Youths torched two buses and police arrested 25 people in French suburbs on the first anniversary of violent riots that spread through France but officials said yesterday it was a relatively quiet night.
Two men boarded a bus in the Seine-Saint-Denis area north of Paris on Friday evening, ordering about 15 passengers and the drivers off before setting it alight.
Another bus was set ablaze in another part of the suburb, police said.
The two attackers, wearing hoods, burned two buses on Friday night on the anniversary of the start of last year's suburban unrest.
The two buses were attacked separately in Le Blanc-Mesnil, north of Paris.
The passengers and drivers of both buses were able to escape unharmed, said the Paris-area transportation authority, RATP.
In one of the attacks, assailants broke the bus' windows and threw firebombs into the vehicle.
A spokeswoman for the transportation authority said that she was unsure if the bombs were thrown before or after the passengers had left the bus.
`QUIET NIGHT'
"Few incidents have been recorded during the night of Oct. 27 and 28" the Interior Ministry said in a statement. "[It was] a relatively quiet night."
Around 4,000 extra police officers were deployed on Friday night, the ministry said, adding that "This allowed [them] to intervene rapidly where certain acts were being committed."
Six police officers were slightly injured, it said.
In southern Toulouse, the town of Meaux east of Paris and in Clichy-Sous-Bois, the northeastern Paris suburb where last year's riots started, youths attacked some police officers and set cars ablaze, the ministry said.
After several attacks on police in poor suburbs in past weeks, police had said the violence could spiral out of control as the anniversary of last year's riots approached.
But the fears appeared unfounded yesterday.
"It's lively but it's not the riots of last year," one police source said during the night.
REMEMBERING
During the day on Friday, several hundred people in this poor Parisian suburb participated in a silent march in memory of two teenagers whose accidental deaths last year triggered three weeks of unrest that shook the country.
In speeches after the march, officials and family members of the teenagers called for calm.
The marchers, many of them youths wearing white T-shirts bearing the words "Dead for Nothing," paused by the power substation where the teenagers died.
The unrest last year, during which thousands of cars were set ablaze and businesses were damaged, shed light on the plight of the country's underprivileged populations, mainly Arabs and black Africans and their French-born children, who feel disenfranchised.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS