[tremon]

What's the rationale behind flagging stories like this? While it may be off-topic as tech news, in my eyes the HN community is quite cosmopolitan and threads like these usually end up being quite interesting and informative for me.

[DanBC]

> While it may be off-topic as tech news,

On / Off topic isn't about how much tech is in the story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[krapp]

Being off-topic is reason enough. Purely political stories like this can overwhelm the site if not dealt with quickly. Hacker News just isn't the proper venue for mainstream news.

edit: looks like the mods unflagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12103575