FRANCE SENT RIOT POLICE BECAUSE IT COULDN'T FIND ENOUGH SUBSTITUTE TEACHERS

This started September 21 at a school in Créteil, out in the broke suburbs where the buildings have rats, falling debris, 35 kids to a room, and no substitute when a teacher goes down. That last complaint is not teenage whining. The education ministry's own numbers say nearly 10 percent of teaching hours in public secondary schools went untaught in 2024-25, and most of that was simply nobody showing up to cover. By Tuesday it was 256,000 people in the streets per the Interior Ministry, 56,000 in Paris, with the teachers' unions joining the kids who started it. The government found the budget for tear gas, water cannons and roughly 5,060 arrests since September. Eighty-seven percent of those arrested are minors. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez says the police response has been proportionate in "almost all cases," and that "almost" is carrying more weight than any French teacher currently employed. On Monday in Lens, a 15-year-old lost his hand and part of his lower arm in a police stun grenade blast. Prosecutors say they still can't establish whether he picked it up or it landed on him. Internal affairs now has six serious-injury investigations running. Meanwhile the blame fight: Macron's government and Le Pen's National Rally accuse the hard-left France Unbowed of stoking the whole thing. France Unbowed denies it. Nobody in that argument has mentioned a substitute teacher.

Why you should give a shit: A government that can't scrape together a sub for third period found the cash for water cannons, and six months out from an election, 87 percent of the people it's arresting are too young to vote against it.