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FRANCE SENT RIOT POLICE BECAUSE IT COULDN'T FIND ENOUGH SUBSTITUTE TEACHERS
This started September 21 at a school in Créteil, out in the broke suburbs where the buildings have rats, falling debris, 35 kids to a room, and no substitute when a teacher goes down. That last complaint is not teenage whining. The education ministry's own numbers say nearly 10 percent of teaching hours in public secondary schools went untaught in 2024-25, and most of that was simply nobody showing up to cover. By Tuesday it was 256,000 people in the streets per the Interior Ministry, 56,000 in Paris, with the teachers' unions joining the kids who started it. The government found the budget for tear gas, water cannons and roughly 5,060 arrests since September. Eighty-seven percent of those arrested are minors. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez says the police response has been proportionate in "almost all cases," and that "almost" is carrying more weight than any French teacher currently employed. On Monday in Lens, a 15-year-old lost his hand and part of his lower arm in a police stun grenade blast. Prosecutors say they still can't establish whether he picked it up or it landed on him. Internal affairs now has six serious-injury investigations running. Meanwhile the blame fight: Macron's government and Le Pen's National Rally accuse the hard-left France Unbowed of stoking the whole thing. France Unbowed denies it. Nobody in that argument has mentioned a substitute teacher.
NFL SUSPENDS TWO REFS FOR CUSSING AT PLAYERS
Line judge Jeff Seeman got two games for appearing to say "f--- you" twice to Cardinals tight end Trey McBride, whose crime was asking where the pass interference flag was on a third-down incompletion. CBS sideline reporter Aditi Kinkhabwala said McBride was heated but never cursed at the official. The tight end held it together. The guy with the whistle did not. Referee Adrian Hill got one game out of Vikings-Dolphins. Ollie Gordon II shoved Eric Wilson into Hill, Hill went to the turf, and Wilson put a hand down to help him up. Hill waved off the help, stood up on his own power, and started yelling at Wilson to get back to his huddle. Wilson was not even penalized on the play. Both bans came from VP of officiating Ramon George, and they are rare. The league had gone eight years without suspending an official, and Seeman's two games is the longest for an official since 1988. The NFL Referees Association calls the discipline "excessive and inconsistent with past precedent" and is challenging the severity, with executive director Scott Green pointing out that officials absorb verbal abuse from players and coaches every week. NFLPA boss JC Tretter's answer is shorter: players get punished when the roles are reversed, so hold the refs to the same standard.
Sources (3)
- espn.com - NFL suspends officials Jeff Seeman, Adrian Hill for conduct toward players
- bostonglobe.com - NFL Referees Association says it will challenge severity of suspensions of two officials
- greenwichtime.com - NFL flags officials, suspending 2 after outbursts on a weekend marked by profane flare-ups
EX-PRINCE ANDREW'S BIG LEGAL MOVE IS ARGUING THE COPS FILLED OUT THE FORMS WRONG
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has a new legal theory, and it is not that he's innocent. It's that the police did the paperwork wrong. The former Prince Andrew has been granted permission to bring a judicial review against Thames Valley Police over search warrants a judge at the Central Criminal Court signed on 18 February. Officers used them on Marsh Farm at Sandringham and on Royal Lodge in Windsor, the house he had already moved out of, and went through it for six days anyway. He was arrested the next day, 19 February, on his 66th birthday, held about 11 hours, then released under investigation. He has not been charged. He has not been cleared. He denies wrongdoing. The underlying inquiry is misconduct in public office, built on allegations he passed confidential trade material to Jeffrey Epstein while serving as the UK's trade envoy. None of that gets settled this week. Thursday is a private hearing in front of Mr Justice Hilliard, and the opening item is Thames Valley Police asking the court to restrict access to the case documents because the criminal investigation is still live. So the hearing about a search of royal property is closed to the public, at the request of the police, in a case the ex-royal filed to get that search thrown out. Everyone in the room wants the curtains shut.
CHARLOTTE COPS PULLED OVER A COUCH, AND THE COUCH HAD TWO DRIVERS
On Friday, Sept. 25, officers in Charlotte stopped two men riding down South Tryon Street on a couch. CMPD said they stopped two gentlemen traveling down S. Tryon on a couch, that it was an actual couch, and that they had questions too. So does everyone. The build deserves respect. A photo showed a love seat balanced on two Lime electric scooters, which meant both men were needed to steer it. Two throttles, one sofa, zero communication plan. That is a group project where a failing grade means road rash. The unit that caught them makes it better. CMPD said the stop was made by its Entertainment District Unit, created in 2025 to work violent crime around bars, nightclubs and sports and entertainment venues on busy nights. They staffed up for closing-time brawls and got a love seat with a learner's permit. Then the department went full dad. Officers asked whether this should be on a road with actual cars, and whether the sheer shock of seeing it would cause other drivers to lose focus, adding that if the answer feels even slightly like yes, maybe rethink the ride. They also advised leaving the mobile furniture displays to IKEA. The Facebook post pulled roughly 1,700 comments and reactions within three hours, most of them jokes. CMPD never named the men, and police did not say whether either was cited.
SHARKS GET EVEN SCARIER
Florida Atlantic University researchers anchored a boat off Palm Beach County, deployed an underwater speaker that drifted up to 62 feet away, and parked a drone 130 to 165 feet overhead to film what wild blacktip sharks would do about it. The sounds were played loud enough to startle the sharks rather than lure them, so this was a jump-scare study. It worked. The sharks picked up the noise from 74 meters out, about 243 feet, and cut hard in the opposite direction. The team ran three low-frequency bands, 100 to 200 hertz, 200 to 400, and 400 to 800, plus a 10 kilohertz control tone that sits outside known shark hearing. The sharks responded to all three real ones and ignored the control completely, which is the closest a fish gets to leaving you on read. More than 70 percent of the reactions happened in the acoustic far field, and lower frequencies got noticed from farther away. How they do it is still open. Sharks have no swim bladder, the gas-filled organ many bony fish use to sense sound pressure, so suspicion falls on the inner ear and a structure called the macula neglecta reading particle motion. Lead author Caroline Sullivan said testing this in a tank is "like being in a house of mirrors," with sound bouncing off every wall, which is why they went out and did it on real sharks in real ocean.
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