Politico: Rome elects first female mayor as 5Star Movement shocks Renzi

The second round of local elections saw 5Star’s Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer, win the capital with 67.15 percent of the vote to become Rome’s first female mayor. Renzi’s candidate, Roberto Giachetti, gathered 32.85 percent of the vote.

In Turin in the north, Chiara Appendino, a 31-year-old manager, won with almost 55 percent.

Renzi’s Democratic Party managed to win Milan, Italy’s business hub, but the prime minister emerges battered from Sunday’s vote, across 121 municipalities, which was being closely watched for signs of who is likely to oppose the former mayor of Florence in the general elections, expected in 2018. [...]

Silvio Berlusconi on the center right and Matteo Salvini’s far-right Northern League party both scored poorly. Berlusconi’s candidate Stefano Parisi lost in Milan, while Salvini lost in nearby Varese, an area where the Northern League had previously enjoyed high support.

read the article 

The Huffington Post: Trumps Of The World

In the U.K., he’s pro-Brexit Nigel Farage; in France, he’s the Le Pens. In Austria, he’s Norbert Hofer. In Germany, he heads a movement with a deceptively bland name, “An Alternative for Germany.” In Hungary, he is Viktor Orban. And in Russia, of course, there is the original Trump template, Vladimir Putin.

In country after country, Trumpians have risen by tapping the same fears: that financial, digital, logistical, political, ethnic and religious globalization will destroy the “homeland’s” power to protect local jobs, culture and even lives. [...]

While their policy proposals (such as they are) differ, the leaders have certain methods and characteristics in common: a lust to amass power through division, not addition. A gift for crude but effective sound bites. Shrewd and obsessive use of social media. A claim to a purist “outsider” status of some kind, often based on family, wealth or both. Disdain for intellectuals and contempt for journalism and free speech. An authoritarianism born of their own raging egos. And the ability to cynically wield nostalgia for a simpler time — one that never really existed outside the minds of their followers. [...]

His toxic stew of racism, xenophobia and populist economics is held together by (white) Americans’ hysteria at losing their place, not only in the world, but within the culture of the U.S. itself.

Voters in Great Britain, America’s mother country, no longer have such imperial illusions to lose. But long after the sun set on their empire, the most fearful among them think they are fighting to save a remnant of the old ways.

read the article 

Atlas Obscura: In Indonesia, Non-Binary Gender is a Centuries-Old Idea

Some might assume that the shift towards viewing gender as fluid or encompassing identities beyond the binary is a novel cultural change; in fact, several non-Western cultures—both historically and today—have non-binary understandings of gender. In Indonesia, one ethnic group shows us that the idea that gender identity is expressed in more ways than two is actually hundreds of years old.

The Bugis are the largest ethnic group in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and are unique in their conception of five distinct gender identities. Aside from the cisgender masculinity and femininity that Westerners are broadly familiar with, the Bugis interpretation of gender includes calabai (feminine men), calalai (masculine women) and bissu, which anthropologist Sharyn Graham describes as a “meta-gender” considered to be “a combination of all genders.” [...]

Around the world, individuals who identify outside of the gender binary are seeing increasing legal and social recognition. In 2014, South Asia’s 4,000-year-old hijra third-gender community won a hard-fought victory when the Indian Supreme Court declared discrimination against hijra illegal and instituted a third gender option on government documents (the hijra have also won this right in Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Australia has allowed a third gender option on passports since 2011, and in the United Kingdom, the proliferation of the option to use the “Mx” title on government and bank documents encouraged the Oxford English Dictionary to officially add the honorific last year.

read the article 

The Guardian: 'Why not Texit?': Texas nationalists look to the Brexit vote for inspiration

The night before we met, Miller addressed a local Tea Party group, drawing parallels between Brexit and Texit, which the TNM is pushing as a hashtag. In Miller’s telling, Britain’s relationship with Europe was a marriage of convenience between ill-suited partners that has become stormy and ripe for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences, with too much sovereignty ceded to an ineffective central bureaucracy and too much hard-earned money sent elsewhere. [...]

The arguments are fundamentally identical, he insists. “You could take ‘Britain’ out and replace it with ‘Texas’. You could take ‘EU’ out and replace it with ‘US’. You could take ‘Brussels’ out and replace it with ‘Washington DC’. You could give you guys a nice Texas drawl and no one would know any different. So much of it is exactly the same.” [...]

The TNM, meanwhile, seeks secession through political avenues and calls for the people of Texas to decide via a referendum. Miller claims that the group has 260,000 supporters. It has fans in Russia among mischief-makers who would relish the break-up of the United States.

read the article