Whipped Cream Difficulties

I missed this one the other day, because of reasons. I also missed this story when it happened, because I was 5 at the time.

Paul Rose has died.

More than 40 years ago, Mr. Rose was a member of the Front for the Liberation of Quebec, or F.L.Q., an extremist group committed to using violence to win independence for French-speaking Quebec. It committed dozens of bombings from 1963 to October 1970.

Mr. Rose was convicted of murdering Pierre Laporte, the Quebec government’s minister of labor. Mr. Laporte was kidnapped by Mr. Rose’s F.L.Q. cell on October 10, 1970, and was found strangled in the trunk of a car on October 18th. Mr. Rose made statements implicating himself in the kidnapping, but “an investigation by a Montreal prosecutor concluded in 1980 that Mr. Rose could not have been present at the killing”. Mr. Rose served 11 years in prison.

Many Quebecers who favored independence from Canada were contemptuous of Mr. Rose and the F.L.Q. René Lévesque, father of the separatist Parti Québécois, which held seven seats in the provincial legislature in 1970 and gained power in 1976, called the members of the group subhuman. The party, which governs Quebec today, received mainly praise for denying requests that the legislature honor Mr. Rose’s death.

Also among the dead, Richard Griffiths. Most of the obits I have seen have concentrated on his Harry Potter role, but his full list of credits is even more interesting: “Withnail and I”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”, and “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear”, along with a lot of TV work.

(I’d kind of like to see “The Brides in the Bath”, simply because the George Joseph Smith case is one of the seminal cases in British legal history.)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 29th, 2013 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Clippings, Law, Movies, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.