BBC4 In Our Time: The Gordon Riots

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most destructive riots in London's history, which reached their peak on 7th June 1780 as troops fired on the crowd outside the Bank of England. The leader was Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, who objected to the relaxing of laws against Catholics. At first the protest outside Parliament was peaceful but, when Gordon's petition failed to persuade the Commons, rioting continued for days until the military started to shoot suspects in the street. It came as Britain was losing the war to hold on to colonies in North America.

With

Ian Haywood Professor of English at the University of Roehampton Catriona

Kennedy Senior Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York and

Mark Knights Professor of History at the University of Warwick

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The Guardian: How Airbnb took over the world

Eleven years on, Airbnb’s site lists more than six million rooms, flats and houses in more than 81,000 cities across the globe. On average, two million people rest their heads in an Airbnb property each night – half a billion since 2008. [...]

In London – where more than 77,000 homes are listed on Airbnb, a fourfold increase since 2015 – mayor Sadiq Khan last month called for a registration scheme for people renting properties on a short-term basis. Since 2015, a legal cap of 90 nights a year for short-term rentals in London has been in place, but it has proved almost impossible to enforce. [...]

Last week an adviser to the European Court of Justice said the company – which is registered in Ireland – should be regarded as a digital service provider rather than a real estate business. This could exempt it from onerous regulation. Airbnb has spawned competitors though none has matched its scale. Marriott International recently said it would become the first global hotel chain to launch a home-rental business. Hilton and Hyatt are considering similar moves. [...]

Fears of using Airbnb for lucrative real estate schemes are not misguided. The city filed a $21m lawsuit against a group of real estate brokers who are accused of using Airbnb to rent out 130 apartments in the city. The restrictions have been supported by housing campaigners, who see the company as a factor in rising rents and gentrification.

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CityLab: Texas High Speed Rail Faces a New Threat: Semantics

The terminology is important for reasons beyond its own sake. Being a railroad or not determines whether Texas Central is entitled to use eminent domain as it surveys and acquires property. State law allows railroads and certain other private companies to use eminent domain to seize land for projects in the public interest. But in February, in response to a lawsuit by a landowning couple in rural Leon County, a district court ruled that Texas Central did not have that right. The firm is “not a railroad or interurban electric company,” the judge stated, because it hasn’t laid track or run a train yet.

Texas Central contends that it is indeed a railroad, and points to an earlier court decision from Harris County where a judge said so. The company says it would prefer to acquire privately held land through amicably struck commercial sales, and has already secured more than 30 percent of the land in its preferred right-of-way. But in the all-but inevitable event that it can’t seal 100 percent of those deals, it plans to keep fighting the Leon County case in court to secure those eminent domain rights, Holley Reed, the managing director of external affairs at Texas Central, told CityLab. [...]

But the Texas Central project differs from California’s high-speed rail in many ways. Chiefly, it is an investor-backed undertaking, not a publicly subsidized project. Texas Central has said that it plans to spend more than $15 billion to build and run its planned 240-mile route from Houston to Dallas, in partnership with Central Japan Railway, which will help implement the shinkansen technology. Construction won’t begin until funding in full has been raised among investors, the firm promises (one bill moving through the Texas legislature would codify that promise in law). Citigroup and Mitsubishi are advising its intricate financing structure, and Renfe, the Spanish rail operator, has signed on to run the trains. Texas Central company might apply for federal loans, but the project won’t be funded by state or federal grants. [...]

It’s hard to dispute that the project is indeed risky in some basic respects, though. The United States has never seen a privately operated high-speed rail line; Florida’s partially opened, investor-backed Brightline project in Florida—now dubbed Virgin Trains USA—is the closest example, but it has the major advantage of using an existing right-of-way and is still a ways from judgment. And it’s true that few rail lines around the world operate successfully on ticket sales alone. (Even Japan’s rail systems, which are unusually profitable, make a big chunk of proceeds from shrewd station planning and advertising.) In the U.S., the best-performing passenger train routes link the densely packed cities of the Northeast Corridor, which have extensive public transit networks. Neither Houston or Dallas particularly qualify on that front. “This is Texas. People have pickup trucks and want to drive cars,” Workman said. “This is the recipe for the worst, most colossal failure financially.”

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Quartz: Photos: Thai king Maha Vajiralongkorn is crowned

King Maha Vajiralongkorn has been officially crowned as Thailand’s monarch amid Buddhist and Hindu prayers and pageantry costing over $30 million.

The 66-year-old Vajiralongkorn, also known as king Rama X, succeeded his father upon the latter’s death in October 2016. But the coronation was delayed by a year of mourning and a suitable span of time from the late king Bhumibol Adulyadej’s funeral in 2017. Today’s coronation was the country’s first in nearly seven decades.

The coronation celebrations span several days and include a royal procession on Sunday, for which rehearsals have been underway in the capital during the week. The ceremonies were preceded by Thailand unexpectedly getting a queen after Vajiralongkorn married the deputy head of his person guard force on Wednesday (May 1), making her Queen Suthida.

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The Guardian: ‘The NRA is in grave danger’: group's troubles are blow to Trump's 2020 bid

The president is likely right to be worried by the NRA’s travails. His tweet seemed to signal concerns about whether the once all-powerful group would again spend tens of millions of dollars to back him in the 2020 election as it did so effectively during his 2016 win, say NRA veterans and gun rights analysts.

Trump’s tweet, coming just days after he made an unprecedented third speech as president to the NRA annual convention, also blasted a new investigation by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, into allegations of financial improprieties at the 5 million-member NRA. The tweet charged James and New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, were “illegally using the state’s legal apparatus to take down and destroy this very important organization”, which has been battered by recent back-to-back yearly losses totaling $64m. [...]

“The reality is that the NRA absolutely helped Trump get elected, and probably to an extent greater than most people realize,” Aquilino said “The strongest NRA states are the swing states. Trump realizes that NRA support in those swing states is more important than political party affiliation for winning.” Trump’s tweet, he added, amounted to “telling the children to stop throwing food across the table at each other and get down to business”. [...]

The NRA reported that it spent $54.4m on the 2016 elections to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). But two NRA sources with ties to the organization’s board told McClatchy last year that the NRA’s total spending in 2016 was at least $70m, a figure that includes spending on its field operations to mobilize voters and online ads, neither of which have to be reported to the FEC.

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Politico: Want to Fix Presidential Elections? Here’s the Quickest Way.

What are the existing proposals, and what’s wrong with them? Most of the energy to date has been devoted to replacing the Electoral College with a “national popular vote,” which would combine all votes cast nationwide into one unified count, rather than tallying them on a state-by-state basis. The idea here is to avoid situations in which a candidate wins the presidency when voters as a whole actually prefer a different candidate. Several of Warren’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate have introduced a constitutional amendment to implement a national popular vote. But a constitutional amendment is notoriously difficult to achieve, especially for this purpose, and especially in today’s partisan environment. [...]

As clever as this plan is, it has some serious problems. First, it’s not clear that the Supreme Court would accept it as constitutional, given that it’s designed to undermine the Electoral College’s system of separate state-by-state voting. Second, although this plan has been gathering momentum—it has been adopted by the District of Columbia and 14 states, most recently Colorado, Delaware and New Mexico—it still remains 81 Electoral College votes short of the 270 necessary to take effect. It’s unclear that the compact will reach the magic number before November 2020, or ever.

There is a third, more significant problem with the interstate compact. As drafted and as adopted by the states that have signed on, the interstate compact would award the presidency to the candidate who receives a plurality, not necessarily a majority, of the popular vote. Anyone concerned that Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, might run as an independent, siphon votes from the Democratic nominee and cause President Donald Trump to win reelection understands the shortcomings of a plurality-based system. Suppose the nationwide vote is 43 percent for Trump, 42 percent for the Democratic nominee and 15 percent for Schultz. The national popular vote compact would hand the White House back to Trump, even though 57 percent of voters wanted him to lose.[...]

Where should reformers focus? It’s hard to say exactly how many states and just which ones would need to adopt this reform before 2020 in order to make a difference in the outcome of the next presidential election. But as a practical matter, the race is likely to come down to only a few battlegrounds. The Cook Political Report identifies five “toss-ups”: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If ranked-choice voting were employed in these five states, but nowhere else, the Electoral College winner would be highly likely to be the same candidate who would have prevailed if a ranked-choice national popular vote were held. In fact, it’s possible that this could hold true if even a single pivotal state adopted ranked-choice voting—think Florida in the 2000 election.

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National Public Radio: Indonesia Plans To Move Its Capital Out Of Jakarta, A City That's Sinking

Jakarta is plagued by massive challenges. As the BBC has reported, it's the fastest-sinking city in the world, with almost half of its area below sea level.

"If we look at our models, by 2050 about 95% of North Jakarta will be submerged," Heri Andreas, an expert in Jakarta's land subsidence at the Bandung Institute of Technology, told the broadcaster. [...]

Brodjonegoro told reporters Monday that neither of these options would mitigate the crowding in Java, where more than 140 million people live, according to the Post. They ultimately decided on the third option — to locate the new capital outside of Java. [...]

The city's massive amount of traffic is also costly. According to the BBC, the planning minister has estimated traffic jams in Jakarta cost the economy some $6.8 billion annually.

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