Marine Le Pen won 39 seats of 577 outright in the first round on Sunday

 Thirty-nine National Rally candidates have already been elected to parliament after winning over 50 percent of first-round votes -- a tour de force by a movement that never before managed to win a parliamentary seat in the first round of voting of a two-stage election before.

They include the party's longtime leader Marine Le Pen and party vice-president Sebastien Chenu. ...

Among the losers was Communist Party leader, Fabien Roussel, who lost his seat to an RN candidate in a constituency that had been held by the Communists for over 60 years. ...

The party's [NR's] worst scores were in Paris, where all its candidates were eliminated in the first round.

More.

His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama has Europe for Europeans moment: Refugees have to go back

Well naturally. Tibet for Tibetans. Germany for Germans. Hungary for Hungarians.

Dalai Lama says 'Europe belongs to Europeans'

Asli Erdogan: Turkey has descended into fascism under President Erdogan

Quoted here:

The award-winning author [not related to the president], still traumatised by the four months she spent in an Istanbul prison, warns that Turkey's institutions are "in a state of total collapse".

"The extent of things in Turkey is like Nazi Germany. I think it is a fascist regime. It is not yet 1940s Germany, but 1930s. A crucial factor is the lack of a judicial system. Erdogan is almost omnipotent. He decides on the price of medicine, on the future of classical ballet, his family members are in charge of the economy. Opera, which he hates, is also directly tied to him. That's the nice thing about fascism, it's also pathetically funny sometimes. It's an emergency state made permanent."

Not one month in to his ambassadorship to Germany, Richard Grenell is throwing his weight around like Ernst Röhm

All of Trump's problems begin with personnel, because he picks them.

From the story here:

Richard Grenell had taken up his diplomatic posting in Berlin on May 8, and immediately irked Germany when he tweeted on the same day that German companies should stop doing business with Iran as Trump quit the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic.

He stoked further outrage over the weekend with reported comments to far-right website Breitbart of his ambition to "empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders".

Grenell also raised eyebrows with his plan to host Austria's arch-conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz -- who the US envoy describes as a "rock star", for lunch on June 13.

Thousands Of French Protest Genitally Modified Marriage

Story here:

Marc, a 60-year-old Parisian who said he was a fervent Catholic, called the government hypocritical. “They all have wives and children. So they understand perfectly well what kind of deviations would result from the approval of gay marriages.”

He was holding a sign that read “No to genitally modified marriage”.

Main Radiation Effects at Fukushima I From No. 4 Spent Fuel Cooling Pond

So says Tony Irwin of the Australian National University for France24 here:

"Reactors 5 and 6, they are now in what's called cold shutdown, and the spent fuel cooling ponds are at normal temperatures.

"They are in the sort of situation now we would like to see 1, 2, 3 and 4 in.

"There was already spent fuel in there [before No. 4 was drained and emptied last November] so there was quite a high load of spent fuel in that pond. And that has been giving the main radiation effects on site."


One presumes from that that the high heat coming off the pond kept boiling away the water during the crisis and not that an earthquake related leak in the pond kept drawing down the level.

For the first time I read in the article a concern about all the sea water being poured on the stricken reactors because it thereby becomes radioactive waste.

Where is it all going, ton after ton? To air and back to sea?

Undoubtedly.