Mid-Week Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

• Job losses stare Wall Street executives. (Reuters)

• Why is Venezuela so violent? (AlJazeera) 

• Government to blame for much of present economic woes. (ET) Also, check out how backward states are fueling India's GDP growth.

• Stalin's deadly railway to nowhere. (BBC Magazine)

Some guards used the insects to inflict merciless punishments.

"They'd undress the prisoner and tie him up for the mosquitoes and that was worse than any torture instrument."

... one young man, enslaved on the railway because of his politically incorrect poetry, was stripped naked and tormented in this way after he refused to give the names of some prisoners who had escaped.

A 16-year-old girl, whose mother had died and whose father returned wounded from the front, was desperate to feed her four younger siblings. When she was caught stealing half a sack of beetroots she too was sent off to build the railway.