They mass imprisonment and cultural destruction is a more recent phenomenon. China first spent several decades bringing in colonists and executing those who complained too loudly.

Meanwhile, in the real world

The New York Times has been covering Uyghur issues since 2001.

It looks like a planned gradual turnup

I’m pointing to an old one because the causes are well known, there isn’t any current propaganda campaign to confuse people about it, and its a wide-area unanticipated failure.

That kind of facility tends to have its own backup power, often with a week or so of fuel stockpiled on-site.

Back when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was a period where the only building with power was a datacenter. The lights prompted soldiers to break in, and the system admin wound up having to pretend that they’d discovered evidence of somebody nefarious forcing the door, so they’d clear the building and leave.

I think that one is coming from the UK Daily Mail which is generally unreliable.

During one of these events, it’s really common for all kinds of misinformation and rumors to fly, and even to come from otherwise trustworthy people.

I’ll note that the US had some very large-scale blackouts in the 1960s which were caused by fairly ordinary technical problems.

In the US, the towers that provide mobile service are required to have a few hours worth of battery backup. The EU may require more, but I’d expect them to go down not too long after the main grid goes out.

It’s a gift link. Folks with Javascript enabled just get the article without needing that.

Definitely not 100% external. A chunk of cases are known to be genetic.

And these people were eating a mushroom known to be mildly poisonous.

Exactly. There’s a reason I won’t eat any Amanita: the similarity of edible and deadly species in that genus makes them the main source of mushroom fatalities in North America.

By contrast, messing up a bolete ID is likely to result in a meal that is too bitter to eat. That’s a much more acceptable risk.

And these days, that means making sure it’s a book written by someone who knows what they are doing, rather than AI auto-generated bullshit.

If you know what you’re doing, you get incredible deliciousness.

He’s already sent people to prison in El Salvador in violation of court order.

And to be clear, “death” isn’t much of an exaggeration:

Because the US has a history of buying islands form Denmark — that’s where the US Virgin Islands come from.

Yeah, you get some silly answers from a small percent of the population, like this one:

Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.

It’s probably some years off; there’s something of a roadmap on how to do it, but crossbreeding it in takes quite a few years, and something like CRISPR usually means a lot of testing of the engineered variety.

They’re probably more afraid that Trump will burn the company down.