Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Hard Numbers

Hard Numbers: France’s Bardella would win an election today, Trump’s support among Latinos falls, Fox hunts for a seat in the Bahamas, and Hitler returns

Marine Le Pen, French member of parliament and parliamentary leader of the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National - RN) party and Jordan Bardella, president of the French far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National - RN) party and member of the European Parliament, gesture during an RN political rally in Bordeaux, France, September 14, 2025.

Marine Le Pen, French member of parliament and parliamentary leader of the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National - RN) party and Jordan Bardella, president of the French far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National - RN) party and member of the European Parliament, gesture during an RN political rally in Bordeaux, France, September 14, 2025.

REUTERS/Stephane Mahe
Make us preferred on Google
0: There are zero candidates who would beat French far-right leader Jordan Bardella in a head-to-head presidential runoff, according to a new poll. Bardella, heir to Marine Le Pen as head of the National Rally party, would win more than a third of the vote in the first round. Caveat: it’s early – the election won’t be held until 2027. What’s more, the second round could be very close, depending on Bardella’s opponent. For more on the “unraveling” of France, read Ian Bremmer’s recent piece here.


9: US President Donald Trump’s approval among Latino adults has fallen nine points since the start of his presidency to just 27%, according to Pew. In 2024, Trump won nearly half the Latino vote, a record for a GOP candidate. Among Latinos who chose Trump in 2024, his approval is still a robust 81%, but even that is down from a high of 93% when he took office. Trump’s handling of immigration and the economy underline the growing disapproval.

39: Will island politics be a slam-dunk for former Los Angeles Lakers star Rick Fox? The three-time champion, who retired from the NBA in 2004, is taking a jumpshot at public service in the Bahamas, announcing that he’ll run for one of the island nation’s 39 constituencies in the next election. Fox holds Bahamian citizenship through his father.

2: Well, Adolf Hitler is back. The Namibian lawmaker who has that unfortunate name is set to win his second election in a row, representing the constituency of Ompundja in a landslide. Namibia is a former German colony. Hitler, 59, says his father “probably didn’t understand” the meaning of the name, and that it’s “too late” to change it now.

More For You

Cuba’s old guard gets even older
Will Fitzpatrick
Raúl Castro, younger brother of Fidel, has been synonymous with the Cuban regime that has frustrated and confounded American presidents for decades. Though he stepped back from official duties in 2021, he continues to serve as a symbolic leader and as the general of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces. But Castro is ringing in his birthday with an [...]
Anthropic prepares for blockbuster public offering
Will Fitzpatrick
The maker of the large-language model Claude became the latest AI giant to file to go public, following a similar move by SpaceX. OpenAI is likely to follow suit. Anthropic’s market debut could arrive as soon as this fall. It’s not clear, though, how many shares it will offer to the public, but the IPO is set to make the company worth above $1 [...]
Japan's SoftBank zooms past Toyota
Will Fitzpatrick
SoftBank surpassed the Japanese carmaker after pledging over the weekend to invest as much as €75 billion ($87 billion) to build Europe’s largest AI facility in France, helping to boost its share price by 14% on Monday – enough for it to overtake Toyota in terms of market capitalization. Toyota’s ousting from Japan’s top spot reflects the surging [...]
Japan’s population drops by millions
Zac Weisz
The fifth-largest economy in the world is facing a major population crunch. The decline — from 126.1 million to 123 million — is the biggest population drop over a five-year period since the government began collecting census data in 1920. The government has urgently tried to encourage citizens to have more children as a way of preventing a [...]