标签： Europe

PARIS — One of France’s most recognizable entertainment figures, 67-year-old singer and actor Patrick Bruel, has been placed in official police custody following sexual violence allegations brought by at least 13 accusers, prosecutors from the Nanterre district confirmed Tuesday. The major French star, who rose to household-name fame across the French-speaking world in the 1980s and 1990s with a catalog of hit singles that remain embedded in modern French popular culture, has repeatedly denied all claims against him. He has been in law enforcement custody since Monday, according to official statements.

Bruel, who has also built an extensive acting career with credits in more than 40 film and television projects, faces allegations that span more than two decades, dating back to the late 1990s. The formal investigation into the claims was first launched after three women came forward with initial accusations of sexual assault and attempted rape, with the alleged incidents occurring in 1997, 2000, and 2001 respectively. As investigators deepened their inquiry, 10 additional accusers were identified and interviewed, bringing the total number of women making formal claims to 13. These expanded allegations include reports of rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment, the prosecutor’s office confirmed in an official release.

Two separate ongoing investigations into separate accusations against Bruel have also been transferred to Nanterre prosecutors to be incorporated into the main inquiry. An investigation opened into an alleged 2012 rape in the Brittany coastal town of Dinard, in western France, was moved to the Nanterre jurisdiction. Earlier this month, Belgian law enforcement also officially notified French prosecutors of a separate allegation of rape and sexual assault allegedly committed by Bruel in Brussels in 2010, which has now been added to the broader investigation.

In a statement released ahead of Bruel’s custody, the star’s legal team — consisting of attorneys Christophe Ingrain, Céline Lasek, and Fanny Colin — noted that Bruel had volunteered to cooperate with judicial authorities for several weeks, stating he was eager to respond to the claims through official legal channels. The allegations against Bruel first gained widespread public attention in recent weeks following a series of media reports, most notably from prominent French investigative outlet Mediapart, which published details of multiple accusers’ claims dating back decades. The publication of these reports prompted additional women to come forward and file formal complaints with authorities.

Judicial officials indicated that a decision on next steps would be reached by the end of the day Tuesday, with two possible outcomes: prosecutors will either file preliminary criminal charges against Bruel, or release him without any charges pending further inquiry.

LONDON – A violent stabbing in a residential neighborhood of Belfast, Northern Ireland, has thrown the United Kingdom into a fresh public conversation about violence, immigration, and online misinformation, after law enforcement took a Sudanese man into custody this week in connection with the attack. The incident, which took place late Monday, gained rapid national attention after graphic videos of the assault were widely circulated across social media platforms.

According to local law enforcement, the victim, a man in his 40s, was rushed to a local hospital with severe, life-altering injuries to his face, eyes, and back. The suspect, a 30-something Sudanese national, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and remains in police custody, with a kitchen knife recovered at the attack site. As of Tuesday, investigators are still working to map out a clear motive for the assault, though senior police officials have confirmed there is no current evidence linking the attack to terrorist activity. Ryan Henderson, assistant chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, confirmed Wednesday that no additional persons of interest are being sought in connection with the case, and that the suspect had been granted official permission to reside in the U.K. and lived close to where the stabbing occurred. Henderson declined to release further details, noting that the active investigation is still ongoing.

In response to questions in Parliament about the suspect’s immigration status, Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn stated he could not confirm whether the man had entered the U.K. through legal or irregular channels. Gavin Robinson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, told lawmakers Wednesday that the suspect had been allowed to stay in the U.K. on a five-year visa, and used the incident to push for stricter government controls on what he called “uncontrolled immigration.”

The Belfast stabbing comes just one week after another high-profile stabbing murder in southern England amplified national tensions around immigration and policing. In that case, 21-year-old university student Henry Nowak, who was white, was stabbed to death in Southampton in December by Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh man who falsely told responding officers that Nowak had assaulted him in a racist attack. First responders initially treated the wounded Nowak as a suspect before recognizing his critical injuries and attempting lifesaving resuscitation. Digwa was convicted of murder last week and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum 21-year term before eligibility for parole. The case has sparked fierce public debate over policing protocol and racial dynamics in the justice system, and a public protest over Nowak’s death turned violent when attendees attacked police officers with chairs and rocks. Multiple people have since been charged with violent disorder in connection with the unrest. U.S. Vice President JD Vance and right-wing activists have already seized on the Southampton case to publicly blame lax U.K. immigration policies for the violence.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose Labour party took power earlier this year, has publicly condemned the Belfast attack as a “sickening” act of violence. “We have no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets,” Starmer said. On Tuesday, his office issued a formal public call for collective calm, stressing that investigators need adequate time and space to conduct a full, unpressured inquiry into the stabbing. Senior political and law enforcement leaders have also joined a coordinated appeal to the public: urging people not to share the graphic attack videos circulating online, and to avoid spreading unconfirmed misinformation that could inflame community tensions.

Nestled along the scenic Adda River in northern Italy’s Lombardy region, a one-of-a-kind vessel has reclaimed its historic purpose, offering local commuters and visitors a quiet, eco-friendly alternative to gridlocked roads after a nearby bridge shutdown for maintenance.

Known popularly as Leonardo’s Ferry, this cable-guided reaction ferry operates on a 500-year-old design first sketched by Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci in 1513, during his detailed studies of northern Italian waterways including Milan’s famous canal network. The original drawing is held in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, outside London, and while historians debate whether da Vinci personally invented the reaction ferry concept, his detailed rendering has cemented the vessel’s place in engineering and cultural history. Today, it is the last fully operational reaction ferry of its kind remaining on the entire Adda, which stretches from the Alpine foothills to join the Po River.

Unlike modern motorized ferries, the vessel relies entirely on the natural current of the Adda for propulsion, making it a zero-emission form of transport. Its ingenious operating principle relies on basic high school physics: a fixed cable tethers the ferry to both banks, and the force of the downstream river current is split per the parallelogram rule of force, with one component creating resistance along the cable and the other generating lateral movement that carries the craft across the water. The ferry’s rudder adjusts the vessel’s angle to the current, fine-tuning its speed and trajectory across the 5-minute crossing.

The historic ferry almost vanished permanently last year, when its long-time concession operator stepped down, leaving the service without a steward. Refusing to let the centuries-old community link disappear, Imbersago mayor Fabio Vergani took matters into his own hands: he earned a commercial ferryman’s license himself, then partnered with the local tourism association to recruit and train a team of local volunteers to run the service.

Through 2024, the volunteer team primarily catered to weekend tourists drawn to the ferry’s historic charm and riverside scenery. That changed this spring, when a nearby connecting bridge was closed for extensive repairs, sending road traffic into hours-long gridlock and forcing local residents to take a 20-kilometer detour to cross between Imbersago on one bank and Villa d’Adda on the other. Stepping up to fill the gap, the volunteer crew added a daily commuter service to their schedule, operating from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily with a two-hour midday break.

Fares are modest: 1.50 euros (around $1.75) for foot passengers, 2 euros ($2.30) for cyclists, 2.50 euros ($2.88) for motorbikes, and 3.50 euros (roughly $4) for cars. For local residents, the ferry has become more than a tourist attraction — it’s a vital, welcome shortcut that cuts hours off daily commutes.

Gianpaolo Graffagnino, who lives in Villa d’Adda and works on the opposite bank, now bikes to work and uses the ferry to avoid the detour. “Right now this is the fastest system, but above all the nicest because you get five minutes of peace,” he said of the quiet crossing. Another local commuter, Mauro Carnati, who drives his car across the ferry to take his daughter to school, says the small fare is worth the unique experience. “It’s true that we spend a little money, and it’s not possible every day, but the romance and added value of the Adda and the ferry are truly amazing. It makes for a better start to the day,” he noted.

For volunteer ferryman Massimo Zoia, the ferry’s new role as a modern community link is a perfect full-circle moment for the centuries-old design. “This is a means of transport that has been here for 500 years and has always connected the two banks of the Adda,” he said. “And now it has returned to its original purpose: connecting two populations living on different banks of a river.”

For decades, Sweden has held a reputation as a global pioneer in digital innovation, home to tech giants like streaming giant Spotify and telecommunications leader Ericsson, and boasting one of the world’s most digitally advanced education ecosystems. But this Nordic nation is set to make a striking policy pivot this coming fall: a nationwide ban on mobile phones in K-12 schools, a move that anchors a growing global reckoning over the unintended costs of saturating classrooms with screen-based technology.

The policy shift is not sudden. Sweden’s center-right coalition government, which took office in 2022, has steadily advanced an agenda that prioritizes traditional learning tools and increased reading time over unregulated screen exposure, starting with the youngest learners in preschools. Lawmaker Joar Forsell, who chairs the Swedish parliament’s education committee, explained that the move comes in direct response to measurable declines in core literacy rates across the country’s student population, particularly among younger cohorts. “We’re rolling the screens back because we believe that books and more traditional ways of learning are better for kids,” Forsell stated.

Sweden’s new rule is far from an isolated policy change. It is the most high-profile step in a growing global trend of nations rolling back unrestricted screen use in schools, decades after governments around the world poured billions into outfitting campuses with laptops, tablets, and educational apps. Across the Nordic region, Denmark is preparing to implement a nearly identical mobile ban, while Finland enacted its own restrictions on classroom mobile device use in August 2023. Beyond Scandinavia, governments from Spain to South Korea have rolled out measures ranging from full classroom mobile bans to caps on screen-based homework assignments. In the United States, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the country’s second-largest public school system — has announced sweeping new rules that ban all screen use for students through second grade, impose grade-specific daily screen time limits, block access to YouTube on school devices, and require full audits of all existing education technology vendor contracts.

To support its return to traditional learning, the Swedish government has allocated 555 million Swedish krona ($59 million) in new grant funding this year specifically for schools to purchase physical textbooks and updated teacher instructional guides. The policy was directly prompted by 2022 data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the leading global comparative study of student performance run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The latest PISA results showed that 24.3% of Swedish ninth graders failed to reach basic proficiency in reading comprehension — a figure only marginally better than the European Union average of 26.2%.

Cognitive science researchers back the policy’s core premise. Magnus Haake, an associate professor of cognitive science at Sweden’s Lund University, explained that learning through physical, print materials engages the motor and sensory regions of children’s developing brains in ways that digital screens do not, creating a more holistic learning experience that improves retention. Beyond school walls, Sweden’s public health agency has also issued guidance to parents encouraging them to model healthy screen habits at home, including adopting shared screen-free zones that align with the new rules in schools.

Many Swedish schools have already been implementing mobile bans independently for years, and on-the-ground accounts from educators and students point to early positive outcomes. At Malmö Borgarskola, a high school in southern Sweden, students have long been required to stow their mobile phones in locked labeled compartments nicknamed the “Mobile Hotel” for the duration of class, retrieving their devices only after the final bell of the day. Seventeen-year-old student Melina Sallahi noted that constant notifications and social media apps create unavoidable distractions when phones are accessible during lessons. “When you have a phone, there’s always something to look at,” Sallahi said. “It’s less of a distraction without it.” Her classmate Vasilije Stjepanovic, also 17, added that entertainment apps are far more engaging than academic content for most teens, and removing phones from classrooms creates space for more focused learning. While every student at the school is still issued a laptop, deputy headmaster Patrik Sander explained that device use is now only permitted when explicitly approved by a teacher. “We have pushed back, learning that writing with your hands and a pencil helps you remember,” Sander said. “Nowadays, we see the push going in the other direction.”

The shift to book-centric learning started early for Sweden’s youngest students: since last summer, children under 2 years old in early childhood education programs are only permitted to use non-digital learning materials such as print books, and preschools across the country face no requirement to incorporate digital learning tools into their curricula. A new national curriculum that formalizes the priority on traditional, book-based learning is scheduled to take effect in 2028.

Not all stakeholders in Sweden support the sweeping shift away from digital learning, however. The Swedish Edtech Industry, a leading trade association for educational technology companies, issued a warning that the pivot could leave Swedish students ill-prepared for the modern workforce. The group’s report notes that 90% of all future jobs are projected to require advanced digital skills, and reduced exposure to digital tools in schools could lead to widespread skills gaps among young workers, stalled innovation in the public sector, and higher youth unemployment.

Peter Carlsson, CEO of Malmö-based edtech startup Imvi Labs, which develops virtual reality tools to train brain-eye coordination for students and adults, argued that framing all screen use as harmful is an oversimplification. Many targeted digital tools are actually critical for supporting students with learning and reading disabilities, he said, and can make instruction far more effective for struggling learners. “By having good tools, the teaching can become more efficient,” Carlsson noted.

But for students and educators on the ground at Malmö Borgarskola, those concerns fail to hold up to daily experience. On a recent May morning, students gathered with printed textbooks to discuss Russian history as they prepared for end-of-year final exams, and many echoed the view that digital literacy is already a part of students’ daily lives outside of school. “Everyone uses digital devices during their free time, so I don’t think that’s something that should be taught in school,” Sallahi said. “It’s nothing I’m worried about.” Classmate Aslan Özhan Kilicasan agreed, adding: “We learn much more easily when we use books.”