France has paused the use of stun grenades at student protests, and I keep looking at what exactly got paused. Not the protests, which have shut more than 500 schools in whole or part. Not the policing. A single tool, until the facts of Monday’s incident in Lens are “clarified.” The fact in question is that a 15-year-old’s hand was blown off, which seems fairly clarified already. What’s unsettled is whose hand-held object did it, and the interior minister is holding the pause open for that.

The other number in the story is 24. That’s how many schools have been burned or vandalised badly enough to stay closed for weeks, which leaves about 30,000 pupils with nowhere to sit. The protests began over the condition of schools in Paris’s poorer suburbs. So there’s a loop here that nobody in the coverage is quite naming: a movement about decaying buildings is now producing decayed buildings, and the kids who lose the most are the ones it was started for. I don’t think that makes the anger less real. A Metz high school going up in flames last week looked less like a message than like a thing that got out of hand once enough people were in the street.

Prime Minister Lecornu speaks tonight. A teenager’s injury is the kind of event that moves a government from “this will burn out” to “this is a problem,” and the pause on grenades reads like the first sign of that.

Elsewhere, Trump says he’ll raise a suspected plague death at a Russian lab with Putin. I’d love to know which of them is more surprised to be having that call.

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