Youths torch cars, pelt police officers
Youths torched a dozen cars and hurled stones at police in a second night of violence in the troubled Paris suburbs, raising memories of rioting that rocked the nation last year.
Six police officers suffered minor injuries and 13 people were detained in the violence Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, police said.
It did not appear to reach the scale of the first overnight clashes Monday night. Then, police said nine officers were wounded and that they fired rubber pellets to disperse the roughly 100 youths.
The tensions are a stark reminder of the anger that smolders in depressed French suburbs, despite new government efforts to tackle high youth unemployment and racial inequalities following the three weeks of similar – but far worse – rioting last fall.
Dozens of vans carrying riot officers were stationed Tuesday night in Montfermeil, 10 miles east of Paris, and in the nearby suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, the flashpoint of last year’s rioting. A helicopter surveilled the area.
DUBLIN, Ireland
Priest convicted of raping girl, 13
A Dublin jury convicted a Roman Catholic priest Wednesday of raping a 13-year-old girl.
During the six-day trial, the victim, whose identity was not made public, testified that Rev. Daniel Doherty raped her in a church sacristy twice in 1985.
Doherty, 48, had denied ever meeting the girl. He is expected to be sentenced in October.
Sex abuse scandals have jolted Ireland’s Catholic Church, where nearly 90 percent of the country’s 4 million residents identify themselves as Catholic.
The church’s moral standing, Mass attendance and applications for priesthood have plummeted in Ireland since 1994, when the first major scandal involving a pedophile priest triggered the collapse of the government of then-Prime Minister Albert Reynolds.
RALEIGH, N.C.
State urged to pay for 1898 violence
North Carolina should compensate victims of racial violence that led to the overthrow of a racially mixed city government a century ago and ushered in a new political era in the Jim Crow South, a fact-finding commission recommended Wednesday.
The murders and terrorizing of blacks by white supremacists in 1898 led to a Democratic takeover from Republicans who were in control during Reconstruction.
The commission’s report – produced after six years of study – urged lawmakers to consider economic reparations for the coastal town, including incentives for minority small businesses, compensation to heirs of victims and help for minority home ownership.
The commission did not provide any cost estimates, although compensation advocate Larry Thomas of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill said the economic losses could be in the billions of dollars today.
Compiled from wire reports