A 15-year-old lost his hand to a police grenade during school protests in Lens, France, on October 5. The prosecutor cannot say whether the boy picked it up; the Daily Mail’s headline says he was throwing it back. The Mail’s sentence has one actor, the boy. The phrase “has hand blown off” has no one throwing anything, and the only act is his: “trying to throw stun grenade back at police”. RT writes “by police crowd-control grenade”, CBC “from police grenade”; France 24 has him “picking up grenade”. The man who opened the case, Béthune prosecutor Etienne Thieffry, said he could not formally say which happened, and sent it to the IGPN, the police inspectorate, for violence causing mutilation. The throw-back version came from a police source speaking to AFP. A girl who says she stood right behind him told La Voix du Nord it landed in his hand and he never picked it up. The Mail’s first and fourth paragraphs carry the police version and name no source for it. The tell to keep: when the hurt person holds the only active verb and the weapon has no owner, the sentence has already answered a question that is still open. Then one small conjunction joins Lens to Paris. The fire was at Vauquelin high school in Paris, and the Mail’s eighth paragraph is the only place the two stories are tied together. The phrase “far-left rioters” is the paper’s label; the head teacher, Carole Zerbib, describes a masked group who did not study there. Read in one breath, a maimed 15-year-old and arsonists become one crowd. That picture suits the CRS riot police, whose grenade it was by early findings, and a government facing 589 disrupted schools six months before the presidential election.
