One reason compromise has become so hard in politics is that many districts are no longer competitive – and therefore, candidates don’t have to win voters beyond their partisan base. Reforming how districts are drawn is an attempt to fix that. 

• Action on Korean Peninsula: North Korea says it will completely cut off roads and railways connected to South Korea beginning Oct. 9 and fortify border areas, state media reported, heralding a further escalation in activity close to the demarcation line.
• Election Day attack thwarted: The FBI arrests an Afghan man who officials say was inspired by the Islamic State militant organization and was plotting an Election Day attack targeting large crowds in the United States.
• Mozambique votes: The presidential election could extend the ruling party’s 49 years in power since the southern African nation gained independence from Portugal in 1975. Some candidates allege manipulation of the election process.
• Nobel Prize in chemistry: David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper are recognized for their work with proteins. Two of them created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins identified by researchers.

Read these news briefs.

Now to our story on who gets to write history. In Argentina, decades of well-documented crimes and court hearings are being questioned by the nation’s new populist, libertarian leadership.

While activists around the world fight for marriage equality, the Philippines is considering “separation equality” – whether, and under what conditions, married couples should be allowed to divorce. The debate delves into issues of religious freedom, women’s safety, and family welfare.

What effect will young voters have on the November election? Trends from prior years show that their habits are changing over time, often motivated by issues that matter to them.

“Saturday Night Live,” which is celebrating its 50th season, launched the careers of scores of comedians. A diverting new film about the TV show’s premiere features frenetic creativity – and its toll.

What an entrance. On Tuesday, or only a week after she became Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo sent her security czar to walk the streets of Culiacán. The city is the epicenter of a murderous struggle between two factions of a giant drug cartel in the state of Sinaloa.

By his mere presence in one of Mexico’s most violent cities, Omar García Harfuch, the new secretary for federal public safety, was sending a nuanced message: Just as Mexico was able to make progress as a democracy in recent decades, it is now improving its approach to defeating organized crime.

Mr. García, a former police officer, was in Culiacán to show that President Sheinbaum plans to deploy some tactics that are different from those of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. While she will keep the crime-fighting social programs of AMLO (as the former president is known), she and her security chief will apply lessons they learned when she was mayor of Mexico City and he was head of the capital’s security. Together, they halved homicides in the city and suppressed many organized gangs.

The new plan includes a focus on only six Mexican states – the ones with the most violent incidents. It also relies heavily on better police intelligence, mediation between cartels, and more coordination among security officials at all levels, from prosecutors to the military.

“Security is a problem that requires shared responsibility and a unified response,” the new president said in laying out her plan. Nearly two-thirds of Mexicans see public safety as the nation’s gravest problem, according to a government survey earlier this year.

Mexico, like many countries in Latin America, has been on a long learning curve in the battle against crime syndicates. Yet despite many setbacks, the region has a strong reason to believe it can someday succeed. Since the 1980s, most countries have successfully fought back against other powerful forces, according to two scholars writing in this month’s Journal of Democracy.

“Drug cartels and their bosses have replaced power-hungry generals, Marxist guerrillas, and predatory business elites as the forces most inimical to democracy,” wrote Javier Corrales and Will Freeman.

Building democracies to resist “nonelected threats” like generals, rebels, and elites once seemed improbable, they stated. Many countries still contend with those threats, but most of Latin America is now democratic.

“The lesson for today’s leaders is that institutional reforms can subdue security threats,” the two scholars concluded.

Mexico’s new leader is avoiding failed anti-crime policies and adopting different ones nationwide that have largely worked in the capital. For Mexicans, progress in their democracy has given them hope of making progress in upending a deep culture of organized crime. Good builds on good.

During his walk in Culiacán, Mr. García displayed that confidence in such progress. He has the people’s faith in rule of law behind him.