Italy’s Frightening Election Result

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/opinion/italy-election.html

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“While we were sleeping, Putin won the Italian election,” the Twitter user Southpaw wrote this morning.

Far-right and anti-Europe parties did very well in that election. It’s still unclear who the new prime minister will be. But Italy’s new government will likely join the list of governments — including those in Hungary, Poland and, yes, the United States — hostile to immigrants and even to democratic values.

“After Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France beat back populist and far-right insurgencies in the past year, Europe had seemed to be enjoying a reprieve from the forces threatening its unity and values,” The Times’s Jason Horowitz writes. “That turned out to be short lived.”

Saving teenage lives. In my column this morning, I tell the story of a tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — the site of last month’s mass shooting — that received almost no attention.

On homecoming weekend nine years ago, three students at the school died when their car plunged into a canal. The tragedy received little attention outside of the community where they lived, because our society has become inured to fatal car crashes.

But they are the biggest killer of American teens. And many of them are avoidable. If this is the time when the country is going to get more serious about protecting teens from violence — thanks in large part to the activism of Stoneman Douglas students — car crashes should be part of the agenda.

The column makes some recommendations that I think Democrats, Republicans and independents should all be able to support.

The Oscars. Frances McDormand used a phrase at the end of her acceptance speech for best actress last night that prompted some frenzied Googling: “Inclusion rider.”

An inclusion rider “is a clause in an actor’s contract that requires the cast and crew be diverse in order to retain the actor,” explained Phillip Atiba Goff of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice after McDormand’s speech. “It matters because it puts pressure on a studio’s bottom line.”

The details would clearly be complicated, but it’s an intriguing idea, because it would change diversity from a mere request to an economic demand. “Imagine the possibilities if a few actors exercised their power contractually on behalf of women and girls,” the University of Southern California’s Stacy Smith has written. “It wouldn’t necessarily mean more lead roles for females, but it would create a diverse onscreen demography reflecting a population comprised of 50 percent women and girls. In other words, reality.”

As FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey, Ella Koeze, Rachael Dottle and Gus Wezerek have documented, most Hollywood movies are dominated by white men.

Russia. A must-read for this week: In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer profiles Christopher Steele, author of the famous Trump dossier.