The Guardian: Modi's BJP suffers heavy election defeats in Hindi heartland

The governing Bharatiya Janata party’s (BJP) vote collapsed by 17 percentage points in Rajasthan state and by at least 12 points in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, all part of the Hindi heartland where Indian governments are traditionally made or broken.

Those losses, as well as the revival of a Congress party frequently written off in the past five years, had analysts revising their predictions for next year’s national polls, which Modi had been expected to win in a cakewalk. [...]

The government has contended with large protests in recent weeks by farmers in distress due to natural disasters and falling prices. Nearly 55% of India’s 1.25 billion population is directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture, and farmers form an important voting bloc for parties.

The BJP has also faced criticism from Hindu nationalist groups unhappy at the delay in building a temple to the deity Ram in his fabled birthplace Ayodhya. Unemployment also remains a problem despite high economic growth. [...]

Yet Modi’s personal popularity remains significant. In Mandsaur, a Madhya Pradesh rural town surrounded by yellow rapeseed fields, six farmers were shot and killed during one demonstration last year. The BJP lost surrounding districts on Tuesday but surprised analysts by holding Mandsaur, where Modi held a raucous campaign event in November.

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The Guardian: Criminalisation of sex work normalises violence, review finds

The review, by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that sex workers suffering repressive policing – including arrest, imprisonment and extortion by officers – were three times more likely to experience sexual or physical violence from a client and were twice as likely to have HIV or another sexually transmitted infection as those who lived in countries where sex work was tolerated. [...]

Their health and safety were at risk not only in countries where sex work was criminalised, but also in Canada, which has introduced the “Nordic model” pioneered by Sweden, under which the client can be arrested for a criminal offence, but not the sex worker. [...]

France, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Norway, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden also criminalise the client. Guatemala, Mexico, Turkey and the US state of Nevada have regulated sex work, which allows better conditions for some, but worse for the many who operate outside the regulated arrangements. [...]

New Zealand is the only country to have decriminalised sex work, in 2003, although it is not legal for migrants. Sex workers said they were more able to refuse clients and insist on condom use, while relationships with police were better. “We always have police coming up and down the street every night,” said one woman. “We’d even have them coming over to make sure that we were all right and making sure … that we’ve got minders and that they were taking registration plates and the identity of the clients. So … it changed the whole street, it’s changed everything.”

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Vox: Paul Ryan’s long con

To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the “most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country.” Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than “the end of the American dream.” [...]

I was among the reporters who took Ryan’s reboot seriously. “To move us to surpluses,” I wrote of his 2010 proposal, “Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher’s growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs.” [...]

But more important than the differences between Ryan and Trump are the similarities. Yes, Ryan is decorous and polite where Trump is confrontational and uncouth, but the say-anything brand of politics that so outrages Trump’s critics is no less present in Ryan’s recent history. How else can we read a politician who rose to power promising to reduce deficits only to increase them at every turn? Or a politician who raked in good press for promising anti-poverty policies that he subsequently refused to pass? [...]

In important ways, Trump is not a break from the Republican Party’s recent past but an acceleration of it. A party that acculturates itself, its base, and its media sphere to constant nonsense can hardly complain when other political entrepreneurs notice that nonsense sells and decide to begin marketing their own brand of flimflam.

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Vox: 2018 was by far the worst year on record for gun violence in schools

According to data from the US Naval Postgraduate School, there were 94 school gun violence incidents this year — a record high since 1970, which is as far back as the data goes, and 59 percent higher than the previous record of 59 in 2006. [...]

Separately, the project also tracks deaths. By this metric, 2018 was also the worst year on record. So far, 55 people, including the shooter, were killed in school gun violence. The second-worst annual death toll was 40 in 1993. (To put these numbers in context, there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths, including homicides and suicides, in the US in 2016.) [...]

But it doesn’t seem that 2018 was a particularly abnormal year for mass shootings, regardless of whether they happened on school grounds. The Gun Violence Archive’s data, visualized by Vox in map form, indicates that there have been 328 mass shootings so far in 2018, or nearly one a day, resulting in 365 killed and 1,301 wounded. That’s roughly in line with recent years going back to 2015, which have averaged about one mass shooting a day. (The Gun Violence Archive defines mass shootings as any incident in which four or more people were shot but not necessarily killed, excluding the shooter, in a similar time or place, which differs from some other groups’ definitions.)[...]

Second, the US has a ton of guns. It has far more than not just other developed nations but any other country, period. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey.

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Spiegel: Rough Road Ahead for the Merkel Dynasty

Indeed, after the campaign in recent weeks and after their speeches on Friday, nobody could say that the CDU did not have a clear alternative. And ultimately, it chose Kramp-Karrenbauer by the slim margin of 51.75 percent to 48.52 percent. Merkel had brought her to Berlin from her position as governor of the tiny state of Saarland in February of this year to prepare her for this moment. Now, AKK, as she is known, takes over from Merkel as the new leader of the party.

Kramp-Karrenbauer did not want to break with the course charted by Angela Merkel. Indeed, she took a page out of Gerhard Schröder's book, who at the end of the Helmut Kohl era promised that he didn't want to do everything differently, but he did intend to do some things better. In a party that has traditionally tended to shy away from taking risks and embarking on political experiments, her message proved more appealing than that of her rival. [...]

Her first task, however, is that of ensuring that the party doesn't split apart, which appears to be the main challenge facing her at the moment. The race between her and Merz was extremely close, with just 35 votes out of 999 separating the two. The fact that a woman has been chosen to replace a woman as the leader of a party that had been run by men for half a century shows just how fundamentally Merkel has modernized the CDU. But just as many feared that Merz was in it primarily to get revenge on Merkel for having cut short his political ambitions almost two decades ago, Kramp-Karrenbauer will now have to contend with those who contend that she represents the continuation of a Merkel dynasty. The chancellor, in any case, would seem to have taken a huge step toward choosing her own successor in the Chancellery.

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