France’s hard-left veteran Jean-Luc Melenchon said that president Emmanuel Macron’s party was “beaten and defeated” on Sunday after his new left-wing alliance made a strong showing in the first round of parliamentary elections.
Macron is not guaranteed to win an absolute majority in parliament, exit polls showed.
Macron’s coalition bloc was expected to win between 270-310 parliament seats – with the mark for an outright majority set at 289 seats – on June 19, according to an Elabe projection showed, while the left was seen getting 170-220 seats, a big increase from 2017.
Initial projections by Elabe put the hard-left veteran Jean-Luc Melenchon’s NUPES bloc neck-and-neck with Macron’s Ensemble! alliance in the first round, with 26.20% and 25.8% respectively.
With the two-round system, which is applied to 577 constituencies across the country, the popular vote in the first round is not a good indication of who will eventually win a majority on June 19, when the second round is held.
“In view of this result, and the extraordinary opportunity it offers for our personal lives and the destiny of the common homeland, I call on our people to defeat them next Sunday. Of course, to definitively reject the disastrous politics of the majority, of Macron,” Melenchon told supporters after the vote.
At stake is Macron’s ability to pass his reform agenda, including a pension reform he says is essential to restore order to public finances. His opponents on the left are pushing to cut the pension age and launch a big-spending drive.
The concept is to replicate the phenomenon of morning dew”, said Kumulus co-founder, Iheb Triki, while filling a paper cup with water coming out of a machine he said can help find solutions to the problem of water scarcity in Tunisia.
“So what happens?”, Triki asked while demonstrating the way his machine works. “We see that the air enters from here and passes through the first air filter to clean it from pollutants, it then goes into the machine to cool down the water, so we replicate dew.”
The first Kumulus-1 machine was set up in an elementary school in the remote town of El Bayadha, near the Algerian border, that lacks proper access to drinking water, according to the school’s principal, Hasan Aoubdi.
The machine has been set up in the school but the startup is still waiting for approval from the government before starting to use it, according to Triki.
The costs of setting up the first machine in the El Bayadha school were covered by Orange telecommunication company.
Triki hopes that the startup will develop and provide not only Tunisia but the wider region with solutions to produce drinking water in times of water scarcity.
According to the startup’s website, the Kumulus-1 machine, which they call an Atmospheric Water Generator, can produce between 20 and 30 litres of drinking water per day.
According to World Bank data, 21% of Tunisians, 20% of Moroccans and 28% of Algerians did not have access to safely managed drinking water in 2020.
Iran and Venezuela signed a 20-year cooperation plan in Tehran on Saturday as the two countries, among the world’s top oil producers, grapple with U.S. sanctions that are crippling their exports.
The signing ceremony was overseen by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro and took place at the Saadabad Palace in north Tehran.
The plan includes cooperation in the fields of oil, petrochemicals, defence, agriculture, tourism, and culture and was signed by foreign ministers Hossein Amirabdollahian and Venezuela’s Carlos Faria.
It also includes repair of Venezuelan refineries and the export of technical and engineering services.
“Venezuela has shown exemplary resistance against sanctions and threats from enemies and Imperialists,” Iran’s Raisi said. “The 20-year cooperation document is testimony to the will of the two countries to develop ties in specific fields.”
“Sanctions and threats against the Iranian nation over the past 40 plus years have been numerous, but the Iranian nation has decided to turn these sanctions into an opportunity for the country’s progress,” he said.
Maduro, who arrived in Tehran on Friday (June 10), is on a two-day visit and heads a high-ranking political and economic delegation. Earlier, he visited Turkey and Algeria.
Maduro said through an interpreter that a weekly flight from Caracas to Tehran would begin on July 18.
Iran and Venezuela have expanded cooperation since 2020, particularly in energy projects and oil swaps.
Defying U.S. pressures, Iran has sent several cargos of fuel to Venezuela and helped in refinery repairs. Last month, Venezuela began importing Iranian heavy crude, widening a swap agreement signed last year to exchange Iranian condensate for Venezuelan heavy crude.
In May, Iran’s state-owned National Iranian Oil Engineering and Construction Co signed a contract worth about 110 million euros to repair Venezuela’s smaller 146,000 barrel-per-day refinery.
That agreement was sealed after recent negotiations attended by Iranian Oil Minister Javad Owji, who was in Venezuela early last month.
Police in northwest Idaho rounded up more than two dozen members of a white nationalist group on Saturday before charging them with planning to stage a riot near a LGBTQ pride event.
The video showed about 20 men kneeling beside the truck with their hands bound, wearing similar khaki pants, blue shirts, white masks, and baseball caps.
Lee White, police chief in the city of Coeur D’Alene, told reporters that 31 members of Patriot Front face misdemeanor charges of conspiracy to riot and additional charges could come later.
A local resident spotted the men, wearing white masks and carrying shields, getting into a U-Haul truck and called police, telling the emergency dispatcher it “looked like a little army,” according to White.
Police pulled the truck over about 10 minutes after the call.
Police recovered at least one smoke grenade and documents that included an “operations plan” from the truck, plus shields and shin guards.
The men come from at least 11 states, White said, including Texas, Colorado and Virginia.
Patriot Front formed in the aftermath of the 2017 white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when it broke off from another extremist organization, Vanguard America, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.
Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Sao Paulo on Saturday to demand the decriminalisation of cannabis in Brazil.
The event organised by the “Marcha da Maconha” (March for the Marijuana) Movement returns this year after a two-year wait due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The demonstrators gathered outside Sao Paulo´s Museum of Art calling for a definitive truce on the war on drugs and for the decriminalization of the possession, cultivation, and consumption of medical and recreational cannabis.
“It’s not fair for a child to have 80 seizures a day and not have access to the treatment because the family can’t pay for the treatment (with Cannabidiol) they don’t have access to it,” said Barbara Gael, a demonstrator attending the march.
In Brazil, the growing and possession of small amounts of marijuana and other drugs were decriminalized in 2006 but buying and selling remain illegal.
Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber has shocked fans with a graphic video revealing the facial paralysis that forced him to cancel three concerts earlier this week.
The singer told fans via Instagram that he had been diagnosed with the rare Ramsay Hunt syndrome.
The 28-year-old pop star posted a three-minute video explaining the diagnosis. The shocking footage showed Bieber unable to move the right side of his face, his right eye unblinking, as he greeted his fans.
“Hey everyone, Justin here, I wanted to update you guys on what’s been going on,” he said.
“Obviously as you can probably see with my face. I have this syndrome called Ramsay Hunt syndrome and it is from this virus that attacks the nerves in my ear, my facial nerves and has caused my face to have paralysis,” said the singer, who boasts over 530 million social media followers.
“As you can see this eye is not blinking. I can’t smile on this side of my face … So, there’s full paralysis on this side of my face,” the singer told his fans in the video.
The syndrome is caused by a shingles outbreak that affects the facial nerves. Loss of hearing and facial paralysis associated with the syndrome are usually temporary, though they can be permanent in some cases, according to medical experts.
In his update posted on his Instagram Story, the singer wrote: “Been getting progressively harder to eat which has been extremely frustrating, please pray for me. Can’t believe I’m saying this. I’ve done everything to get better but my sickness is getting worse.”
On Tuesday, Bieber announced that he was postponing the “next few shows” of his seven-leg, 130-date Justice World Tour due to a “non-Covid related illness”.
Bieber is scheduled to perform in Bangkok on November 6 as part of a worldwide tour to promote his latest albums “Changes” and “Justice”, released in 2020 and 2021.
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