France: outrage at police treatment of a journalist...

The knocks on his door came at 6:40 a.m., Vittorio de Filippis recalled, when Paris was still dark and he was fast asleep. Three police officers -- a pair of men and a woman, all wearing armbands -- had come to take him in.

By the time his ordeal ended five hours later, about 11:30 a.m. Friday, the journalist wrote, he had been manhandled, handcuffed, humiliated in front of his sons, twice forced to strip and submit to body cavity searches and interrogated without lawyers by an investigating magistrate -- all over a two-year-old libel case.

The treatment meted out to Filippis, an executive and former editor in chief of the Paris newspaper Liberation, prompted an outcry Saturday from his colleagues, lawyers and other supporters, who said the tactics were out of place in a country with long and cherished traditions of rule of law and freedom of expression. More...

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