A MAN has been arrested on suspicion of murder after the death of a man in Bristol, police have said.

Avon and Somerset Police arrested a 32-year-old man in the Eastville area of the city at about 5.45pm on Saturday following a manhunt.

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He remains in custody.

The arrest follows the death of a 25-year-old man who was stabbed on Stapleton Road at about 5.40pm on Friday.

Police in the area began administering first aid and called for backup.

The man received emergency care from paramedics at the scene before being taken to Southmead Hospital, but was pronounced dead later that evening.

A murder investigation was launched, with extensive searches of the Bristol on Friday night, with assistance from the National Police Air Service.

Police have also arrested two women, aged 36 and 47, on suspicion of assisting an offender. They both remain in custody.

A man who was arrested on suspicion of the same offence on Friday has been released with no further action.

Detective Inspector Mark Newbury, senior investigating officer, said: “The arrest of a man this afternoon on suspicion of murder marks a significant development in our investigation.

“He is in custody and will be interviewed by detectives from our major crime investigation team in due course.

“We are in contact with close friends of the man who died and have updated them this evening of this news and continue to offer them support.

“Stapleton Road was reopened this afternoon following the conclusion of our inquiries at the scene and we are grateful for the public’s understanding while that necessary work was undertaken.

“The community can continue to expect to see an increased high-visibility police presence over the next few days as we look to help anyone who has concerns following this tragic incident.”

Bristol Commander, Superintendent Mark Runacres, said earlier on Saturday: “There is no place for violence on Bristol’s streets and we are committed to working with partners around this issue.

“We want the community to understand that we are here to help them.

“We understand such tragic news is hugely distressing and therefore there will be an increased police presence in the area over the coming days with more patrols carried out, not because we’re aware of any increased risk, but because we want to make sure you can approach us to raise any concerns.

“Stapleton Road is a busy place at the best of times, especially early on a Friday evening.

“We are grateful to those people who have already spoken to police and told us what they saw and we’d urge anyone else with information to please contact us as soon as possible.”

Mr Runacres said he was aware that people were filming in the area, and they would like to hear from anyone with footage relevant to their investigation.

However, he asked that out of respect for the man’s friends and family no insensitive footage is published on social media.

Anyone with information is asked to call 101 and quote reference number 5224248976.

Two days after a devastating sabotage operation stunned Hizbollah and plunged its communications network into chaos, one of the militant group’s most senior military leaders called a clandestine meeting of at least 15 elite officers in southern Beirut.

By nightfall the men were dead, killed along with at least 10 civilians in an Israeli air strike on Friday that targeted the residential building in Hizbollah’s heartland where they were meeting in an underground room. The attack dealt a crushing blow that rounded off probably the most calamitous week in the Iranian-backed, Lebanese group’s 40-year history. 

Coming so soon after suspected back-to-back Israeli attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday that caused thousands of Hizbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies to explode, killing at least 37 people and wounding thousands, it reinforced the group’s vulnerability to Israel’s intelligence agencies. 

Not only had Israel been able to strike successfully at the heart of Hizbollah’s command and control structures, it also delivered a stinging psychological blow, spreading panic across Lebanon and undermining the credibility of the nation’s dominant political and military force. 

“It’s definitely the hardest moment for the organisation since the 1990s,” said Emile Hokayem, director of regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Militarily, it’s the biggest blow they’ve suffered so far.”

The question facing Hizbollah, battered and humiliated, is how it responds. 

The group has been locked in an intensifying conflict with Israel since it first fired rockets into the Jewish state a day after Hamas’s October 7 attack triggered the war in Gaza. Those clashes, however, have largely been contained to the Lebanese-Israeli border region. Hizbollah has made clear it does not want to be drawn into an all-out war with Israel’s far better equipped military. 

But Israel said this week that it was entering a “new phase” of the conflict as it launched the audacious attacks in Beirut and pounded the border region with the heaviest air strikes of the conflict. 

Analysts said Hizbollah is facing mounting pressure from its supporters, whose sense of security has been severely diminished, to change tactics and more forcefully repel Israel in a bid to restore its deterrence. 

Yet at the same time it is grappling with the aftermath of its most serious security breach in recent history, a severely disrupted communications network and the loss of some of its most senior commanders. 

“Hizbollah’s flank is exposed and they know it,” said a person familiar with the group’s thinking. “I don’t think they’ve ever been in such a vulnerable position before and it’s sowing enormous fear and panic. Everyone is wondering at all times, ‘what does Israel have in store for us next?’”

Hizbollah’s response has been muted, with its leader Hassan Nasrallah vowing a familiar refrain of retribution and ordering only a slight uptick in rocket fire at Israel. 

The group has acknowledged that two top commanders — including Ibrahim Aqil, the founder of its Radwan Force — were among those killed on Friday.

Israel said it killed the “senior chain of command” of the Radwan, the arm of Hizbollah responsible for cross-border operations into Israel and defending southern Lebanon against a ground invasion. 

Aqil’s death means that there are now only two out of the seven original members of the jihad council, Hizbollah’s top military body, left alive, according to two people familiar with the group’s operations. 

On top of that, hundreds of their fighters were maimed by the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies.

Experts said that Hizbollah would probably need time to recuperate and therefore may not significantly immediately escalate the conflict.

The group, Iran’s main proxy and one of the world’s most heavily armed non-state actors, still boasts a vast arsenal of rockets and increasingly accurate precision-guided missiles, and tens of thousands of fighters.

During the past 11 months of conflict, it has only deployed a fraction of its capabilities, experts said. 

But Israel has spent months targeting its fighters and rocket and missile launchers along the border.

“Hizbollah may be battered and weakened but it is not dead,” said Hokayem. “It’s still a disciplined, motivated organisation with an ethos and an ideology. They can survive.”

The choices facing the group includes raising the stakes with Israel to restore its credibility

“The other option is to suck it up, but Nasrallah was very clear about it, he’s not going to let go of the linkage between [supporting Hamas in] Gaza and Lebanon, because he knows it’s about his political perception and credibility,” he said.

“There’s an additional element, essentially all your detractors no longer see you as all powerful.”

In a front-page story on Saturday, Al Akhbar, a pro-Hizbollah Lebanese newspaper that often reflects the group’s thinking, said the militants would be forced to change tactics.

“What the enemy did yesterday was like closing the curtain on any political chapter related to the ongoing war in the region, and opening the door to a new level of confrontation that will force the resistance [Hizbollah] to adopt new methods,” Al Akhbar wrote. 

However, Amal Saad, an academic and Hizbollah expert, said: “No response will restore deterrence, that ship sailed a while ago”.

“The next phase will now be about denying Israel its strategic objectives,” she said, by preventing some 60,000 Israelis displaced from their country’s north from returning home.

“We’re talking about a new way to fight now because it’s a new paradigm, and a new stage in the war,” Saad said, adding that Hizbollah doesn’t have the intelligence capabilities to do respond in kind. “They will probably do something qualitatively different than what they’ve done before.”

That would involve keeping up the tempo of daily cross-border attacks, while trying to avoid mass civilian casualties to avoid giving Israel a pretext to trigger a full-scale war, she said.

Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence officer, said he believed Israel wanted to push Hizbollah to accept a diplomatic settlement that would force them back from the Israeli border. But he added that it “seems Israel is preparing itself for a broader escalation”.

“Israel really wants to cause damage to the functional and military sphere in Hizbollah,” Milshtein said. 

But there are also risks for Israel, particularly if it slid into “a broad escalation, even a regional one, not only in the north, without a strategy”.

“We have already seen in Gaza, the war started well by occupying almost half of Gaza, but now we are in a war of attrition,” Milshtein said.

“I am afraid that without a strategy, we will find ourselves in an unclear war, with heavy prices, a lot of crises with allies, and without very concrete goals. This would be a catastrophe.” 

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Michel Barnier, France’s new prime minister, picked a conservative senator for the key post of interior minister alongside figures from president Emmanuel Macron’s camp in an effort to forge a stable government that could survive in a hung parliament.

It took the conservative Barnier, the EU’s former Brexit negotiator, more than two weeks of difficult negotiations with the various parties in the National Assembly to come up with a government that he hopes will not fall to a no-confidence vote. The government faces tense budget negotiations that are expected to include unpopular spending cuts. 

Bruno Retailleau, a conservative senator from Barnier’s party known for his hard line on immigration and harsh criticism of Macron, will serve in the key post of interior minister, overseeing police and security. He replaces political heavyweight Gérald Darmanin. 

But centrists from Macron’s party or their allies were selected for key ministries in which the president traditionally holds more sway than the prime minister. The former Europe minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, is being promoted to head of the ministry for foreign affairs, while loyalist Sébastien Lecornu remains in charge at defence and the armies.  

“This is the most rightward-leaning government for more than a decade when Nicolas Sarkozy was president, and Retailleau is the only one real political heavyweight in the cabinet,” said political analyst and journalist Alain Duhamel on BFM TV.

The “real power” will lie in parliament, he added, where the opposition, stretching from the leftist Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) to the far-right led by Marine Le Pen, will hold the fate of the Barnier government in their hands.

A little-known pair of deputies from Macron’s party has been named to serve in the crucial finance and budget ministries. Antoine Armand, a 33-year member of parliament who served on the energy commission, will take the all-important economy, finance and industry job. Another 39-year old lawmaker, Laurent Saint-Martin, will be in charge of the budget and public finances, reporting directly to Barnier. 

Replacing veteran finance minister Bruno Le Maire, the pair have the delicate task of crafting a new budget for 2025 that aims to redress deteriorating public finances with spending cuts.

The talks are expected to be contentious as Macron’s camp seeks to protect his pro-business legacy by holding off the left’s calls for tax hikes. The budget talks must grapple with a public deficit that is already expected to exceed the previous target of 5.1 per cent of GDP this year and reach at least 5.6 per cent.

With Barnier as premier, the cabinet will be operating more independently than at any time in Macron’s term in office. This could lead to tensions as the men hail from different parties and Macron is seeking to protect his legacy and retain his responsibility for defence and international diplomacy.

French politics have been in turmoil since Macron called snap elections in June that delivered a hung parliament where none of the three main blocs held enough seats to have a clear claim to the premiership.

Although Macron’s centrist alliance lost the most seats while the left and far-right expanded their ranks, the president selected Barnier to seal an alliance with the smallest faction, the conservative Les Republicains party that only won 47 seats.

In all, 38 portfolios including junior minister posts have now been allotted, with none going to the left-wing alliance NFP that won the most seats in the assembly. The NFP pushed hard for their own candidate to become prime minister, only to be rejected by Macron. Leftist activists held protests in Paris and elsewhere on Saturday against what they see as Macron’s choice to ignore the left’s election win.

“Why did Macron dissolve parliament if it’s to end up the same lot, just even more to the right?” former Socialist president François Hollande told France Bleu Radio on Friday after the ministerial appointments began to leak. 

Green party leader Marine Tondelier called the Barnier government “indecent” and “shameful” given the NFP’s strong result in the legislative election.

In a social media post on Saturday, Le Pen criticised the cabinet selection as not in keeping with “voters’ desire for change”. She said this would be “a transitional government”, hinting again that her Rassemblement National party could bring down Barnier’s government.

“The fact we did not block the government from the outset does not mean we don’t have the ability, depending on the budget, to back a no-confidence motion if we believe that the highest interests of the French are being trampled on,” Le Pen told Le Parisien newspaper last week. 

Conspiracy theorist and pillow-pusher Mike Lindell is facing backlash online after his company marked down some of its pillows to $14.88, a figure seen as symbolic for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

On Friday, Lindell and his MyPillow business advertised the discounted products on social media, promising consumers the “ultimate comfort upgrade.”

“Sleep like a dream with our Standard MyPillow for just $14.88!” the posts read in part.

Below an image of Lindell holding two pillows is a large graphic prominently displaying the price.

The number “1488” is a common symbol used among hate groups. The “14” is shorthand for the “14 Words,” a stand-in for a white supremacist slogan, while “88” refers to an abbreviation of “Heil Hitler,” since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

The posts were shared on major platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X, formerly Twitter. As of Saturday afternoon, the posts remained online, with hundreds of comments denouncing Lindell.

A spokesperson for MyPillow did not return a request for comment. Lindell could not be reached for comment.

Lindell, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, has repeatedly boosted conspiracy theories falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

In 2021, Lindell offered $5 million to anyone who could win his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” by disproving data related to his election fraud claims.

In February, a judge confirmed that Lindell had to pay $5 million to a computer forensics expert who successfully took on Lindell’s challenge. Lindell recently handed over financial documents in the case as the expert tried to collect the money.

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“University of Florida Eliminates all DEI-Related Positions,” read a March 2, 2024, New York Times headline. The article documented how Florida’s decision to terminate funds for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) related programs resulted in the University of Florida removing all DEI-related positions from their campus. This is but one of a series of stories about how states such as Alabama and Indiana are working to eliminate DEI programs and content in education. While the anti-DEI efforts have received much media coverage, little attention has been paid to how educational technologies (ed-tech) undermine the mission of DEI advocates.

DEI work is an outgrowth of affirmative action policies born of the 1961 Executive Order No. 10925, signed by President John F. Kennedy. The order and subsequent legislation resulted in schools largely voluntarily adopting affirmative action policies that, in education specifically, sought to increase the representation of historically underrepresented groups, such as women and people of color. Work done in the name of affirmative action never settled comfortably into the United States’ hyper-individualist culture. Since its passage, the courts wrestled with affirmative action, culminating in the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively outlawed affirmative action on the grounds that current policies “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

Like affirmative action, DEI has been skewered by individuals who do not believe in its mission. What is rarely discussed is how DEI advocates are often bamboozled by the ed-tech rhetoric into adopting tools and platforms that undermine the mission of DEI. The biggest ed-tech platforms and companies claim that their products adhere to DEI principles, but in practice, they counter the mission of DEI.

Today, students and teachers are monitored—and monitor each other—by a complex set of surveillance tools found in common classroom software and hardware, such as Turnitin, ClassDojo, Illuminate Education and G Suite for Education, Chromebooks, and Apple tablets, that enable technology management, law enforcement, teachers, students, and families to monitor classrooms, school libraries, and reading lists. This, in addition to one’s personal devices which listen as well.

Rather than enhance education, these tools undermine the autonomy of students, teachers, and families and reduce them to data repositories to be mined by Big Tech corporations. Big Tech’s economic viability rests on tracking and surveilling users, then selling that data and its analysis to predict and modify human behavior. Entering classrooms, especially the classrooms of minors, enables unprecedented access to precious data. Despite this invasiveness, it is perfectly legal, thanks to 2012 changes to the student privacy rights bill, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), that allowed ed-tech companies to access the private information of enrolled students.

Because compulsory education makes the vast majority of young people in the United States a captive audience, the changes to FERPA transformed schools into a testing ground for new surveillance technologies. Often introduced under the guise of safety, surveillance technologies collect copious amounts of data beyond what might be needed for educational purposes. For example, Bark, a product specifically designed to monitor students’ communications, can read all student data, including emails, web searches, and social media posts made on their school-issued and personal devices.

In their pursuit of profit and access to data, ed-tech companies undermine equity, which refers to the campus commitment that all students receive the unique support needed to achieve student success. Due to algorithmic bias, the unfair and discriminatory outcomes that result from the bias coded into algorithms, ed-tech companies produce inequitable outcomes for historically marginalized communities. For example, research has shown algorithmic bias in ed-tech, such as admissions platforms incorrectly concluding that students of color and students with disabilities are more prone to criminality and diagnosing LGBTQ+ students with mental health problems. It is also worth noting that surveillance in schools is inequitable as poorer students’ economic challenges force them to depend on school-issued digital devices and platforms, while wealthy students can skirt school surveillance by purchasing personal devices.

In addition to being inequitable, ed-tech tools often undermine inclusivity. For example, school-issued devices can and do alert campuses to student web searches about sexuality and in the process, have outed students’ sexual preference. As a result, the school closed down one of the few spaces that could potentially be inclusive for these students to explore their identity. Similarly, when surveillance is a prerequisite for education, students whose migrant status is in question face the additional challenge of protecting their place of residence, including any relatives whose status may also be contested.

Despite their rhetoric, ed-tech companies seem disinterested in promoting diversity. For example, Proctorio, a browser extension used in remote learning situations to scan the room via facial and gaze detection to determine if a student is cheating, seems to have not been coded to account for students with disabilities. Indeed, there have been cases where a student with a disability is scanned, and the program inaccurately accuses them of cheating. This discriminatory accusation creates an extra challenge for students with disabilities, who not only have to complete their education but also clear their name for an offense they did not commit. Relatedly, school districts have used algorithms in an effort to diversify their student body. Still, research has revealed that algorithmic biases in these platforms promote homogeneity, especially in terms of class and race, in schools.

As critical scholars, we argue that it is imperative to analyze, assess, and evaluate ed-tech tools and acknowledge their complexity. We do not aim to eradicate digital technologies from schools. However, the research is clear: Ed-tech, in its current form, does not support DEI. As a result, in addition to combating the anti-DEI efforts, DEI advocates must reflect upon how their use and support for ed-tech contributes to anti-DEI outcomes.

Allison Butler is a Senior Lecturer, Director of Undergraduate Advising, and the Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, MA, where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. She is a contributor to The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022) and co-author with Nolan Higdon of Surveillance Education Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools (Routledge, 2024).

Nolan Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Project Censored National Judge, author, and university lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a contributor The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022) and co-author with Allison Butler of Surveillance Education Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools (Routledge, 2024).