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Five candidates are in the race to become the new president. A vice-president, senators and about 18,000 local officials including mayors will also be elected.

On Saturday a mayoral candidate was murdered in the south.

The presidential frontrunner is 71-year-old Rodrigo "Digong" Duterte, who has run a campaign focused on law and order issues but made many controversial statements, including saying that he would butcher criminals.

How should one resist the Trump administration? Well, that depends on what kind of threat Donald Trump represents.

It could be that the primary Trump threat is authoritarianism. It is hard to imagine America turning into full fascism, but it is possible to see it sliding into the sort of “repressive kleptocracy” that David Frum describes in the current Atlantic — like the regimes that now run Hungary, the Philippines, Venezuela and Poland.

In such a regime, democratic rights are slowly eroded. Government critics are harassed. Federal contracts go to politically connected autocrats. Congress, the media and the judiciary bend their knee to the vengeful strongman.

Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase, wrote in July of this year (in a clients-only newsletter obtained by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson) that “profit margins have reached levels not seen in decades,” and “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement.” (Cembalest printed the latter quote in boldfaced lettering.) “US labor compensation,” he explained, “is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”

Citigroup analysts see the American postindustrial economy’s abandonment of fair play as an interesting fact to consider in formulating future investment strategies

“The upper classes of this country raped this country” is one of the more polite things that Morgan Stanley money manager Steve Eisman has to say on the eve of the 2008 sub-prime fiasco.

Nine months into his papacy, Francis has sought to shift the tone of the church, with a special focus on helping the poor. On Sunday, he named cardinals from small, poor countries like Haiti, Burkina Faso, Nicaragua and Ivory Coast. He also named a second cardinal for the Philippines, a heavily Catholic nation struggling to recover from a devastating typh

But Francis’s appointments to the college are also part of his larger plans for the church, which include overhauling the Roman Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the Vatican, and opening a broad debate on the theme of family that could touch on delicate issues like homosexuality and divorce. The cardinals are expected to meet on Feb. 22 at the Vatican for a consistory, a formal meeting, to begin discussions. New cardinals will be formally appointed at that meeting.

Very high national fertility rates have not disappeared, but they are now mostly concentrated in a single region: sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, all five countries with estimated total fertility rates (the average number of births per woman) at six or higher — Niger, Mali, Somalia, Uganda and Burkina Faso — were there. So were nearly all of the 18 countries with fertility rates of five or more (the exceptions were Afghanistan and East Timor).

Sub-Saharan Africa also makes up a substantial portion of countries with estimated fertility rates between three and four: Notable exceptions include Iraq, Jordan, the Philippines and Guatemala

In reality, slower population growth creates enormous possibilities for human flourishing. In an era of irreversible climate change and the lingering threat from nuclear weapons, it is simply not the case that population equals power, as so many leaders have believed throughout history. Lower fertility isn’t entirely a function of rising prosperity and secularism; it is nearly universal.

the very unification of Italy, forged through the annexation of several kingdoms and states, had to deal with the Pontifical States ruled by the Pope. The new Kingdom of Italy would have been meaningless without those lands, which occupied a large part of the central Italian peninsula, and without their capital, Rome.

But the inclusion of the Papal States into the new Italy was painful and not easy. When the Italian troops led by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia entered in Rome in 1870, Pope Pius IX refused to recognize the loss of his territories and the demise of his temporal power and declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican.

Indonesian police have arrested 12 people in connection with Thursday's deadly attack in front of a Starbucks in central Jakarta, including one accused of having received a wire transfer from the alleged ISIS-linked operative suspected of orchestrating the assault, the country's police chief said Saturday.

one is suspected to have received a money transfer from the alleged mastermind, Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian militant who authorities believed to have conducted the operation from ISIS' headquarters in Syria, national Police Chief Badrodin Haiti said.

They also opened fire at people on the street. One of the injured was also a foreigner.

The tools that broke American democracy were not just the Ku Klux Klan’s white sheets, vigilantes’ Red Shirts, and lynch mobs’ nooses; they were devices we still encounter when we vote today: the registration roll and the secret, official ballot.

Along with exclusions of felons and permanent resident aliens, these methods swept the entire United States in the late 19th century, reducing nationwide voter participation from about 80 percent to below 50 percent by the 1920s.

turnout in the United States has never recovered; by one 2018 survey, the country ranks 26th of 32 developed democracies in participation.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

Every other rich country also needs to make similar cuts, immediately. The developed nations with large emissions (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Britain and others) can afford their own Green New Deals; perhaps they can be persuaded to do their parts, if we do.

developing nations — such as India, Pakistan, Ecuador and Malaysia — aren’t going to unilaterally constrain their own economies. If carbon-based energy sources help them compete in the global marketplace, that’s what they’ll use — unless, economists say, they get financial help to develop sustainably, with industrialization powered by renewable energy instead of oil, gas and coal. And there’s only one place they can get that help: from wealthy countries like ours. Giving them cash needs to be part of any Green New Deal.

In the poorest developing countries, where many people live without electricity or other basic necessities, it is unrealistic to expect emissions to drop from their already low rates in the next decade. Some of these countries, including India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are very populous, and their industrialization could cause emissions to skyrocket.

Fascism, it appeared, was dead.To guard against a recurrence, the survivors of war and the Holocaust joined forces to create the United Nations, forge global financial institutions and — through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — strengthen the rule of law.

fascism — and the tendencies that lead toward fascism — pose a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II.

He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity.

For months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions.

Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company

Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.

According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook.

we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics.

President Trump has been talking up a new strategy in the nation’s struggle against the opioid epidemic: imposing the death penalty on drug dealers, just as they do in Singapore and Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines.

“You have to have strength, and you have to have toughness — the drug dealers, the drug pushers are, they’re really doing damage, they’re really doing damage,

Some countries have a very, very tough penalty — the ultimate penalty — and by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do.

Facebook and Google have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days are numbered”

“Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.

In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”

In 2017, the Communist Party formally took control of all print media, including books.

Wherever authoritarian regimes are growing in strength, from Brazil, to Hungary, to the Philippines, literature that expresses any kind of political opposition is under a unique, renewed threat. Books that challenge normative values, especially those with L.G.B.T. themes, have been hit especially hard. History textbooks crafted by independent scholars are being replaced with those produced by the state at a disturbing rate

Last month, the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s education minister Ziya Selcuk revealed — proudly — that 301,878 books had been taken out of schools and libraries and destroyed. All these books were purportedly connected to Fethullah Gulen,

while there is cooperation on many levels — including among companies that are ordinarily fierce competitors — hanging over the effort is the shadow of a nationalistic approach that could give the winner the chance to favor its own population and potentially gain the upper hand in dealing with the economic and geostrategic fallout from the crisis.

What began as a question of who would get the scientific accolades, the patents and ultimately the revenues from a successful vaccine is suddenly a broader issue of urgent national security.

behind the scramble is a harsh reality: Any new vaccine that proves potent against the coronavirus — clinical trials are underway in the United States, China and Europe already — is sure to be in short supply as governments try to ensure that their own people are the first in line.

Donald Trump has begun a tour of Asia with a warning that “no dictator” should underestimate America, in a thinly veiled reference to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.

North Korea marked Trump’s arrival in Japan by warning the “spiritually unstable” president not to make “reckless remarks” about the regime in Pyongyang.

In what many believe is a low-risk start to a 12-day visit that will include stops in South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, Trump praised US servicemen and women and their counterparts from Japan, a “treasured partner and crucial ally”.