This week in the “true du faux Junior”, the students wonder regarding a mysterious bacterium which would have contaminated rice, the repeated use of 49.3 and the notion of an attack which is not used to talk regarding the racist massacre in the rue d’Enghien in Paris.
Is it true that we cannot speak of an attack when it is the act of a single person? Could the use of 49.3 affect the functioning of our democracy? Is there any rice that has been contaminated with carcinogenic bacteria? The students of the Sophie Germain high school in Paris and the Jules Ferry college in Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois in Essonne question us and we answer them.
The notion of an attack has nothing to do with the number of people involved
Mahaut and Lisa wonder regarding the killing that took place on December 23 last rue d’Enghien in Paris.
That day a man shot and killed three people and injured three others. The facts took place in front of a Kurdish cultural center and the author of this killing declared in police custody that his gesture was linked to racist motivations. Mahaut and Lisa noticed that the media were talking “attack on the Kurds“, or even “gunshots in Paris“, but never of a terrorist attack. So they wonder if we can’t talk regarding an attack because it was an act committed by a single person?
David Di Giacomo, head of the police-justice department of franceinfo replies that “no, it is not because it is a single person that we are not talking regarding an attack, but because the justice system considered that there were not the necessary elements to qualify this triple assassination as an attack” It is the magistrates of the PNAT, the national anti-terrorism prosecution, who assess the situation, that is to say the first elements of the investigation and they then decide, or not, to seize. David Di Giacomo adds that ‘generally, “it is when an investigation is opened by these anti-terrorist magistrates that the media, including franceinfo, no longer speak of attacks but of attacks, of terrorist acts.“
49.3, a very regulated article of our Constitution
Cleo and Lisa are wondering if”the government’s repeated use of 49.3 may affect the functioning of our democracy.”
Julie Marie-Leconte, head of the political department of franceinfo replies that it is difficult to answer this question categorically, she recalls that indeed “the oppositions criticize the repeated use of this article of the Constitution which makes it possible to pass a bill without going through a vote, to cut short the debates and not to retain the amendments voted before the debate has been stopped, c It is thus the version of the government which is adopted.“
But Julie Marie-Leconte also explains that the use of 49.3 is very supervised, “because when the government resorts to it, it exposes itself to being overthrown, its opponents can deposit a motion of censure, which, if it is voted by the majority of the deputies, obliges the government to resign.” Et since a 2008 reformthe Constitution “also limits its use, because now, apart from budgetary texts, the government has the right to use it only on a single text during the same parliamentary session.”
A batch of a rice brand was taken off the shelves in November
Inès saw on the internet that “lThe rice was contaminated with carcinogenic bacteria‘ and she wonders if it’s true.
No, this does not concern all the rice that is sold in France, but certain batches of a brand of rice that were withdrawn from the shelves in November. This rice had been contaminated, not by bacteria, but by fungi that sometimes appear on food. Except that these mushrooms produce natural toxins that are also called mycotoxins, they have no taste or smell, but when they are present in too large quantities in a food they are dangerous for health. For this rice, the identified mycotoxin is called aflatoxin.
Hélène Gayon, head of food risk assessment at ANSESthe national health security agency, explains to us that these aflatoxins can “be particularly toxic to humans, either in the short term, causing diarrhoea, nausea or bloating, or in the long term and increasing the risk of cancer, having effects on the liver or the immune system“.
