PARIS: British graffiti artist Banksy, known for his politically charged sketches on walls from London to New York to Gaza City, has descended on Paris, painting a series of murals that are sparking debate among residents and tourists.
The satirical images, tackling issues such as migration and poverty, began popping up late last month. The secretive artist has since posted photographs of them on his Instagram account and added comments, confirming his authorship.
One mural, on a street in northern Paris where migrants often sleep rough, shows a black girl spray-painting pink wallpaper over a swastika. The painting has since been defaced to make it look like she is drawing the swastika herself.
Others depict rats, a common Banksy motif, including one flying through the air on the back of a champagne cork, and a pair walking under a parasol near the Eiffel Tower.
One of the most provocative, painted near the Sorbonne, on the trendy Left Bank, shows a stern man with a hand-saw hidden behind his back offering a bone to a pleading dog that has had part of its front leg sawn off.
Vincent, the director of an art foundation in Paris, stopped to take a picture as he headed for lunch.
“This painting is of an unspeakable cruelty which is representative of the times in which we live, times of wantons,” said the 49-year-old.
“The man’s stare is empty and cold, while the dog is weak and full of humanity. I think it is a clear representation of the European context and the migration crisis.”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the May 1968 uprisings, when French students and unionists mounted violent protests across Paris and its surrounding area, bringing much of the country to a standstill for weeks.
Referencing the anniversary, Banksy painted a picture of a rat holding a stencil pen and wearing a bandana over its face on the side of a building near the Pompidou Center. Another showed a rat dressed as Mini Mouse perched on the numbers 1968.
While two of the nine murals have been defaced, most of the others have been covered by plexiglass to protect them.
Banksy concluded his series with a mural on an emergency escape door to the Bataclan, the music venue where 89 people were shot dead by Islamist militants in November 2015.
The image depicts a woman in mourning, wearing what looks like a hijab, the head scarf worn by Muslim women, although the picture also has echoes of Mother Theresa.
“This one is my favorite,” said an American tourist. “I can feel that her sadness is deep and palpable.”
Banksy’s subversive art draws tourists and locals in Paris
Banksy’s subversive art draws tourists and locals in Paris
Judge declares 4 men wrongly accused of 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent
- The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families
- Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999
TEXAS, USA: A Texas judge on Thursday declared four men who were wrongfully accused of the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent, formally clearing their names in a courtroom for the first time since the killings of four teenage girls that haunted the city for decades.
“You are innocent,” state District Judge Dayna Blazey said during a hearing in a packed Austin courtroom.
The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city that was shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators’ inability to solve it for decades. Blazey called her order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
Cold case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.
Two of the original four suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors tell the judge that they are innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.
“Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men ... (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,” Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. “We could not have been more wrong.”
A declaration of “actual innocence” would also be a key step for the men and their families to seek financial compensation for years they spent in jail or in prison.
“All four lived under the specter of the yogurt shop murders. These four never had the chance to live normal lives,” Strassburger said.
The murders shocked Austin and confounded investigators for years
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.
“Let us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,” Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the hearing.
Connection to a new suspect revealed
The case effectively went cold until 2025. It got new public attention when an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.
Investigators announced in September that new evidence and reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.
Austin investigators also found that Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings. In his stolen car was a pistol that matched the same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.
Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers’ other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
