Less than a week after France banned police chokeholds, the government responded to growing officer discontent by announcing it would test stun guns for wider use, adding to the ranks of European law enforcement agencies that have recently adopted the weapons that many in the U.S. equate with excess police violence.
For Johny Louise, it felt as though the 22 seconds of Taser pulses that led to his son’s death counted for nothing.  
“They need more death so that one day they understand, but it will be more pointless deaths and sufferings for families,” Louise said.  
Gendarmes in Orléans responding to a drunken brawl tried to arrest his son, Loïc. One of the officers, Noham Cardoso, fired his Taser for the first time, hitting Loïc Louise in the chest with the twin darts and jolting him for a full 17 seconds, rather than the usual 5-second cycle, then hitting him again less than a minute later with another 5 seconds, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press. Loïc Louis, who was black, passed out and was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Cardoso was charged last year with involuntary homicide in the Nov. 3, 2013, death. He has said Loïc Louise was aggressive and appeared ready to attack.
The officer’s lawyer, Ludovic de Villèle, can’t fathom why France would replace an immobilization technique with a weapon. He said it would make more sense to invent another technique to replace the banned chokehold.  
“It’s a bad sign to say, ‘You can’t strangle, but here are Tasers for you to use,'” de Villèle said.  
But Tasers, or other stun guns, are increasingly the weapon of choice for European law enforcement as they have been for years in the United States. In Atlanta, just hours after the French announcement on Friday, a seemingly routine sobriety check outside a Wendy’s restaurant ended in gunshots after Rayshard Brooks grabbed a Taser from officers and ran.  
The killing of the 27-year-old black man in an encounter with two white officers late Friday rekindled fiery protests in Atlanta and prompted the police chief’s resignation. One of the officers was fired.  
Axon, the company that makes Tasers, has made a big push outside the United States in recent years and agencies in the Netherlands and Italy recently expanded use of stun guns, following the path of Britain, where use has increased steadily since they were introduced in 2003.
Stun guns are in limited but increasing use in France already. The number of discharges increased from 1,400 in 2017 to 2,349 in 2019. According to the French police oversight agency, stun guns killed one person last year and three suffered severe injuries. After France said it would abandon the chokehold last week, police across the country staged scattered protests, saying they felt abandoned by the government.  
Police in England and Wales discharged Tasers 2,700 times over the 12 months ending in March 2019, according to government statistics, which also showed black people were more likely than white ones to have stun guns used on them.
Britain’s Independent Office for Police Conduct said last month that there were growing concerns “about its disproportionate use against black men and those with mental health issues.”
British rapper Wretch 32 posted video last week of his 62-year-old father being hit by a Taser in his London home during a police raid in April. The Metropolitan Police force said a review found no indication of misconduct, but London Mayor Sadiq Khan called for an urgent investigation by the police watchdog.
According to Amnesty International, at least 18 people in Britain have died after a stun gun was discharged on them by police, but in many cases it was not determined that the weapon caused the death. The human rights group has said at least 500 people died after being hit by stun guns between 2001 and 2012 in the United States.
Italy’s government approved using Tasers in January after a two-year trial and opened a bidding process to purchase nearly 4,500 stun guns to be divided among various law enforcement agencies. Police chief Franco Gabrielli said in March that the next phase would involve a period of training and “operational experimentation” in a half-dozen cities.
“The administration is certainly attentive to guaranteeing that the security of our personnel is first, obviously without causing damage to the people who might find themselves on the other side,” Gabrielli told reporters outside a Genoa hospital where he had gone to visit two police officers who were recovering after being injured in a shootout.
The Netherlands began issuing stun guns to police in 2017 and is training 17,000 of the force’s 40,000 officers. But far fewer of the weapons are on order and they will not be part of an officer’s standard equipment.
There are about 15,000 stun guns in France, which has a total police and gendarme force of around 240,000. In the United States, by contrast, more than three-quarters of officers carry the weapons as standard issue, according to William Terrill, a professor of criminal justice at Arizona State University. Axon says it has standing relationships with 95% of American law enforcement agencies.
Terrill said training must come before widespread distribution of Tasers, which are sold as a way to protect officers from aggressive suspects while avoiding deadly force.
“It’s almost asking a police department to make an unfair choice in many respects,” he said. “By articulating it that way, it’s almost saying I value my officers’ safety more than the community’s safety.”
For Loïc Louise’s family, from the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion, it was a weapon used far too easily on someone with dark skin.
His father does not believe all gendarmes are racist but “some use their uniform to do whatever they please,” said Johny Louise. “And my son paid for it.” 
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Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday ordered two Czech diplomats to leave the country in a quid pro quo response to Prague’s expulsion of Russian diplomats amid tensions rooted in differences over history.The ministry said it summoned the Czech ambassador Monday to announce the move, saying the two diplomats must leave Russia by Wednesday.Earlier this month, the Czech government ordered two Russian diplomats to leave the country. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said the nation’s spy agency has discovered that one of them had spread false information about a Russian assassin arriving to allegedly target Czech politicians.The alleged assassination plot surfaced in April when a magazine reported that Czech intelligence services suspected that a Russian who arrived in Prague on a diplomatic passport was sent to poison Prague Mayor Zdenek Hrib and Prague 6 district mayor Ondrej Kolar with a potent toxin.  Kolar, Hrib and the mayor of Prague’s Reporyje district, Pavel Novotny, all consequently received police protection.Moscow has dismissed the allegation as baseless. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov ridiculed the claims published in the magazine, saying the notion that Czech authorities spotted a Russian man equipped with ricin and let him through didn’t make sense.The three politicians had been involved in actions that previously angered Russia.  In February, a Prague square in front of the Russian Embassy was renamed after slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, with Hrib unveiling the new nameplate.  In April, Kolar’s district removed a statue of Soviet World War II commander Ivan Konev, whose armies completed the liberation of Prague from Nazi occupation. The statue’s removal caused outrage in Russia, which has angrily lashed out at any attempts to diminish the nation’s decisive role in defeating the Nazis.Novotny provoked Moscow’s ire with plans to build a monument to the soldiers of Gen. Andrei Vlasov’s army. Over 300 of them died when they helped the Czech uprising against Nazi rule and contributed to Prague’s liberation. Their role is controversial for Russia, however, because they previously fought against the Red Army alongside Nazi troops. 
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The statue of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square is now boarded up.  In the Dorset town of Poole on England’s southern coast police are mounting a 24-hour guard on a statue commemorating Robert Baden Powell, the founder of the Scouts movement and briefly an admirer Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, once describing it as a “wonderful book.” In east London last week, just days before ugly clashes erupted in the British capital between far right activists and supporters of Black Lives Matters, workmen hastily removed a statue memorializing Robert Milligan, an eighteenth-century merchant, who on his death owned 526 slaves laboring on sugar plantations in Jamaica. Anti-racist campaigners in Britain have a burgeoning hit list of statues they want removed, triggering a new front in a culture war that risks future violent street tussles.  Most Britons pay little heed when rushing past monuments lionizing some of the great men of Britain’s past — from national leaders like Churchill to grand merchants and city fathers like Milligan.  William Shakespeare, the country’s great playwright and poet, once described public statuary as “unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.” He bragged that his words would outlast statues of great men, mocking, “Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” He may be right.  Britain’s public statues — many erected at the height of the British empire between 1830 to 1914 — have become a tumultuous flashpoint, which on Saturday spilled violently on to the streets of London in running skirmishes between bottle-throwing far right agitators, baton-wielding police and Black Lives Matters protesters, all under the watchful eye of Admiral Horatio Nelson from atop his column in Trafalgar Square.  Nelson, the preeminent British admiral during the Napoleonic era, himself once wrote in defense of the Jamaican slave trade. Anger at the past Far right activists said they had come to protect statues in the capital from being toppled — as happened during anti-racist protests earlier this month to a monument in Bristol commemorating Edward Colston. Jubilant protesters dragged Colston’s bronze statue from its plinth and chucked it in the harbor, in scenes more reminiscent of the 2003 toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad or the removal of monuments to Lenin and Stalin witnessed at the end of the Soviet era.   In a dramatic gesture mirroring what happened to Floyd, one protester placed his knee on Colston’s bronze throat before the statute was rolled to the harbor wall.FILE – The statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston falls into the water after protesters pulled it down during a protest against racial inequality, in Bristol, Britain, June 7, 2020.A 17th century merchant and great municipal benefactor, who founded schools and alms-houses in Bristol, Colston’s wealth was derived from the transatlantic slave trade. His trading company is estimated to have transported around 84,000 African men, women and children, with 19,000 dying on the ships transporting them from the coast of Africa to the plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas.For supporters of Black Lives Matters, galvanized by protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a black man who was suffocated by a white policeman in Minneapolis in Minnesota on May 25, the statues are terrible reminders of a dark imperial past Britain refuses to fully acknowledge.  Until it does, they say, racial inequality and prejudice will persist.  The statues to men like Colston and Milligan are hurtful, they say, and offensive to the descendants of slaves in the city of Bristol. “The crowd who saw to it that Colston fell were of all races, but some were the descendants of the enslaved black and brown Bristolians whose ancestors were chained to the decks of Colston’s ships,” historian David Olusoga wrote in the Guardian. He added: “Whatever is said over the next few days, this was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were.” For others, a matter of pride For self-declared patriots, the statues representing the past should be celebrated — and defended.  Paul Golding, leader of Britain First, a far-right group, told Saturday the ranks of his supporters, some drawn from from the fan clubs of professional soccer teams: “I’m here today because for two consecutive weekends our monuments and memorials have been trashed by left-wing thugs. We’re here today with one pure mission: to defend our memorials.”  Hundreds of people also turned out in other British cities, including Glasgow, Belfast and Newcastle, claiming to safeguard historic statues and war memorials from harm. Dennis Smith, who turned out to protect statues, told reporters, “If it wasn’t for people like Winston Churchill, we wouldn’t be here today speaking English. We would be speaking German and there wouldn’t be any black people around either.”  A week ago Churchill’s monument in Parliament Square was vandalized with a protester daubing on it that Britain’s wartime leader “was a racist.”Police officers stand in front of the Winston Churchill statue during a rally in Parliament Square in London, Tuesday, June 9, 2020. The rally is to commemorate George Floyd whose private funeral takes place in the US on Tuesday.Historical revisionism British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted Friday that defacing the statue was “absurd and shameful,” adding that Churchill “was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial.” He added: “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations.”  He noted: “They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong. But those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults.” Johnson and his ministers are now talking about introducing legislation that would make it a criminal offense to desecrate historic and war memorials with a maximum ten-year prison sentence. That might help to safeguard the monuments, but it is unlikely to silence the debate about some of them, which is featuring not just activists but journalists, politicians, historians, and Oxford and Cambridge colleges, too, in heated exchanges about their future and how best to teach history. “Pulling down statues is nothing new, nor is the changing of street names and even those of cities and countries,” says historian James Holland. Writing for Sky News, he said: “It has happened time and again through history. Most of us in the West cheered when the swastikas were blown up in 1945, or when the statues of Lenin and Stalin were pulled down, or even that of Saddam Hussein.” The comparison, though, with Nazi and Communist leaders incurs the wrath of others. They acknowledge there are some clear-cut cases like the slave-traders Colston and Millington, which should have been consigned long ago to museums, but statue-defenders say the criticism of other historical figures lacks nuance and that arguments for the removal of their statues risks editing and censoring the past.  On Saturday Chris Patten, the chancellor of the University of Oxford, defended the statue of Cecil Rhodes on the facade of Oriel College, telling students who are campaigning for its removal they should be prepared to embrace freedom of thought or “think about being educated elsewhere.”  He said that they are simplifying the facts about Rhodes. A British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa in the late nineteenth century, Rhodes was an ardent advocate of British imperialism, describing the Anglo-Saxon race as “the first race in the world.” His defenders point out that he created Oxford’s famous Rhodes Scholarships, requiring that “no student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a Scholarship on grounds of his race.” The focus on Rhodes is unfortunate, Patten said, noting that Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president after the end of apartheid, endorsed the Rhodes scholarships. “There is something facile and narcissistic about parading your moral superiority over someone who died more than a century ago simply because he upheld the values of his own age, according to newspaper columnist Daniel Hannan, who concedes Rhodes was not a saint.  Winston Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames, says the vandalism of his grandfather’s statue was “sad to see.” He acknowledges Churchill’s views of black people, Indians and women’s rights are “unpalatable to many people nowadays,” but he notes his grandfather came of age in a “different era” and “at the end of the day, Churchill saved this country. He was one of the greatest leaders this country has ever seen. He was a great defender of liberty and democracy.”  His legacy should be assessed “as a whole,” he says. For some who are sympathetic to the call for statue removals, there is danger in moving too fast and of failing to appreciate that most historical figures were flawed personalities.  Times columnist Janice Turner says previous generations did not think too hard about the sources of Britain’s historical mercantile wealth. “Today’s young are citizens of a diverse Britain, more likely to have a friend of another race. For white teenagers now, descendants of slaves sit next to them in class, score for their football team,” she says.  But she warned that while “the youthful fire of demonstrators can achieve real change” they should “pause for reflection before the far right exploit it.” A culture war, she fears, “threatens to become a street battle. Which is what a nihilist minority on each side want.” 
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Monday sees more reopenings in France, Britain, Greece and other locations, while China is reimposing some coronavirus restrictions after dozens of new cases in Beijing. Restaurant owners in Paris are able join those in the rest of the country by opening their doors for patrons to eat inside.  Travelers from other European countries can also travel to France again as countries open their borders to travelers from other parts of the continent. “We must relaunch our economy,” French President Emmanuel Macron said. In Britain, non-essential shops are opening again Monday, as are places of worship for individual prayer, and recreation sites such as drive-in movie theaters and zoos.  People will still need to observe social distancing rules and the government is advising the use of facemasks when people are inside. On Britain’s public transit, Monday brought new orders for mandatory face coverings. Greece opened the international airport in is second largest city, Thessaloniki, to EU travelers, and the country’s museums reopened after a three-month shutdown.People visit the Pnyx Hill in Athens overlooking the ancient Acropolis on May 29, 2020 as Greece eases lockdown measures taken to curb the spread of the COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus).China reported 49 new confirmed COVID-19 cases, the majority linked to a wholesale market in Beijing, prompting authorities to reimpose some social isolation restrictions and suspend plans to restart some classes. Many areas around the world have struggled with the decision about when and how quickly to relax measures put in place to slow the spread of the virus that has infected 7.9 million people worldwide and killed at least 433,000. The governor of New York state, the hardest-hit area of the United States, expressed his concerns Sunday about complaints local authorities and businesses are not properly enforcing restrictions, leading to large gatherings with poor social distancing and few people wearing masks. “If you have large gatherings of people who are not socially distanced, who are not wearing masks, you will have an increased spread in the virus,” Cuomo said.  “It may not come for a period of time, but it will come. And once it comes, it’s too late. Now you’re back up in a spike situation and it’s going to take you weeks of extraordinary effort to bring it down.” Turkey’s health minister also expressed concerns about his country’s efforts, saying Turkey is “moving away from the target” with more than 1,500 new confirmed cases in one day.  It was the highest such figure for Turkey since June 3. 
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