New World Orchestra’s musicians are shocked at French police targeting peaceful gathering with teargas

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As riot police encircled Place de la République last week, lobbing teargas canisters to disperse demonstrators, the conductor Étienne Jarrier and his orchestra played on. They kept playing even after everyone else had disappeared and teargas was being fired into the central Paris square.

It was only when Jarrier noticed his musicians were being directly targeted that he ordered them to stop. “There were teargas canisters landing in the double bass and music stand cases, and starting fires the musicians had to stamp out,” he told the Guardian.

Politicians have called for ruthless sentencing, but lawyers blame the politicians for the poverty, and anger, behind their clients’ looting

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Awa, 18, stood in the dock in the tribunal de Paris, a small, mute and bewildered figure seeming unable to understand, let alone answer, the simplest of questions.

The court was told she had joined young people who looted an Yves Saint Laurent store on Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris’s Left Bank late on Sunday and stripped it bare within minutes.