France’s left-wing New Popular Front alliance and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition thwarted a far-right victory in legislative elections on Sunday, staging one of the greatest political upsets in recent French history.The results were a major defeat for Marine Le Pen’s populist, anti-immigrant National Rally party, which had hoped that Sunday would mark the final step in its transformation from a fringe neofascist group into a mainstream political force.
Instead of ushering in France’s first far-right government since World War II, the French voters who turned out in high numbers on Sunday boosted the left and the center, which unexpectedly came in first and second, even appearing to stun some of their own lawmakers. [snip]
The left-wing alliance garnered at least 181 seats and Macron’s Together coalition got more than 160.
The far right had been comfortably ahead in the first round, with the support of 1 in 3 voters. An absolute majority of seats appeared to be in reach, and some polls had suggested that the party could end up with 200 seats more than Macron’s alliance.
But on Sunday, National Rally and its allies were third, winning 143 seats. At the party’s election night event, where jovial supporters had gathered to celebrate what they thought would be historic gains, the results were met with shocked silence. Some activists cried, observers said. [Ed.: cry more, fascists.]... (our emphasis)
Following last week's UK's election that resoundingly returned Labour to power after 14 wretched years of Tory rule, beating back the Marine Pen / Vladimir Putin fascist National Rally comes as a relief, however ephemeral considering the nature of French politics. A relief, for now, but the fascists will be back, so the French must remain vigilant.
A major Russian missile attack across Ukraine killed at least 20 people and injured more than 50 on Monday, officials said, with one missile striking a large children’s hospital in the capital, Kyiv, where emergency crews searched rubble for casualties.
The Russian barrage targeted five Ukrainian cities with more than 40 missiles of different types, hitting apartment buildings and public infrastructure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a social media post.
Strikes in Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, killed 10 people and injured 37, in what the head of city administration, Oleksandr Vilkul, said was a massive missile attack.
At the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv, rescuers were searching for people under the rubble of a partially collapsed wing of the facility, Zelenskyy said, adding that the number of casualties was not yet known.
Vsevolod Dorofieiev, the senior instructor of a volunteer medical unit, said some people had died but he did not say how many or whether they were children or adults.
On social media, Zelenskyy said: “It is very important that the world should not be silent about it now and that everyone should see what Russia is and what it is doing.”...
We can't afford to look away from what war criminal Putin is doing. His ambitions to fracture the Western Alliance took a hit with the results of the French election, but the US and its NATO allies need to beef up their support for Ukraine's fight for freedom and against this murderous fascism.
Hurricane Beryl is advancing inland on Monday morning in Southeast Texas and is bringing “extreme rainfall rates and flash flooding” to populated areas such as the Houston and Galveston metro areas.
“Extremely heavy rainfall will move northward this morning with areas of flash flooding likely,” according to the Weather Prediction Center.
“This will include areas of considerable to severe urban flash flooding with locally life-threatening impacts expected.”
Extreme rainfall rates of two to four inches per hour are possible, especially where the inner eyewall or other organized bands east of the storm’s center pass through. Rainfall totals of four to eight inches are expected through midday.
Hopefully, people who were told to evacuate did so.
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