Vast deployments of riot police restored calm to the troubled suburbs of northern Paris, with only scattered cases of arson reported yesterday after nights of rioting.
A few vehicles and garbage cans were set on fire overnight in the Val d'Oise region north of the capital and police made less than 10 arrests, a spokeswoman for the local government said. There were no attacks targeting police and no police injuries, she said.
"It really is getting calmer and calmer," she said.
She declined to be identified by name, in line with her department's policy.
"We are returning little by little to normal," she said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy's government deployed riot officers again to the worst-hit town, Villiers-le-Bel, on Wednesday night.
The trigger for the riots was the deaths on Sunday of two teenage boys in a motorbike crash with a police car in Villiers-le-Bel. Some residents refused to believe the deaths were accidental, blaming the police.
Violence peaked on Monday night and echoed riots that raged through poor suburbs nationwide for three weeks in 2005. The unrest showed that anger still simmers in poor housing projects where many Arabs, blacks and other minorities live, often isolated from mainstream society.
Successive governments have struggled with the question of how to integrate minority youths from poor neighborhoods. Heavy state investment has done little to improve housing and create jobs in the depressed projects that ring Paris.
The government's newest plan -- an "equal opportunities" bill to improve the prospects of those in poor suburbs -- will be unveiled on Jan. 22.
Sarkozy promised tough punishments for rioters who fired at police with shotguns.
They "will find themselves in a criminal court," Sarkozy said. "That has a name, it is a murder attempt."
Prosecutors said that they had opened a preliminary inquiry for attempted homicide in the cases.
The unrest has drawn comparisons to riots that raged through poor suburbs nationwide for three weeks in 2005 and it shows that anger still simmers in poor housing projects where many Arabs, blacks and other minorities live, often isolated from mainstream society.
The rough suburbs are shaky ground for a president who has confidently tackled striking rail workers and sticky diplomatic situations, but is unwelcome in poor French housing projects where his hard line on crime and immigration has riled many residents.
As interior minister just before the 2005 riots, Sarkozy called troublemakers in the suburbs "scum."
During his election campaign early this year, Sarkozy deftly avoided such neighborhoods, except for one carefully orchestrated blitz visit.
On Wednesday, Sarkozy described the incident that sparked the riots as "distressing."
Later the president met with families of the two teens and told them a judicial inquiry had been opened into their deaths.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to