Didn’t follow the news this weekend? Well yeah, you knew your favorite website was going to give you the recap at the end of the day. Come on, hang up the news wagons with our five-point news. Spoiler alert: as usual, we’re talking football and Ukraine.
1. In Saint-Soline, the demonstration turns into chaos
A protester is between life and death after violent clashes with the police on Saturday in Deux-Sèvres. The vital prognosis of this 30-year-old man, victim of a head trauma, remained engaged on Sunday according to the Niort prosecutor’s office, which opened an investigation into the circumstances in which three demonstrators in total, including a 19-year-old woman and another man 27, were seriously injured.
According to a still provisional report provided by the prosecution, 29 gendarmes were injured, two of them seriously without their life being threatened, and seven demonstrators in total were also taken care of by the emergency services. But the organizers – the agricultural union Confédération paysanne, the collective of associations Bassines non merci and the environmental movement of the Uprisings of the Earth – report a much heavier toll: 200 demonstrators injured, including 40 seriously. Between brainwashing, discrepancies in figures, tear gas canisters or molotov cocktails, here is the film of this mobilization which turned into “an unbearable surge of violence”, according to the government and “a violent drift of the State”, according to the organizers . Read a recap by Xavier Regnier here.
2. No “retirement” for “reforms”
Despite the blockages and the challenge, the executive does not want to consider immobility. Government spokesman Olivier Véran therefore assured this Sunday that the executive would continue to roll out a “rearranged” roadmap. “The pension reform does not sign the retirement of the reforms. There will be other reforms tomorrow, led by us or by the governments that will succeed us,” he underlined in an interview with the Sunday newspaper. Nevertheless, on Tuesday the executive will have to face a 10th day of mobilization against the pension reform, whose political future is now in the hands of the Constitutional Council, while tensions in the street are increasing.
“I wonder if this is not what the President of the Republic is looking for, to do everything to radicalize the movement, to arouse so much anger that it overflows (…) and to turn public opinion against the demonstrations”, lambasted Fabien Roussel, this Saturday on RMC. An Emmanuel Marcon who will meet, Monday at noon, with his Prime Minister, then the duo will be joined at 1:15 p.m. by the bosses of parliamentary groups, party leaders and some members of the government
More info: In the show Daily, columnist Nicolas Fresco launched his column on Friday evening with a video shot by Polska, in which the influencer announces that she and her friend are going to demonstrate. The two women are “famous for having been rejected because of their neckline deeper than the hole of the Secu”, specified Nicolas Fresco, before scratching their slogan “forms against reform”. The sequence, posted by Daily on Twitter, was denounced by a number of Internet users this weekend. To find out more, it’s here.
3. Vladimir Putin, depleted uranium and Belarus
Vladimir Putin threatened on Saturday to use depleted uranium shells in Ukraine if kyiv were to receive them from the West, as recently mentioned by a British official. “Russia, of course, has something to answer for. We have, without exaggeration, hundreds of thousands of such shells. We are not using them at the moment,” the Russian president said in an interview on Russian television. And in the process, Vladimir Putin affirmed that Moscow was going to deploy “tactical” nuclear weapons on the territory of its ally, Belarus. Kiev immediately accused Russia of taking Belarus as a “nuclear hostage” and asked the UN Security Council to organize an emergency meeting to counter Russia’s “nuclear blackmail”.
More info: Since Monday, Diane Regny, journalist at 20 minutes, is in Ukraine. She met, Thursday in kyiv, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Minister of Culture since June 2020. Here is his interview, to read here.
4. Les Bleues start the Six Nations Tournament with a victory
We had predicted it (our rugby journalist Nicolas Stival): the Bleues were finally going to delight us. No need to completely miss a World Cup to make your revolution. Take the women’s XV of France. Honest third in the New Zealand World Cup in the fall (even if they were aiming for the title), the Blues attacked the Six Nations Tournament, this Sunday in Italy, with new coaching. Coach Thomas Darracq and manager Annick Hayraud jumped ship in December, and yesterday’s assistants Gaëlle Mignot and David Ortiz have become today’s bosses. “It’s a revival, appreciates the new captain Audrey Forlani, who is coming back strong after being deprived of the World Cup. Training is going pretty well, with a good atmosphere on and off the field. We play liberated, that’s what will surely be our strength. “Freed, it’s won since in Parma, our Blue finished on a nice 12-22.
5. The young is the new old
It’s an info 20 minutes. After three years spent living through crises (health, climate, inflationary, Ukrainian and social), one would have thought that 18-30 year olds would have burned life at both ends. Happy aquoibonists way, not Amy Winehouse way. The latest #MoiJeune study conducted in partnership with OpinionWay contradicts what we would have liked to read: almost three years after the first confinement, young people are not happy. In the “next world”, so much vaunted by Emmanuel Macron on the evening of March 16, 2020, 78% of them assess the state of mental health of their generation as “not good”. There follows a whole series of figures on 18-30 year olds which do not really make you want to “celebrate it” over an aperitif. And a curious observation: the young is the new old. To find out more about this “revolution through knitting”, it’s here.