This is what one Emmanuel (Macron) said to another (the acclaimed writer Carrère) in 2025: “I was never a teenager. I don’t like teenagers. I don’t understand them.”

But do teenagers understand themselves? Do “Gen Z”, or whatever is the arbitrary cohort of the moment? Young people have a leftwing image and perhaps self-image. For a while now, I have suspected that it is false, that some of the bolshiest among them are in fact capitalists or at least conformists who don’t know it yet. Nothing over the past month has altered that view.

In France, the (peaceful) protesters demand better-funded schools and then a smoother link to universities, which in turn will determine their career prospects. You might regard this as an expensive request for an indebted state. But it is also an embrace of bourgeois values. What the students want is a proper functioning of the merit-based, study-and-work social order, not an alternative to it. A fairer rat race but a rat race. The contrast with the 1990s slacker ethic, let alone 1968, with its frontal attack on normie ways, is sharp. And lost on some of these purported rebels.

Or consider the “cockroach” movement in India. It got going after an exam leak ruined the matriculation of lots of medical students. The campaign then widened to encompass other grievances, such as bad schools and nepotism in elite jobs. Notice the theme here: thwarted ambition to advance within the system, not a rejection of it from first principles. (There shouldn’t, a radical would argue, be elite jobs.)

In the 1770s, Edmund Burke said the American colonists just wanted their existing rights as free sons of the empire, not a new social order, and so weren’t revolutionaries at all, but in a sense more conventional than those who would refuse them. There is something Burkean about the non-violent protests of 2026. Honour the old social contract, is the gist of their message to the state. Make bourgeois aspiration easier. There were times when de Gaulle and LBJ would have given an arm for protesters like these.

Expect them to become more capitalist over time, and not because of age. The central grievance of young progressives, especially British ones, is expensive housing. It is sparking protests in Milan and Tirana too. For now, their preferred solutions, such as rent controls and more state-owned homes, are dirigiste. When these flop — Britain has vastly more social housing than the rich-world average as it is — the larger issue should dawn on them. 

Not enough houses are built, due to legal trammels. Supply isn’t allowed to grow with demand. The interests of the young are more aligned with market forces than those of the “conservative” old, who profit from artificial housing constraints. There is no guarantee that young people will come to see it this way. The rhetorical fog about Thatcher and “neoliberalism” dies hard. But cold interest tends to tell in the end.

Also: by their deeds you shall know them. In practice, the young and high-minded seldom have a problem with capitalism. This column reaches you from Los Angeles, whose eastern districts have been gentrified over the decades, often by left-leaning twenty-somethings who regard that change as “problematic”. It is a global pattern. Frogtown is Williamsburg is Kreuzberg is Canal Saint-Martin. (“West End Girls”, though a pop jewel, takes some explaining to those below a certain age in London. Those “girls” would now live east and the “East End boys” out in Kent or Essex.) 

The displacement of old communities does trouble these gentrifiers. But, to look around, not that much. To be at the vanguard of market-led change, and to shudder at it: that is the young to a T. As with the protests, I would mock the underlying conservatism, if I didn’t thank the stars for it. 

Submission Statement: Protests last Saturday across France deteriorated into vandalism and violence as roving bands of rioters attacked hundreds of shops, smashing windows and running off with merchandise. The turmoil has since eased, but with protesters calling for another day of unrest this Saturday residents, authorities and shopkeepers are on edge.

While traditional sales of hunting rifles have collapsed, demand has jumped for pepper sprays, tear gas-like canisters, pistols firing rubber bullets and other non-lethal gear. The increase in sales is “unprecedented,” Gollety said, more pronounced than in past episodes of rioting and civil unrest.

The Prefecture of Police told business owners to hire more private security agents ahead of Saturday, drawing the ire of many, including Eric Larcheveque, the co-founder of the Crypto hardware wallet maker Ledger. He wrote on X that if the state can no longer protect the people, the French should stop paying taxes.

Submission Statement: Indian arms makers have sent at least $872 million worth of ammunition — including artillery shells, mortar shells, propellant and explosives — to European countries since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to data sourced by Trade Data Monitor from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry of India.

While still modest compared with the US and other leading exporters, for India it represents a more than 1,600% increase from the $49.2 million in arms exported to Europe in the four-year period before the war, according to trade data.

Three-quarters of those shipments have gone to nations within a 13-country bloc in Eastern and Central Europe that’s been a major arms supplier to Ukraine, and where demand surged after Russia’s full-scale invasion. India is now the overall second-biggest supplier of arms including shells, mortars, propellants and explosives to these countries, behind South Korea, up from 28th four years ago, according to Trade Data Monitor.

The data show how the country is steadily climbing into the booming global arms trade. Although Indian officials have publicized high-tech weapons sales, including new deals for its BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, the data show that the driving force behind the growth in New Delhi’s arms exports has been more basic battlefield supplies manufactured by state-run firms.

At the heart of India’s scale-up in weapons exports are companies known as Defence Public Sector Undertakings, state-run weapons firms that accounted for more than half of India’s defense exports in the last fiscal year. Among them is Munitions India Ltd., India’s largest producer of ammunition, which accounted for more than half of all export earnings by Indian public defense companies in the two years through fiscal 2025.

It’s difficult to know exactly how many Indian-made arms have made it to Ukraine. Unlike big-ticket weapons like fighter jets and missile platforms, shells and other ordnance move in industrial-scale quantities across multiple borders, and customs records document individual transactions, not the full path from manufacturer to final recipient, making them difficult to trace.

In one instance, however, Ukrainian customs records compiled by Big Trade Data show Indian-origin ammunition entering Ukraine in February 2024. The records show at least 78 shipments valued at $62.8 million of 155-millimeter artillery shells, along with their propellants and fuzes.

In these transactions, Regulus Global LLC, a Virginia-based defense and logistics company, was recorded as the exporter, according to the filings from Big Trade Data. The company has spoken publicly about its support for Ukraine and supplying arms for its war effort. The importer was recorded as SpetsTechnoExport, the state-owned arms procurement firm headquartered in Kyiv. The records don’t show what happened after the weapons were imported or how Regulus acquired them.

Customs records also show multiple Eastern European buyers importing defense goods from India in the same periods they were exporting similar products from other countries to Ukraine.

According to Indian customs documents compiled by Big Trade Data, Munitions India exported nearly 72,000 rounds of 120-millimeter mortar shells between 2024 and 2025, with C.N. Romtehnica S.A, the official procurement arm of the Romanian Ministry of National Defence, listed as an importer of these shells. Ukrainian customs records, meanwhile, show that in early 2024 Romtehnica was recorded as the exporter of nearly 6,000 rounds of the same caliber, with Ukraine’s state-owned foreign-trade defense enterprise Ukrspecexport named as the importer and Bulgaria listed as the country of origin.

Similarly, Indian customs records compiled by Big Trade Data show that between 2023 and 2025, Solar Industries India Limited sent at least 229,000 kilograms of RDX — a high explosive — with the Polish state-owned explosives manufacturer Nitro-Chem S.A., which describes itself as “an export leader in the Polish arms industry,” listed as an importer of these explosives.

Ukrainian customs records, meanwhile, show two shipments of RDX in 2024 on which Nitro-Chem was recorded as the exporter, with Ukrainian Advanced Microtechnologies named as the importer and the European Union listed as the country of origin.

The Ukrainian buyer, according to its website, uses RDX to make reactive-armour elements for tanks — an end use recorded on the Ukrainian customs paperwork too, which describes the material as “a high explosive… used for the production of elements of dynamic protection of tanks” supplied “under a state contract under a state defence order for the needs of the National Guard of Ukraine.”

The transactions show that India could be helping Ukraine’s allies restore stockpiles depleted from years of selling to Ukraine, allowing such support to continue, said Siemon Wezeman, senior researcher in the Arms Transfers Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which researches conflict and arms control.

The Czechoslovak Group, a leading European arms company whose subsidiaries have bought millions of dollars worth of Indian munitions since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, declined to comment on specific transactions. But it noted that Indian companies were well-positioned to supply Europe.

“India has a well-developed defense and chemical industry and is currently one of the possible suppliers of energetic materials and other inputs used in ammunition production,” the group said in a statement. “This is particularly important at a time when European production capacity in this area still falls short of the level needed to fully meet demand.”

SS: Taiwanese prosecutors are charging five men for plotting to run over a Taiwanese comedian, known for mocking the CCP and Xi Jinping, at the behest of an individual from mainland China. The prosecutors are saying: "This case involves a serious incident in which the Chinese Communist party is suspected of using cross-border suppression tactics to direct lawless elements in our country to suppress dissenting political voices through extreme violence.”

Obviously this case represents one extreme, however acts of transnational repression have been complicating cross-strait relations. With the government currently carrying out a probe over relations between organised crime and this campaign of repression.

An LNG company in Alaska has been financed by a Russian gas company (WTF), and is looking for approval to use that Russian company’s technology in northern Alaska. This potential deal has been brought up in Witkoff and Kushner’s Ukraine/Russia negotiations.

This is relevant to the state of US sanctions on Russia and conflicts of interest in the US negotiating some sort of end to the Russia/Ukraine war.

Pretty interesting article. Apparently the source is a recent CEO of the Alaskan LNG company who didn’t even know about the Russian financing. He resigned when he found out.

Robespierre was a lion 🦁

There have been a lot of posts about how to improve teaching and learning. I think this is a good bit of look at the difficulties public policy face in actually changing something.

Halfway through President Trump’s three-month gambit to import more ground beef to lower prices, little extra beef has been imported and prices have barely budged.

In August, Mr. Trump signed a proclamation allowing 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings to enter the United States at a reduced tariff rate. The additional beef could be imported over 90 days, with up to 100,000 metric tons entering each month in September, October and November.

But only 37,486 metric tons of this beef entered the country in September, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, barely more than a third of the allowed amount. There hasn’t been much improvement in October, as just 21,937 metric tons entered through the 19th.

The lack of action is a potential blow to Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Mr. Trump said this month that beef prices “really became unacceptable to the voter,” and he has been trying to lower prices while keeping farmers and ranchers — typically a reliable Republican voting bloc — on his side.

Groups representing ranchers immediately criticized the president’s plan to import beef, saying it would lower what they received for their cattle; live cattle prices fell 3.4 percent the day the proclamation was signed. Ranchers said the threat that Mr. Trump would intervene in the market anytime prices rose made them more likely to send heifers and cows to slaughter instead of taking the risk of holding them back to help build up a larger herd.

“I am afraid they are trying to solve a short-term problem with beef prices, which will create long-term cattle supply problems in the process,” said Ford Drummond, the president of the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association. Cattle prices have since rebounded.

And there is little evidence that any substantial discount has reached consumers, after Mr. Trump “encouraged” importers to sell beef at a 25 percent discount. The average price of a pound of ground beef fell 1.9 percent in September, to $6.79 from $6.92, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A year earlier, a pound cost $6.32.

Asked why most of the import quota was going unfilled, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Trump is “delivering on his promise to consumers by reducing beef prices while allowing our American beef herd to grow.” She also said the president had “done more for American agriculture than anyone.”

The 37,486 metric tons of lean trimmings were imported in September under the customs agency’s “Affordable Beef” quota. But according to agricultural economists, it is unlikely that all, or even most, of that beef was imported solely because of the president’s proclamation. Some of it would have come into the country anyway.

The United States imported 1.9 million metric tons of all kinds of beef last year, with the bulk coming from Australia, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and New Zealand. Most of it was lean trimmings destined to be combined with high-fat trimmings from American cattle to make ground beef. An additional 300,000 metric tons would be significant, but pale in comparison with what already enters the country.

James Mitchell, a livestock economist at the University of Arkansas, used two different methods to calculate the amount of lean trimmings that would have come into the United States in September under usual circumstances, if there were no proclamation. One of the methods found that 41 percent of the 37,486 metric tons would have been imported, while the other method found that 79 percent would have been.

“Neither approach is perfect, but I think both are more reasonable than assuming all 37,486 metric tons were additional imports,” Mr. Mitchell wrote in an email.

From the beginning, it was unclear whether the president’s plan would meaningfully lower beef prices. Lean trimmings make up only a portion of the cost of ground beef; much of what the consumer pays for are costs like fattier trimmings, labor, processing, transportation and marketing.

Mr. Trump said he had a “commitment” that this beef would be sold at “25 percent below market prices,” though it is unclear if he meant retail or wholesale prices.

Ted Schroeder, a livestock economist at Kansas State University, said there would be no way for grocery stores to offer specific discounts to customers buying ground beef with these imported trimmings. It isn’t specially labeled, or labeled at all. Everyday meatpackers and processors receive meat from a number of different imported and domestic sources, and they don’t label them all for their customers.

“It is all stuff that gets blended, so there is going to be no way that I can think of that a product is labeled just that,” Mr. Schroeder said. “As soon as you start blending, identity preservation is just gone.”

Wholesale prices for domestic or imported lean trimmings, which vary by region, have barely changed, Mr. Schroeder said. And the small decrease in September’s retail ground beef prices is typical because grilling season is over.

“Is it a penny? Three cents? Four? Two and a third?” Mr. Schroeder asked, referring to how much cheaper the additional imports have made ground beef. “The reality is it is not going to be noticeable.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney called Türkiye an “exceptional partner” during joint statements with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Thursday, the latest move in a warming of relations between the two NATO allies.

“We had some kind of disconnect for a period, but today we put an end to it,” Erdogan said via English translation. That remark came at the very end of the leaders’ joint statements, before announcing he would be accepting the invitation to visit Canada at some point.

Canada and Turkiye have had a few irritants over the years.

The defence relationship has been rocky, with Canada suspending arms export permits in 2020. A government report found evidence the country was using Canadian military technology, specifically sensors used on Turkish drones, in the conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. That ban was lifted in 2024.

Meanwhile, human rights groups have been calling on Canada to condemn the ongoing crackdown in Türkiye on LGBTQ2S+ groups.

On Thursday, the two leaders spoke in meetings for about an hour and a half, after an elaborate welcome ceremony at the presidential palace.

Carney said next month, negotiators from both countries will meet in Ankara for the first round of free trade talks. The federal government has not yet released the results of consultations with Canadians on the possibility of a free trade deal, which wrapped up last month.

Carney and Erdogan also announced the Canada-Türkiye Strategic Partnership, which the prime minister said involves a three-year action plan, and is focused on the goals his office laid out for the trip: trade and investment, defence and security, energy and people to people ties. Carney said both countries’ foreign ministers will meet on an annual basis for a dialogue to “keep this partnership on track.”

The governments also finalized a previously announced air transport agreement, allowing weekly passenger flights between the two countries to increase from 12 to 21, with no limit on cargo-only flights.

Erdogan and Carney last met in Ankara at the NATO summit in July, where they formally launched the free trade deal talks and signed a defence framework. Carney’s trip aims to deepen ties as the government continues to try and lessen dependence on the United States.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a slur to proudly announce to an auditorium of Marines in September that he was ridding the military of all transgender troops.

The Pentagon had set up review boards at bases around the globe, manned by everyday uniformed service members with narrow orders that all but ensured that the trans troops appearing before them would be voted out.

But just steps from the auditorium where Mr. Hegseth spoke, at Marine Corps Base Quantico, boards assigned to carry out those orders were doing the opposite. Instead of firing trans Marines, the boards were voting to keep them.

The same was happening in the Navy: Boards given strict rules instructing them to force out sailors were rebelling and voting to let them stay.

It is not just a few outlying individuals. Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases.

The Pentagon keeps the proceedings secret. Outsiders — even spouses — are not allowed to attend. Officials won’t release numbers. Leaders won’t discuss the outcomes. The New York Times compiled the figures through interviews with service members and lawyers involved in the hearings.

The number of Navy and Marine cases is small and could easily change as more hearings are conducted. The same pattern has not been seen so far in the Army or Air Force, which have overwhelmingly voted to discharge trans service members.

Still, the votes are a stunning rebuke from the armed forces, where following orders is bedrock. And they suggest the military’s transgender ban is being rejected by the very troops the administration says the ban is meant to serve.

“These boards are being told to do something that they know is wrong — to rubber-stamp a non-choice given to them by the administration,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer and a professor at Southwestern Law School who has been tracking the cases. “We are seeing them say they’re not going to play that game. We are seeing them nullify a process they see as unjust.”

The board decisions are only recommendations, and could be reversed by the politically appointed secretaries overseeing each service branch. There are also pending legal challenges that could pause the ban or rescind it entirely.

The Trump administration claims that trans troops, who account for about 4,250 people or about 0.1 percent of the military, are a costly burden on military effectiveness — a position that military findings contradict. President Trump signed an executive order barring trans troops during his first week in office, saying the action was needed to weed out dishonorable radicals who poison morale and waste resources.

“For the sake of our Nation and the patriotic Americans who volunteer to serve it, military service must be reserved for those mentally and physically fit for duty,” the order read.

The Pentagon designed a policy that paid transgender troops to leave voluntarily. Hundreds of highly qualified people left, including doctors, lawyers, pilots and nuclear technicians. The troops who stayed to challenge their dismissal waited in limbo, sometimes for more than a year.

While they waited, the administration set up a system of three-member separation boards to process the remaining cases using a narrow set of instructions. Under the rules, any evidence of transgender feelings or tendencies — even if there is no formal transition — requires dismissal.

The three-person boards are made up of everyday officers and enlisted personnel plucked temporarily from their normal jobs to hear one case, like civilian jurors. They are not allowed to consider whether a person is a top performer, a specialist in a critical career field or a decorated combat veteran.

The members are given a one-page findings sheet and instructed to circle a few words to find that a service member exhibits evidence of being transgender and therefore is not qualified to serve and should be discharged.

At least, that was the plan.

Trans Marines and sailors who went before boards said in interviews that after months of being vilified by top government officials, they expected a quick dismissal, but instead encountered thoughtful respect from fellow service members who voted to keep them.

Marine Staff Sgt. Damien Contreras was one of them. The Marine Corps pulled him from his job and put him on paid leave in April to await his discharge. In late August the Marine Corps flew him from Hawaii to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia to face a board.

He walked in with his head down, sure that his career was over.

The government's lawyer presented documents from 2017 showing that he had changed genders.

The three members then reviewed his decade of flawless service as a supply and logistics specialist, his three overseas deployments, and his good performance reviews.

They then crossed out instructions on their findings sheet regarding “a history of cross sex hormone therapy” and circled “remains qualified,” and voted to retain him.

“I was shocked at first, but when you come down to it, it makes sense,” Sergeant Contreras said in an interview from Hawaii, where he is stationed. “You have war fighters looking at war fighters,” he said. “They see I’ve always done my job, I’ve deployed, I’ve mentored other Marines, followed the rules. They say, ‘Hey, this is a good Marine, why wouldn’t we retain him?’”

Sergeant Contreras’s lawyer, Priya Rashid, has represented dozens of trans service members and has a broader understanding of the boards than anyone else. After losing nearly all of her initial cases, she saw a stark shift this summer. She has no idea why.

The Army was the first to hold hearings, beginning in February. It has held about 50, according to Ms. Rashid, and voted to discharge soldiers in all but about five cases.

The Air Force started this summer. It has reviewed about six cases and voted to discharge in every known case.

But the Navy and Marine Corps, which began holding hearings in July, have voted to retain in the majority of cases.

“I don’t understand why this pattern is occurring,” Ms. Rashid said in an interview. “And I’m worried that if the pattern becomes too apparent, the government will just change the processes and procedures again so that the pattern can be extinguished.”

Last week Ms. Rashid won another — this time in the Army.

Across the military, the hearings follow a pattern. A lawyer for the government briefly presents medical records and other documents showing evidence that a service member is transgender. The defense then often spends hours presenting a portrait of a service member’s years of service and accomplishments, submitting binders of awards and evaluations, and calling witnesses to vouch for character.

“It all made no difference,” said Maj. Kara Corcoran, an infantry officer who has served for 18 years and deployed to Afghanistan twice. An Army board voted in May to dismiss her in what she called a “kangaroo court.”

“They cut off my character witnesses halfway through and said, ‘We get it, your service is commendable, that’s not what we’re here to decide,’” said Major Corcoran, who now heads the trans advocacy group SPARTA Pride. “The government lawyer, the board, they thought it was ridiculous, but I think they felt they had no choice.”

Navy and Marine Corps hearings have followed the same pattern. But their decisions have been an about-face.

In the Navy, which began hearings in July, nine boards have led to seven votes to retain sailors, according to lawyers involved in the cases.

In the Marine Corps, which began hearings in August, three boards have led to two votes to retain. In the third, the board voted to dismiss a Marine, but wrote on the findings sheet that its members unanimously believed that the Marine should “be retained based on his commendable service record and unique skills.”

What’s driving the shift is far from clear. The military branches, citing ongoing litigation, declined to discuss the outcomes or make board members available for interviews. The Defense Department also declined to comment.

Ms. VanLandingham, the former military lawyer, said the votes might be influenced by growing concern in the ranks that the current Pentagon is preoccupied with wedge issues and gives little thought to the welfare of the force.

Mr. Hegseth in his speech to the Marines, she noted, said the force should have “No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals," but did not mention those killed or wounded in the war with Iran.

“There’s been a chipping away at any kind of confidence that Hegseth actually cares about service members,” she said. “I think that’s given the boards license.”

There may be cultural factors, too, she said. The board instructions in all the branches are nearly identical. But each branch has different values. The Army is often seen as the most bureaucratic and least likely to buck orders. The Navy is the most diverse. The Marine Corps prides itself on a culture of loyalty.

The Navy has nearly twice as many people who identify as gay, bisexual or transgender — 9 percent — compared to other branches, according to a 2015 report by the RAND Corporation.

That was clear to a Navy paramedic who was retained by a board in July. The paramedic, who asked to not be named because he feared retribution, said he was stunned when his lawyer asked a chief, a lieutenant commander and a commander sitting on his board if they knew any trans sailors.

“They all said yes,” the paramedic recalled in an interview. “The chief said his liberty buddy in Thailand was transgender and was a phenomenal sailor. The lieutenant commander said her first work center supervisor was transgender, and she learned a lot from her. The commander said he’d worked with several transgender sailors, and he barbecues with his next-door neighbor, who’s trans.”

There were other factors working in his favor. He had been meritoriously promoted twice for superior performance; remained able to deploy his entire five years in the Navy; and had saved several lives working in emergency rooms.

For his last assignment he was attached to Marines deployed to the southern border. “I never ran into people who cared if I was trans,” he said. “They just cared that I did my job well.”

His lawyer, Steph Kral, a former Air Force officer, represented a second sailor a short time later in front of a different board that she said had no relationships with trans sailors. That board also voted to retain.

“I don’t think they are trying to make any grand policy statement,” Ms. Kral said. “I think they’re just trying to do what’s best for the Navy.”

The Marine Corps has the lowest reported percentage of women, gay and transgender personnel. It also has a tradition-bound culture based on masculine toughness. But Marines have an almost cultlike loyalty to fellow Marines, expressed in their motto, Semper Fidelis — Always Faithful.

“The questions from the Marine boards have focused in on how the policies of higher-ups may have changed, but the Marines in question never did anything wrong,” Ms. Rashid said. “I think they are looking for a way to give a fellow Marine the benefit of the doubt.”

When Sergeant Contreras went before a board, he produced years of performance evaluations and letters from superiors — some who never knew he was trans — that vouched for his good work.

After deliberating for about three hours, the board scratched out language on the instructions sheet about evidence of being transgender and voted to let him stay.

“It was very humbling to see the things that they had to say about me,” the sergeant said. “It had nothing to do with being transgender. I honestly don’t think they care about that. It was about how I was a great Marine.”

SS: Bukele has started a military operation in Haiti after four Salvadoran aviation techs were kidnapped by gangs. Is this a breach of sovereignty, or has Haiti collapsed to such a state that it's not really possible? Already, the fighting has been fierce, with Salvadorans having at least 4 troops unaccounted for in clashes with the gangs.

Get ready for armed intervention #3001

A gunman killed one person and wounded four more on Friday in what authorities suspect was a terrorist attack targeting an ethnically diverse area outside the French capital.

French officials said the gunman was in a car and used an automatic firearm at three different sites in the towns of Trappes and La Verrière. The towns, around 20 miles southwest of Paris, are lower-income areas with housing projects, mosques and large immigrant and Muslim populations. They said a man was detained and remains in police custody.

The national antiterrorism prosecutor’s office said it is investigating whether the shootings were targeting a specific race, ethnicity, origin or religion.

Ali Rabeh, the mayor of Trappes, told the BFMTV network that the person who died was killed at a play area and was of African descent. Another person shot next to a gas station has origins from the Maghreb region of northwest Africa and was seriously injured, he said.

Rabeh said the gunman was from a nearby town in the Yvelines area, where the shooting took place. He said the man fired a “number of shots” and was targeting pedestrians “systematically.” He shot at vehicles and a health center and wanted to go on a rampage, the mayor said.

“It’s a miracle that we don’t have more victims,” Rabeh said.

Nicolas Dainville, the mayor of La Verrière, said it appeared that the gunman at some point got out of his car to shoot two men ages 29 and 48. The gunman then went down a street, where he told a passerby, “You’re lucky.” He went on to shoot a 12-year-old girl, Dainville told the CNEWS network.

“Deep emotion following the shooting attack that occurred in Trappes and La Verrière,” President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X. “In this terrible ordeal, the Nation stands by their side.”

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, described the shooting as a “barbaric act” on X and said that the people responsible should be severely punished.

The shooting took place as France is already reeling from violent lootings and riots last weekend after student protests devolved into widespread destruction.