Suspect arrested after Paris Kurdish center shooting leaves 3 dead
PARIS — A man who was charged last year with attacking migrants shot and killed three people at a Kurdish cultural center Friday in Paris in an assault that appeared to be specifically aimed at foreigners, authorities said.
The shooting, which also wounded three people, shook the Kurdish community in the French capital and sparked skirmishes between angry Kurds and police. It also rattled merchants in the bustling central Paris neighborhood on the eve of Christmas weekend and put officers on alert for more violence.
Authorities identified the suspect as a 69-year-old Paris man who had been jailed for attacking migrants living in tents and had been released this month. Investigators were considering a possible racist motive for the shooting.
The attack occurred at midday at the cultural center and a nearby restaurant and hair salon, according to the mayor of that part of the city, Alexandra Cordebard.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the suspect was clearly targeting foreigners and had acted alone, and was not affiliated with any extreme-right or other radical movements.
Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said terrorism prosecutors were in contact with investigators but had not given any indication of a terrorist motive.
A construction worker who was on a job nearby described seeing the assailant go first to the cultural center, then to the restaurant and the hair salon. The worker then said he saw the assailant wound three people before two passersby in the salon intervened and stopped him.
The suspect, who is French, attended a shooting range in a sports club and had several registered weapons, Darmanin said. The man was not on any radicalism watch lists.
The suspect had past convictions for illegal arms possession and armed violence, and was handed preliminary charges of “premeditated, armed violence of a racist nature” for the attack last year on a migrant camp in Paris, the prosecutor said.
He had been held in provisional detention in that case until Dec. 12, when he was released under judicial supervision, ordered to get psychiatric care and banned from carrying weapons.
Rapper convicted: A Los Angeles jury Friday found rapper Tory Lanez guilty of three felonies in the 2020 shooting of hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion that left her wounded with bullet fragments in her feet.
The jury of seven women and five men deliberated for one day before convicting the 30-year-old Canadian rapper, whose legal name is Daystar Peterson, of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, having a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. The counts could lead to up to 22 years in prison.
Lanez showed no reaction as the verdict was read. He was handcuffed while in the courtroom.
Megan Thee Stallion, whose legal name is Megan Pete, testified that Lanez fired a handgun at the back of her feet and shouted for her to dance as she walked away from an SUV in which they had been riding in the Hollywood Hills in the summer of 2020.
She said the two had gotten into a dispute that became heated when she began insulting his music.
She needed surgery to remove the bullet fragments from her feet.
US flu update: Flu is decreasing in many parts of the U.S. after an alarmingly early and strong start to the season.
The number of flu hospital admissions fell for the second week in a row, according to a national surveillance system run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And the percentage of doctor visits due to fever and other flu-like symptoms has dropped for three weeks in a row.
“It looks like for this first wave of (flu) activity, maybe we’ve seen the worst of that,” said the CDC’S Lynnette Brammer, who leads the government agency’s tracking of flu in the United States.
But she added that the flu is still spreading. CDC data indicates flu activity last week was high or very high in 45 states.
Military bases damaged: Military bases that housed tens of thousands of Afghan refugees in the U.S. sustained almost $260 million in damage that in some cases rendered buildings unusable for troops until significant repairs to walls and plumbing are made, the Pentagon’s inspector general found.
Over the last two weeks of August 2021, the U.S. Air Force managed the largest humanitarian evacuation in its history, airlifting 120,000 people from Afghanistan in just 17 days.
After processing, many of the refugees were flown to eight military bases in the U.S., where many were housed for months as they awaited visa processing and resettlement.
The sheer volume of people in the temporary housing left those barracks and buildings with significant wear and tear, the inspector general found.
Congo rebels retreat: Eastern Congo’s M23 rebels retreated Friday from some of the territory it held, the group’s first withdrawal since it began seizing swaths of land more than a year ago.
The rebels left the Kibumba area and its positions were taken over by the East African Regional Force — a multinational group charged with protecting the area. This retreat is in line with an agreement made last month at a summit in Angola, M23’s political spokesman Lawrence Kanyuka said in a statement.
Kibumba, in the Nyiragongo territory of Congo’s North Kivu province, has been held by the M23 since November 2021 and it was the closest the rebels got to Goma, eastern Congo’s regional capital.
The M23 rebels are largely Congolese ethnic Tutsis who became prominent 10 years ago when their fighters seized Goma, eastern Congo’s largest city on the border with Rwanda.
UK, France strikes: Air travelers faced possible delays at U.K. airports Friday as government employees who check passports went on strike in the latest walkout over pay amid a cost-ofliving crisis.
France braced for similar Christmas travel disruption, with a weekend rail strike starting Friday.
The strike by Border Force staff was due to continue through the end of the year, with the exception of Tuesday. Hundreds of thousands of passengers could be affected, though the British government said it was preparing military personnel and workers from other public services to help at airports.
About half of France’s train conductors are going on strike for the Christmas weekend. A third of scheduled train services were canceled Friday and 40% of trains were canceled for Saturday and Sunday, according to the SNCF national rail authority.