French police have detained twelve suspects after 145 people reported being pricked with syringes during the country's annual street music festival, officials said Sunday.

Millions of people took to the streets across France on Saturday evening for the Fête de la Musique, with authorities reporting "unprecedented crowds" in Paris.

Before the party, posts on Snapchat and other social media had called for targeting women during the festivities.

The interior ministry said 145 victims reported being stabbed with needles across the country, with Paris police reporting 13 cases in the capital.

Officials did not specify if they were cases of so-called needle spiking with date-rape drugs such as Rohypnol or GHB, used by attackers to render victims confused or unconscious and vulnerable to sexual assault. 

"Some victims were taken to hospital for toxicological tests," the ministry said.

In Paris, investigations were opened after three people including a 15-year-old girl and an 18-year-old male, reported being stabbed in three different locations in Paris, prosecutors said.

All three reported that they felt unwell.

Twelve people suspected of being responsible for the stabbings were arrested across the country, the interior ministry said.

They are believed to have targeted around 50 victims, according to a police source.

Apart from those suspects, more than 370 people were detained during the festival on various charges, including nearly 90 people in Paris.

Fourteen participants in the festivities were seriously injured, including a 17-year-old who was hospitalised after being found sitting on the street with stab wounds to the lower abdomen.

Thirteen members of law enforcement were also injured.

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20250622-syringe-attacks-mar-france-s-f%C3%AAte-de-la-musique-summer-street-festival

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Zelensky has a Nazi problem. He can’t lie his way out of it
Facts and numbers make his Russia-Hitler comparisons laughably hypocritical

Anniversaries can be opportunities. For better or worse. In the case of the recent anniversary of Nazi Germany’s massive attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941 – code-named Operation Barbarossa by the Germans – Ukraine’s beyond best-by-date president Vladimir Zelensky went for the worst. Using his own Telegram channel, Zelensky shared his bizarre view of why that anniversary mattered. In short, because it can serve in the information war against Russia.

“Eighty years ago,” the Kiev regime leader wrote, “the world overcame Nazism and swore ‘Never again.’ But today Russia is repeating the crimes of the Nazis […] Now Ukrainians are fighting against rashism [a pejorative term fusing the words “Russia” and “fascism”] with the same courage with which our ancestors defeated Nazism…”

Where to begin? Why not with the obvious: IF Russia were following Nazi examples, then much of Ukraine would now look like, for instance, Gaza. And while every death is a tragedy, the numbers of Ukrainian civilians killed in the Ukraine War would be of an entirely different order of magnitude.

This is not a matter of opinion. It’s a fact that can be quantified and proven: As of the end of May, the UN counted about 13,279 Ukrainian civilians killed, since the beginning of the large-scale fighting in February 2022. It is true that the UN also warns that these are conservative, minimum figures.

Yet consider some figures for Gaza under Israeli genocidal assault since October 2023. As of early June, the enclave’s health ministry – generally acknowledged as reliable and also conservative with its numbers, notwithstanding Israeli and Western propaganda – has counted over 55,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza alone (Israel’s victims in the West bank and elsewhere should, of course, not be forgotten.) 

The Gaza Health Ministry does not distinguish between resistance fighters and civilians, but there is a virtual expert consensus that the share of the latter is unusually high, as you would expect during a genocide. A peer-reviewed study in the prestigious and unbiased medical journal The Lancet, for instance, has estimated that 59.1% of deaths between October 2023 and June 2024 were women, children, and the elderly. Other equally reputable organizations have even estimated around 90% of civilian casualties in Gaza.

Keep in mind that the above is deliberately restricted to minimum estimates. As The Lancet has also shown, the real death toll in Gaza is likely to be far higher. Let’s also not even dwell here on “details,”such as that Gaza now has the highest concentration of child amputees in the world.

For even the bare figures cited suffice to gain a sense of proportion and perspective: Gaza, before the Israeli mass murder attack had a total population of between 2.2 and 2.4 million. Ukraine’s total population on the eve of the large-scale escalation of February 2022 was just over 41 million, according to Ukrainian official sources.

And now compare the numbers of civilian casualties and the total populations. It is obvious: If Vladimir Zelensky is looking for a state that uses methods – if that is the word – of Nazi warfare, then that would be Israel, not Russia. But he cannot say that because Israel is aligned with the US and the West, just like his own regime.

Figures can help expose blatant lies, especially when they are as stunningly unambiguous as in this case. But the quantitative isn’t everything, obviously. What about what social scientists and historians – such as me – call the qualitative dimension? In other words, what about what makes people tick? 

In that regard, the West’s proxy war against Russia and via Ukraine has seen one of the most successful operations of political whitewashing in recent memory. Before Kiev, first under Zelensky’s predecessor Petro Poroshenko and then under Zelensky himself, turned Ukraine into a Western tool and battering ram against Russia, at least some Western experts and even mainstream media were well aware that Ukraine had a rapidly growing, increasingly powerful, and extremely subversive (domestically and internationally) far-right movement.

As of 2014, even the BBC was still admitting that Ukrainian media and politicians were deliberately “underplaying” the potency and significance of their far-right. But then, as if on command, Western mainstream media united to belittle this malevolent force, pretending that it was either hardly there (and any impressions to the contrary were, of course, “Russian disinformation”), really harmless (a handful of misunderstood “patriots” with a few tattoos that look Nazi but are really just Tolkien), or on the mend, undergoing a steady and, of course, totally honest conversion to mainstream politics.

What happened in reality was that instead of adjusting to the Western “value” mainstream or Center – wherever that supposedly might be – the Ukrainian far right succeeded in making that mainstream adjust to its will. Probably because real-existing Western “values” have a genuine affinity to fascism anyhow. 

Now with the West’s war going badly, as even Western media have to recognize, even French paper of record Le Monde – as russophobic and rarara-proxy war as its worst peers in the US – has noticed that far-right, indeed strictly Neo-Nazi tendencies – polite expression – are alive and kicking in key units of Ukraine’s armed forces. Dear colleagues from France: Congratulations! And you should see the politics.

Since the West and Ukraine are losing the war, expect more of such shocked re-discoveries of what every objective observers has known for a long time: In the Ukraine War, the home of men and women who genuinely enjoy displaying Nazi symbols – from the swastika to the Wolfsangel to the sun wheel – is in Ukraine. 

That does not mean that the majority of Ukrainians side with them. But their regime and its controlled media do. The same regime and media droning on about Russia and Nazis. As they – rightly – say about Israel, so about the Zelensky regime: Every accusation is a confession.

https://www.rt.com/russia/620343-ukraine-zelensky-ideas-about-nazis/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.