statista: The Most Culturally Chauvinistic Europeans (Oct 30, 2018)

A Pew Research Center survey set out to answer that question by surveying 56,000 adults across Europe. Respondents were asked whether they agree with the statement "our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others". The following map shows the share of people in different countries considering their own culture to be superior to others and there are certainly some interesting results. Take Portugal where 47 percent of people agree with the above statement compared to just 20 percent in neighbouring Spain.

The most chauvinistic attitudes towards culture were recorded across Eastern Europe with Romania (66 percent), Bulgaria (69 percent) and Russia (also 69 percent) on top. The highest score of any country across Europe was actually recorded in Greece where 89 percent of people agreed with the statement.

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Jakub Marian: Map of ‘vegetarian friendliness’ (number of vegetarian restaurants) in Europe by country

The original idea of this article was to create a map showing the percentage of the population following a vegetarian diet, but it turned out to be impossible to find a reliable source of data for more than a handful of countries. Since there is correlation between supply and demand, I decided to create a map of the supply part instead (which, however, is affected by many other factors than just the percentage of vegetarians, e.g. tourism and overall wealth).

The following map is based on the number on entries at HappyCow, the largest directory of vegetarian restaurants in the world, and shows the number of vegetarian restaurants per 1 million inhabitants. It should be noted that the number can be somewhat misleading for tiny countries. For example, according to happycow.net, there is just one vegetarian restaurant in Andorra, but since it has only around 80,000 inhabitants, the figure shown here is “12.6 vegetarian restaurants per 1 million inhabitants”.

Note: The previous version of this map (from 2014) was inaccurate because it included also health food stores (which HappyCow includes in the number of listings shown for each country). To create the updated version, I checked the number of listings for all cities manually to make sure that only restaurants are included.

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The World Economic Forum: Chart of the day: Is 2019 the beginning of the end for coal in Europe?

Western Europe saw particularly dramatic drops in production – up to 79% in Ireland, according to climate think-tank Sandbag. And there were times of zero or near-zero generation in many countries. The UK, for example, switched off its coal plants for a fortnight in May for the first time.

In absolute terms, Germany saw the biggest drop, as it made substantial cutbacks in both hard coal and its dirtier relative lignite. But it remained responsible for over a third of the coal generation in the EU so far this year, the research shows. [...]

The trend for less coal puts the EU on course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5% year-on-year. But coal’s phase-out is still fairly slow: just a smattering of plants have been closed so far in 2019, mostly in the UK and Germany. And coal will continue to account for 12% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions this year.

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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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Vox: The House just passed a sweeping LGBTQ rights bill

The bill would address a remaining gap in civil rights laws: While there are already federal laws protecting people from discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and disability, there are no such federal laws explicitly protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.

The Democratic-controlled House passed the legislation, but it faces tough odds in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans who generally oppose expanding LGBTQ rights — making the bill very unlikely to become law. [...]

Under federal and most states’ laws, LGBTQ people aren’t explicitly protected from discrimination in the workplace, housing, or public accommodations (like restaurants, hotels, and other places that serve the public).

So someone can be fired from a job, evicted from a home, or kicked out of a business just because an employer, landlord, or business owner doesn’t approve of the person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. [...]

LGBTQ advocates, citing legal precedent, say that what the original laws’ authors believed or intended is irrelevant. Joshua Block, an attorney with the ACLU LGBT and HIV Project, cited a 1998 Supreme Court case, Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services Inc., in which the Court unanimously agreed that bans on sex discrimination prohibit same-sex sexual harassment. Same-sex sexual harassment was not something the authors of federal civil rights laws considered, but it’s something, the Supreme Court said, that a plain reading of the law protects.

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Axios: Map: Where the world's population is growing and shrinking

The big picture: According to the United Nations, the 10 fastest shrinking countries on Earth are in Eastern Europe. Japan, perhaps the country with the most oft-analyzed demographic challenges, is 11th. Many of those countries are struggling economically, with aging populations, a lack of skilled labor and — in some cases — restrictive immigration policies. [...]

Bulgaria’s population is expected to drop more precipitously than that of any other country on Earth, declining by 1.7 million by 2050. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Sofia, the capital, and the metropolitan area surrounding it disappearing over the course of three decades. [...]

Paradoxically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, far-right anti-immigrant parties have fared best in areas with dwindling populations, and Eastern European countries have generally been unreceptive to refugees arriving in Europe. (Though, having reached Europe, those refugees are typically seeking settlement in wealthier countries.)

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CityLab: An Incredibly Detailed Map of Europe's Population Shifts (JUN 22, 2015)

Look at the Eastern section of the map and you’ll see that many cities, including Prague, Bucharest, and the Polish cities of Poznań and Wrocław, are ringed with a deep red circle that shows a particularly high rise in average annual population of 2 percent or more. As this paper from Krakow’s Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Geography notes, Eastern cities began to spread out in the new millennium because it was their first chance to do so in decades.[...]

We already know from other available data that Europe is experiencing a migration to the northwest, but the BBSR map adds complexity to this picture and reveals some interesting micro-trends. The dark blue coloring of the map’s Eastern section shows that the lean years for Eastern states are by no means over. Residents have continued to leave Albania, Bulgaria and Latvia in particular in search of jobs, while even relatively wealthy eastern Germany has been hollowed out almost everywhere except the Berlin region.

Population growth in the Northwest, meanwhile, is far from even. While large sections of Northern Scandinavia’s inland are losing people, there’s still modest growth on the Arctic coasts. And while the Scottish Highlands contain some the least peopled lands in all of Europe, Scotland’s Northeast shows remarkable population gains, a likely result of the North Sea oil industry concentrated in Aberdeen. [...]

Spain’s trends look a little different from those of Europe as a whole. It’s actually in the country’s Northwest where the population has dropped most sharply, notably in the provinces of Galicia and León, which have long been known to produce many of Spain’s migrants.

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Politico: Europe in pieces: Where voters disagree

The European Parliament election in May is expected to produce a major turnover in political power in the EU’s institutions, with populist parties making new gains and voters across the bloc split on what issues to prioritize in the ballot. [...]

The EPP, the EU’s biggest political group, is leading the polls in only two of the bloc’s 10 most populous countries. An EPP-affiliated party leads a national government in only one of its 13 most populous countries. Here are its projected results in the EU-wide election: [...]

If the votes of people who abstained in the 2014 European Parliament election counted toward a new party, that party would be the biggest political force in 24 out of 27 EU countries. The graphic below shows the percentage of people who abstained from voting in the last European election.

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CityLab: The Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

Drive alone to work: More than three-quarters (76.4 percent) of commuters drive to work alone. But in the New York metro area, the share is just about half. It’s 57 percent in San Francisco; about two-thirds in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Seattle; and about 70 percent in Chicago and Portland. And, as might be expected, a smaller-than-average share of workers drives to work alone in more compact college towns such as Boulder, Colorado; Corvallis and Eugene, Oregon; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Ames and Iowa City, Iowa.[...]

Bike to work: Just half of a percent of Americans nationwide bike to work. But nearly 7 percent do in Corvallis, Oregon, and more than 4 percent in Boulder; Ames; and Santa Cruz, California. Two or three percent of commuters get to work by bike in other college towns: Gainesville, Florida; State College; Ann Arbor; and Madison, Wisconsin. Among large metros (with more than 1 million people), almost 2 percent of commuters get to work by bike in San Jose and San Francisco. [...]

Education is another piece in the picture of how Americans get to work. People are less likely to drive to work alone and to use alternate modes in metros where more adults are college graduates. The share of adults with college degrees is negatively and significantly (-0.41) associated with driving to work alone, and positively and significantly associated with using transit (0.56), biking (0.62), walking (0.56), and working from home (0.50), although it is not statistically associated with carpooling. [...]

The way we get to work is also related to our political cleavages. On the one hand, commuters in more progressive metros—those where Hillary Clinton got a bigger share of votes in the 2016 election—are more likely to walk (0.44), bike (0.44), or use transit (0.59), and less likely to drive to work alone (-0.36). Commuters in more conservative metros, where a larger share voted for Trump, are more likely to drive to work alone (0.44). This reflects the fact, though, that more liberal metros tend also to be denser, more affluent, and more educated.

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Social Europe: Tackling poverty and inequality in Europe

National poverty rates in the EU vary between over 25 per cent in Romania and less than 10 per cent in the Czech Republic. For Germany, the figure is 16.5 per cent (2016). The official Eurostat figure for the EU as a whole is 17.3 per cent, which puts poverty in the EU only slightly higher than the level in Germany. However, if a proper EU-wide poverty threshold is calculated, the figure comes out significantly higher. [...]

The poverty rate has decreased slightly since 2015, with the number of people at risk of poverty in the EU falling by around 4 million. This fall is equivalent to just under one percentage point. Any progress may be due to relatively strong growth, especially in the poorer countries. [...]

(a) Intra-country inequality is increased by welfare cuts and labour-market deregulation, technological change and globalisation. All these causes can be addressed by government policy. For example, in Germany the introduction of a minimum wage has halted the rise in inequality observable since 1995. In the EU, a stricter Posted Workers Directive could curb wage competition. In his most recently published book, the late Tony Atkinson presented numerous suggestions for how intra-country inequality could be reduced, covering all categories of cause. Unfortunately, the EU’s economic-policy advice and the requirements it has imposed on indebted countries have instead tended to increase inequality.

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Business Insider: Map shows how much Trump's approval ratings have changed in each state since he took office

In January 2017, the month Trump was sworn in to office, he was broadly popular across a wide geographic area. Trump had a negative net approval rating — the difference in the share of the population approving of his performance minus the percentage disapproving — in only six states and Washington, DC. [...]

By December 2018, Trump's net approval rating had declined in every state and DC. Drops in net approval ranged from a modest 6 percentage-point fall in South Dakota to a massive 36-point swing against the president in New Mexico. [...]

Trump's approval ratings even saw modest declines across several regions of the country since Morning Consult's November 2018 release, with a fall in net approval in all but seven states. It's worth noting, however, that most of the changes since November were small, and could be the result of normal statistical sampling error.

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FiveThirtyEight: The 2018 Map Looked A Lot Like 2012 … And That Got Me Thinking About 2020

But it does mean that pretty much every political battle is going to be pitched with an eye toward 2020. And 2020 will be a unique year in that the House, Senate and presidency are all potentially in play.1 How the presidency goes is anybody’s guess. But Trump took advantage of the Electoral College last time around, winning the tipping-point state (Wisconsin) by about 1 percentage point even though he lost the popular vote by 2 percentage points. If Trump has the same edge in 2020, that could go a long way toward winning him a second term. [...]

With those caveats aside, here’s the map you come up with if you count up the popular vote. It ought to look familiar. In fact, it’s the same exact map by which Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, except with Ohio going to Republicans. It would have equated to 314 electoral votes for Democrats and 224 for the GOP. [...]

The pink states — where Republicans won by fewer than 5 percentage points — are also interesting, mostly because they include Texas, where Democrats lost the popular vote for the House by only 3.6 percentage points and Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost his race for the Senate by just 2.6 points. It’s not as though Texas is exactly at the tipping point yet: Democrats came close to winning it, but they didn’t get over the top, even in a pretty blue year. But it probably deserves to be included in a group of Sun Belt states with North Carolina, Arizona and perhaps Georgia (where Democrats lost the popular vote by 6 points) as places where Democrats can compete in a good year. Among these, Arizona was the best one for Democrats on Tuesday night; they currently trail in the popular vote for the House there by 1.7 points and could make up further ground, as a lot of ballots from Maricopa County are still left to be counted.

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CityLab: Mapping Where Americans Don't Vote

Even in the last presidential election, just 56 percent of could-be voters showed up to the polls. In fact, in hundreds of counties around the U.S., the number of eligible individuals who did not vote far outweighed the number of ballots actually cast for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016. If those millions of no-shows had picked “nobody” on the ballot—the effective choice of their abstention—“nobody” would have won in a landslide.

That is the message of a striking map created by amateur cartographer Philip Kearney in April 2018, which was expanded upon by Jim Herries, an Esri cartographer, last week. Drawing on Census Bureau data and election results, “United States of Apathy” compares those no-show votes to the actual turnout for both presidential candidates in the 2016 election, and adds up the electoral votes that would have been produced. “Nobody” wins 445 electoral votes, a victory of several factors over Trump’s 21 and Clinton’s 72. (Again, that’s if they were actually running against a no-show candidate. In reality, Trump won the electoral college with 304 votes while Clinton lost it with 227, despite winning the popular vote.) In the updated version, Herries has added a series of interactive maps that detail where the pluralities of “apathetic” voters played to the advantage of both candidates, and by what margin, across the 50 states. Dive in here.

While surveys of no-show voters in 2016 indicate a lack of interest in the candidates or issues at hand, it may not be fair to pin the cause of America’s low turnout rates entirely to apathy. Some voters are disillusioned with what they see as the inefficacy of the political system; others may live far from polling places and lack transportation access; still more may prefer to prioritize their jobs or families. And voter suppression efforts—be they photo ID requirements, late registration penalties, last-minute poll closures or schedule changes, or voter roll purges—keep an untold number of Americans away from the ballots. So do problems that arise when people do show up to vote, including long lines and malfunctioning machines.

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Jakub Marian: Number of top-ranked universities by country in Europe

The map below shows the number of universities that are in the top 500 on the 2019 list. It should be noted that other university rankings (e.g. the QS World University Rankings) may use a different methodology, which may lead to different results. [...]

The map below solves this problem by calculating the number of students studying at top-500 universities divided by the population in thousands. For example, the figure 13.6 in Germany indicates that there are 13.6 students studying at a top 500 university per 1,000 people. [...]

As you can see, the playing field is much more level here, the champion being Iceland, which, despite its tiny size, has two top-500 universities.

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CityLab: Europe’s Capital Cities Keep Getting Richer and Younger

Per-capita GDP has risen most sharply in capital regions across the continent, with the biggest leaps coming from the Dublin region, followed by Inner West London, and the regions around Bucharest, Warsaw, and Bratislava. [...]

Meanwhile, further west there are causes for concern as countries tend to polarize between poorer and richer regions; the U.K. in particular shows an especially patchy growth map. While some sections of London remain extremely (if unequally) wealthy, per capita GDP has dropped immediately to its north, above all in most of the sprawling Yorkshire region, where an ongoing journey from an industrial economy decimated in the 1980s towards a service-oriented one seems to be neither complete nor entirely successful. [...]

Germany’s east side isn’t alone when it come to the aging of its small cities and countryside. The regions north of Hamburg and the rural districts that sandwich the heavily industrialized Ruhr region both have notably high average ages, suggesting that here too, the countryside is being drained of young people, pushing these regions towards becoming agricultural and retirement communities with little urging younger locals to stay. [...]

Another key map in the report highlights just how much Europe’s regions are diverging. The image below relates the GDP of urban regions to their national averages, with blue shading showing rates above national averages and orange showing rates below. Again the U.K. shows cause for concern, with the London region powering ahead of the national average and almost all of its former industrial heartland in central and northern England falling behind. Poland’s contrasts are also notably sharp, with Warsaw far wealthier than the national average while its rural hinterland just to the south is far poorer.

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Quartz: All the places plastic bags are banned around the world

In America, only two states have conclusively banned single-use plastic bags: Hawaii and California.

Though Hawaii’s ban came first, it wasn’t technically a state-wide ban: all five Hawaiian islands (Big Island, Honolulu, Kauai, Maui, and Pala) individually banned plastic bags at various points—the last of which took effect in 2015. The bans, which aim to fully phase in by 2020, range in definition and severity, but generally still allow for the use of 100% recyclable plastic bags.

California passed a unilateral, state-wide ban in September of 2014, and it went into effect in November of 2016. The law bans single-use plastic bags at all large retailers, and imposed a 10-cent charge for paper bags. Before the law was passed, more than 100 California local laws banning bags were already in place. [...]

At least 32 countries around the world have plastic bag bans in place—and nearly half are in Africa, where plastic bags frequently clog drains, leading to increased mosquito swarms (and, as a result, bouts of malaria). [...]

In Ireland, a 22c plastic bag tax has reduced usage by as much as 90%. Portugal has seen a drop in excess of 85%. And since imposing a tax in 2003, Denmark has seen the lowest plastic usage in Europe, averaging just 4 bags per person per year.

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Jakub Marian: Nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments per capita by region in Europe

The map below shows the number of nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments (which includes hotels, holiday cottages, camping grounds, etc.) in a region divided by the number of people living in that region. In other words, it is a kind of tourists-to-residents ratio, including tourists from other parts of the same region. The map is based on data provided by Eurostat. There are no data for the UK, for some reason.

The map does not really do justice to some of the regions above the “10+” cut-off point. There are five regions with more than 50 nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments per capita (which means, essentially, that more than 50/365 ≈ 14% of their population are tourists, barring “intra-regional” tourism):

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Vox: Forget the Rust Belt. Florida is now Trump’s strongest swing state

Trump’s state-by-state approval rating has significantly dropped over the past year and a half. In January 2017 he had a net-positive approval rating in almost every state in the country, except California, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhodes Island. That’s far from the case now. [...]

As you can see, Trump is currently polling better in Florida than he is in Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Utah, Nevada, or North Carolina (all states that proved crucial to his 2016 presidential win). [...]

In Florida Trump’s voter base isn’t comprised of the overlooked white working-class voters who figured prominently in postmortems of the 2016 election. As Michael Grunwald wrote for Politico, the “economically secure retirement meccas” that delivered Trump his presidential victory are giving Republicans hope they can stave off a possible “blue wave” election in 2018:

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statista: The ten countries where it's worst to be female

A new study from the Thomson Reuters Foundation has found that India is the most dangerous country in the world for women. The research was based on a survey of 550 experts on women's issues and criteria included healthcare, discrimination, cultural traditions, sexual/non-sexual violence and human trafficking.

Ending violence against women in India was made into a national priority after a student was raped and murdered on a bus in Delhi five years ago. Experts have now said that the country is not moving fast enough to eradicate danger to women with rape, sexual harassment/harassment and female infanticide still continuing at alarming levels.

The war-ravaged countries of Afghanistan and Syria came second and third in the study while number 10 is certainly a surprising addition. According to experts, the United States makes the top-10 list of the most dangerous countries for women due to the #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns dominating newspaper headlines and media coverage for months. 

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Jacobin Magazine: Against Janša, Against Brussels

Miro Cerar’s party presided over, nominally speaking, an extremely successful economic era, with economic growth among the highest in the EU. High economic growth, however, came at the cost of growing precarization among young people and unending austerity. Discontent festered below the positive headlines, and union activity increased in both the private and public sectors, as well as in previously nonunionized areas. Then in March of this year, at the very moment when negotiations between the state and the public sector unions had reached a deadlock, Cerar stepped down, bringing an abrupt end to his three-and-a-half-year tenure. [...]

And what, then, of the Right? The base of SDS is quite different from, say, those who attend Hungarian Guard marches. Still, this election marked the first time an SDS leader openly supported far-right organizations (for example, the Slovenian branch of Generation Identitaire / Generacija identitete, a racist movement originating in France). Another new development is the public and financial support from Hungary’s ruling far-right party, Fidesz, and the media companies around the prime minister, Viktor Orban. Orban and SDS leader Janez Janša started their friendship in January 2016, when Orban was visiting Slovenia on official business. After meeting with then-Prime Minister Cerar, he proceeded to a closed-door conference with Janša. Hungarian investments into SDS media outlets followed. Today, three Hungarian media companies connected to Orban own 45 percent of SDS’s media-company shares. Hungarian media also owns 52 percent of Nova Obzorja, which publishes a SDS newspaper, and Nova24tv.si (SDS TV) and New Horizon share the same address. Hungarians have so far invested over 2.2 million euros into SDS media, some of it in the months leading up to the elections. If there was any question of their tightening relationship, Orban also took part in the SDS Congress in May, where he declared his full support for Janša’s party. [...]

During the election campaign, Janša’s party emitted right-wing rhetoric on a whole host of topics, including the migrant crisis, women’s and LGBT rights, and the credibility of mass media. At the same time, the election results do not amount to the so-called Orbanization of Slovenia. SDS won 220,000 votes on June 3, 70,000 less than in 2011, when it came in second. For a party with an especially stable voter base (86.6 percent were return voters), this was a mediocre finish. The success of SDS is always in direct correlation to the amount of broken promises and lack of alternatives coming from the centrist and left-of-center parties. Slovenian society is culturally rather left wing, and can be mobilized against the Right — but it has to consider left parties worthy of support.

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