logo

Of these 27 were less than 25 years old - the equivalent of an entire school class as Isabelle Massin the

Posted by admin   ·     ·   Jump to comments

Of these, 27 were less than 25 years old - the equivalent of an "entire school class", as Isabelle Massin, the junior minister in charge of road safety, pointed out. Excessive drink and tiredness, after New Year parties extending until dawn, are believed to be to blame for many of the deaths.The causes of the sharp rise in road victims last year are more difficult to fathom. Experts blamed failure by police and gendarmerie to enforce speed limits and tougher drink-driving laws. They also suggested the proliferation of safety equipment, such as air-bags, was giving people a false sense of security. Ms Massin praised one local initiative in the Bordeaux area: in future, police will close down any nightclub that has a customer killed in a drink-related road accident. These statistics were tragically illuminated by a disastrous New Year's Day in France.

In the first 24 hours of 1999, 46 people were killed on the roads, more than double last year's figure. In 1997 the number of people killed in road accidents in France fell below 8,000 for the first time, causing the authorities to congratulate themselves on the effectiveness of new safety laws, on drink-driving in particular. Inexplicably, road deaths leapt again in 1998, when it is estimated that 8,450 people died - the highest figure for five years (and roughly twice as many as the annual average in Britain). The number of road deaths in France rose dramatically last year after nine years of steady decline. Applicants would also face a test of knowledge of Germany's parliamentary democracy.. A MURDEROUS New Year on the French roads has drawn attention to a depressing and puzzling statistic. Children aged 10 or over not conversant in German would not be admitted.

Bavaria has also lobbied strongly on behalf of nationalistic exile groups of Germans driven out of Eastern Europe after the Second World War.The CSU policy paper, due to be published tomorrow, proposes to clamp down on immigrants even further New arrivals would face language tests. "The people feel that the limits of our identity as Germans are bursting open."Mr Stoiber's government in Munich has done much to protect German identity in the past. Last autumn, it "sent home" a 14-year-old thug to Turkey, even though the boy had been born and brought up in Germany by his Turkish parents. Mr Stoiber fears the new Germans will breed and attract "hundreds of thousands" of relatives from their previous homelands "The German people don't want that," he said. "It's all about mobilising prejudices," said Ottmar Schreiner, party manager of the Social Democrats.Edmund Stoiber, the Bavarian Prime Minister, likened the foreign peril to the "threat posed to national security by the Red Army Faction", the urban terrorist group in the 1970s and 1980s.

readers comments

Comments are closed.

NBA

NBA

MLB

MLB

NFL

NFL

NHL

NHL

WWE

WWE

Your sideblock text goes here