Contents this week: “Cocaine at the wheel, the new scourge”; “Who goes piano goes lontano”; “The Damned of Cobalt”; “The broken choirs”.
After the accident caused by Pierre Palmade, investigate these more and more drug addicts on our roads. Users of cocaine and other narcotics take the wheel without realizing the risks they run and the danger they represent for other motorists. Result, sometimes shattered lives and opposite, for these speeders, convictions often considered far too light by the victims. In 2021, in France, nearly 600 people would have lost their lives as a result of accidents involving a driver under narcotics.
A report by Anaïs Bard, Olivier Sibille, Juliette Jonas, Julien Fouchet, Lila Bellili and Marielle Krouk.
Who goes piano goes lontano
Her life, she”has always lived it in music“. Colette Maze, born June 16, 1914, is a pianist. For her, “everything is rhythm“, the music “it’s a world of images, of beauty, of colors” And “a hand is like a brush, each finger must have its poetry“. She discovered the piano when she was very young, preferred it to her dolls and never stopped playing. His instrument him “gave tenderness“, perhaps the one that was missing in this child whose mother “was tough and only knew how to slap“.
A graduate of the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, Colette Maze took lessons from Pascal Rogé, then became a piano teacher and practiced all her life. At 108, she still practices every day for four to five hours on her Steinway, chosen for her “good sound“. The secret to her longevity is, she says, “lots of gymnastics, dancing and field hockey“, because she needs to feel the vigor of her body, of her muscles. She affirms it: with the music, “you can stay young in your head, in your heart… I’m still alive with the piano“.
A report by Violaine Vermot-Gaud, Claire-Marie Denis, Luis Marques, Benoît Sauvage, Mathilde Rougeron and Marie Bouchet.
The Cobalt Damned
The scene is chilling: Hervé, a young Congolese, goes down every day into a narrow well, which he dug himself, in search of cobalt. This ore is essential for the energy transition: it is used, among other things, for the manufacture of electric batteries. “Special Envoy” accompanied one of these “damned cobalt” working 20 meters underground in an artisanal mine, which fails to collapse at any time and where oxygen is scarce. With the strength of the arms, each month, Hervé brings up a ton of cobalt. Sale price: 1,100 euros. What slightly improve his daily life and that of his family, but not enough to get out of poverty. A paradox when you think that the Democratic Republic of Congo holds the largest cobalt reserve in the world.
The country could have used this providential windfall to finally bring its population out of underdevelopment. Yet the vast majority of Congolese barely benefit from this resource. The authorities have sold the main mines to foreign companies, mostly Chinese. Only crumbs of cobalt remain for the Congolese, who see, before their eyes, the natural wealth of their country confiscated by other nations.
A report by Julien Fouchet, David Kalinga and Marielle Krouk.
The broken choirs
It is a muffled world, often bourgeois, where speech is finally free: that of children’s choirs. The “Special Envoy” teams, in partnership with the daily The Parisian, reveal several sexual abuses that would have been committed on young singers by choir directors, in particular within the choir school of Moineaux du Val-de-Marne, in the Paris suburbs. An unprecedented investigation, with rare testimonies and archives that show that one of these choir leaders could have gone from choir to choir thanks to the complicit silence of several employers.
A report by Brice Lambert, Grégory Roudier and Vincent Fajeau, for TV Presse Productions.
The editorial staff of “Special Envoy” invites you to comment on the program on its Facebook page or on Twitter with the hashtag #Correspondent.
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