Jacobin Magazine: Latin America’s Re-Militarization

Law No. 13.491, passed by the Brazilian Congress in October 2017, gives military courts jurisdiction over their personnel accused of human rights violations. Prior to the law’s approval, the Ministry of Defense publicly made the case that allowing civilian courts to handle such cases would hinder policing operations. Michel Temer’s administration increasingly used the armed forces for domestic policing duties, whether in rural areas against land rights activists or in the favelas and peripheries of major cities.

Brazil’s 2008 “pacification” policy led to the deployment of military personnel to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and the militarization of policing intensified in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic games. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of civilians are killed by the military and police each year. The new Ministry for Public Security, created in February, is led by an army general, and in May the Brazilian military was deployed in response to the nationwide truckers’ strike that blockaded highways. This was the first time the military had been used in this way since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.[...]

Brazil is not alone in militarizing its justice system. Military courts are increasingly asserting jurisdiction throughout Latin America. In June 2015, Colombia passed a bill similar to the one adopted in Brazil, shifting jurisdiction for most crimes committed by members of the military to the military courts. The Constitutional Court struck down the first two iterations of the bill, but the government was determined to make the change and crafted a slightly narrower law that has since taken effect. Since 2005, Venezuela has been using military courts extensively to prosecute civilians involved in protests against the government. In Chile, cases of human rights violations committed by the military are still tried in military courts. [....]

Many politicians have run on platforms promising to be “tough on crime” and have deployed the military to conduct domestic policing operations, as in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Elected leaders, seeking to deliver results for their voters in fighting drug trafficking and gang violence, are turning to their militaries and equipping them with increased legal powers.

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CityLab: The New Metropolitan Majority

To understand what happened on Tuesday, you have to begin by acknowledging that the fight for control of the Senate was a home game for President Donald Trump—and he won it, as expected. The real battlegrounds were the House of Representatives and the gubernatorial contests in states the president won in 2016, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.[...]

Gratifying as that may be, Democrats shouldn’t misinterpret the results. The voters who wrote off Democrats two years ago haven’t retroactively endorsed the party’s 2016 agenda. Their votes in 2018 were driven by their antipathy for Trump. That’s an important distinction because it suggests they won’t automatically stick with the Democratic Party in 2020. So how can Democrats turn this onetime rejection of Trump into a long-term realignment?

Here’s the political reality. In 2016, Democrats suffered because too many Americans viewed us as the urban-enclave party. I’m a big-city mayor—these are my people. But I’m experienced enough to know that the fate of Democratic candidates in 2020’s nationwide and statewide contests depends on their ability to win the hearts and minds of the new “Metropolitan Majority,” a bloc encompassing both the progressives who came out for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and the swing voters who live in the suburban and exurban communities that recently turned from red to blue. [...]

Here’s the crucial takeaway. Over the next two years, Republicans will try to cleave the suburbs from the Democrats’ urban base, pulling swing voters into a coalition with rural conservatives. To build the new “Metropolitan Majority,” Democrats will have to do the opposite, building ties between voters in cities and those in the suburbs that surround them. The election two years from now will hinge on which party is more successful. If Republicans prevail, we’re likely to face a second term of President Trump. If Democrats succeed, we may remember Tuesday as the moment the Democratic Party began building a durable coalition.

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Mic: What Dems still fail to understand about white women voters

CNN exit polling data shows Democratic candidates in key races in Texas, Florida, Georgia and elsewhere won overwhelming support from black, Hispanic and Asian-American women as well as men. But a majority of white women voted for Republican candidates in those same races. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) received 60% support from white women, compared to just 39% for his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. Fifty-one percent of white women chose Ron DeSantis over Andrew Gillum in Florida’s gubernatorial race. This political reality has persisted through election cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle over the years, vexing both liberal feminists and Democrats along with their grassroots allies in the process.[...]

However both male and female voters tend to place defending abortion rights low on their list of priorities. Another 2016 Pew study showed abortion placed 13th of 14 top issues for American voters regardless of sex. The economy, terrorism and foreign policy ranked first, second and third respectively among voters’ priorities, the study found. [...]

“Using gender politics for many Republican women can actually backfire,” study author Melissa Deckman said via email on Wednesday. “There are lots of white women who are pro-life and find the GOP more appealing for that reason; or they are more generally socially conservative and oppose LGBT rights, or are concerned about religious liberty. Moreover, they are very much opposed to feminism more broadly, which they view as a philosophy opposed to men, so attempts to frame a campaign about gender equality aren’t going to work.”

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Politico: Winners and losers from conservatives’ Helsinki lovefest

But the big prize comes with big risks. Weber becomes the man-to-beat for all the other EU political families, but he is also in danger of becoming ensnared in an institutional fight between the European Council and the Parliament over the “lead candidate” process itself. The Council has already said it cannot be legally bound to nominate a Spitzenkandidat as Commission president, as the Parliament has demanded. Weber’s lack of prior experience as a former head of state or government makes him particularly vulnerable to the Council going in its own direction. Resistance to the “lead candidate” process from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe also raises the possibility that Weber’s time to enjoy his grand prize could be limited. [...]

Best Actor — Alexander Stubb: The former Finnish prime minister is an Ironman triathlete — and who better than a marathon runner to understand winning is not as important as getting to the finish line with your head high? Especially if you score a personal best. Stubb is virtually guaranteed a prominent role in the EU leadership going forward, perhaps as a digital czar, given his interest in the risks and opportunities of technological disruption. He will no longer be a target of opposition parties, and he faces none of Weber’s risks. If the Spitzenkandidat process unravels, Stubb could even emerge as a compromise candidate — someone who participated fully in the campaign, but may be more appealing to liberals and socialists than the conservative Weber, who is already being criticized as a longtime ally of Hungary’s self-proclaimed “illiberal” prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Stubb knew the EPP establishment was arrayed against him, but never resorted to criticism or complaint. In the EU, knowing how to lose is a winning trait.

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The Guardian: Pushing up trees: is natural burial the answer to crowded cemeteries?

Added to that was the environmental consideration. Modern cremators use the equivalent of 40 litres of petrol per corpse, on average – enough to drive from Sydney to Port Macquarie – while older cremators can consume twice that, according to 2011 estimates from the Department of the Environment and Energy. “It’s not that cremation of itself is one of the most massive polluters in our society,” Hartley says. “Motorcars, transport, planes would eclipse it, no problem at all – but when you think about it, it’s just a thing that we don’t need to do.”[...]

Cemeteries have long been preoccupied with the problem of space. There’s been talk of building skyward with multi-storey mausoleums and going subterranean with carpark-like catacombs; upright burials, feet first into deep graves, are on offer in Victoria’s Corangamite Shire. In a world-first trial at Rookwood, 120 pigs have been buried and exposed to additives in an experiment in speeding up decomposition in order to bury more human bodies in the same plots.[...]

Hartley wants the project to convey an optimistic message: the earth is surprisingly resilient. Decades from now, if all goes to plan, the pasture would be transformed by 20-metre tall eucalypts, including peppermints and snow gums, as well as tea trees, bottlebrushes, and acacias. People who want to be interred there would have their non-embalmed bodies placed in a biodegradable coffin or shroud and be buried at the minimum legal depth (90 centimetres in NSW) to promote natural decomposition. Native vegetation would then be planted on top and on another acre along Saumarez Creek. The idea is to restore a native wildlife corridor connecting Saumarez Ponds and Dangars Falls, a long-term goal of the Armidale Tree Group.

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Politico: Matteo Salvini, peacemaker (of sorts)

In an interview in his office in the Viminale, the interior ministry headquarters in downtown Rome, Salvini held out several olive branches to Brussels, which has been the main target of his anger since he was elected leader of the far-right League in late 2013. The one exception is the Italian budget, which the European Commission rejected for breaking its deficit rules.[...]

The 45-year-old, who has taken his party from 4 percent support when he became leader five years ago to 17 percent in March’s general election, to about 34 percent in the most recent polls (“for me that’s too high,” he said), reckons it’s clear that austerity budgets don’t work. [...]

Nor does Salvini believe that the Commission would ever cut EU funding to Italy, as some diplomats have suggested. “Italy is one of the [EU] founding countries, Europe’s second manufacturing power, they cannot treat us like Luxembourg [also a founding EU member],” he said.[...]

Sanctions on Russia, a country with which he has close ties, are “counterproductive and useless,” he said, adding that “we’ll try to convince as many countries as possible of how useless they are.” However, he said that at the December EU summit, when leaders will decide whether to roll over the Russia sanctions, “no veto” will be used by Rome. [...]

He said he still believes the single currency “has been an experiment that was socially and economically wrong” but at the same time “we are not in government to leave [the eurozone], or to destroy it. We work with what we have, we stay in the EU and in the single currency system.”

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Politico: The sack of Rome’s mayor

Since taking office in 2016, the mayor of Rome has been unable to clean up the city’s filthy streets and make its badly maintained transport system work. Last month a tube station escalator collapsed, injuring 24, including one man who lost a foot. Almost no one is pleased with her work. [...]

According to the 5Stars’ code of ethics, a conviction of any kind would result in her resignation. Yet while her boss, 5Star leader and Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, and the movement’s founder, Beppe Grillo, don’t like Raggi, they also don’t want her to resign because they fear losing control of Rome to their coalition partner and chief political rival, the League. [...]

Before the 5Stars took over a major city for the first time, Rome was briefly governed by the center-left Democratic Party’s Ignazio Marino, and before that by the right-wing Gianni Alemanno. The latter is currently facing trial for corruption and Marino — who denounced the city’s systemic corruption to prosecutors, triggering the “Mafia Capitale” scandal — resigned over a restaurant expenses scandal.

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Axios: Marijuana legalization, daylight savings and other notable measures passed in the midterm elections

Marijuana legalization: Michigan became the 10th state to legalize marijuana — including the District of Columbia — and first midwestern state to do so for recreational use. North Dakota rejected a similar measure, but voters in Missouri approved the legalization of medical marijuana.

Abortion: The matter was on the ballot in three states. In Oregon, voters defeated a measure that would have banned the use of public funds to pay for abortion coverage. Alabama and West Virginia approved sweeping anti-abortion language to the states’ constitution, proclaiming that women have no right to perform the procedure.[...]

Daylight saving: Californians decided they no longer want to reset clocks twice a year. A measure they approved would implement a permanent year-round daylight saving time. But, it requires a two-thirds vote from the state legislature and a change in federal law to go into effect.

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The Guardian: TaxPayers’ Alliance concedes it launched smears against Brexit whistleblower

The rightwing pressure group the TaxPayers’ Alliance has conceded that it illegally sacked the whistleblower Shahmir Sanni for revealing unlawful overspending in the Brexit referendum campaign, in a case that could have a major impact on how lobbyists are described in the media. [...]

The alliance has accepted all the allegations Sanni made during his action claiming unfair dismissal, wrongful dismissal, direct discrimination and “dismissal by reason of a philosophical belief in the sanctity of British democracy”.

Read more Significantly, it has also conceded that it is liable for what Sanni’s lawyer, Peter Daly of Bindmans, describes as “extreme public vilification”. Sanni had claimed that it was responsible for a smear attack published by the website Brexit Central, and that it coordinated “derogatory statements” made by the head of Vote Leave, Matthew Elliott, to the BBC – calling Sanni a “Walter Mitty fantasist” and “so-called whistleblower” and claiming that he was guilty of “completely lying” – before an official finding by the Electoral Commission into the conduct of the Brexit referendum.[...]

Chris Milsom, a barrister who specialises in whistleblowing cases, said: “It is incredibly unusual for a respondent to make a complete concession on liability as the respondent has here. To wave a white flag to avoid disclosing documents and giving evidence in court is really unusual. They conceded everything. How does an ostensibly private company come to be working with Downing Street? What is their relationship? Who are their funders?

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