Le Pen first had success in an ex-mining town. Her message there is now winning over French society

Le Pen implanted herself in the northern town of Henin-Beaumont in the early 2000s. (REUTERS)
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Updated 02 July 2024
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Le Pen first had success in an ex-mining town. Her message there is now winning over French society

  • Le Pen easily won her own race for a parliamentary seat in the first-round voting Sunday
  • Overall, her National Rally and its allies won a third of the nationwide vote

HENIN-BEAUMONT, France: In the former mining town at the heart of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s political strategy, her party’s electoral success Sunday came as no surprise to hundreds of supporters who gathered to see her victory speech. The same promises to bring back good jobs and upend the political elite that long resonated here have found a national audience.
Le Pen implanted herself in the northern town of Henin-Beaumont in the early 2000s, hoping to win over disenchanted voters feeling left behind by the new economy and growing tired of decades of Socialist local governance. It was the start of a decade-long effort to detoxify her anti-immigration National Rally and win over voters from across French society.
Several waves of industrial shutdowns have left unemployment levels above the national average, and 60 percent of the population earns so little it does not need to pay tax, according to data from France’s national statistics agency, INSEE. The construction of a mammoth shopping center on Henin-Beaumont’s outskirts emptied out the town and dozens of shops, hairdressers and restaurants remain empty.
In 2013, the town’s Socialist mayor, Gérard Dalongeville, was sentenced to four years in prison and a 50,000-euro ($53,000) fine for embezzlement of public funds.
“There was a winning cocktail,” including the mayor’s corruption and the closure of industrial plants, said Edouard Mills-Affif, a filmmaker who has done two documentaries on Henin-Beaumont and the rise of its far-right mayor, Steeve Briois.
Le Pen easily won her own race for a parliamentary seat in the first-round voting Sunday — garnering more than 64 percent of the votes in the town. Since she won more than 50 percent of the vote, she won’t have to compete in a second round on July 7.
Overall, her National Rally and its allies won a third of the nationwide vote, official results showed, ahead of leftist coalition New Popular Front and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party. Sunday’s results provide an overall picture of how each camp fared, but they do not indicate how many seats the groups will get in the end.
Still, for the first time since World War II, a majority in Parliament for a party like Le Pen’s is within reach.
Although France has some of the highest standards of living in the world, lower unemployment than it’s had in decades and a relatively low crime rate compared to its peers, discontent has simmered in some parts in the post-industrial era. But for many National Rally voters, Sunday’s victory is a long-coming revenge on a political class that they see as out of touch with everyday people and their concerns, such as crime, purchasing power and immigration.
“The French have almost wiped out the ‘Macronist’ bloc,” a victorious Le Pen told supporters in Henin-Beaumont. The results, Le Pen added, showed voters’ “willingness to turn the page after seven years of contemptuous and corrosive power.”
Henin-Beaumont is where Le Pen began her efforts to turn her father’s party from political pariah to a voter-friendly alternative — a strategy she then sought to replicate on the national level when she took the reins of the party in 2012.
Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, ran a fringe political party, which too often relied on antisemitism and racism to provoke and draw attention, according to Stanford University professor Cecile Alduy.
“Since (Marine) has been at the helm of the party, she has tried to smooth out the rhetoric, embrace a kind of democratic rhetoric,” said Alduy. “Since 2012, it’s been a constant rise, in the ballot box and in the polls.”
Le Pen’s father, now 96, was “a little too extreme” for Magali Quere, born and raised in the town.
“But the National Rally does not scare me,” said Quere, 54, who runs a second-hand furniture shop. “It scared me 30 years ago, but not anymore.”
And it’s not just voters, Alduy said. “Other parties on the right have started to copy her vocabulary or arguments or themes, mainly around immigration and insecurity,” she explained, including Macron and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
“It normalizes even more what they (the National Rally) have to offer,” she said.
Briois, Henin-Beaumont’s mayor, was elected in 2014 and reelected for a second term in 2020 with 74 percent of the votes. He remains a close ally of Marine Le Pen and has been heralded as a model for other National Rally candidates.
A former salesman, his style was a contrast with his predecessors’. He was everywhere. “He associated marketing and advertising techniques with the oldest practices of political action, which is to be at the markets, to go door to door,” said Mills-Affif, the filmmaker who followed him for months on the campaign trail.
Briois encouraged dutiful local residents to inform him of any acts of misconduct or vandalism, taking pictures when they could, that he would then use in his campaigns.
Many residents in Henin-Beaumont say it’s looking better now than it had in a long time. Briois seems to have set aside some of his most extreme projects, such as building a coalition of mayors who are against migrants or a decree he passed to ban begging in the town center that critics said unfairly targeted the Roma population.
Instead, the town renovated the church and the city hall, improved roads, and sent police to regularly patrol the streets, giving locals a sense of security.
Murielle Busine, 57, who described herself as anti-National Rally, praised the work done by Briois. “I will not go as far as voting for them, but I cannot deny everything he has done for the city, and that he is very accessible,” Busine said. “When there’s a problem, he tries to fix it.”
Now there is Jordan Bardella, the party president and Le Pen’s 28-year-old protégé with a huge TikTok following.
“People often say it’s the old people who vote National Rally. Bardella brings the youthful momentum that was missing,” said 22 year-old student Ewan Vandevraye, who attended the event in Henin-Beaumont from Lille, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) away, with three friends.
On Sunday night, supporters were not just shouting “Marine! Marine!” Men, women and youth alike also chanted Bardella’s name.
If the National Rally wins an absolute majority on July 7, Bardella will become France’s youngest-ever prime minister. Le Pen has her eyes on a bigger prize: the presidency in 2027.


‘Existential hour’ for Palestine at 30-country conference in Colombia

Updated 59 min 26 sec ago
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‘Existential hour’ for Palestine at 30-country conference in Colombia

  • UN special rapporteur: ‘The time has come to act in pursuit of justice and peace’
  • Participants will lay groundwork for implementing UNGA motion calling for end to occupation

LONDON: A 30-country conference aimed at ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine is one of the most significant political developments of the past 20 months, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has said.

The two-day event starts on Tuesday in the Colombian capital Bogota, and will be attended by representatives from countries including China, Spain and Qatar.

Albanese will announce that the conference comes at “an existential hour,” The Guardian reported on Tuesday.

Participating countries will use the event to lay the groundwork for implementing a UN General Assembly motion calling on member states to pressure Israel into ending its illegal occupation of Palestine.

The motion included a deadline of September for putting into action the International Court of Justice’s 2024 opinion that found Israel’s occupation of Palestine to be unlawful.

The court’s advisory opinion last July called on Israel to end its occupation “as rapidly as possible.”

UN member states also have an obligation “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territory,” it found.

Conference host Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s president, said the meeting will demonstrate a global will to move from condemnation to collective action against Israel.

In an article for The Guardian last week, he said: “We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict, or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics.”

The Hague Group behind the conference was initially established by Colombia and South Africa, but now includes Spain, Qatar, Indonesia, Algeria and Brazil.

The group met in January at a nine-country conference and agreed to implement the ICJ’s provisional measures.

Albanese will tell the Bogota meeting: “For too long, international law has been treated as optional — applied selectively to those perceived as weak, ignored by those acting as the powerful. This double standard has eroded the very foundations of the legal order. That era must end.

“The world will remember what we, states and individuals, did in this moment — whether we recoiled in fear or rose in defense of human dignity.

“Here in Bogota, a growing number of states have the opportunity to break the silence and revert to a path of legality by finally saying: enough. Enough impunity. Enough empty rhetoric. Enough exceptionalism. Enough complicity.

“The time has come to act in pursuit of justice and peace — grounded in rights and freedoms for all, and not mere privileges for some, at the expense of the annihilation of others.”


Some airlines checking Boeing fuel switches after Air India crash

Updated 15 July 2025
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Some airlines checking Boeing fuel switches after Air India crash

  • Precautionary moves by India, South Korea and some airlines in other countries
  • Some airlines around the world said they had been checking relevant switches since 2018

NEW DELHI: India on Monday ordered its airlines to examine fuel switches on several Boeing models, while South Korea said it would order a similar measure, as scrutiny intensified of fuel switch locks at the center of an investigation into a deadly Air India crash.

The precautionary moves by India, South Korea and some airlines in other countries came despite the planemaker and the US Federal Aviation Administration telling airlines and regulators in recent days that the fuel switch locks on Boeing jets are safe.

The locks have come under scrutiny following last month’s crash of an Air India jet, which killed 260 people.

A preliminary report found that the switches had almost simultaneously flipped from run position to cutoff shortly after takeoff. One pilot was heard on the cockpit voice recorder asking the other why he cut off the fuel. “The other pilot responded that he did not do so,” the report said.

The report noted a 2018 advisory from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which recommended, but did not mandate, operators of several Boeing models including the 787 to inspect the locking feature of fuel cutoff switches to ensure they could not be moved accidentally.

India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation said it had issued an order to investigate locks on several Boeing models including 787s and 737s, after several Indian and international airlines began making their own inspections of fuel switches.

The regulator oversees the world’s third-largest and fastest-growing aviation market. Boeing planes are used by three of the country’s four largest airlines.

Precautionary checks

Some airlines around the world said they had been checking relevant switches since 2018 in accordance with the FAA advisory, including Australia’s Qantas Airways and Japan’s ANA.

Others said they had been making additional or new checks since the release of the preliminary report into the Air India crash.

Singapore Airlines said on Tuesday that precautionary checks on the fuel switches of its 787 fleet, including planes used by its low-cost subsidiary Scoot, confirmed all were functioning properly.

A spokesperson for the South Korean transport ministry said checks there would be in line with the 2018 advisory from the FAA, but did not give a timeline for them.

Flag carrier Korean Air Lines said on Tuesday it had proactively begun inspecting fuel control switches and would implement any additional requirements the transport ministry may have.

Japan Airlines said it was conducting inspections in accordance with the 2018 advisory.

Boeing referred Reuters’ questions to the FAA, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the weekend, Air India Group started checking the locking mechanism on the fuel switches of its 787 and 737 fleets and has discovered no problems yet, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday.

About half the group’s 787s have been inspected and nearly all its 737s, the source added, speaking on condition of anonymity. Inspections were set to be completed in the next day or two.

The Air India crash preliminary report said the airline had not carried out the FAA’s suggested inspections as the FAA’s 2018 advisory was not a mandate.

But it also said maintenance records showed that the throttle control module, which includes the fuel switches, was replaced in 2019 and 2023 on the plane involved in the crash.

In an internal memo on Monday, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson said the preliminary report found no mechanical or maintenance faults and that all required maintenance had been carried out.


Indonesia rescues 11 who swam for hours to survive boat capsize

Updated 15 July 2025
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Indonesia rescues 11 who swam for hours to survive boat capsize

  • Two boats and dozens of rescuers hunted for those missing after the boat with 18 aboard overturned off the Mentawai Islands in the province of West Sumatra

JAKARTA: Indonesian rescuers found alive on Tuesday 11 people missing at sea who had survived a boat capsize in bad weather by swimming for at least six hours to the nearest island, officials said.

Two boats and dozens of rescuers hunted for those missing after the boat with 18 aboard overturned off the Mentawai Islands in the province of West Sumatra at about 11 a.m. on Monday, regional officials said.

“It was raining hard when the incident happened,” island official Rinto Wardana said. “Some of the passengers managed to swim and reach the nearest island.”

Seven had been rescued earlier, Wardana added. Ten of those on board were local government officials on a business trip to the town of Tuapejat, the boat’s destination when it left Sikakap, another small town in the Mentawai Islands.

The Mentawai Islands consist of four main islands and many smaller ones.

Boats and ferries are a regular mode of transport in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, where accidents are caused by bad weather and lax safety standards that often allow vessels to be overloaded.

When a ferry sank this month near the tourist resort island of Bali with 65 aboard, 30 passengers survived, while 18 died and 17 went missing.


Bangladesh struggles to contain the fallout of an uprising that toppled its leader last year

Updated 15 July 2025
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Bangladesh struggles to contain the fallout of an uprising that toppled its leader last year

  • One year after Hasina’s ouster, interim government faces growing unrest, delayed reforms, political fragmentation
  • Rights concerns remain a major issue, conservative religious factions gain ground and Yunus resists calls for early elections

DHAKA: Bangladesh was on the cusp of charting a new beginning last year after its former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was removed from power in a student-led uprising, ending her 15-year rule and forcing her to flee to India.

As the head of a new interim government, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus promised to hold a credible election to return to democracy, initiate electoral and constitutional reforms and restore peace on the streets after hundreds were killed in weeks of violence that began on July 15, 2024.

A year later, the Yunus-led administration has struggled to contain the fallout of the uprising. Bangladesh finds itself mired in a growing political uncertainty, religious polarization and a challenging law-and-order situation.

Here’s what to know about Bangladesh a year after the protests that toppled Hasina.

Chaotic political landscape

Uncertainty about the future of democracy looms large in Bangladesh.

The student protesters who toppled Hasina formed a new political party, promising to break the overwhelming influence of two major dynastic political parties — the Bangladesh Nationalists Party, or BNP, and Hasina’s Awami League.

But the party’s opponents have accused it of being close to the Yunus-led administration and creating chaos for political mileage by using state institutions.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s political landscape has further fragmented after the country’s largest Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, returned to politics more than a decade after it was suppressed by Hasina’s government.

Aligned with the student-led party, it’s trying to fill the vacuum left by the Awami League, which was banned in May. Its leader, Hasina, is facing trial for crimes against humanity. The strength of Jamaat-e-Islami, which opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, is unknown.

Both BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami party are now at loggerheads over establishing supremacy within the administration and judiciary, and even university campuses.

They are also differing over the timing of a new parliamentary election. Yunus has announced that the polls would be held in April next year, but poor law and order situation and a lack of clear-cut political consensus over it have created confusion. The chief of Bangladesh’s military also wanted an election in December this year — a stance Yunus didn’t like.

“Post-revolution honeymoons often don’t last long, and Bangladesh is no exception,” says Michael Kugelman, a Washington-based South Asia analyst and senior fellow of Asia Pacific Foundation. “The interim government faced massive expectations to restore democracy and prosperity. But this is especially difficult to do as an unelected government without a public mandate.”

Yunus wants reforms before election

Yunus has delayed an election because he wants reforms — from changes to the constitution and elections to the judiciary and police. Discussions with political parties, except Hasina’s Awami League, are ongoing.

Some of the reforms include putting a limit on how many times a person can become the prime minister, introduction of a two-tier parliament, and appointment of a chief justice.

There appears to be little consensus over some basic reforms. While both the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami parties have agreed to some of them with conditions, other proposals for basic constitutional reforms have become a sticking point.

The Jamaat-e-Islami also wants to give the interim government more time to complete reforms before heading into polls, while BNP has been calling for an early election. The student-led party mostly follows the pattern of the Jamaat-e-Islami party.

Kugelman says the issue of reforms was meant to unite the country, but has instead become a flashpoint.

“There’s a divide between those that want to see through reforms and give them more time, and those that feel it’s time to wrap things up and focus on elections,” he says.

Human rights and the rise of Islamists

Human rights in Bangladesh have remained a serious concern under Yunus.

Minority groups, especially Hindus, have blamed his administration for failing to protect them adequately. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council says minority Hindus and others have been targeted in hundreds of attacks over the last year. Hasina’s party has also blamed the interim government for arresting tens of thousands of its supporters.

The Yunus-led administration denies these allegations.

Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, says while the interim government has stopped enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions that had occurred under the Hasina government, “there has been little progress on lasting security sector reforms or to deliver on the pledge to create robust, independent institutions.”

Meanwhile, Islamist factions — some of whom have proposed changes to women’s rights and demanded introduction of Sharia law — are vying for power. Many of them are planning to build alliances with bigger parties like the BNP or the Jamaat-e-Islami.

Such factions have historically struggled to gain significant electoral support despite Bangladesh being a Muslim majority, and their rise is expected to further fragment the country’s political landscape.

Diplomatic pivot and balancing with global powers

During Hasina’s 15-year rule, Bangladesh was India’s closest partner in South Asia. After her ouster, the Yunus-led administration has moved closer to China, which is India’s main rival in the region.

Yunus’ first state visit was to China in March, a trip that saw him secure investments, loans and grants. On the other hand, India is angered by the ousting of its old ally Hasina and hasn’t responded to Dhaka’s requests to extradite her. India stopped issuing visas to Bangladeshis following Hasina’s fall.

Globally, Yunus seems to have strong backing from the West and the United Nations, and it appears Bangladesh will continue its foreign policy, which has long tried to find a balance between multiple foreign powers.

But Kugelman says the country’s biggest challenge may be the “Trump factor.”

In January, the Trump administration suspended USAID funds to Bangladesh, which had sought significant levels of US support during a critical rebuild period post Hasina’s ouster.

“Dhaka must now reframe its relations with an unconventional US administration that will largely view Bangladesh through a commercial lens,” Kugelman says.


Russia says it destroys 55 Ukrainian drones overnight, several people injured

Updated 15 July 2025
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Russia says it destroys 55 Ukrainian drones overnight, several people injured

  • Several apartments in multi-story buildings in the city of Voronezh that is the administrative center of the broader Voronezh region were damaged
  • Additionally, several commercial facilities throughout the region were damaged by falling drone debris

Several people were injured and houses and non-residential buildings were damaged as a result of Ukraine’s overnight drone attack on the neighboring Russia’s southwestern regions of Lipetsk and Voronezh, regional governors said on Tuesday.

Russia’s air defense units destroyed 12 drones over the Voronezh region that borders Ukraine, Governor Alexander Gusev said on the Telegram messaging app.

“Unfortunately, there were injuries,” Gusev said. “In central Voronezh, several people sustained minor injuries due to debris from a downed UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles).”

Several apartments in multi-story buildings in the city of Voronezh that is the administrative center of the broader Voronezh region were damaged, as well as houses in the suburbs, Gusev said.

Additionally, several commercial facilities throughout the region were damaged by falling drone debris, he said, without providing further details.

In the city of Yelets in the Lipetsk region a drone crashed in an industrial zone, regional governor Igor Artamonov said on Telegram.

“One person was injured and is receiving all necessary medical assistance,” Artamonov said.

The Russian defense ministry said on Telegram that its units destroyed 55 Ukrainian drones overnight over five Russian regions and the Black Sea, including three over the Lipetsk region.

The full extent of damage from the attacks was not immediately known. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine about the attack.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in their strikes during the war that Russia launched against Ukraine more than three years ago. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.

Ukraine has launched multiple air strikes on Lipetsk, a strategically important region with an air base that is the chief training center for the Russian Aerospace Forces.