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Diamond Heist, The Sequel: After Brussels Airport, Paris Department Store Hit

FRANCE 24, LE PARISIEN (France)

Worldcrunch

PARIS - A day after armed men pulled off a spectacular 50 million euro diamond heist at Brussels Airport, two men made off with 3 million euros worth of diamonds after holding up a popular department store in central Paris on Tuesday night.

The heist happened in broad daylight – an hour before closing – at the Printemps department store. The unsuspecting crowd of customers remained oblivious to the entire incident, said France 24.

The Printemps is one of Paris’ oldest and most popular stores, in the center of the city’s busy Opera shopping and business district .

The two men, who wore bulletproof jackets but no balaclavas, carried out their hold-up very discretely, without firing their handguns, said France 24.

They asked a salesperson from the De Beers counter to open two jewelry cases, emptied the contents into their bags, and exited through a service staircase in the back of the department store, reports le Parisien. French police believes this could be an inside job. The men’s faces were uncovered even though the store has an extensive video-surveillance system.

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The Printemps Department store in Paris, Wikipedia

De Beers, a Dutch company, is one of the world’s leading diamond firms. A spokesperson confirmed clients and personnel were safe and that they were cooperating with the police.

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Ideas

Purebreds To "Rasse" Theory: A German Critique Of Dog Breeding

Just like ideas about racial theory, the notion of seeking purebred dogs is a relatively recent human invention. This animal eugenics project came from a fantasy of recreating a glorious past and has done irreparable harm to canines. A German

Photo of a four dogs, including two dalmatians, on leashes

No one flinches when we refer to dogs, horses or cows as purebreds, and if a friend’s new dog is a rescue, we see no problem in calling it a mongrel or crossbreed.

Wieland Freund

BERLIN — Some words always seem to find a way to sneak through. We have created a whole raft of embargoes and decrees about the term race: We prefer to say ethnicity, although that isn’t always much better. In Germany, we sometimes use the English word race rather than our mother tongue’s Rasse.

But Rasse crops up in places where English native speakers might not expect to find it. If, on a walk through the woods, the park or around town, a German meets a dog that doesn’t clearly fit into a neat category of Labrador, dachshund or Dalmatian, they forget all their misgivings about the term and may well ask the person holding the lead what race of dog it is.

Although we have turned our back on the shameful racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of an “encyclopedia of purebred dogs” or a dog handler who promises an overview of almost “all breeds” (in German, “all races”) has somehow remained inoffensive.

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