Some observations

*  Last night's Foreign Correspondent, about Saudi Arabia's attempt to open up to foreign (well, Western) tourism actually showed the place to be of much more archaeological and geographic interest than I realised.  (Call me ignorant, but I didn't expect some of the mountain-y bits in the country.  I usually just imagine it as all sand dunes with a handful of cities.)   I still don't want to go there, though.   It's one of my Rules of Life:  do not holiday in countries where you can be charged with witchcraft.

*  I really think American pundits spend too much time trying to analyse the potential performance of Presidential candidates.   Polling is difficult in the country, with their voluntary voting and weird system of voter registration into categories that people may not follow on the day anyway;  international and domestic events are quite unpredictable;  and with any luck it would be Trump, who appears to get no sleep anymore and slurs regularly at rallies and speeches, who might have a health crisis before November.  Hence I am cynical about this study, indicating that Sanders can only do win  if he gets a surge of new young voters, and the way people like David Roberts are already certain that with Sanders, who they don't mind, is still bound to lose.

*  That Malaysian king seems pretty considerate, for a king:

By the way, Jason - do you follow that Erin Cook on Twitter?  She seems to combine smart, informed, on the ground commentary on South East Asia together with a fragile personal life in which she is always broke and emotionally just scrapping through.   

*  Oh, and here is some analysis of what is going on in Malaysia at CNA.  It includes this bit:

Professor James Chin, director of the Asia Institute Tasmania at the University of Tasmania, told CNA that Dr Mahathir’s decision to resign on Monday was purely tactical as he never wanted to hand over the baton to PKR’s president Anwar Ibrahim.

He said Dr Mahathir had agreed to the PH succession pact to hand over the premiership to Mr Anwar before the May 2018 polls because he needed the help of PKR, Democratic Action Party (DAP) and Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah) to overthrow former prime minister Najib Razak and his Barisan Nasional coalition.

“Prior to the election, everybody got together because everybody wanted to get rid of Najib. You can’t really hold them to what they agreed on before the election because back in 2018, it was widely understood that Najib had damaged Malaysia because of the 1MDB (1Malaysia Development Berhad) corruption case,” he said.

Prof Chin said the bitter history between Dr Mahathir and Mr Anwar suggested that the succession would never have happened between them.

“The general consensus in Kuala Lumpur is that Anwar will not be prime minister this year or next year and will probably miss his chance to be prime minister in the future as well.

“As long as Mahathir is in charge, he will try to hand over the prime minister position to somebody else,” said Prof Chin.