South Asia: Democracy’s New Hotbed? | California Will Keep You Up on Election Night

As global freedoms seem to dwindle, South Asia provides a glimmer of hope.

The principal opposition leader in the Maldives, former President Mohamed Nasheed, was in exile. Several others were under arrest. And a day before the Indian Ocean archipelago voted in elections expected to return President Abdulla Yameen to power, his security agencies raided an opposition party’s offices. But by late evening on Sept. 23, what had seemed impossible had happened: Yameen’s increasingly authoritarian regime stood defeated. It wasn’t alone in that fate.

For decades, India, the world’s largest democracy, has stood as a sole beacon of relatively free and fair elections in South Asia. It’s been surrounded by nations that have had intermittent democratic journeys interrupted — at times brutally — by military coups and civilian dictatorships. But now, change is afoot in the world’s most densely populated region. Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and now the Maldives all have had democratic elections in the past eight months with a rare common outcome: The incumbent has been defeated.

Nearly 100,000 new jobs for mining “support activities” have been created under the U.S. president.

Two months after taking office, President Donald Trump stood before an audience at a rally in Louisville, Kentucky, and reiterated one of his campaign promises. “We are going to put our coal miners back to work,” he declared. “They have not been treated well, but they’re gonna be treated well now.”

At the time, Trump was hot off repealing environmental regulations. But the boom he promised never seemed to become reality: Coal production went up slightly in 2017, but coal consumption fell. Still, miners across the United States hoped that their industry and its once-secure, well-paying jobs would return. And they are … but in a new way. The Trump administration has presided over roughly 6,300 new mining jobs, but Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that jobs in support activities for mining have risen 37 percent since January 2017.

‘Andrea’ fled gangs in Honduras and landed right in the heart of a heated American immigration debate.

A normal morning in my life: I wake up early, go to school. After school, I go to work from 5 to 10, and then I go home. I don’t do much. On the weekends, Friday, I go out with my friends at night after work. Saturday and Sunday I do my homework. That’s practically all I do.

Since I work in Koreatown, I have a lot of Korean friends, and I’ve noticed Koreans like to sing. So in my free time, we go and sing karaoke. Sometimes we play billiards, or we go to the movies. Obviously, sometimes we go to a club since I’m 21. With my family, sometimes we’ll go out to eat dinner.

In Honduras, the neighborhood where we lived was very dangerous. Every time I left school, there were a lot of gang members looking at me. I was the first one they were waiting for, and the guys would follow me and be like, “Oh, Andrea, come here get in my car.” Even though I would tell them no, they would say, “Haven’t you seen my tattoo?” And they would show me their tattoos that showed they were part of the gangs.