French burkini bans challenged
France’s highest administrative authority is studying whether local bans on full-body burkini swimsuits are legal, amid growing concerns in the country and abroad about police forcing Muslim women to disrobe.
Images of uniformed police appearing to require a woman to take off her tunic, and media accounts of similar incidents, have elicited shock and anger online this week.
Some fear that burkini bans in several French towns, based on a strict application of French secularism policies, are worsening religious tensions. Divisions have emerged in President Francois Hollande’s government over the bans, and protests have been held in London and Berlin by those defending women’s right to wear what they want on the beach.
Critics of the local decrees have said the orders are too vague, prompting local police officials to fine even women wearing the traditional Islamic headscarf and the hijab, but not burkinis. The bans do not generally use the word “burkini” but forbid in a general way clothing that is ostentatiously religious.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on BFM television Thursday that burkinis represent the “enslavement of women” and reiterated support for the bans — but urged police to implement the bans fairly and respectfully. COLUMBUS, Ohio — Accidental drug overdoses killed 3,050 people in Ohio last year, an average of eight per day, as deaths blamed on the powerful painkiller fentanyl again rose sharply and pushed the total overdose fatalities to a record high, the state reported Thursday. Over one-third of those deaths — 1,155 — were fentanylrelated, which more than doubled from the previous year and increased from just 75 in 2012. Authorities who had been targeting prescription painkiller abuse say the problem has changed quickly in recent years as users turned to heroin, fentanyl and even stronger drugs. It’s an epidemic that can only be effectively addressed through co-operation and a combination of prevention, early intervention, up-to-date treatment, and life-saving measures such as the opioid overdose antidote naloxone, said Dr. Mark Hurst, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services’ medical director. “This isn’t an issue that, as state departments and agencies, we’re going to be able to solve unilaterally,” Hurst said. “It requires communities, it requires families, it requires individuals, it requires schools. If we’re really going to make good progress and sustain progress on this, we need all hands on deck.”