Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

• Bloomberg Businessweek’s How to Hack an Election profiles Andrés Sepúlveda, who has been manipulating elections in Latin America for a decade.
• IPA is funding research into financial services for the poor (deadline April 29).
• The great Development Impact Blog turns five today, and contributors look back over some of their favorite posts.
• A friend posed a good question: Why aren’t the horrible sexual abuses by UN peacekeeping troops of children they were sent to protect sparking the same public outrage as the Catholic Church abuses?
• Markus Goldstein and David Evans have a helpful post on turning your research into a 15-minute presentation (hints: skip the lit review, decide on model or results, and no tables).
• From AER, big impacts for sons when mothers got a cash transfer as part of the first US welfare program (1911-1935). They:
  

  …lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers. They also obtained one-third more years of schooling, were less likely to be underweight, and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers.

• Previous research has suggested a U.S. Southern “Culture of Honor,” among Southern white men, where disputes can more often result in violence (including the famous insult experiment). A new political science study looks at whether the President’s background matters for conflicts:
  

  Interstate conflicts under Southern presidents are shown to be twice as likely to involve uses of force, last on average twice as long, and are three times more likely to end in victory for the United States than disputes under non-Southern presidents.

And, some poor State Department worker was forced to delete a series of tweets warning Americans about dangers traveling for spring break after upsetting a number of people. Because if there’s one truth about international affairs we can’t handle, it’s that we might not be hot:

(h/t Lindsey Shaughnessy & David Batcheck)