Well, the election battleground has been set: Trump vs. Clinton. (Yes, I know the District of Columbia has yet to vote.) For those unhappy with the choices presented, the question of “what about a third party candidate?” arises. (Yes, I know there is both a Libertarian Party and Green Party already.) Months ago, FiveThirtyEight looked at where Michael Bloomberg fell as a third party candidate, a run he briefly considered. Turns out he too moved out of the middle and into one of the four corners of the board.
The lay of the land for outsider candidates, ca January
Or the post’s sub-title could be something like, Boys with Toys, because I have long enjoyed diagrams of military hardware, liketheseexamples. Today’s post is about Russia’s new main battle tank, the first new design since the 1970s: the T-14 Armata. It premiered in last year’s parade and is expected to enter service soon. This BBC article from last year’s parade shows the various new models expected to enter the Russian Army.
Russia’s new toy
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
Donald Trump will be the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States.
Last summer I never imagined I would type those words in all seriousness, but after Trump won a majority of the votes in Indiana and likely swept all the delegates there, Ted Cruz suspended his campaign.
Two graphics strike my mind to best capture the story. The first is from last summer when FiveThirtyEight added Donald Trump to an existing graphic that loosely mapped out which candidates belonged to which factions of the Republican Party.
Trump was the exception in so many ways…
You can clearly see Donald Trump falls as an outlier at the extreme end of the Tea Party circle. This would be the argument that Trump is not a true conservative. But how did that argument play out over the following months?
Well this New York Times results map breaks down results to the county level. And you can see a lot of Trump red.
Results as of 4 May
It started with wins in New Hampshire and, more importantly South Carolina. Candidates try to win Iowa and New Hampshire and whatever other states there are prior to Super Tuesday, because Super Tuesday requires a ground game that is expensive to maintain. And early victories lead to donations. But Trump’s crushing victory in South Carolina led to a series of wins in the deep Republican red South.
Importantly for this last phase of the contest, the Cruz campaign had bet on winning those very same southern states, the Bible Belt. While Cruz won Texas, it was his home state, he lost almost every other state. The map above shows just how wide and diverse Trump’s victories were. From liberal Massachusetts to Alabama and as far west as Arizona. The final one-two blow, however, came in the above map’s deepest reds: a swath from Rhode Island through Connecticut and New York into Pennsylvania then south into Delaware and Maryland. Trump was favoured in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, but most had not expected those margins. The second blow, look at the deep red in Indiana. Cruz needed to win Indiana. He lost it big. And now he has stepped aside.
Donald Trump will be the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States.
Who is Rousseff? She is the president of Brazil and both she and her government are currently mired in a corruption scandal. Yesterday a parliamentary committee voted in favour of proceeding with impeachment, the first step in a lengthy process. What is that process? Thankfully, we have a BBC graphic to explain it all.
Brazil’s impeachment process
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
As you may know, while I presently live in Chicago, I hail from Philadelphia. I grew up there and most of my best mates did too. And some of them attended a small school called Villanova. And as you may know, their men’s basketball programme just won the national championship in dramatic fashion. So today’s post shares with you a graphic from the Wall Street Journal that explains how Villanova won the game in the final few seconds.
The final shot won it all
Credit for the piece goes to the Wall Street Journal graphics department.
Okay, so the title might be a bit hyperbolic, but the point that China has spent the last few years expanding minor reefs into major military installations still stands. This New York Times piece is a few months old at this point, but through a combination of maps, photography, and diagrams, it illustrates what has been going on in the South China Sea.
Fiery Cross Reef
The screenshot above is of the first still in a short time lapse video introducing the article If you do not have the time to read the entirety of the piece, just watch the video. A lot can happen in one year.
It’s cherry blossom time in Washington. So the Washington Post has a nice piece—appropriately coloured—looking at where the different varietals are within and near the Tidal Basin.
Where the cherry trees are
Credit for the piece goes to Emily Chow and Dakota Fine.
The terror attacks in Paris and Brussels were bad. But even worse? The two attacks exposed a network of IS terrorists living within the Schengen Area. Are there cells or even other networks? One way of uncovering them would be to examine the links between the known terrorists and see if additional nodes appear at the network’s fringes. Given Friday’s piece from the New York times examining the links between the known terrorists, investigators in Europe are likely doing just that.
Looking at the terrorists’ network
Credit for the piece goes to Larry Buchanan, Haeyoun Park, Sarah Almukhtar, Josh Keller, Sergio Peçanha, and Tim Wallace.
I have only ever been to Brussels once and that was only to the airport for a brief layover whilst en route to Vilnius for work. I flew Brussels Airlines for the European segment of the trip and I snagged these photos from the in-flight magazine. Felt appropriate today.
The types of aircraft Brussels Airlines flew at the timeThe seating options on Brussels Airlines flightsThe layout of Brussels Airport
Unfortunately it was a short layover and I was exhausted from the flight, so I never had the opportunity to take photographs of the interior wayfinding and graphics.
Credit for the pieces goes to the Brussels Airlines graphics department.
