Wooosh

“A pal is a wonderful thing !”

Y’a un meme autour du canard ? Moi j’ai juste réagi par instinct grégaire 😅

Even if she was shot by a young child, shouldn’t charges be brought against the parents or anyone responsible for letting that child have access to a lethal weapon ?

Yup, Germany needs better highspeed railways. It only takes 1h45 from Paris to Strasbourg which is roughly halfway between Paris and Berlin. So the whole trip could potentially be under 4h downtown to downtown.

You can go from Paris to Stuttgart in less 3h 30min by train. No customs, no TSA, downtown to downtown.

Jeebus ! The number of people commenting here who don’t have any knowledge of the situation is annoying.

France vowed in the Noumea Accord of 1998 to gradually give more political power to New Caledonia. Since, under the agreement, New Caledonia has held three referendums over its ties with France, ALL rejecting independence. Now, the last referendum in 2021 had something like 94% people voting to stay French BUT the independentists had called for a boycott of the referendum, and so turnout was only about 44%. In 2018, New Caledonians rejected independence at 57%. In 2020 it was 53%. In both these votes, the turnout was 80+% .

So this is not a case of France imposing control on the local population, there seems to be at least a small majority of people who wish to stay French.

New Caledonians have French nationality, they vote in all french national elections (presidential, parliament, etc. ) and could absolutely vote in local elections if they moved to say Paris or Marseille.

The thing is, the electoral lists in New Caledonia were frozen in 1998, and so anyone who came to live there legally after that still can’t vote in local elections. This is now being reversed, allowing citizens who have lived there for at least 10 years to vote, and that’s why the independentist party is rioting. They fear the independentist vote would be diluted by these newcomers, which presumably would vote to stay French.

Edit : To add some context on the independentists, they are mostly of the Kanak people, the aboriginal population of the islands. Today, they represent about 41% of the ~300k people living in New Caledonia.They are usually poorer and benefit from a lesser level of education than Neocaledonians of European or mixed descent.