SpaceX Launches Polaris Dawn Mission in Daring Bid for First Private Spacewalk

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A daredevil billionaire rocketed back into orbit Tuesday, aiming to perform the first private spacewalk and venture farther than anyone since NASA’s Apollo moonshots.

Unlike his previous chartered flight, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman shared the cost with SpaceX this time around, which included developing and testing brand new spacesuits to see how they’ll hold up in the harsh vacuum.

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Read More: The Polaris Dawn Mission Opens a New Chapter in Private Space Flight

If all goes as planned, it will be the first time private citizens conduct a spacewalk, but they won’t venture away from the capsule. Considered one of the riskiest parts of spaceflight, spacewalks have been the sole realm of professional astronauts since the former Soviet Union popped open the hatch in 1965, closely followed by the U.S. Today, they are routinely done at the International Space Station.

Isaacman, along with a pair of SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, midway through the five-day flight.

But first the passengers are shooting for way beyond the International Space Station — an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), which would surpass the Earth-lapping record set during NASA’s Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon have ventured farther.

The plan is to spend 10 hours at that height — filled with extreme radiation and riddled with debris — before reducing the oval-shaped orbit by half. Even at this lower 435 miles (700 kilometers), the orbit would eclipse the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest shuttle astronauts flew.

All four wore SpaceX’s spacewalking suits because the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized for the two-hour spacewalk, exposing everyone to the dangerous environment.

Isaacman and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis will take turns briefly popping out of the hatch. They’ll test their white and black-trimmed custom suits by twisting their bodies. Both will always have a hand or foot touching the capsule or attached support structure that resembles the top of a pool ladder. There will be no dangling at the end of their 12-foot (3.6-meter) tethers and no jetpack showboating. Only NASA’s suits at the space station come equipped with jetpacks, for emergency use only.

Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX’s Anna Menon will monitor the spacewalk from inside. Like SpaceX’s previous astronaut flights, this one will end with a splashdown off the Florida coast.

“We’re sending you hugs from the ground,” Launch Director Frank Messina radioed after the crew reached orbit. “May you make history and come home safely.”

Isaacman replied: “We wouldn’t be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back at SpaceX and everyone else cheering us on.”

At a preflight news conference, Isaacman — CEO and founder of the credit card processing company Shift4 — refused to say how much he invested in the flight. “Not a chance,” he said.

SpaceX teamed up with Isaacman to pay for spacesuit development and associated costs, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president who once headed space mission operations for NASA.

“We’re really starting to push the frontiers with the private sector,” Gerstenmaier said.

It’s the first of three trips that Isaacman bought from Elon Musk 2 1/2 years ago, soon after returning from his first private SpaceX spaceflight in 2021. Isaacman bankrolled that tourist ride for an undisclosed sum, taking along contest winners and a childhood cancer survivor. The trip raised hundreds of millions for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Spacesuit development took longer than anticipated, delaying this first so-called Polaris Dawn flight until now. Training was extensive; Poteet said it rivaled anything he experienced during his Air Force flying career.

As SpaceX astronaut trainers, Gillis and Menon helped Isaacman and his previous team — as well as NASA’s professional crews — prepare for their rides.

“I wasn’t alive when humans walked on the moon. I’d certainly like my kids to see humans walking on the moon and Mars, and venturing out and exploring our solar system,” the 41-year-old Isaacman said before liftoff.

Poor weather caused a two-week delay. The crew needed favorable forecasts not only for launch, but for splashdown days later. With limited supplies and no ability to reach the space station, they had no choice but to wait for conditions to improve.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

source https://time.com/7019533/spacex-polaris-jared-isaacman/

Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America

Donald Trump’s ambivalence on abortion is back in the news because of his recent flip-flopping on a November referendum in his home state of Florida. On August 29, Trump said he suggested he would vote for the referendum, which would expand abortion rights and overturn the state’s current six-week abortion ban. After intense blowback from anti-abortion activists, Trump walked back his support the next day.

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While Trump’s about face on this referendum shows that the activist class still has some pull, it remains true that Trump has done something unimaginable in modern Republican politics. He has bullied the GOP into abandoning four decades of support for a national ban on abortion. Even more surprising, there’s no evidence that Trump’s renegotiation of the allegedly nonnegotiable has hurt him among the rank and file of the party.

This perplexing outcome is revelatory. Trump’s cavalier treatment of this supposedly sacred issue has exposed the Republican Party’s best kept secret: The connection between Republican voters and their leaders was never primarily about abortion. Rather, as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) transformation of the party reveals, Trump’s bond with his supporters is forged from different material: namely, his militant mission to return power to white Christian America.

Trump instinctively understands this reality. In contrast to his vacillation on abortion, Trump’s rallies are filled with evocations of an idealized ethno-religious state that are articulate, energetic, and consistent. His nostalgic diatribes about reclaiming a lost white Christian past fueled his rise to presidential power, and he has continued this strategy in 2024.

One of Trump’s early re-election campaign stops was the annual meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville on February 22, attended by leaders of the largest white evangelical communications outlets. In his rambling 75-minute speech to these Christian Right leaders, Trump spent a scant two minutes talking about abortion. He began strongly, stating, “From my first day in office, I took historic action to protect the unborn. Like nobody has ever done.” He also touted his attendance at the March pro-life rally in Washington, DC. But then he hailed his achievement of sending “this issue” (he notably did not utter the word “abortion” in the speech) back to the states since “everybody agrees that’s where it should be”—a position that is a clear abandonment of a nationwide ban on abortion. While there was no applause for that line, the crowd remained with him.

The beating heart of the speech was the projection of a white Christian nationalist vision. Trump told the enthusiastic crowd—many of whom sported red hats emblazoned with the words “Make America Pray Again”—that he knew they were “under siege.” He declared that one of his first acts of his second term would be to set up a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” and pledged to protect “pro-God context and content.” He received spontaneous applause for vows to promote school vouchers for private Christian schools and seal the United States’ southern border against “an illegal alien invasion by the world’s most sadistic criminals and savage gangs.”

He openly mentioned his four criminal indictments but transformed them into a messianic narrative. Echoing the evangelical theology of substitutionary atonement, he claimed, “I’ve been very busy fighting and, you know, taking the, the bullets, taking the arrows. I’m taking ’em for you. And I’m so honored to take ’em. You have no idea. I’m being indicted for you.”  After he narrowly survived an assassination attempt in August, Trump mused that he was only alive because of divine intervention, making this messianic comparison quite literal.

Notably, his promises to the evangelical broadcasters extended beyond the realm of policy: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.” He continued: “I really believe it’s the biggest thing missing from this country, the biggest thing missing. We have to bring back our religion. We have to bring back Christianity in this country.”

Trump’s deployment of the term “our religion”—one he regularly rolls out when addressing predominantly white evangelical audiences—is transparently an affirmation of an America of, by, and for white conservative Christians. This worldview, most frequently referred to as white Christian nationalism today, is an old one, predating the founding of our nation. It flows directly from the 500-year-old Christian Doctrine of Discovery—the idea that America was designated by God to be a promised land for European Christians—which justified the settler colonial project and lies at the ancient headwaters of our nation’s history.

Read More: The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think

A 2024 study conducted by PRRI, where I serve as president and founder, explored just how strongly white Christian nationalism is connected to Trump’s contemporary allure. Building on research by political scientists Paul Djupe, Phil Gorski, Sam Perry, and Andrew Whitehead, PRRI developed five distinct agree/disagree questions to measure support for Christian nationalism:

• God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.
• The US government should declare America a Christian nation.
• Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
• If the US moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
• US laws should be based on Christian values.

The PRRI survey, the largest ever conducted on this topic, finds that 3 in 10 Americans can be classified as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers (those who either fully or mostly agree with these five statements), while two thirds of Americans can be classified as Skeptics or Rejecters (those who either mostly or fully disagree with these five sentiments). So, by a margin of two to one, most Americans oppose this anti-democratic worldview.

But the minority of Americans who affirm these sentiments wield disproportionate power because their voices are amplified through Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and its takeover of the Republican Party. Today, a majority of Republicans (55%)—and fully two thirds (66%) of white evangelicals, the religious base of the GOP—qualify as Christian nationalist Adherents or Sympathizers.

The survey also reveals how tightly Christian nationalism is correlated with support for Donald Trump, not just at the national level but at the state level. The proportion of Americans who qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers differs considerably across states, but there is a distinct pattern. Residents of red states are nearly twice as likely as residents of blue states to be Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers. And among white Americans, the positive correlation between a state’s average score on the Christian nationalism scale and the proportion of residents who cast votes for Trump in 2020 is a textbook example of a strong linear relationship. The more strongly white residents of a state support Christian nationalism, the more likely they were to have cast their votes for Trump in 2020.

Why should we be worried about this? There is, of course, the obvious answer that the overall vision of America as a promised land for European Christians is fundamentally anti-democratic. Beyond that, Christian nationalist beliefs are strongly linked to a range of other attitudes that are corrosive to democracy: white racial resentment and denials of the existence of systemic racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, and support for patriarchal gender roles. In other words, white Christian nationalism evokes a set of hierarchies that positions white, Christian, heterosexual men as the divinely ordained ruling class. This assertion of white Christian entitlement and chosen-ness is toxic to the values of pluralism and equality on which democracy depends.

Most ominously, Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to think about politics in apocalyptic terms and are about twice as likely as other Americans to believe political violence may be justified in our current circumstances. Nearly 4 in 10 Christian nationalism Adherents (38%) and one-third of Sympathizers (33%) agree that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with only 17% of Christian nationalism Skeptics and 7% of Rejecters. And support for political violence among Christian nationalists is hardening. While there is no significant shift in support for political violence among Christian nationalism Adherents across the last year, among Sympathizers support for political violence is up 11 percentage points.

The worldview of white Christian nationalism raises the stakes of political contests exponentially, transposing political opponents into existential enemies. Politics are no longer understood to be honest disagreements between fellow citizens but rather apocalyptic battles over good and evil, literally fought by agents of God against agents of Satan. From these illiberal assumptions, it easily follows that political rivals should not just be defeated in fair electoral contests; they should be jailed, exiled, or even killed.

This racist ideology thankfully no longer rests comfortably in the psyches of most Americans. But it has, paradoxically, found a final refuge in the shambles of the party of Lincoln. More than any other discreet moment in the last half century, the 2024 election will present us with a choice that is much more than partisan.

We will have an opportunity to choose between a regressive fantasy of America as a white Christian nation and an aspirational vision of America as a pluralistic democracy. Until we find the will to finally reject the dangerous, authoritarian political theology that now controls one of our two political parties, it will continue to undermine the potential for a truly democratic American future.

Excerpt adapted from the paperback edition of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and a Path to a Shared American Future by Robert P. Jones, published by Simon & Schuster on September 10, 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Robert P. Jones.

source https://time.com/7019236/trumps-christian-nationalist-america-essay/

Tropical Storm Francine Forms Off Mexico and Is Expected to Hit Louisiana as a Hurricane

MIAMI — Tropical Storm Francine formed Monday off the coast of Mexico and was expected to drench the Texas coast with up to a foot (30 centimeters) of rain before coming ashore in Louisiana Wednesday night as a hurricane.

“We’re going to have a very dangerous situation developing by the time we get into Wednesday for portions of the north-central Gulf Coast, primarily along the coast of Louisiana, where we’re going to see the potential for life threatening storm surge inundation and hurricane force winds,” said Michael Brennan, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

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Francine is taking aim at a stretch of coastline that has yet to fully recover since hurricanes Laura and Delta decimated Lake Charles, Louisiana, four years ago.

The hurricane center said Francine is located about 245 miles (395 kilometers) southeast of the mouth of the Rio Grande, and about 480 miles (770 kilometers) south-southeast of Cameron, Louisiana. Francine’s top winds Monday morning were about 50 miles per hour (85 kilometers per hour). A tropical storm is defined by sustained winds between 39 mph and 73 mph (62 kph and 117 kph).

Francine should be a hurricane as it approaches the northwestern Gulf Coast on Wednesday, pushing a storm surge of up to 10 feet (3 meters), forecasters said.

“Francine is expected to bring heavy rainfall and the risk of considerable flash flooding along the coast of far northeast Mexico, portions of the southernmost Texas coast, the Upper Texas Coast, southern Louisiana, and southern Mississippi into Thursday morning. A risk of flash and urban flooding exists across portions of the Mid-South from Wednesday into Friday morning,” the hurricane center warned.

source https://time.com/7019260/tropical-storm-francine-louisiana-hurricane/

Rap Megastar Kendrick Lamar Will Headline the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show

LOS ANGELES — Kendrick Lamar will pop out on the NFL’s biggest stage next year: The Grammy winner will headline the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show in New Orleans.

The NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced Sunday that Lamar would lead the halftime festivities from the Caesars Superdome on Feb. 9. The rap megastar, who has won 17 Grammys, said he’s looking forward to bringing hip-hop to the NFL’s championship game, where he performed as a guest artist with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg in 2022.

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“Rap music is still the most impactful genre to date,” Lamar said in a statement. “And I’ll be there to remind the world why. They got the right one.”

Lamar has experienced massive success since his debut album “good kid, m.A.A.d city” in 2012. Since then, he’s accumulated 17 Grammy wins and became the first non-classical, non-jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize for his 2017 album “DAMN.”

The rapper’s latest album “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers,” was released in 2022. He was featured on the song “Like That” with Future and Metro Boomin on a track that spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 this year. He also garnered another hit with “Not Like Us.”

Roc Nation founder Jay-Z called Lamar a “once-in-a-generation” artist and performer.

“His deep love for hip-hop and culture informs his artistic vision,” Jay-Z said. “He has an unparalleled ability to define and influence culture globally. Kendrick’s work transcends music, and his impact will be felt for years to come.”

Roc Nation and Emmy-winning producer Jesse Collins will serve as co-executive producers of the halftime show. The creative direction of Lamar’s performance will be provided by pgLang.

source https://time.com/7019048/super-bowl-2025-halftime-show-performer-kendrick-lamar/

Typhoon Yagi Kills at Least 14 in Vietnam as Officials Warn of Heavy Rain and Flooding Risk

HANOI, Vietnam — At least 14 people have died and 176 others injured in Vietnam after Typhoon Yagi slammed the country’s north, state media said Sunday, as officials warned of heavy downpours despite its waning power.

Described by Vietnamese officials as one of the most powerful typhoons to hit the region over the last decade, Yagi left more than 3 million people without electricity in northern Vietnam. It also damaged vital agricultural land, nearly 116,192 hectares where rice and fruits are mostly grown. Hundreds of flights were canceled after four airports were closed.

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The typhoon made landfall in Vietnam’s northern coastal provinces of Quang Ninh and Haiphong with wind speeds of up to 149 kilometers per hour (92 miles per hour) on Saturday afternoon. It raged for roughly 15 hours before gradually weakening into a tropical depression early Sunday morning. Vietnam’s meteorological department predicted heavy rain in northern and central provinces and warned of floods in low-lying areas, flash floods in streams and landslides on steep slopes.

Municipal workers along with army and police forces were busy in the capital, Hanoi, clearing uprooted trees, fallen billboards, toppled electricity poles and rooftops that were swept away, while assessing damaged buildings.

Yagi was still a storm when it blew out of the northwestern Philippines into the South China Sea on Wednesday, leaving at least 20 people dead and 26 others missing mostly in landslides and widespread flooding in the acrchipelago nation. It then made its way to China, killing three people and injuring nearly a hundred others, before landing in Vietnam.

Storms like Typhoon Yagi were “getting stronger due to climate change, primarily because warmer ocean waters provide more energy to fuel the storms, leading to increased wind speeds and heavier rainfall,” said Benjamin Horton, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore.

source https://time.com/7019024/typhoon-yagi-vietnam-death-toll-officials-warn-heavy-rain-flooding/

Documentary Shows Hunter Biden in Emotional Meeting With His One-Time Tormentor

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Two months before he pleaded guilty this week to nine federal tax charges, Hunter Biden was in a conference room in Los Angeles meeting a man inextricably linked to all his legal troubles. 

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Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani and his fixer in Ukraine, struggled to contain his emotions as he apologized to the First Son for his role helping then-President Donald Trump seek out evidence of political nepotism, a quest that ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, as well as a series of criminal probes into Hunter Biden over drugs, money, and a gun.

“We get a second chance, both of us,” Hunter Biden told a crying Parnas. “Both of us,” Parnas replied with a fist-bump.

The striking exchange comes at the tail end of a two-and-a-half-hour confessional-slash-documentary that debuted Saturday in Brooklyn. The film, From Russia With Lev, will have arthouse screenings this week and its broadcast debut on Friday on MSNBC. MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow executive produced the project, her first documentary for the network. 

The Biden-Parnas meeting was not one the film’s team imagined when they began more than 30 hours of interviews with Parnas and his associates, producers say. In fact, The summit didn’t come together until July.

Parnas was part of the political operation that eventually found itself on the ground in Ukraine looking for dirt on political rivals to help Trump, who at the time was facing special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into 2016 election interference that paved the way for the House to impeach Trump. Parnas’ effort was looking to preemptively discredit both Mueller and Joe Biden, who was again mulling a White House run. 

Hunter Biden, who is facing up to 17 years in prison for this week’s tax-case guilty plea and another 25 years for lying on a gun application in a June conviction, seemed sincere in his forgiveness. “It really takes a big person to not only admit that they are wrong and to do so in public and to do so on the stage you did,” Biden said.

Parnas and an associate later were arrested for their alleged role in a scheme to direct foreign cash to a member of Congress in exchange for his help pushing the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from the posting, a case that resulted in a guilty verdict and a 20-month prison sentence.

“Just so you know, I wasn’t very sympathetic,” Hunter Biden said to mutual laughter.

In the years since, Parnas has become an outspoken critic of Trump, calling him “unfit for office” and an aspirational dictator. He also has repeatedly and publicly repented for getting wrapped up in the right-wing effort to pressure Ukrainian officials to launch criminal probes in the Bidens for Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. In conservative circles, Hunter Biden’s position with Burisma is a manifestation of what is often—and incorrectly—short-handed to The Biden Crime Family. Parnas has testified to Congress that there’s no there there.

“I’m ashamed of myself. I truly believed that we were helping America. But looking back at it now, we destroyed America,” Parnas told the camera during the new film. “We have such division. People are at each other’s throats. And the sad part: that is exactly what Vladimir Putin wanted, and we gave it to him on a silver platter.”

Hunter Biden similarly knows the image rehabilitation tour circuit. He too published a book accounting for his fall from grace. Whereas Parnas got swept up in conspiracy theories and political dirty tricks and disinformation, Biden wrote his memoirs about his battle with addiction, which led him to thank Parnas during their meeting for making amends as if working a 12-step program.

But Biden, who has been fairly defiant about his prosecutions, also saw the chance to ask Parnas about documents that would later come to haunt him in the form of a tax case.

Those bank documents helped federal prosecutors bring a criminal case in California about unpaid taxes on cash Biden used to fund drugs and hookers. Rather than put his family through another devastating trial—the gun case in Delaware was deeply embarrassing to the Bidens as family dirty laundry seemed to come up daily—Hunter Biden entered a guilty plea on Thursday. Sentencing for the tax charges is expected mid-December after a mid-November sentencing on the gun conviction.

During the meeting, which took place while Hunter Biden still planned to fight the tax charges, saw his payoff for appearing on camera with his one-time nemesis.

“How did they get my bank records? My bank records aren’t even on a computer,” Biden asked.

Parnas responded that the documents had been secretly subpoenaed by the FBI and circulated in conservative media. Giuliani also took them himself to the Department of Justice.

Biden, a graduate of Yale Law, then went further. “When did it cross over from being a hair-brained Rudy Giuliani operation in concert with Trump to the Department of Justice? When did Trump’s lackeys inside the Department of Justice begin to also conspire to take me on?”

The reply: Almost immediately.

Toward the end of their meeting, Biden seems to absolve Parnas. “Bottom of my heart, I promise you, you’re a hero to me,” Biden said.

The scene is tough to watch but a demonstration that no grudge has to last forever. It offers a fascinating coda to a film that Maddow herself has described as a “very gonzo story.” But to be sure, the grace these two men modeled for the cameras is very much the exception to politics today.

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source https://time.com/7018899/hunter-biden-documentary-maddow/

Protesters Rally in France Against Michel Barnier’s Appointment as Prime Minister

PARIS — Thousands of protesters took to the streets across France on Saturday, responding to a call from a far-left party leader who criticized as a “power grab” the president’s appointment of a conservative new prime minister, Michel Barnier.

The protests directly challenged President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to bypass a prime minister from the far-left bloc following a deeply dividing —and divided — legislative election result in July. Authorities did not record a huge turnout nationwide.

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The left, particularly the France Unbowed party, views Barnier’s conservative background as rejecting the electorate’s will, further intensifying the EU’s second economy’s already charged political atmosphere. Saturday’s demonstrators denounced Barnier’s appointment as denying democracy, echoing France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Melenchon’s fiery rhetoric from recent days.

In Paris, protesters gathered at Place de la Bastille and tensions ran high as police prepared for potential clashes. Some carried placards reading “Where is my vote?”

At the head of the Parisian procession, Melenchon spoke passionately, declaring that “the French people are in rebellion. They have entered into revolution.”

“There will be no pause, no truce. I call you to a long-term battle,” he added.

In the southwestern city of Montauban, a rally speaker told the crowd that “the people have been ignored.” Other protests took place is some 150 locations nationwide.

While Barnier was meeting with healthcare workers at Paris’ Necker Hospital for his first official visit as prime minister, opponents say the unrest in the streets is shaping his government’s future.

Barnier, who is working to assemble his Cabinet, expressed a commitment to listening to public concerns, particularly about France’s public services.

Jordan Bardella, leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), warned that Barnier was “under surveillance” by his party as well. Bardella, speaking at the Chalons-en-Champagne fair, called for the prime minister to include his party’s priorities in his agenda, particularly regarding national security and immigration.

Barnier, 73, is the oldest of the 26 prime ministers that have served modern France’s Fifth Republic. He replaces the youngest, Gabriel Attal, who was 34 when he was appointed just eight months ago.

Attal was forced to resign after Macron’s centrist government performed poorly in the July snap legislative elections. Macron called the election in the hopes of securing a clear mandate, but it instead produced a hung parliament, leaving the president without a legislative majority and plunging his administration into turmoil.

Attal was also France’s first openly gay prime minister. French media and some of Macron’s opponents, who immediately criticized Barnier’s appointment, quickly dug up that, when serving in parliament in 1981, the new prime minister had been among 155 lawmakers who voted against a law that decriminalized homosexuality.

Though Barnier brings five decades of political experience, his appointment offers no guarantee of resolving the crisis. His challenge is immense: He must form a government that can navigate a fractured National Assembly, where the political spectrum is deeply divided between the far left, far right, and Macron’s weakened centrist bloc. The outcome of the snap poll, far from providing clarity, has only served to destabilize both the country and Macron’s grip on power.

The president’s decision to turn to Barnier, a seasoned political operator with deep ties to the European Union, is seen as an attempt to bring stability to French politics. And Barnier, who gained prominence as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, has faced daunting tasks before.

Critics say Macron, elected on the promise of a break from the old political order, now finds himself battling the instability he once promised to overcome.

source https://time.com/7018956/protesters-rally-france-against-michel-barnier-prime-minister-appointment/