfare were raised in September 2023 by a GP at their registered practice, and Essex County Council’s safeguarding team referred these to police.
The GP had not seen the couple for some time and said Mr McCullough had failed to collect medication and attend scheduled appointments. It was found McCullough had frequently cancelled appointments, using a range of excuses to explain her father’s absence.
Police said a missing persons investigation was initially launched and McCullough lied to officers, claiming her parents were travelling and would be returning in October.
It became a murder investigation, and when officers forced entry to the house in Pump Hill on September 15 2023, McCullough confessed that her parents’ bodies were in the house and that she had killed them.
Nicola Rice, a specialist prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “McCullough callously and viciously killed both of her parents before concealing their bodies in makeshift tombs within their home address.
“She spent the next four years manipulating and lying to family members, medical staff, financial institutions, and the police, spending her parents’ money and accruing large debts in their name.”
She added: “This was a truly disturbing case, which has left behind it a trail of devastation, and I can only hope that the sentence passed today will help those who loved and cared for Lois and John begin to heal.”
To downplay the genocide, the israelis claim there’s only 20,000 people left in north Gaza, says
@MahaGaza
: the real number exceeds 400,000
Man of the right wing Nigel Farage taking more second jobs and freebie helicopter rides
Gosh he’ll soon be a true blue Tory at this rate
Or far far worse
The cost-of-living crisis is far from over, yet the government’s 50% increase to the bus fare cap is a political choice, adding hundreds to annual costs.
To address hardship & the climate crisis, the government must keep the £2 cap & make public transport accessible for all.
G20 waters down support for Ukraine amid pressure for peace talks
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November 23, 2024
8:25 am
Defense alliance NATO chief Mark Rutte has met US President-elect Donald Trump to discuss global security issues, according to a NATO spokesperson.
The meeting took place in Palm Beach, Florida.
During his first term as US president, 2017-2020, Trump pushed for European NATO countries to spend more on defense and described the alliance’s cost-sharing as unfair to the US.
Rutte took over as NATO chief from Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg in November.
Before taking office in January, Trump has nominated Pete Hegseth for the post of defense secretary, which has raised eyebrows among many allies.
Hegseth, 44, has served as an infantry captain in Iraq and Afghanistan, but has no senior military or government officer experience.
November 23, 2024
8:25 am
November 23, 2024
8:17 am
Multiple missiles were fired in an airstrike towards a densely populated part of Lebanon’s capital early on Saturday.
The huge airstrike targeted Beirut’s Basta neighbourhood, and no prior warnings were given by the Israeli military. The largely residential area was struck last month.
At least one violent explosion was heard across the city, Reuters witnesses said, and plumes of smoke could be seen. Scenes of massive destruction at the site were shared online, including a massive crater in the ground.
“Beirut, the capital, woke up to a horrific massacre, as the Israeli enemy’s air force completely destroyed an eight-story residential building with five missiles on Al-Mamoun Street in Basta,” the state-run National News Agency reported.
The health ministry put the initial death toll at four, with 23 wounded. The number is expected to climb in the coming hours as search and rescue efforts continue.
It came after a long day of Israeli airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs, which have been non-stop since last week.
The cross-border fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group escalated into a full-blown war in mid-September.
Israel has bombed southern Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs and the eastern Beqaa region, and has sent ground troops across the border. Hezbollah has continued to fire rockets deeper into Israel.
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