Mansoor was still consolidating his rule of the Taliban, which he took over (hurriedly) in 2015. But his death throws the organization into even deeper disarray.
What's likely is that whoever succeeds Mansoor will try to demonstrate his legitimacy by proving himself on the battlefield — the same strategy Mansoor followed.
This would obviously not be great for the prospect of peace talks in Afghanistan. But since Mansoor himself wasn't exactly interested in peace talks, the US has decided this is a risk it's willing to take.
Mansoor's death may, however, affect the US's relationship with Pakistan — which reportedly backed Mansoor in the Taliban's internal leadership struggles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the US didn't notify Pakistan in advance about the strike.
Pakistan's government is claiming that the drone strike violated its sovereignty, which is both true and something the US has not typically concerned itself much with when it comes to drone strikes.
Austria's Green Party won the country's presidential election over the weekend. But the real story is that the far-right, post-neo-Nazi Freedom Party only barely lost.
The presidency is a largely ceremonial position. The reason the election matters is that it demonstrates a shift in Austrian politics, with the far right gaining ground.
The Freedom Party is something of an innovator in Europe's new far right. Its rise from neo-Nazi holdouts to a populist (and racist) national agenda in the 1990s set the template for far-right parties across the continent.
And in the aftermath of a continent-wide panic over the influx of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries, the far right is on the rise throughout Europe.
Some observers caution against reading too much into the rise of the Freedom Party, claiming that while its rhetoric might be far to the right, its policies aren't that far off from the centrist parties that have traditionally governed the country.
But it's pretty hard to deny that the general political trend — not just the rise of the far right, but the hollowing of the center — is a problem that goes beyond Austria to the rest of Europe.
The US has been holding out the promise of lifting the arms embargo as an incentive for Vietnam to improve on human rights, which it hasn't exactly done.
(To prepare for Obama's visit to the country, in fact, the Vietnamese government cracked down on environmental protests after tons of dead fish started washing up on the country's beaches.)
It's not that memories of the Vietnam War are dead, exactly — 100,000 Vietnamese have been killed or wounded by unexploded bombs and mines since the war ended, and (as Michael Sullivan reports) schoolchildren are still taught how to avoid land mines.
Rather, the Vietnamese have embraced the free market and therefore, by extension, America; at Quartz, Matt Phillips observes that the turn to economic populism in America and Europe has left Vietnam as "globalization's last big fan."
Unofficially, the embargo lifting is almost certainly about China. China is flexing its muscles in the South China Sea, and the US wants its allies to be prepared.
Cancer researchers are increasingly focusing on "exceptional responders": rare patients who recover post-treatment faster and more completely than anyone could've expected.
"Risk assessment" scores are meant to help courts judge which defendants are likely to reoffend. But a closer look shows they mistakenly rate black defendants as dangerous — and white defendants as low-risk — at a startling rate.
"[Moby's] been in a relationship for eight months now, his first in 10 years. It seems to be going OK, though he can’t really tell… He keeps having to ask his girlfriend things: 'Like, is it OK if I go to bed after you do?'"
"It is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world. Probably, she will be betrothed to Trump's son, and they will be crowned American royalty."
"We would just find great beats that were usually in people’s crates and had the name scratched out. So we did not know the name of the song was 'Walk This Way.'"
"It is my contention that the tendency of strategy games to turn even the woolliest of liberals into ravening tyrants is a result of a perspective that the games foist upon us. … People placed in positions of power do not become authoritarian because the system is ‘rigged,' they become authoritarian because in order to control a state they have to see the world like a state — and the state cares no more for individual humans than we do for the individual cells in our bodies."
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The dairy industry would like Gen Z to drink more milk, so they made a Fortnite diner tycoon game
