Vox Sentences: Xenophobia doesn’t always win: London elects Muslim mayor

Can Sadiq Khan make Labour great again?; Obama forces companies out of their shells; North Korea's rare party Congress.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Fighting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism alike!

Mary Turner/Getty Images

• Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party appears to have won London's mayoral election (though the vote counts haven't been finalized), making him the first Muslim mayor of the city.

  [BBC]

• Khan had been expected to beat the Conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith, who came under significant criticism from other Conservatives for focusing on Khan's religion and ties to "extremists."

  [Middle East Eye / Peter Oborne]

• (Khan was a human rights lawyer who represented some clients he calls "pretty unsavoury characters." But representing someone doesn't mean sharing their views.)

  [Press Association]

• From one angle, Khan's election is a vindication for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party — the progressive wave that swept Corbyn to the head of the party last year also helped Khan win the party's candidacy in the mayoral election.

  [FT / Sebastian Caine]

• But Labour has been something of a problem for Khan in the last days of the campaign. He had some pretty harsh words about anti-Semitic comments from some Labour leaders (including former London Mayor Ken Livingstone), and was trying to distance himself from the party earlier this week.

  [Bloomberg / Andrew Atkinson]

• In the rest of the country, Labour lost a few dozen seats on local councils, which is highly unusual for a minority party. (Like midterm elections in the US, off-year elections in the UK tend to favor the opposition.)

  [The Guardian / Heather Stewart, Rajeev Syal, and Rowena Mason]

• The losses are just bad enough for Corbyn's moderate critics within Labour to criticize him, but not quite bad enough for them to actually call for his removal.

  [The Guardian / Claire Phipps and Haroon Siddique]

Disclosure on the half-shell

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11421966/panama-papers-nine-questions-embarrassed-to-ask

• The Obama administration formally issued its long-awaited federal regulation forcing banks to disclose the owners of shell companies.

  [Reuters / Timothy Gardner, Jeff Mason, Susan Heavey, and Doina Chiacu]

• The rule would require disclosure of anyone who owned 25 percent or more of the equity interest, or anyone with "significant responsibility" for the business.

  [Wall Street Journal / Samuel Rubenfeld]

• Obama paired the regulation with a call for Congress to tighten up financial disclosure laws — requiring all companies to tell the Treasury Department's financial crimes unit who their real owners are, for example.

  [McClatchy / Kevin G. Hall, Tim Johnson, and Lesley Clark.]

• It probably sounds like this is all a reaction to the Panama Papers leak last month. It's actually been in the works since 2012, but it's quite likely that the leak sped it along.

  [NYT / Louise Story]

• It's unlikely, though, that the regulation will be enough to satisfy the leaker, who released a manifesto Friday (under the name "John Doe") expressing frustration that the documents had led to more talk than action.

  [ICIJ / John Doe]

• John Doe's complaints go way beyond shell companies, though. He thinks that the Panama Papers should have spurred widespread action on income inequality itself. (Note to future leakers: You don't always control the narrative.)

Ain't no party (congress) like a Workers' Party (congress)

Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

• North Korea's seventh Workers' Party congress in national history, and the first since 1980, began on Friday.

  [BBC]

• In a stunning move, foreign journalists were invited into the country to cover the congress. In an even more (or perhaps not at all) stunning move, they were subsequently barred from actually attending it.

  [NYT / Christine Hauser]

• Here's what we know: Kim Jong Un is following in the footsteps of his grandfather Kim Il Sung in elevating the role of the party in the workings of the country (while his father, Kim Jong Il, preferred the military).

  [Washington Post / Anna Fifeld]

• That's not to say North Korea doesn't have expanding military capacity, though — Kim Jong Un opened the congress by praising its nuclear progress, which US intelligence officials admit they haven't been able to stop.

  [NYT / David E. Sanger and Choe Sang-hun]

• This is all a case for taking North Korea seriously. As Max Fisher wrote for Vox in January, it's important not to think of it as a kingdom ruled by a cartoon dictator but as a holdover from 1930s-era Japanese fascism.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• In that context, the fact that Kim Jong Un banned weddings and funerals for the weekend, so that all attention could be paid to the congress, is ridiculous — but it's also totalitarian and immiserating.

  [The Daily Beast / Gordon G. Chang]

MISCELLANEOUS

Whatever happened to Chamillionaire after "Ridin'"? He invested his money extremely wisely and became a multimillionaire venture capitalist, that's what the hell happened. [AV Club / Joe Blevins]

• Sadly, the boat that should be named Boaty McBoatface will be named after Sir David Attenborough. But one of its remotely operated undersea vehicles will be Boaty McBoatface, even though it is not a boat and should be called "remotely operated undersea vehicle mcremotely operated undersea vehicleface" (ROUVy McROUVface for short).

  [BBC]

• Since 2000, more than 1,800 people have been sentenced to death in India. Only three have been executed. Why?

  [Hindustan Times / Harry Stevens and Aparna Alluri]

• Meet Chloe and Halle. They are 16 and 17, they are beloved of Michelle Obama and mentored by Beyoncé, and you will be hearing them on the radio shortly.

  [NY Mag / Jada Yuan]

• A list of Bach chorales "as translated by my niece after one semester of German."

  [McSweeney's / Nolan Bonvouloir]

VERBATIM

"If you had to choose a moment in human history to live — even if you didn’t know what gender or race, what nationality or sexual orientation you’d be — you’d choose now. There’s power in nostalgia, but the fact is the world is wealthier, healthier, better educated, less violent, more tolerant, more socially conscious and more attentive to the vulnerable than it has ever been." [Barack Obama to NYT / Philip Galanes]

• "Let’s all congratulate J Mascis on his brand new VW Golf."

  [AV Club / Marah Eakin]

• "Converts like Hugo Marcus, a gay Jewish philosopher, show Islam wasn’t just present in Europe in the years after World War I — for some, it played a vital role in discussions about what the continent’s future should look like."

  [Foreign Policy / Marya Hannun and Sophie Spaan]

• "In one study in 2011 of more than 5,000 women across India, only 3 percent said they were "forced" into the sex trade, and only 10 percent said they freely chose it. The rest fell into the gray area in between."

  [NYT Mag / Emily Bazelon]

• "In the moving piece, published by Time, Spears praises Preston, 10, and Jayden, 9, calling them her 'masterpiece' — which, while certainly heartfelt, sort of diminishes Spears’ hit 2001 song, 'I’m A Slave 4 U,' long heralded by fans and critics alike as her actual masterpiece."

  [StarWipe]

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