the times | Tuesday October 20 2020 2GM 33
The World at Five
Is teacher’s murder a
turning point for France?
In depth and online today at 5pm
thetimes.co.uk
said: “The chance that Derkach is a
Russian spy is no better than 50-50.”
John Ratcliffe, the White House
director of national intelligence, told
Fox News yesterday that the hard drive
“is not part of some Russian disinfor-
mation campaign”.
Mr Trump switched his focus to Dr
Fauci in a call to campaign staff yester-
day. “People are tired of Covid. People
are saying, ‘Whatever, just leave us
alone.’ People are tired of hearing Fauci
and all these idiots,” Mr Trump said.posted the school’s address online. Mr
Chnina also held a meeting with the
head teacher and was accompanied by
Abdelhakim Sefraoui, a preacher who
is on an intelligence agency watchlist of
suspected Islamists. The two men are
among the 15 people arrested after the
murder, along with some of Anzorov’s
friends, his closest relatives and four
pupils of Mr Paty’s school who may
have helped the killer to identify the
teacher in return for payment.
Anzorov, who lived in Évreux, 55
miles from the school, contacted the
pupil’s father and Mr Sefraoui, the
police said. He asked for details of Mr
Paty’s lesson, which was devoted to
illustrating freedom of expression. It is
not known whether they had replied.
Mr Darmanin said the school inci-
dent had been circulated widely on Isla-
mist social media. “They apparently
launched a fatwa against the teacher,”
he said on Europe 1 radio.
Anzorov loitered outside the junior
secondary school in the afternoon after
being driven there from Évreux by a
friend and offered money to pupils to
identify Mr Paty to him as the teacherBiden family
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Chaired by Times Radio’s John Pienaar,our stateside panel includes:
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To register visit
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eventsDr Fauci, 79, who has served under
six presidents, told CBS on Sunday that
Mr Trump “sometimes equates wear-
ing a mask with weakness”.
Mr Trump added: “He’s been here for,
like, 500 years. He’s like this wonderful
sage — Fauci, if we listened to him, we’d
have 700,000 [or] 800,000 deaths.. .”
Mr Trump unveiled a new line of
attack on Mr Biden at his rally in Pre-
scott, Arizona, saying that his rival
“wants to listen to Dr Fauci”. Mr Biden
tweeted, “Yes”.Dawn raids on Islamists as
Macron vows to get tough
France
Charles Bremner Paris
Police officers raided the homes of
more than 90 radical Islamists in Paris
yesterday after a Chechen-born teen-
ager beheaded a teacher who showed
pupils cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad.
The operation followed orders from
President Macron to crack down on
extremists whose doctrines are blamed
for inciting Abdullakh Anzorov, 18, to
murder Samuel Paty, 47, who taught at
a secondary school on the outskirts of
Paris, on Friday. At least two activists
who refused to hand over computer
and phone passwords were arrested.
Gérald Darmanin, the interior minis-
ter, said that the targets of the raids
were not suspected of involvement in
the murder but were activists on the
security watch list. “We have the clear
intention of passing a message: there
will not be a minute’s respite for
enemies of the republic,” he said.
Mr Macron has promised to “make
fear change sides” after eight years of
attacks in France by jihadi terrorists.
The murder of Mr Paty outside his
school in the suburb of Conflans Sainte
Honorine caused a shock that has stiff-
ened the president’s resolve to eradi-
cate what he had described in a speech
on October 2 as a creed of intolerance
that has taken root over two decades in
immigrant-dominated districts.
Mr Macron met Mr Paty’s parents at
the Élysée Palace yesterday and he is to
lead a national memorial service for the
teacher tomorrow.
So far 15 people have been detained
since Anzorov, whose parents sought
asylum in France in 2006, was shot
dead by officers after the killing.
Investigators established that he had
acted after watching videos on social
media in which Brahim Chnina, the
father of one of Mr Paty’s pupils, called
for the teacher’s dismissal for showing
pupils caricatures of Muhammad from
the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Heleft to walk home. Prosecutors have in-
structed the police to trace and open
criminal proceedings against 80 people
who posted support for Mr Chnina’s
video postings or Anzorov’s act. Gabriel
Attal, the government spokesman, said
that people who posted support for the
videos “are in a certain way responsi-
ble” for the teacher’s murder.
Executives in charge of the French
divisions of Twitter, Facebook, You-
Tube and other social media companies
have been summoned by Marlène Schi-
appa, the minister for citizenship, to ex-
plain today how they plan to curb the
use of their platforms for radical Isla-
mist doctrines. Before the murder, com-
plaints to YouTube over videos attack-
ing the teacher produced no response.
The government was already moving
to tackle hate on social media after Mr
Macron’s October 2 announcement of a
war against Islamist “separatism” in
France. It is now expected to revive a
law, struck down by the state Constitu-
tional Council in the spring, that
obliged social media companies to de-
lete offending postings in 24 hours or
face steep fines and possible closure.
Conservative and far-right politi-
cians were sceptical over Mr Macron’s
pledges to get tough with Islamist activ-
ists. Gérard Larcher, the conservative
leader of the Senate, warned the presi-
dent not to flinch from action as Fran-
çois Hollande, his Socialist predecessor,
had done after the killing of 12 people at
Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015.
“The republic is facing a danger of a
kind that it has rarely confronted,” he
said. There had been a “lack of collective
courage” that led to Mr Paty’s murder.
The presiding judge at the trial of
alleged accomplices of the Charlie
Hebdo attackers paid tribute to the dead
teacher yesterday.
The leaders of France’s 13 regional
councils decided to issue booklets of
political and religious caricatures to
schools around the country to reinforce
the case for tolerating free speech.
Melanie Phillips, page 28Flowers piled up at the school where
Samuel Paty was decapitated on FridayGive cyclists number plates, say police
Germany
Oliver Moody Berlinbike during the pandemic. The number
of bicycles on the roads has risen by a
quarter in 12 months, according to the
transport authority, and manufacturers
have trumpeted record sales figures.
One article in Der Tagesspiegel in Ber-
lin complained of “anarchy on two
wheels” and suggested that the police
could introduce a driving licence for
cyclists, who account for about one in 25
of the city’s road accidents. The author, a
seasoned cyclist, said that her life was
endangered daily by “hooligan” riders
recklessly zooming around at “feral
speeds”.
“Many believe cycling alone makes
them better people, but that’s not true,”
she wrote. “War rages on the streets. Fel-
low cyclists jostle me, they cut me up,
sandwich me or block my way when I’m
trying to thread through the traffic. At
red lights they gather like Formula One
drivers, waiting to grab as quick a start as
possible and outpace the field.”
Ms Slowik, 54, said she was worried
about “serious violations [of traffic reg-ulations] and above all their serious
consequences”. Victims were frequent-
ly pedestrians, she said. “We have to
think about how we can respond to
this,” she told the Berliner Morgenpost.
“When you look at the complaints ped-
estrians send us, compulsory number
plates for cyclists would be at the very
least something worth considering.”
Until 2012 Switzerland and Liechten-
stein operated a scheme known as the
Velovignette, which obliged cyclists to
buy liability insurance and display the
details on a small placard. It was abol-
ished because of high administrative
costs and the popularity of private in-
surance policies. In Japan all bikes must
be registered and labelled with a small
yellow sticker, largely to minimise theft.
The ADFC said, however, that man-
datory number plates would do little to
penalise the rule-breaking minority.
“Accidents involving cyclists can over-
whelmingly be attributed to violations
of [traffic] rules on the part of other
road users,” a spokeswoman said.They slalom through pedestrians along
the pavements, career blithely in the
wrong direction down cycle paths, run
red lights and sometimes knock down
bystanders without stopping.
Cyclists are so out of control that they
may need number plates like cars or
e-scooters, Berlin’s police chief suggest-
ed. Barbara Slowik said that “increasing
aggression” by cyclists caused more
than half the accidents they were
involved in, often because they strayed
out of their designated lanes.
Pro-cycling groups said, however,
that registering Germany’s 75 million
or so bicycles would be a bureaucratic
nightmare and risked putting people off
one of the greenest forms of transport.
The German National Cycling Club
(ADFC) said it knew of no country in
the world that forced bicycle owners to
use licence plates.
Many Berliners began commuting byA Trump rally
in Nevada
dwarfed Joe
Biden’s café
visit with his
granddaughter
Finnegansupport they once did. To many they
are proof of Mr Trump’s selfish
approach to a pandemic that has
claimed 220,000 American lives.
Every time he appears on stage,
with those behind him ordered to
wear masks but those in front
largely unprotected, half of America
is more convinced of its vote for Mr
Biden, who has been so cautious
about the virus that he once gave a
speech to an empty field.
Floating voters could laugh off
petty boasts about crowd size four
years ago but many find it appalling
today that Mr Trump is cramming in
his fans.