- Julien Offray de la Mettrie was born in Saint Malo, on the twenty-fifth of December, 1709, to Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Marie Gaudron, who were living by a trade large enough to provide a good education for their son. They sent him to the college of Coutance to study the humanities; he went from there to Paris, to the college of Plessis; he studied his rhetoric at Caen, and since he had much genius and imagination, he won all the prizes for eloquence. He was a born orator and was passionately fond of poetry and belles-lettres, but his father thought he would earn more as an ecclesiastic than as a poet, and destined him for the church. He sent him, the following year, to the college of Plessis where he studied logic under M. Cordier, who was more a Jansenist than a logician.
- World Report 2024: United Kingdom (hrw.org)
In 2023, the UK government eroded domestic human rights protections and reneged on important international obligations. The government passed a law further criminalizing protesters and limiting workers’ strikes. A new law will ban people who arrive “irregularly” to the UK from claiming asylum or accessing protection, putting them at further risk of harm.