US cares so much about the region that Biden didn't even show up. Sent Blinken to lecture all the region's heads of state. I'm sure that will go down well.

It would have been nice if the article actually described the plan, rather than just the locker room politics of who likes it and who does not.

Special military operation?

It's wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.

Only dozens? HK government getting soft now?

"While imperialist colonizers" is doing a lot of work in the post. In my view, there's little credit to be given out for offering liberalism to a tiny fraction of the population under your rule. So from a macro standpoint, Wilhelm hardly stands out.

I will give the British some credit for bowing to the inevitability of decolonization many years later, after WWII, with only a little bit kicking and screaming. (France, not so much.)

That's pretty much the European median for the time.

This is a politically-motivated ruling... Thailand's judiciary, including its constitutional court is packed with ultra-conservative royalists who deploy the law to take down their political enemies. Conveniently enough, politicians who are friendly to the royalist/military establishment aren't subject to such scrutiny.

It will be interesting to see how Rwanda manages after Kagame leaves the scene. In the past, he has styled himself after Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, but Lee stepped down and left behind a well functioning civil service and a second generation of political leaders who weren't hacks. Kagame seems to be avoiding talk about succession plans, which is not a good sign.

Funny thing is, TSMC in Taiwan is considered a premium employer. It offers much better pay and parks than other companies.

People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don't think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.

But if it's not just a matter of Google being assholes, what's the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?

Riots caused by court rulings don't usually topple prime ministers. This feels really weird and off.

That's wild.

Bangladesh has actually been doing pretty well in the past decade, no? I know there have been concerns about Hasina's increasing authoritarianism over the years, but the stuff I've read indicated that she was actually quite popular, within the context of the country's incredibly polarized politics.

Having her toppled by a mob like this... while hoping for the best for Bangladesh, I can't help but feel quite pessimistic for the future of the country. For one thing, there's the distinct possibility that this is a military coup disguised as a popular insurrection. Hope that's not the case.

Decent affordable Bandai kits when...

Trump has a fawning audience, true, but unfortunately he also is a pretty funny guy who can think on his feet. During the debate, his quip that "I don't know what he just said and I don't think he does either" was 100% perfect. You can really see how his entertainment background sets him apart from other politicians. (All this, of course, is in service of the worst policies, which is too bad.)

They also pinky-promise that they are not running current psy-ops on many other topics. (Tee hee.)

That's like telling a starving person that long-term obesity concerns are the real issue.

Trump lost by around 50,000 votes in swing states, in the middle of a bungled pandemic response. In 2020, Biden was polling significantly higher than Trump; today he is polling significantly lower.

All this before that picture of Trump fist-pumping after being shot, which is going to be widely juxtaposed against Biden's inability to walk down 2-3 steps.

I don't know where this idea that Trump has "no chance" comes from.

Whelp... Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey's Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.

Also:

• Sonia Sotomayor's decision not to retire during Biden's term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.

• We're going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.

• Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump's, they're going to be brushed aside.

• For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.

Polls have significant predictive power, especially when you poll reportedly and/or aggregate them. Which is why all political campaigns, R or D, spend literally millions running their own polling. Moreover, it's now July, the first convention is literally coming up within days, so the excuse of being "far out from the election" no longer holds.