What happened
France is preparing to shift some high schools to remote learning after a rapidly expanding student protest over conditions in the education system saw a number of fires lit and teachers injured. About 900 demonstrations, blockades and other incidents were reported outside schools nationwide yesterday, with more than 160 of them closed. Nearly 3,000 students have been detained since the protests began, including almost 2,000 yesterday.

The demonstrations began around Paris last week before spreading across the country. “The pupils’ grievances range from overloaded timetables and overcrowded classes to insufficient teachers and unbearable temperatures during heatwaves this year,” said Jon Henley in The Guardian.

Who said what
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu warned that the violence was making it “virtually impossible to maintain the continuity of public education”.

There’s now “revolution in the air”, said Adam Sage in The Times. The lycée protests are now “engulfing France”. The demonstrations have “sparked political finger-pointing”, said Victor Goury-Laffont on Politico. Marine Le Pen, the far-right front-runner in next year’s presidential election in France, said on X that left-wing rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon “bears a heavy responsibility for the situation our country is facing today” after he made inflammatory comments this week.

What next?
Lecornu has summoned ministers for a crisis meeting while riot police remain deployed.

What happened
A Scottish man detained for nine years in an Indian prison without a trial has been released on bail. Activist Jagtar Singh Johal was charged with several terrorism offences in 2017, weeks after travelling to the Punjab region for his wedding. Prosecutors allege that Johal (pictured above, centre) aided a Sikh separatist group responsible for attacks on Punjab officials – a claim that he denies.

His release on bail comes with stringent conditions, including the surrender of his passport while he awaits trial.

Who said what
“I’ll sleep well tonight knowing that he’s not behind bars,” said Johal’s brother Gurpreet. His family claims that his detention is a politically motivated reaction to his “blogging about alleged human rights abuses against the Sikh community”, said Sky News.

What next?
The court’s bail order acknowledges that the trial is “certainly not likely to conclude anytime soon”. Legal charity Reprieve, which is representing Johal, said he still faced the death penalty on what it labelled as “trumped up charges”, and has called on the Foreign Secretary to intervene.

As a result of nearly 300,000 US-based Haitians having their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) revoked by the Trump administration in August, many are heading north of the border. But while they look to join a country that has a vibrant Haitian diaspora, fleeing to Canada presents its own challenges.

Canada’s “asylum rules allow migrants with close family members to enter the country and seek protection”, said The Atlantic, and many have roots in the nation. There are about 100,000 people of Haitian descent living in Canada, according to the country’s 2021 census, a number that has likely increased during the past five years. Even before the TPS revocation, Haitians were the largest group of asylum seekers in Canada. In Montreal alone there are about 80,000 Haitians, making them the city’s “largest immigrant group”.

But Haitians “without close family members in Canada who arrive at the land border are generally ineligible to seek asylum”, so it is “difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing into Canada”, added The Atlantic. There have also been changes since the first Trump administration, when a “road from upstate New York to Montreal became a well-known crossing point”, said CNN. Since then Canadian immigration rules have “changed significantly, and it’s much harder to make asylum claims at Canada’s border”.

But this hasn’t stopped numerous people from trying. Haitians “who do apply for asylum are more likely to be rejected than approved”, but officials say that “US work experience, along with English and French proficiency, could provide qualified applicants with a major advantage in the Canadian job market”, said WLRN media.

Some immigrant rights activists are wary of an influx of Haitians to Canada. “We are not encouraging folks to go to Canada if they know they might be in danger,” Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, because Canadian immigration might return them to ICE. “I know that Canada has been promoting human rights, human dignity, or whatever, but I know for sure that Canadian immigration has been very hard” for Haitians.