What happened
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen yesterday announced she will run for president in 2027, hours after an appeals court cut short her five-year ban on seeking public office. The court upheld the 2025 embezzlement conviction that prompted the ban, handing Le Pen a three-year prison sentence for her National Rally party’s misuse of $3.2 million in European Union funds. But the judges suspended two years of her sentence and said she could serve the third wearing an electronic bracelet. 

Who said what
Yesterday’s “stunning turnaround” in Le Pen’s fortunes makes her the “front-runner” to replace term-limited President Emmanuel Macron, the New York Times said. But running for France’s highest office with a criminal conviction is a “remarkable political gamble,” the BBC said. “As recently as last week,” Politico said, Le Pen “said she would not run for president if wearing an ankle monitor and would cede the role” to 30-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella, who is “slightly more popular” in opinion polls. But Le Pen also announced she was appealing yesterday’s ruling to the Court of Cassation, a process that “will suspend her requirement to wear an electronic bracelet” until the high court rules on her case, likely in January, The Wall Street Journal said. 

What next?
If the high court upholds yesterday’s ruling, the Journal said, “Le Pen would be required to wear the bracelet” while campaigning, limiting her movement before April’s election.

What happened
An ICE agent fatally shot a Houston man early yesterday during a “targeted enforcement operation,” the agency said in a statement. The man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, and “from information we are receiving, he “refused to follow multiple verbal commands and weaponized his vehicle,” causing the ICE agent to fire “in self-defense.” Local officials and civil rights groups demanded that ICE release all video footage as part of an independent investigation. 

Who said what
Ramon Salgado said in a statement that his father, a construction worker killed en route to a job, had been in the U.S. for 35 years and was in the process of getting his work permit. In most of the 20 cases where immigration agents shot people in their cars, The New York Times said, officials said it was justified “because the vehicles had been ‘weaponized’ and the agents’ lives were in danger.”

ICE’s account of Araujo’s killing “echoed many of the statements the agency quickly issued in other shootings,” The Washington Post said. But in the killings of Renee Good in Minneapolis, 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas and several other cases, video evidence established that “the officers were not in danger and, in some cases, acted as the aggressors.”

What next?
ICE said the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General is investigating Araujo’s shooting. “Prosecutors have not criminally charged any of the ICE agents” who killed Good, Martinez or Alex Pretti, The Texas Tribune said.

An overabundance of durian has crashed the price of the notoriously pungent tropical fruit, said the BBC. The “durian tsunami” is the result of a “decade-long boom” in which Malaysian farmers “flocked to durian farming to cash in on growing Chinese demand.”

Due to its strong smell, the fruit is “commonly banned” on public transport and in hotels in Southeast Asia, said The Times of London. Nevertheless, the global durian trade has grown to $7.35 billion, with 90% of exports going to China, where a “newly affluent middle class is discovering a taste for the exotic.”

Prized varieties like the Musang King, known as the Hermès of durians, have proved to be particularly popular as Chinese consumers become more “selective and sophisticated,” said The Times. A single durian can sell for “up to $29, and they are often presented on special occasions as luxurious gifts.” To help meet this “insatiable appetite,” freight trains have even been designed with “specially refrigerated” cars that allow durians to travel all the way from Thailand and Vietnam to China with their “flavor unimpaired.”

But now a “bumper harvest” has caused durian prices to “tumble,” said Malaysia’s Star. And prices are expected to “remain low until August” before “gradually recovering.” 

Until then, shops are employing “creative measures” to shift their extra stock, said the BBC. Viral videos have emerged of customers leaving a stall in Malaysia’s Pahang State carrying all-you-can-fit sacks filled “beyond the brim” with the spiky green fruit, and some vendors in Singapore are just giving them away.