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Mayor targeted as youths fight police near Paris
Tue May 30, 8:51 AM ET
PARIS (Reuters) - Youths clashed with police in a Paris suburb overnight and attacked the home of the local mayor in disturbances one police union said were the worst since a wave of urban riots shook France in November.
French media said some 150 youths armed with baseball bats fought around 250 police for four hours in Montfermeil north of Paris after the arrest of a youth suspected of attacking a bus driver, an incident witnessed by the local mayor Xavier Lemoine.
Youths smashed windows, hurled two petrol bombs at the town hall and stoned the mayor's home, the media reports said.
Seven police officers were slightly hurt in the violence, in which six youths were detained, police said. Three remained in custody.
"Around 100 hooded youths stoned my home shouting 'the mayor is a son of a bitch'," Le Monde newspaper quoted Lemoine as saying. "The clashes took place 50 meters (yards) from my home."
Lemoine, a married reserve naval officer with seven children, said he had been targeted after coming to help a bus driver being assaulted by youths who then recognized him.
The arrest of a suspect in the attack late on Monday triggered the violence, he said.
The mayor, whose home and family have previously been set upon, courted controversy last month when he banned unsupervised under-aged youths from gathering in groups in the town center. The order was later overturned by an administrative court.
Michel Thooris, secretary general of the Action Police CFTC union, said the latest violence was the worst since November.
"Last night we saw the strongest after-shock of the earthquake of November 2005 that hit the suburbs. The situation in the suburbs remains explosive," he said in a statement, calling on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to put community officers back on the beat to reduce tensions.
Montfermeil borders Clichy-Sous-Bois, where last year's riots began after two youngsters died while apparently fleeing police. In the three weeks of rioting that followed in poor suburbs around France, some 9,000 vehicles and dozens of public buildings and businesses were torched.
The government invoked emergency powers to quell what was the worst unrest in mainland France in nearly 40 years.
The opposition say the government has failed to alleviate the high unemployment and racial discrimination that provided the backdrop to November's disturbances.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm
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May 29, 11:42 PM (ET)
PARIS (Reuters) - Around a hundred youths clashed with police during the night after setting fire to cars and rubbish bins in a Paris suburb that was the scene of violent riots last November, a local official said on Tuesday.
Seven police officers were slightly injured and six youths were arrested in a neighbourhood of Seine-Saint-Denis in confrontations that started at about 2030 GMT on Monday evening, according to a security official from the suburb to the North of the French capital.
The youths began burning cars in reaction to a police operation in which a young man was arrested several hours earlier. Officials said they did not yet know how many cars had been burned.
More Violent Riots in France
By Reuters More>
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5 comments:
Dag,
I never believed there would be a coup d'etat staged by the military, but I always agreed with you that we would see more rioting with the spring. I have a feeling this is only the beginning.
What do you think?
I fear now that I indulged in wishful thinking based on what I still think is solid intuition, if I may make rubbish of logic.
I looked into the time-frames of French revolts over the past 200 years, and they are consistently from April to Sept. with only sporadic fighting in off-months. The period is right due to the weather.
Truepeers suggests that the drug and prostitution trades suffer from the rioting, and that those in the crime ledership are keeping the public rioting to a minimum.
Charles asks who the political leaders are, who are the spokesment of the yoots in question. Who's behind the rioting?
Is it spontaneous or organised and guided or prevented by imams, politicos or drug lords?
It seems obvious now after the insights we have regarding the cartoon intifada that the Iranian government can control much of what happens in Europe's Muslim communities, turning on or off the violence pretty much on command. Will that continue? With th scent of blood in the ghettos and the taste for it, will the yoots remain under control? So far we see only minor skirmishing ad opportunistic crime on the part of the yoots against the French. Compared to what we've seen before this is nothing to get excited about.
If the Iranians can make violence on command, then it will happen if they feel a need to distract Europeans from the nuclear discussions. Yoots are proxies regardless, in my opinion. If Iran wants fire, they will throw these lumpen idiots onto the sparks to create the fire they want. However, these rag-people still have emotional volition, and they can turn as they will on impulse. These rag-people might catch fire from another's spark, Iran notwithstanding.
If there are skilled and intelligent agents provocateurs working in the shadow, then we might hope for a politics of confrontation after all that will help settle the issue. Otherwise, it's the slow boil.
I scanned this article and printed it out so that I will have something interesting to read with my coffee later.
Meanwhile back in Canada... Canadian Union of Public Employees [CUPE] in Ontario has called for a boycott of Israel. What alot of nerve.
I worked for two Presidents of CUPE in BC. CUPE BC, like CUPE in Ontario, operates under the umbrella of CUPE National. Let me be on record as stating that CUPE DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS.
None of the women working in the CUPE office in which I worked were allowed to belong to a union. One long term secretary, Ann Styba, had to take CUPE to court in an attempt to get a pension. Another woman, Kim Steele, was fired for speaking to another CUPE employee about the fact that she was getting stressed out over being yelled at routinely by Vice President Paul Cooke. Cooke claimed she had violated his right to privacy by speaking up, despite the fact that she had talked to him about the problem first. [Once Cooke flew into a rage because she had accidentally opened a letter that had come into the office for him from the UBC staff person with whom he was having an extra-marital affair, while his wife was home with the kids. Some of these CUPE leaders were real classy guys.] Women, who spoke up about double and triple workloads were fired, instantly, with no warning.
CUPE even fired a book keeper when she got cancer (unlike the other female staff, the bookkeeper had been on contract for years).
I saw three women get fired. I was the only one who escaped getting fired but I damaged my health doing triple workloads.
CUPE is not above 'police state' tactics either. When women complained about unjust firings and not being allowed to belong to a union in the CUPE office, CUPE arranged for the Vancouver Police to pay a visit to the home of one of them, sending a powerful message to the others to muzzle themselves. This woman said that the cops -- apparently eager to please another union -- were very agressive, pounding on her apartment door.
But CUPE didn't only target women for police state tactics, men too. One man, a pipefitter in Plant Operations at UBC also got targeted. He got Workers Compensation briefly and started to notice what he believed were some questionable numbers. He alleged that money was being siphoned off WCB cheques. He took the issue to his union, CUPE, and was ignored for a long period and then mysteriously got a cheque for $1,000 in the mail. But he still didn't shut up.
CUPE then targeted him for a "psychiatric assessment". There's nothing wrong with him. I know him; he's a nice guy, a decent guy. They based the need for an assessment on the fact that he had told CUPE Vice President Paul Cooke, "I should take you out." He is from Scotland and Cooke from Ireland and that is apparently an expression that guys use when they mean, 'We should go outside the pub and have a fist fight'. Anyway, he was forced to appear at a meeting with CUPE lawyer, Connie Corrico, during which he was threatened that he had to attend sessions with a psychiatrist and take medication or lose his job. He was scared and didn't have a lawyer so he met the conditions. I told him, "Stop taking medication; it's going to damage your health." After taking it for a couple of years, he told me he was thinking of quitting.
Judy Darcy, the head of CUPE National at the time, knew about such rampant abuse -- everything from the denial of CUPE female staff the right to belong to a union to the political psychiatry tactics that could rival China -- and didn't care.
By accusing Israel of human rights abuses, CUPE is self-righteously acting as some model of human rights. It is nothing of the kind.
Dag,
You might remember that I think all the rioting in Europe was coordinated by outside sources.
I think it is likely that those who coordinated the rioting of 2005 may realize their overstepped their bounds, and yes, they may try to limit the rioting in 2006.
We shall see.
We shall. Pedestrian Infidel has more on the attack against the mayor today. If it does get crazy in France we can thnk God it comes so the French will have to deal with it rather than continue to live in phantasy land as they insist on doing now.
This is a topic that interests me deeply, so we'll post on it as often as events call for.
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