Vox: Photos: al-Qaeda-linked militants kill more than 320 in Somalia truck bomb attack

The carnage came Saturday, when a massive truck bomb killed over 320 people and wounded 300 more at a busy intersection in the capital, Mogadishu. The blast destroyed nearby hotels, restaurants, and government offices. Just a few hours later, a second explosion rocked the suburb of Medina, setting dozens of vehicles on fire.

The government has accused al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group that has been waging a bloody insurgency in the country for more than a decade, of carrying out the attacks. Al-Shabaab militants have carried out dozens of high-profile attacks in Somalia and neighboring Kenya in recent years, including the April 2015 massacre at Kenya’s Garissa University in which militants targeted mainly Christian students, killing 148, and the siege of a popular pizza restaurant in Mogadishu just four months ago that left 31 people dead. [...]

The sheer scale of the devastation of Saturday’s attacks is hard to comprehend. Witnesses speaking to the UK’s Guardian newspaper described an area of destruction the size of “two or three football fields” in downtown Mogadishu.

read the article and see the photos

The New York Review of Books: Is Democracy in Europe Doomed?

Those who believe millennials are immune to authoritarian ideas are mistaken. Using data from the World Values Survey, the political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk have painted a worrying picture. As the French election demonstrated, belief in core tenets of liberal democracy is in decline, especially among those born after 1980. Their findings challenge the idea that after achieving a certain level of prosperity and political liberty, countries that have become democratic do not turn back.  

In America, 72 percent of respondents born before World War II deemed it absolutely essential to live in a democracy; only 30 percent of millennials agreed. The figures were similar in Holland. The number of Americans favoring a strong leader unrestrained by elections or parliaments has increased from 24 to 32 percent since 1995. More alarmingly, the number of Americans who believe that military rule would be good or very good has risen from 6 to 17 percent over the same period. The young and wealthy were most hostile to democratic norms, with fully 35 percent of young people with a high income regarding army rule as a good thing. Mainstream political science, confident in decades of received wisdom about democratic “consolidation” and stability, seemed to be ignoring a disturbing shift in public opinion. [...]

Too many people on the European left scoff at nationalism, mistaking their own distaste for evidence that the phenomenon no longer exists or is somehow illegitimate. If 2016 and 2017 have proven anything, it is that this sort of visceral nationalism, or loyalty to one’s in-group, still exists and is not going away. Those who dismiss this sort of national sentiment as backward and immature do so at their own peril. [...]

The first step in any coherent political project to counter right-wing populists is to reject the fear that fuels their popularity and resist the temptation to adopt their policies. Very few leaders have done this. In Holland and Denmark, the center right and the social-democratic left have largely caved and adopted planks from the populists’ platform. The left has lost much of its old base by appearing to care only about free trade, technological progress, and limitless diversity. This scares many people who used to vote for the Democratic Party, British Labour, or European Social Democrats.

read the article

Politico: Prague poised to turn away from Brussels

Recent polls predict the maverick ANO movement and its founder, former Finance Minister Andrej Babiš, will be the election’s biggest winner with some 25 percent of the vote. Support for Babiš is largely due to his vow to fight political corruption — despite the fact he currently faces charges of subsidy fraud. But he has also denounced EU-imposed migrant quotas and “EU meddling” in Czech politics. [...]

Czech voters are deeply skeptical about both the euro and the EU project itself. According to a 2017 survey by the Czech Public Opinion Research Center, only 18 percent of Czechs “strongly agree” the country should be a member of the bloc, while 38 percent “somewhat agree” — by far the lowest support for EU membership among members of the so-called Visegrad Group of Central European nations, which also includes Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. Another poll by the same organization found that only 21 percent of Czechs are in favor of adopting the euro. [...]

Other party leaders have kept the door open to governing with ANO — while insisting they do not want Babiš to be prime minister. But Babiš has repeatedly insisted that he will not let someone else take the reins if ANO wins the most seats in parliament, and there is no obvious alternative candidate within his party for the premiership. He also has an ally in President Miloš Zeman, who is likely to throw his weight behind a coalition headed by the ANO leader.

read the article

Vox: Divided island: the story of Haiti and the DR

How one line created vast disparity between countries. The six Vox Borders documentaries, presented by lululemon, are publishing weekly on Tuesdays.

The Atlantic: What John McCain Gets Wrong About Trump's Nationalism

Between 1947 and 1989, the defining imperative of American “international leadership” was anti-communism. At times, anti-communism nurtured ideals of freedom, human dignity and peace. In the name of anti-communism, America protected fragile democracies in West Germany, Italy and Japan. In the name of anti-communism, the United States fed Europe’s starving post-masses via the Marshall Plan. In the name of anti-communism, the United States committed itself to Western Europe’s defense, thus keeping German nationalism in check and laying the groundwork for a postwar economic boom.

But anti-communism also justified America’s overthrow of elected governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. It justified Ronald Reagan’s decision to label Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress a terrorist organization and America’s longtime assistance to the kleptocratic Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. And far from keeping the peace, it led the United States to drop more bombs on Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War than it had during during World War II. [...]

The point is that American “leadership” sometimes furthers the ideals that Americans revere and sometimes it desecrates them. Sometimes it makes America stronger; sometimes it doesn’t. McCain’s implication is that it’s only when American “abandon[s]” and “refuse[s]” its leadership role that it fails its people and the world. But that’s not true. Over the last fifteen years, in a spasm of military hyperactivity, the United States has toppled governments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, in wars that have cost America dearly, and bred more conflict in their wake. Trump won the Republican nomination, in part, because—facing establishment candidates who would not criticize George W. Bush’s foreign policy—he condemned such adventures and pledged to avoid new ones. [...]

Now McCain and many of his hawkish allies are criticizing Trump’s amoral nationalism, which is good. But until they question the disastrous overstretch that helped create it, they will remain his useful ideological foils.

read the article

Business Insider: The architect of post-9/11 New York City reveals the one move that changed the course of city history

Zoning divides a city into districts that allow for different uses of property, like industry, housing, commercial, and so on. Changing zoning codes can have big impacts on a city's housing affordability, industrial practices, and overall economy. Prior to Bloomberg's tenure as mayor — which lasted from 2002 to 2013 — the last overhaul of New York City's zoning code happened in 1961. [...]

Doctoroff acknowledged in the book that gentrification was a serious side effect of all this change. But he also defended it, saying that gentrifying neighborhoods prove the virtuous cycle of growth — more people moving in, more money raised for the city, more services offered — is working.  [...]

Zoning is a delicate balance: go overboard and you end up with a San Francisco-like situation, where building new housing is so difficult that the city starts to become unlivable. Allow lax zoning and you end up with what's happened in Houston, where sprawl takes over. Some people have recently argued that the hands-off zoning approach there also made the city extra-vulnerable to flooding.

read the article

Independent: Neo-Nazi leader quits movement, calls racism 'rubbish', and reveals he is gay with Jewish heritage

Kevin Wilshaw was a high-profile figure of the National Front in the 1980s and was speaking at extreme right events as recently as this year.

Speaking to Channel 4 News, he explained he had given up his violent past – which included smashing a chair over someone’s head, vandalising a mosque and being arrested for online hate race offences.  [...]

“It’s a terribly selfish thing to say but it’s true, I saw people being abused, shouted at, spat at in the street – it’s not until it’s directed at you that you suddenly realise that what you’re doing is wrong,” he told the news show. [...]

He added that he felt “appallingly guilty” about his past, but also that he would find it difficult to fill the “void” of far-right activity that has shaped his life.

read the article

The Guardian: Pope Francis is changing his church on the death penalty. What next?

Human life, he said, “is always sacred”: that’s a line Catholic leaders are very keen on, of course, but usually in connection with abortion, which it vehemently opposes. Liberal Catholics have long argued that the church should be as vociferous on other aspects of taking life as it is on abortion: what will be most surprising to many about the news from Rome is that the Catholic catechism – its central statement of faith and belief – still, in its 1992 edition, allows for the death penalty in certain circumstances. Abortion is not allowed under any circumstances.

But if it sounds uncontroversial enough for God’s man on Earth to be condemning killing, think again. A US survey last year found that 43% of American Catholics back the death penalty – not as high as the 69% of white evangelicals, it is true, but a significant minority who will inject yet more discontent into the ranks of the church, under the Argentinian pontiff who, while he’s undoubtedly top of the popes in the wider world, is an increasingly divisive figure among his own followers. [...]

If Francis decides to change Catholic teaching on that, he will put the cat well and truly among the pigeons, not only inside his own church (can a Catholic be in the armed forces, if the Pope says war is always wrong?), but also across the whole world, which will have to reconsider the basis of why wars are ever fought, and whether it is ever right for any group of human beings to take up arms against another. The ripples from the fallout of that debate are likely to be truly awesome.

read the article

Quartz: The typical political party only lasts 43 years

En Marche is the 15th political party since 1900 to be among the top two in seats won in France. Of the 14 previous political parties to accomplish this, only three remain relevant today (as defined by having finished in the top five in the previous two elections). On average, parties remained relevant for 34 years.

In order to quantify the transience of political parties, Quartz analyzed data from the ParlGov database, an elections results database maintained by Holger Dorin and Philip Manow at the University of Bremen. The database contains election results for all EU countries and most OECD countries. For comparability, our analysis only looks at results from parliamentary elections. The US does not appear in the dataset because it is not a parliamentary system. [...]

How long do parties usually last? To calculate this number, we used a statistical technique called survival analysis (pdf). It is a method for estimating a person or organization’s typical lifespan when some of the people or organizations that are part of an analysis are still in existence. We found that the median major political party lasts around 43 years, and one third of parties don’t even last 20 years. (These estimates are based on a statistical model, so not perfectly accurate, but they are likely correct to within 10 years.)

read the article