It's Wednesday and this is Anna cutting through the noise of today's news for you

Today's headlines

Indian guru convicted of rape

An Indian court has found a prominent guru guilty of raping a teenage girl in 2013. Asaram Bapu, 77, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, prompting concerns that his followers will turn violent in protest. It is the latest high-profile rape case in India that have fuelled public protests and raised concerns about how police handle allegations and treat victims.

Inside misogynist subculture Incel

Shortly before a van rammed into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto - killing 10 and wounding 14 others - Alek Minassian, the suspect being held on suspicion of carrying out the attack, shared a short and cryptic message on Facebook. The post made reference to another mass killer – Elliot Rodger, who shot dead six people and wounded 13 others in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 – and said that the ‘incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and the Stacys’. Incel is a deeply misogynistic online subculture that advocates for the ‘involuntary celibate’, and is almost always exclusively male. On incels.me a member is described as someone who ‘can’t have sex despite wanting to’ and is denied the pleasures of relationships. In incel vernacular, sexually successful men are known as ‘Chads’, and attractive women are called ‘Stacys’.

Macron and Trump talk Iran deal

During an almost caricature-esque state visit to the US, Emmanuel Macron has proposed negotiations on a ‘new deal’ aimed at curtailing Iran’s military power and nuclear developments that would work alongside the Obama-era agreement. The French president offered the idea of a new deal at a joint White House press conference with Trump as a way of salvaging the 2015 agreement, which Trump has threatened to leave. It is unclear, however, how Trump feels about the proposal.

WhatsApp no longer for the young

WhatsApp is banning under-16s from using its messaging platform in the European Union. As it stands, users must be at least 13, but the firm is changing the rules ahead of new EU data privacy regulations coming into force in May. The app will ask users to confirm their age in new terms of service in the next few weeks But it remains to be seen how the age limit will be enforced.

What we like

Must-read

The New York Times’s glass ceiling index has found that there are more men named John than there are women in America’s top jobs - and that’s only the half of it. Exploring a range of industries, and using a varied methodology, the publication shines a spotlight on how far we still have to go to see gender equality in the workplace.

In-depth

A rare dose of measured optimism about the future of America in Fallows’s article entitled ‘The reinvention of America’ for The Atlantic is worth taking the time to read. He travelled across the country, visiting places like Mississippi and Kansas and South Dakota and inland California and Rust Belt Pennsylvania, to find out how people actually feel about their lives. And, contrary to what mainstream media will tell you, America is, according to this writer, heading in the right direction. As radical as that sounds.

Culture

Where are all the queer women on TV in 2018? A question posed by Dazed and Confused Magazine in response to a wave of more complex representations of gay men on screen, such as Queer Eye and Call me by your Name. Writer Sophie Lynne Jackson calls for more nuanced and pronounced explorations of queerness for women in the mainstream, because if the men can have it now, why can’t females?

Entertainment

YouTube star Jake Paul is reportedly being sued for $2.5 million after he was accused of trashing a rented property in California. The lawsuit was filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday and stated Paul and others rented the ‘multi-million dollar single-family home located in an upscale neighborhood’ in 2016, The Wrap reported. Paul and others allegedly trashed the property while shooting their YouTube videos, pulling pranks and doing stunts for his 14 million YouTube subscribers.