The Black Panther Warriors黑豹天下 [1993]
Directed By: Clarence Fok (Credited as Clarence Ford)
Very fun era in Hong Kong Cinema where the creativity by directors such as Yuen Woo-Ping, Ching Siu Tung & Clarence Fok was pushing genre of action to new heights from a visual and choreography approach.
With elements usually seen in the Wuxia genre with the wire work. Some of these directors started using that approach for hand to hand combat and combining it at times with gunplay.
Giving us action fans a dynamic visual experience that is very reminiscent of what we saw in comic and manga panels.
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The moment the ball hit the wire running across the field, the play should’ve been dead.
England’s goal shouldn’t count! 🇳🇴
‘The Wire’ star James Ransone’s autopsy reveals tragic new details about his death
The Japan Rugby League One 2025–26 runners-up: Kubota Spears 🥈
What a season for the Spears and the Orange Army 👏🍊🦄
After a final that went right down to the wire, congratulations to
@Kubota_Spears on an incredible campaign filled with unforgettable moments, relentless rugby, and a fight worthy of the biggest stage
#
NTTLeagueOne#
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“The world needs Africa more than Africa needs the world.”
You might know Idris Elba from ‘The Wire,’ ‘Luther’ or being named People's ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ — but alongside his wife, Sabrina Dhowre Elba, he’s also been doing impactful work beyond the screen.
Through their nonprofit the Elba Hope Foundation, the couple has focused on some of today’s most pressing issues, including food security, support for smallholder farmers, sustainability, and youth advocacy. Much of the organization's work happens in Sierra Leone, his father's homeland, as well as in the U.K., where Idris was born.
“I feel like an underdog, and Elba Hope not just fights for the underdog, but helps give a voice to the underdog, the underserved, the unheard,” Idris told TIME.
For using their platform to advocate and educate, the Elbas are on the TIME100 Philanthropy list. Read about the work that got them there here:
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🇹🇼🇺🇸 The “English Teachers” Beijing Never Wanted You to Meet: Taiwan Just Lifted the Curtain
Defense Minister Wellington Koo confirms what the CCP has spent years trying to deny. U.S. troops are already on the island, and more are coming.
For years they moved through Taiwan’s bases without name tags, logged as “American English teachers.” Their real curriculum was combat. On Friday, Taipei stopped pretending.
In a rare on-record briefing, Defense Minister Wellington Koo told a small group of reporters that U.S.-Taiwan military cooperation “is far closer than you might imagine.” The timing was deliberate.
Taiwan’s largest annual war games, Han Kuang 42, kicked off Wednesday and run through August 14. The Wall Street Journal first exposed the quiet American training presence in 2021. Koo has now confirmed it and previewed a scale-up. “A lot more ‘American English teachers’ will be showing up where they need to be,” he said. “But you won’t be able to spot them everywhere they operate.”
Two senior officers reinforced the message on the record. Maj. Gen. Sun Li-fang, the Ministry of National Defense spokesman, said the Americans “share a lot of real combat experience with us.” Lt. Gen. Huang Wen-chi, who leads the Department of Strategic Planning, confirmed Taiwanese units have been reshaped by realistic combat training with U.S. personnel.
The message is aimed squarely at Zhongnanhai. Taiwanese authorities logged 85 Chinese coast guard sightings in May and June alone, a nearly 90 percent jump against the same period last year, with two vessels probing waters east of Taiwan on Friday, far from the mainland. The People’s Republic no longer bothers to disguise that its coast guard operates as a naval auxiliary rehearsing blockade.
Taipei’s response is transparency as deterrence. The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), Washington’s de facto embassy in Taipei, released a photograph of U.S. and Taiwanese coast guard cutters sailing in tandem, a public handshake the two sides once buried.
Koo added a clarifying line that Beijing should study carefully. Taiwan’s war plan does not assume American intervention. That is not resignation. That is a democracy telling the CCP it will fight, and the trainers teaching it how are already inside the wire.
ACI — Aric Chen | Insights
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Mad Men and the Wire are both great, but as time passes the Wire feels more like a product of the 2000s (with great memes) whereas Mad Men is perhaps more timeless.
I went and read the Chinese version of the Micron story. The wire was accurate. The translation was not.
Reuters on Friday: Micron's Taiwan workers to get rewards worth up to 68 months of pay. It went everywhere. Someone with fifty thousand views called it fake news. It is not fake. But two things in the Chinese original did not make the trip.
First, the unit. The company's figure reads 整體薪酬, total compensation. Taiwan production staff get 35 to 68 months of total comp, meaning base pay and bonus and stock added together. In English that became rewards worth up to 68 months of pay, which reads as a bonus on top of salary. Same number, different thing.
Second, the counterparty answered, and the answer was no. The same day, in Chinese, the union called it no different from the insulting bonuses handed out before, and said that if the company still does not address its demands the union will keep moving toward a strike. The strike option has not been withdrawn.
The numbers underneath it. The union asked for a one-off FY26 bonus of about 83 months of salary, on top of pay. From FY27 it wants the Incentive Pay Plan scrapped and replaced with 15 percent of operating profit, paid quarterly, benchmarked openly against peers. In its own words, what it is fighting for is not more bonus or more stock, but a fair share of the result and protection by a system when the cycle turns.
Scale: about 15,000 staff across Taoyuan and Taichung, close to 10,000 of them union members, and an August ballot in which over 80 percent of voting members backed a strike.
What makes it price. Micron's June quarter revenue was 41.456 billion dollars against 9.301 billion a year earlier, from the 10-Q. Up 346 percent, and the run into it was 13.6, then 23.9, then 41.5. Taiwan is a key Micron HBM site. A stoppage there would not land in a normal memory market. It would land in the tightest one on record.
I have no idea who wins the bargaining. What I can say is that in English this is a settled story and in Chinese it is an open one, and only one of those is true. $MU $SNDK $SKHY
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I head the Market Access department at Truth Social, even though that is just another way of saying that I'm selling the head start.
I provide the President with free access to 340 million Americans. I sell the ten seconds before the post to ten companies at a rate of $100,000 a month each, and the only thing I have ever needed to sell is the gap between those two figures. For most of the thirty years before I came to be here, I sold this service on Wall Street under forty different names. The name that I now use is the Truth API, and it is the most honest title that the business has ever had, and I'll explain why in a moment.
People are always referring to this as corruption. I'm going to show you, step by step, why it isn't, since I happen to enjoy doing so and because my lawyers required me to memorise the terminology.
Begin with the part that is solid. The President is not engaging in any form of sale. He publishes free of charge, for all people, at every hour, out of a love that I can only describe in those terms. The man cannot stop telling you precisely what he is about to do to the world. I do not sell his words; his words are free. I sell the gap between his words and your eyes, and that gap has never been free in this country, not a single time, not for anything deserving of being crossed.
However, it is a mistake to think that this started with him; someone has always been the one to sell the head start.
Thirty years ago I disposed of a server. Not the server itself, but the position: my client's order reached the matching engine a few millionths of a second before the rest of the market became aware that an order was in existence because the cage was 40 feet closer to the exchange's matching engine than yours. The exchange paid me for the distance. I charged a premium for it. No one regarded that as corruption. They called it colocation and included it in a brochure.
Twenty years ago I sold two seconds; a research organisation gave the nation's consumer-confidence figure to its paying elite two seconds before giving it to the general public, and in that two seconds a quick desk could turn a coin toss into a definite decision. I also sold those two seconds.
I have sold the lockup room, in which reporters hold the job report behind glass until the clock hits and a pipe that works quickly turns the embargo into a starting gun. I have sold the analyst's note before it appeared in print. I have sold my proximity to those who draw up the laws and then buy the companies which are the subject of those laws, and when they were caught they passed a law bearing their own name on it and continued to trade, and I kept on selling.
People always manage to secure the head start. I am the most skilled at doing so that has ever existed, and the Truth API is my finest achievement since, for the first time, the source is no longer leaking, whispering, or arriving two seconds early; he is now shouting for free to everybody, and yet I am still able to charge one hundred thousand dollars a month for the ten seconds that come before the shout. If you want to call it a loophole, then call it one; I refer to it as artistry and I have the profit margins to win the argument.
The point on which the critics are wrong is also the one for which I am most proud. They believe that a head start requires a crime, whereas it in fact requires the opposite. I have no use for a liar since he is unpredictable and I don't sell surprises. All I sell is certainty accompanied by a timestamp. His conviction constitutes my inventory. All I need to do is stand next to the loudest man living at the moment he exhales, and by so doing I have made the square foot next to him the most expensive in the world.
See how much the exhalation is worth. He announces that Iran has agreed to delay. The price of oil falls by $4 a barrel before the wire desk has finished phoning the Pentagon. My subscribers are already in long positions. You pick this up from a push notification. They found out from the lungs.
He announces that the tariffs are on hold. The market increases by nearly $1 trillion within the course of an afternoon. Now he has the role of the weather, so I sell the one umbrella that opens before the rain falls.
Corruption is a favour carried out in the dark. I carry out my favours through a subscription portal, using a dashboard, a rate card, and a customer-success manager called Brandon who sends you a fruit basket as soon as your funds clear the first $1 billion from the feed. They took legal action against me, of course. A press foundation and a magazine, being very serious about it, described the situation as corrupt and unconstitutional in the headline. That headline resulted in the best sales week of my career. Nothing sells a table like a velvet rope and a judge standing beside it.
This is exactly the point that I have been working towards in my entire speech, so I want you to imagine yourself in it. A head start is of no use if nobody is staying put. You can't have a fast side without a slow side to compare with. And you have already decided, in a comfortable manner, that the slow side is a pension fund in a state you have never been to.
It is you.
Throughout your life you've always been the slower part in a fast-paced trade. The layoff—that your vice president became aware of in March and you found out about in June. The increase in rent that took place the month the building changed hands, even though no one had informed the tenants weeks earlier. The plant closing the week after the executives had quietly sold it. The diagnosis code that your insurance company had already priced before your doctor had said the word out loud. You regarded all of this as bad luck. It was a product and it had a department; I manage that department.
A shop teacher who has now retired, aged 71, has one entry on page 30 of the pension fund and each Sunday morning checks his balance while having a cup of coffee, since on that day the market does not move and he is able to look at it without feeling any anxiety. In the best month of my career, the month when oil prices reached $90 as a result of the blockade, he awoke on a Sunday poorer than he had been on Saturday by an amount greater than the sum he had earned in his final full year as a teacher, and he never managed to work out which sentence had caused it. He did not receive an alert because alerts are a paid feature; he obtained the figure in the same way that the slower side always does, in a complete and finished form and far too late to be anything but a matter of arithmetic, at the speed of a citizen, that is to say, the speed of last.
Once a child who was sitting on my desk asked me whether it kept me awake. I explained to him that everybody receives the same messages. He replied to his screen without looking up, "They receive them only after it's all over; the delay is the result. You just don't include it on the invoice." After that he entered his figure for the quarter and stopped asking, just as all the others do, just as I stopped asking, just as you will stop reading this in a minute and go to check your own balance.
My own money is in a blind trust. I never trade on any of it, and here is the beautiful part: I do not have to. I sell shovels to a gold rush, and the shovel never has to find a single flake of gold. It only has to reach the dirt first. I have gotten quietly, enormously rich standing perfectly still, in daylight, with my name on the door.
All Americans have the freedom to hear the President's words, and the ten seconds prior to them cost $100,000 a month and are increasing, since there is no upper limit to the amount a person will pay in order to cease being a citizen.
All people pick up the news, with someone always being the first to do so; someone is always the one to capitalise on that early advantage, and the only difference in thirty years is that at last I've discovered a source loud enough to be able to sell the silence that comes before him and charge for it as a subscription.
There is a level higher than the one that I deal in. Although I have not been authorized to find out how much it costs, I know that it exists, that someone whom you'll never meet is already paying that price, and that on the day it becomes publicly known you'll see about it right here for free, many months after it has stopped being relevant.
At the speed of the previous one.
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Backing 🇪🇸 Spain on
@thefireflyapp for the World Cup run! Join the ⚽World Cup Prediction Festival to hunt down a share of the $50,000 prize pool.