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from India Insight:

Karnataka Assembly elections: Bangalore goes to the polls

(Pictures by Gokul Chandrasekhar, Rahul Singh and Raktim Hazarika) Elections to 224 constituencies of the Legislative Assembly of Karnataka were held on Sunday, May 5, 2013 across the state. The state capital Bangalore has 28 seats in the legislative assembly. Despite muted campaigning in the city, voters came out in large numbers to vote. Security was tight, given that the city had witnessed a bomb attack barely a few weeks ago.  Voter turnout was brisk during the early hours but slowed towards the afternoon. Here are a few snapshots of the polling booths across the city, where the elections by and large were peaceful.

from The Great Debate:

Maduro pressed to drop ‘magic’ focus on ‘realism’

Nicolas Maduro’s election campaign was rich in magical realism, designed to bedazzle voters.

Banking on sympathy votes after Hugo Chavez died of cancer last month, and confident he would don his mentor’s socialist revolutionary mantle, Maduro conjured visions that blurred fantasy and fact, evoking the genre that Latin American literary giants Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges had popularized.

from MacroScope:

Italian elections may yet shake euro zone

Is Italy about to add some bite to its bark as far as the euro zone is concerned? Quite possibly. An opinion poll last night showed Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition is charging up along the rails, increasing the chances of a messy election result with the front-running centre-left unable to form a stable government.

Although it retains a strong lead, the way votes are carved up in the Senate could easily rob it of a majority in the upper house. The huge media coverage Berlusconi can command via his empire may be starting to tell. Technocrat premier Mario Monti, who could yet play a key part in a centre-left administration if his centrist grouping is needed in a coalition, responded to the polling evidence by launching a stinging attack on Berlusconi.

from Photographers Blog:

Heartbreak in Kenya

WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC CONTENT

Garsen, Tana Delta, Kenya

By Siegfried Modola

When I got into photography and started my career as a freelance documentary photojournalist at the age of 29, I had to decide to either move from Kenya, the country where I lived and grew up for most of my life, or to stay.

I believe the latter choice has made an important difference in the way I perceive, follow and conceptualize the stories that I work on. Kenya feels like home. I know the region and speak the language. I feel an intimate connection with the country that comes with having a history with the place, years of building relationships and having enough time to go in-depth in my work.

from MacroScope:

Italy gives new bite to euro zone crisis

Don’t start putting out the tinsel yet. Just when we thought we had a smooth glide path into Christmas the euro zone has bitten back.

Over the weekend, Italy’s Mario Monti called Silvio Berlusconi’s bluff and said he was pulling the government down which will mean early elections in February. The budget bill will be passed and then the country will be in a potentially precarious state of limbo as parliament is dissolved. Italian bond futures have opened more than a point lower, which denotes a reasonable measure of alarm, although the safe haven Bund future has only edged up so we’re far from panic mode.

from Chrystia Freeland:

Making the most of diversity

For America, 2012 will go down in history as the year of the Latinos, the blacks, the women and the gays. That rainbow coalition won President Barack Obama his second term. This triumph of the outsiders is partly due to America's changing demographics. And it is not just the United States that is becoming more diverse. Canada is, too, as is much of Europe.

That is why it is worth thinking hard about how to make diverse teams effective, and how people who straddle two cultural worlds can succeed. Three academics, appropriately enough a diverse group based in Asia and America, have been doing some provocative research that suggests that our ability to comfortably integrate our different identities - or not - is the key.

from Chrystia Freeland:

Obama, the super-rich and the election

Among the losers in the United States this week are the super-rich, who spent unprecedented millions to evict President Barack Obama from the White House. The investing class turned sharply and vociferously against the president many of them had supported in 2008. On Tuesday night, the plutocrats lost their shirts.

"Boy, they threw away a lot of money," Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor, told me. "It was very interesting to hear on Tuesday night about all the corporate jets packed in Logan Airport" for Mitt Romney's party in Boston.

from Thinking Global:

Historic stakes are higher in China than in U.S.

Now that all the high-cost, mud-slinging drama of the U.S. presidential campaign is over, the world can focus on another political transition of potentially greater consequence: China’s 18th Communist Party Congress, which began today.

Don’t be misled by the choreographed orderliness of the moment when China’s new leaders parade on stage in order of seniority; the selection process this time has been marred by the murder of a British businessman and the purge of the provincial party boss Bo Xilai, punctuated by a blind political dissident seeking refuge in the U.S. embassy, and soiled by corruption charges and a New York Times report on the estimated $2.7 billion wealth of Premier Wen Jiabao’s family.

from Mark Leonard:

China and U.S. face mirror-image leadership challenges

By a twist of fate, the world’s two most powerful countries will select their new leaders in the same week. On the surface, they are almost perfect mirrors of each other.

While the U.S. election promises a nail-biting finish, the results are likely to be predictable. In Beijing, the next leader – Xi Jinping – was ordained several years ago to be appointed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the Party Congress this week.

from Ian Bremmer:

Sandy clouds the election’s final act

With Election Day 10 days away, there has been no “October surprise.” The economy plods slowly forward. Iran has not exploded. No shots have been fired in the South China Sea. Syria’s carnage continues, but the two candidates agree that U.S. troops should remain outside the line of fire. Republicans have tried without much success to use the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi to backfoot the president.

Just when it seemed we’d have an election without a last-minute wildcard, along comes Sandy. The storm has claimed lives, destroyed homes, cut power -- and created uncertainty. The media and the country have turned away from the election toward the disaster’s startling images and human toll.