Personne ne sait rien

(Nobody knows anything)

A short primer on international law:

Israel attacking hospitals where Hamas fighters are embedded and storing weapons and carrying out active military operations, plus a Gazan hospital being damaged by a wayward Palestinian rocket: proof of genocide.

Russia attacking a children’s cancer hospital in Kyiv with a targeted missile strike: it’s the kids’ fault for wanting to expand NATO or something HEY LOOK BEHIND YOU (runs away)

Great job with the peace mission, Mr. Orban. And Mr. Modi, your timing is absolutely impeccable.

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Remember 48 hours ago, when we all thought the far-right Rassemblement National party was poised to win the most seats - maybe even an outright majority - in the French legislature?

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the ballot box:

The champagne was on ice at the far-right National Rally's (RN) headquarters, but the celebratory mood swiftly turned to disbelief when the first projected results from Sunday's parliamentary election appeared on TV screens.

For days, Marine Le Pen had confidently predicted that her party would triumph with an outright majority and her protege Jordan Bardella would be prime minister. Instead, the National Rally was on course to come third, behind a left-wing alliance and President Emmanuel Macron's centrist bloc.

It was undone to a large extent by tactical dealmaking between centrist and leftist opponents, who pulled more than 200 candidates from three-way races to avoid splitting the anti-RN vote.

The projected result brought to a shuddering halt what had appeared to be the far right's relentless rise in France, carefully engineered by Le Pen who had sought to clean up her party's image and tap the grievances of voters angry over living costs, strained public services, and immigration.

To be sure, Le Pen and her party have suffered disappointment before, most recently her 2022 defeat to Macron in the presidential election, and have managed to bounce back more strongly than before.

But for now, the outcome was a bitter pill to swallow.

"The results are disappointing and they don't represent what French people want," said Jocelyn Cousin, 18, who had come to party HQ expecting a victory party.

The RN and its allies were kind of screwed by the first-past-the-post electoral system, winning a much larger share of the popular vote than its opponents but finishing third in the seat count.

But over 60% of French voters soundly rejected them. The French might not know what they want, but a clear majority didn’t want what Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella were selling.

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So we can sit back and relax and have a good laugh at the far-right being humiliated and declare right-wing populism dead and buried, right?