Well, it was never the intention of Alfred Nobel to have a prize for Economics. The so-called "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics" was established after a large donation from the Bank of Sweden in 1968, but has been regarded by many (including Nobel's grandson) as an inauthentic award.
They have only asked once, and prior to that they left the offer open for two years. The Ecuadorian prosecutor has every right to intercede in the matter, especially if he is uncertain of the security situation. Interviews by proxy have also been used by Swedish authorities in the past.
Your response is full of defamatory conjecture and bizarre imagination. All we know is that two women have alleged that Assange failed to use a condom and/or intentionally tore a condom, and that the Swedish authorities have refused to pursue the investigation further by interviewing Assange in London. It's not very complicated.
The Swedish police have had the option to interview Assange in London for three years, all expenses paid. They have chosen instead to temporize and delay, and thereby leave the investigation without closure. Note that the Swedish police have conducted foreign interviews in the past, but for some reason seem intent on drawing out this particular process.
Perhaps you should have put "their population is declining" first in that list. Yes, Japan is struggling in many ways, but it is also ahead of the curve in coping with negative population growth, something we will all have to face sooner or later.
In any case, being able to live above your place of business on an urban street in Tokyo is a no-brainer improvement to quality of life for small entrepreneurs. It's a major reason why Tokyo remains such a livable city for so many people (30 million in the Tokyo-Yokohama megalopolis) despite the extended stagnancy in growth.
Nobody wants war in Asia. The question is how and at what rate the United States withdraws from its ultimately unsustainable position as pacific hegemon. China would like it to happen sooner. Most of the rest of Asia would like it to happen later, and to share more equitably in a post-american security coalition. To make that possible, Japan and South Korea may need to show more strategic solidarity in the short term.
He indicated in his address that an elderly emperor can sometimes leave the society itself dangerously paralysed (an oblique reference to the pre-war period) and that the emperor "must always be with the people". It's actually a pretty powerful, if careful, statement from someone with no legal influence on the country. We can agree that he wants his son to succeed him (though "want" hardly comes into it) but I think the timing of this abdication has more to do with securing a path forward for the Japanese people. That's something the current political system has failed to do.
The reason these nominal monarchies remain has nothing to do with the monarchs' unwillingness to let go, and everything to do with the useful diversion of royal celebrity. Oh, some of the european royals have said good things about the environment and peace and the need for civil society, and the japanese emperor notably rebuked the right wing for its jingoistic understanding of "patriotism" a few years back, but let's be clear that it's their usefulness to the establishment that preserves them, not their own clever designs on power.
I've looked through a friend's copy and I have to say, it's pretty amateurish work. Not worth the asking price, imo. These interview vids are actually more interesting than what I saw in Volume I.
Very new to Rust ecosystem, but I wondered, regarding this last point about using an LLVM plugin to generate structs, etc... would this also be a better way to do clean FFI to functions that use C-style unions? I have been struggling to see how the Rust bindings for Vulkan can be improved.