Next week (tomorrow) the courts and the Constitutional council will decide on Marine Le Pen’s fate as presidential candidate. The court in Paris is to rule on Monday in a case against the Rassemblement National over misusing €2.5bn of EU funds between 2004-2016 to pay party staff and non-accredited parliamentary assistants in Brussels. The charges prosecutors seek for Le Pen, who became party leader in 2011 and was MEP between 2009 and 2017, are a five-year prison term with three years suspended, a €250,000 fine, and a five-year ban from public office with provisional execution. If the verdict is confirmed, this means that even if she appeals the verdict, she won’t be able to run in the 2027 elections, as the appeals process is likely to last longer than that. The provisional execution is thus the lynchpin of this case politically. It could mean the end of Le Pen’s political career if the ban is applied immediately ahead of any appeals process. Provisional execution has been used in civil and criminal ruling…

the U.S. is the leader of the free world and the most powerful country on Earth. It is critically important to mankind that we keep that position. We should be super proud of it. But one part of that is that it does come with responsibility! We need to do our best to have people in these jobs who aren’t fucking morons!

Set in Cuba in 1991 amid economic ruin following the collapse of Fidel Castro’s patrons in the Soviet Union, Los Frikis opens with a title card informing us that, following the Cuban Revolution, rock-and-roll music was outlawed by Castro’s Communist regime. The titular “Frikis” were Cuban punks—mohawk-sporting, skateboard-riding musicians—who risked arrest and torture at the hands of the Cuban police if caught listening to American radio stations or playing the forbidden music.