keating
:Updates:
François Hollande, the president of France, has put forth a plan to reduce the number of regions from 22 to 14 in 2015. This will be accomplished by merging regions: Basse-Normandie with Haute-Normandie, Champagne-Ardenne with Picardie, Alsace with Lorraine, Bourgogne with Franche-Comté, Auvergne with Rhône-Alpes, Centre and Limousin with Poitou-Charentes, and Languedoc-Roussillon with Midi-Pyrénées. A few regions remain untouched. The departments will remain for now, but their powers will be diminished and the expectation is that they will eventually fade away. One reason for the reform is to save money by cutting the territorial administrative load. The plan has been in flux for some time; the specific mergers above were announced as final on 2014-06-02.
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