Today in Focus: India is voting: will Modi win the world's biggest election?

The world’s largest ever election is nearing its conclusion in India, with voters in 20 states casting their ballots in the marathon six-week poll.

The election is being viewed as a referendum on the prime minister, Narendra Modi, a staunch Hindu nationalist who rode a wave of popularity five years ago to become the first leader of a majority government in decades.

The Guardian’s South Asia correspondent, Michael Safi, has been out on the campaign trail and tells Anushka Asthana that following the suicide bomb attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir earlier this year, Modi has focused his campaign fully on his national security credentials.

Also today: the Guardian sketchwriter John Crace on his day at Nigel Farage’s rally in West Yorkshire, where the Brexit party leader’s anti-establishment message was rapturously received.

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The Conversation: Franco’s invisible legacy: books across the hispanic world are still scarred by his censorship

One other hugely important legacy that few people are aware of is the continuing effect on books, both in Spain and throughout the Spanish-speaking world. To this day, translations of many world classics and works of Spanish literature are being reprinted using expurgated texts approved by the dictator’s censors – often without publishers even realising it, let alone readers. It has had a chilling effect on freedom of speech over the years, and must be addressed as a matter of urgency. [...]

With no one under the age of 40 even alive during the dictatorship years, few people are even aware of the problem. Public libraries are encouraging people to read thousands of volumes without realising they are censored. Many of these texts have been imported to Latin America, sometimes even being republished in different countries with their censored parts intact. It means that a fairly large proportion of the world’s population is being routinely denied access to literature as it was intended to appear. [...]

The upshot is that Spain’s literary censorship problem is alive and well today. Indeed, it is arguably getting worse: it is easy to release digital versions of these classics, so Franco’s hand even reaches into Kindles and tablets. We are talking about one of the most long-lasting yet invisible legacies of his regime. The effect on culture in Spain and in other hispanic countries is almost incalculable. Censorship has certainly distorted many people’s perception of the civil war and its consequences. Many readers will also be ignorant of writers’ real points of view regarding important social issues such as gender roles, birth control and homosexuality.

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The New York Times: Will a Documentary Take Down the Polish Government?

The problem of pedophilia is well illustrated by the story of Father Pawel Kania, one of the subjects of the film. He was detained by church authorities in 2005 for attempting to seduce children and possessing child pornography. But instead of punishing him or turning him over to the authorities, the church relocated him to a parish in the city of Bydgoszcz — where he was, amazingly, tasked with working with children.

In 2010, a court found Father Pawel guilty of possessing child pornography. Two years later, the priest was found in a hotel room with a boy and arrested. In 2015, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for rape and child molestation. Earlier this year, the church finally expelled him from the priesthood. [...]

Law and Justice is also implicated in the abuse cover-ups. One of the party’s best-known figures, Stanislaw Piotrowicz, made his name in 2001, when as a prosecutor in the town of Krosno he dismissed a case against a priest accused of raping six girls. Mr. Piotrowicz argued, “The priest confirmed that he took children into his lap, children would run up to him during catechism, they would hug him, he, too, would hug them, caress them, he sometimes kissed them. The children were happy, they were content. There was no sexual subtext.” After the case was transferred to a different jurisdiction, the priest was convicted. [...]

The Law and Justice and Church faithful have every right to be disoriented. In today’s highly polarized Poland, elections are won thanks to large-scale voter mobilization. And that’s what is happening now — people are angry at both institutions. That may prove the deciding factor in whether or not the party retains power. The first poll since the documentary appeared shows that the opposition European Coalition ranks 10 percent above Law and Justice, 43.6 percent to 33 percent, a 6 percentage-point drop in a week for the ruling party.

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The Guardian: 'Staggeringly silly': critics tear apart Jacob Rees-Mogg's new book

But its early readers have not been persuaded that the project was time well spent. The historian AN Wilson, whose book The Victorians was published in 2002, wrote in the Times that Rees-Mogg’s effort was “anathema to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense”. Describing the work as “a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions”, he said it claimed to be a work of history, but was in fact “yet another bit of self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician”.

On the chapter about Gen Charles Napier’s conquest of Sindh, Wilson wrote: “At this point in the book you start to think that the author is worse than a twit. By all means let us celebrate what was great about the Victorians, but there is something morally repellent about a book that can gloss over massacres and pillage on the scale perpetrated by Napier.” [...]

She criticised the lack of women in the book. “In mythology, six of the 12 Titans, the children of Uranus and Gaea, were female; not here,” Hughes wrote. “The only female who appears in the book is Queen Victoria herself who, Rees-Mogg assures us, ‘became no less of a woman when she learned to rely upon Albert as a partner and to trust him’.”

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Vox: North Dakota quietly decriminalized marijuana

As the news outlet Marijuana Moment and the advocacy group NORML reported, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed a bill decriminalizing marijuana last week — but the issue got little to no attention from his office or news media. The law makes it so first-time possession of up to half an ounce of marijuana is no longer a criminal misdemeanor that carries the potential for jail time, but instead is an infraction that only carries a fine. [...]

The concern for legalization advocates is that decriminalization keeps the ban on selling marijuana, which means users wouldn’t have a legal source for the drug, and criminal organizations would therefore still have a source of revenue that they can use for violent operations around the world. The fines, while less punitive than arrests or prison time, can also cause problems, since they’re often applied in a racially disparate manner. [...]

Supporters of legalization argue that it eliminates the harms of marijuana prohibition: the hundreds of thousands of arrests around the US, the racial disparities behind those arrests, and the billions of dollars that flow from the black market for illicit marijuana to drug cartels that then use the money for violent operations around the world. All of this, legalization advocates say, will outweigh any of the potential downsides — such as increased cannabis use — that might come with legalization.

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Forbes: 5 Important Takeaways From Google's Two Year Study Of Remote Work

Recently, the folks at Google published their findings from a two year study they conducted on remote work. The company is certainly in a good position to study this, as a full 30% of the meetings held there involve at least two time zones. The report published, ‘Working Together When We’re Not Together’ had some interesting insights that both remote workers and employers considering a remote arrangement for their teams should know about. [...]

When teams work together in a single location, they have the opportunity to connect with one another through daily interactions and microinteractions. They stop by one another’s desks to chat. They may even socialize outside of work. These connections can act as a buffer when more difficult conversations must occur. For example, it’s easier to point out a mistake or critique an idea when all parties involved have a history of goodwill. [...]

If a team or organization is new to remote work, there may be hesitance to acknowledge any problems. After all, nobody wants to be part of the team that caused management to reconsider allowing employees to work remotely. However, it’s imperative that teams do just that. Just like each team must be free to establish their own communications methods, tools and standards, they must also feel comfortable acknowledging any roadblocks they face.

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