Three big stories beyond Brexit: Macron’s latest headache

PA Wire/PA Images - Credit: PA Wire/PA Images

Poor Brigitte Macron – the force behind the great hope of the centre Emmanuel since… well, since he was quite young.

(Photo by Alain Apaydin/ABACAPRESS. COM) – Credit: ABACA/PA Images

She is, by all accounts, the woman who makes the man who has grabbed French politics by the scruff of the neck. And yet her 39-year-old husband’s attempts to formalise the position of First Lady seem doomed.

There has been a petition against the move and attacks from the Left – who Macron borrowed many voters from to beat Marine Le Pen back in May.

The issue is the just the latest headache for Macron after the online petition against creating the role received more than 200,000 names. Another poll showed a majority of French people were also opposed. Approval ratings are already not good and the short-lived honeymoon is very much over for Macron.

Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger addresses a news conference at the publication of a report into super-injunctions, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. – Credit: PA Archive/PA Images

The planned new role would have mirrored that of the US – a country that, like France, has never had a female leader.

‘Every August you have something horrific that’s going to happen,’ Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian with the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy said this week.

And just as Donald Trump settled into his ‘working’ vacation at one of his golf courses in Bedminster, New Jersey, The Washington Post reported Kim Jong-Un’s latest round of nuclear willy waving.

The editor-in-chief of the Duden publisher Kathrin Kunkel-Razum can be seen in Berlin, Germany, 24 July 2017. Photo: Britta Pedersen/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB – Credit: DPA/PA Images

In 1998, Bill Clinton was forced back to Washington from Martha’s Vineyard to deal with missile attacks in Sudan and Afghanistan.

Ronald Reagan came home early from a California vacation in 1983 after Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down in by a Soviet fighter jet.

In 2005, George W Bush refused to leave his sun lounger even when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Barack Obama’s summer breaks were interrupted by the beheading of journalist James Foley by Islamic State in 2014 and Syria’s chemical weapons use in 2013.

And yet, it’s probably safer if Trump stays in NJ playing golf.

German language dictionary Duden has added 5,000 new words.

The new edition added several words of English origin such as ‘selfie’, ‘tablet’ and ‘fake news’.

‘It’s simply a fact that many things in our lives are coming from the Anglo-American area,’ Duden’s managing editor Kathrin Kunkel-Razum said.

‘Flüchtlingskrise’ (refugee crisis) and ‘postfaktisch’ (post-truth) also made it – ‘Brexitclusterfuck’ did not, but perhaps next year …