This Is Beirut 2024-06-30 22:27 - Reading : 6 minute(s)
Jordan Bardella, 28 years old and ever closer to Matignon since the National Rally (RN)'s success in the first round of legislative elections, has established himself as the poster child and embodiment of LePenism without even bearing the name. Since the dissolution announcement, he has tried his hand at three-piece suits, whose austerity should ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-30 21:07 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
France's far right won the first round of pivotal legislative elections on Sunday with the centrist forces of President Emmanuel Macron coming in only third behind the left after the highest turnout in over four decades, estimates said. But it remained unclear if the far-right National Rally (RN) party of Marine Le Pen would win an absolute ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-30 19:48 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
Representatives of Afghanistan's Taliban government began meetings on Sunday with United Nations officials, as they attended talks in Doha with special envoys to the Central Asian country for the first time, a UN spokesperson said. The two-day, UN-hosted meeting in Qatar is the third of its kind in the gas-rich emirate in just over a year, but ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-30 18:45 - Reading : less than a minute
Turnout in France's snap parliamentary elections on Sunday was 59.39% at 5:00 PM (1500 GMT), the Interior Ministry said, some 20 points higher than at the same stage in the last such polls in 2022. This would equate to a final turnout of 67.5-69.7% when polling stations close this evening, according to projections by several polling ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-30 15:50 - Reading : 1 minute(s)
The provisional results of the first round of the French legislative elections in Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana have been released. They place the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) in the lead in these overseas departments, despite a breakthrough by the Rassemblement National (RN). In Martinique, no candidate managed to secure an absolute ...
Michel Touma 2024-06-30 14:12 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
An election with little strategic significance, but undeniable symbolic importance... The presidential election held in Iran on Friday to choose a successor to Ebrahim Raisi, who died on May 19 in a helicopter crash while returning from Azerbaijan, has led to a runoff between the moderate reformist candidate, Massoud Pezeshkian, and the ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-30 11:41 - Reading : 2 minute(s)
Blackouts are becoming longer and more frequent in Egypt, as a growing energy and economic crisis pushes the Egyptian government to intensify "load shedding." At least once a day, the hum of every fan, air conditioner and fridge across Egypt goes quiet. The lights go out and an expletive is muttered or hurled into the quickly-heating air. Lifts ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-29 22:14 - Reading : less than a minute
Police in three countries searched the offices of French defense company Thales this week over suspected corruption involving arms sales abroad, notably to Brazil, a judicial source said Saturday. Officers in France, the Netherlands and Spain carried out the searches between Wednesday and Friday, the source told AFP, confirming a report from ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-29 17:53 - Reading : 2 minute(s)
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen was in Cairo on Saturday to kick off a two-day investment conference, where deals potentially worth over $42 billion are expected to be signed. "At this conference, European companies are signing over 20 new deals... which are worth over 40 billion euros," von der Leyen said at the meeting in the ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-29 13:50 - Reading : 2 minute(s)
Ultraconservative former Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, who will face a reformist in a runoff for president, is widely recognised for his steadfast anti-Western stance. Jalili, 58, will aim to unify Iran's fragmented conservative factions in the bid for the presidency when he faces Masoud Pezeshkian next Friday. A relatively reserved ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-29 11:00 - Reading : 2 minute(s)
Iran's sole reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian and ultraconservative Saeed Jalili have qualified for a runoff presidential election after leading in the first round, an official said on Saturday. Pezeshkian got more than 10,400,000 votes and Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator, has more than 9,400,000, said Mohsen Eslami, spokesman of Iran's ...
This Is Beirut 2024-06-28 23:09 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
Voting in Iran's presidential election on Friday was extended a third time as Iranians cast their ballots in a contest marked by a lone reformist's bid to break through against a divided conservative field. Around 61 million Iranians are eligible to vote in the election called after the death of ultraconservative president Ebrahim Raisi in a ...