As outrage over the police killing of Nahel M. in western Paris dominates headlines in France, a new photo feature in Le Monde depicts life and environmental politics in the Tuamotu Archipelago, where French nuclear tests spread severe plutonium contamination between 1966 and 1996.
Read more: Police violence gathers pace in ParisNous sommes totalement éloignés de la légitime défense. [This is a long way from any kind of legitimate defence.]
Police in Paris shot and killed Nahel M., aged 17, during a traffic stop on Tuesday morning in a suburb west of Paris, sparking protests in which 31 people had been arrested as of Wednesday morning. Yassine Bouzrou, a lawyer representing Nahel M.’s family, told BFM-TV the police’s initial claim—that Mr M. had been attempting to ram the officers—no longer held up, after footage emerged on social media showing the shot at point-blank range through the driver side window just after Mr M. had started the car and moved off.
Despite the horror and cruelty of war, it’s still better than living in drought and water scarcity.
Iraq has suffered from severe water management crises in recent decades, compounded by climate change, which is projected to reduce winter precipitation over the Mediterranean region by up to 40% in certain regions—especially at the headwaters of Iraq’s two major rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris, in southern Turkey. Al Jazeera spoke with Firas Mohammed, one of many residents facing an increasingly desperate shortage around Habbaniyah Lake in central-western Iraq.
Nous sommes vivants, jusqu’à demain. [We’re alive, until tomorrow.]
Francine Tangi has lived on the Tuamotu Archipelago, home to 15,000 Pacific Islanders, for over 60 years. Le Monde reports unbalanced wind patterns, temperatures, fishing seasons, and tides, added to rising sea levels that threaten to swallow the islands, atop damage by the pearl industry and contamination from three decades of French nuclear tests.
