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Scotus reversed an earlier ruling which held the maps should be redrawn to accurately represent the state’s Black populationHello and Happy Thursday,A few days ago, the US supreme court made a decision in a significant voting rights case that I find unusual and alarming. Continue reading...

By upholding Alabama’s gerrymandered districts, the supreme court is laying the groundwork for ending voting rights and political power for Black peopleTuesday’s US supreme court decision, Merrill v Milligan, which upheld Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional map, is reminiscent of the holding in the supreme court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision: “That a Black man (woman) had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Even though the two cases addressed two different situations, the overall disregard of the rights of Black people in America by the highest court in the country is the same.And just as the Dred Scott decision laid the groundwork for similar rulings that led to the continuation of white political power at the expense of Black political power, so too does the Miller case lay the groundwork for ending voting rights and political power for Black people in this country and a path towards white political power at all levels of government.April England-Albright is an attorney and the Black Voters Matter Fund (BVMF) legal director. Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown are BVMF cofounders Continue reading...

Panel asks National Archives to turn over communications about missing and destroyed records relevant to Capitol attackThe House oversight committee on Thursday opened an investigation into potential violations of the Presidential Records Act by Donald Trump, after he retained and destroyed records relevant to the 6 January insurrection.The panel asked the National Archives to turn over communications between the former president and the agency about missing and destroyed records, as well as a description of materials in boxes of records retrieved from Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago last month. Continue reading...

The leaked document says unions would not ‘improve anything’. Plus, a third of Americans have detectable levels of toxic weedkillerGood morning.Target is instructing store managers to prevent the retailer’s workers from unionizing, leaked training documents reveal.How does the training characterize unions? As “a business that makes money from the dues and fees paid by its members” – but then goes on to say they’re formed when workers join and express the wish to be represented collectively.The leak comes as other US chains including Amazon and Starbucks fight unionization.Why is the move significant? It suggests the panel is close to investigating potential culpability for Trump.When did Navarro discuss 6 January? He has spoken about the events of that day in his book In Trump Time, on his podcast and with reporters. This means he should be free to speak to the panel without legal impediment.Why is he of special interest? Navarro was an influential advisor to Trump while also being in regular contact with the political operatives behind the scheme to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. Continue reading...

Loved by artists from Prince to Butthole Surfers, Davis created a fearlessly sexual, futurist sound that sowed the seed of rebellion• Betty Davis, raw funk pioneer, dies at 77In 1974, a year before the release of Nasty Gal, the third studio album by funk and fashion trailblazer Betty Davis, the New York Times predicted that her radical, raunchy music would eventually be appreciated, if only people would let themselves catch up with her: “Miss Davis is trying to tell us something real and basic about our irrational needs, and western civilisation puts its highest premiums on conformity and rationality and rarely recognises the Bessies or the Bettys until they’re gone.”Rather than conform, Davis, who has died aged 77, let the landmark discography she recorded in the 1970s speak for her, along with the sultry, futurist stage persona she created in a powerfully tall afro, cosmic leotards, sequinned hot pants and silver thigh-high boots. “I made three albums of hard funk,” Davis said in the 2017 documentary They Say I’m Different. “I put everything there.” And then, for decades, she vanished from the public eye. Continue reading...

The share of students returning for a second year of college fell in 2020 to the lowest level since 2012, and uncertainty about the virus could deepen the dropout crisisCollege took a back seat the moment Izzy B called the suicide hotline.Izzy, 18, had spent her senior year of high school online. Then she’d gone straight to online summer school at a local community college near Denver. When in-person classes there started this past fall, she was glad to be back in the classroom and finally experiencing some real college life. Continue reading...

Schools across the US scramble to fill vacancies created by a teacher shortage and Covid-related absencesHenry Leckenby, 54, recalls a feeling of scarcity when he first started working as a substitute teacher. Each morning, he jumped on the computer first thing to see which assignments were open that day.Now, he has his pick of jobs he wants to take and schools he wants to work in. Continue reading...

Former Senator David Perdue, now running for Georgia governor, repeats false election fraud claims on campaign trailA Republican candidate for governor in Georgia has said he would not let “any of the left” run elections in his state, adding repeatedly that it would happen “over my dead body” and underscoring the violent tone that has come to shape discourse around democracy in America.Former Senator David Perdue railed against his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, in a video of a speech given 4 February in Fayette county. Abrams, a voting rights activist, would be the first Black governor in the state’s history if elected. Continue reading...

New leaked training guidelines prompt managers to look for warning signs of worker and labor union organizingLeaked training documents from Target, one of the largest retailers in the US, reveal how the company is directing management at stores to prevent workers from organizing unions.At the end of January 2022, Target emailed store management new training guidelines on labor relations to complete, prompting managers to look for warning signs of worker and labor union organizing within their stores and coordinate with corporate human resources to quell union organizing campaigns. Continue reading...

State takes legal action over allegations of widespread discrimination and harassment of black staff at plant near San FranciscoThe state of California is suing Tesla over allegations of operating a “racially segregated workplace” at its factory near San Francisco.California’s department of fair employment and housing (DFEH) said it had filed a lawsuit alleging widespread discrimination and harassment of black employees following complaints from hundreds of Tesla workers at its main factory in Fremont. Continue reading...

A Human Rights Watch report found Cameroonian asylum-seekers forcibly flown back home suffered imprisonment, torture and rapeCameroonian asylum-seekers deported by the Trump administration suffered imprisonment, torture and rape on their return, and many were forced in to hiding or fleeing the country once more, according to a new report.In the last months of the Trump administration, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency stepped up its deportations of African migrants, especially Cameroonians. Over 80 of them were flown to Cameroon in October and November 2020 alone, amid allegations of abuse, in which Ice detainees said they had been forced to sign or fingerprint documents believed to be waivers agreeing to their deportation. Continue reading...

Cincinnati had been predictably underwhelming for years before a young quarterback with swagger and ability turned things aroundThere is something remarkable about Joe Burrow. Call it an aura, call it swagger, call it what you want. In the abstract, talk of an ‘it factor’ feels like a whole lot of blathering to explain the unexplainable: His Cincinnati team playing above their understood talent level. And then you watch the games, and you see it: Tough to identify; impossible to ignore.Burrow has rejuvenated a sorry Cincinnati franchise who, up until the quarterback’s arrival in 2020, had laid their claim to fame as being the cheapest, most stable presence in the league. They rarely hit rock bottom, lows were always accompanied by flashes that the good times were around the corner: The heady days of the Carson Palmer-Chad Johnson era; five-straight trips to the playoffs (and five-straight losses) behind Marvin Lewis, Andy Dalton, and a stacked roster. Continue reading...

The lifting of mandates is coming at a time when the CDC says a vast majority of the country is still seeing high Covid transmissionSeveral US states, many of them governed by Democrats, began rolling back mask mandates this week, a move public health experts warn could set back progress battling Covid.On Wednesday, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York and Rhode Island joined California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Oregon in lifting mask mandates for some public places. Continue reading...

Trump programme to ‘counter Chinese national security threats’ continues to spread fear among academics with links to ChinaIt was sometime before 7am on 21 May 2015 when Xiaoxing Xi, a physics professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, was woken by people pounding on his front door. Still not fully dressed, he opened the door to be confronted by about 12 armed FBI agents.The agents burst into Xi’s house, running about, shouting “FBI, FBI”. They pointed their guns at his wife and two daughters and ordered them to walk out of their bedrooms with their hands raised. Xi was handcuffed and arrested in front of his family. Continue reading...

Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to confuse Hitler’s secret police with popular Spanish cold tomato soupThe extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene triggered a wave of viral jokes on Wednesday after ranting about the “gazpacho police” patrolling the Capitol building in Washington DC.Greene was apparently mixing up the famously cold Spanish soup gazpacho with the Gestapo – the brutal Nazi-era secret police in Germany. Continue reading...

Authorities say Kelly Turner spent years fabricating her seven-year-old’s illnesses to gain sympathy from charitiesA Colorado mother who fatally abused her seven-year-old daughter and lied about her health to receive handouts from charities worth at least $100,000 has been sentenced to 16 years in prison.A judge issued the sentence to Kelly Turner on Wednesday after she pleaded guilty last month to child abuse, charitable fraud and theft. Continue reading...

Move to pursue Peter Navarro suggests the select committee is edging ever closer to examining potential culpability for TrumpThe House select committee investigating the Capitol attack on Wednesday subpoenaed Donald Trump’s former White House senior adviser Peter Navarro, escalating its inquiry into the former president’s efforts to return himself to office and the January 6 insurrection.The move to pursue Navarro, who helped finalize the scheme to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win with political operatives at the Willard hotel in Washington DC, suggests the panel is edging ever closer to examining potential culpability for Trump. Continue reading...

Temperatures 15-20F above normal expected in southern California from Wednesday through SundayAn unusual winter heatwave is expected across California this week with record temperatures in the forecast for multiple cities from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles.In southern California, where temperatures are predicted to be 15 to 20 degrees above normal from Wednesday morning through Sunday, the National Weather Service upgraded a heat watch to a heat advisory. Continue reading...

Denis Cilley had given up her pet, Ashes, for dead but a microchip confirmed she had somehow made her way 1,500 miles awayA Maine family that long ago gave up on a lost family cat is being reunited – more than six years and 1,500 miles later.Denise Cilley, of Chesterville, said she was shocked to get a voicemail last week announcing her cat, Ashes, had been located in Florida. Continue reading...

Kaleb Franks admitted conspiring to abduct Gretchen Whitmer, leaving four alleged co-conspirators still facing trialA man charged in an alleged plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, pleaded guilty on Wednesday, a second key conviction for the government a month before four others face trial.Kaleb Franks joined Ty Garbin as the second person to admit guilt in a plot to abduct the Democratic governor before FBI agents arrested them in October 2020. The plea gives prosecutors another important witness for the 8 March trial. Continue reading...

Coffee chain fires seven workers in Tennessee but denies that the reasoning was tied to union effortsStarbucks has fired seven workers involved in organising a union in Tennessee, fueling accusations that the coffee giant is retaliating against the growing labor movement it faces nationwide.The workers – a third of the total workforce at the Memphis location – were fired on Tuesday, including most of the union organising committee. Continue reading...

Students instructed to raise their arms in prayer at event in public school’s auditoriumBetween calculus and European history classes at a West Virginia public high school, 16-year-old Cameron Mays and his classmates were told by their teacher to go to an evangelical Christian revival assembly.When students arrived at the event in the school’s auditorium, they were instructed to close their eyes and raise their arms in prayer, Mays said. The teens were asked to give their lives over to Jesus to find purpose and salvation. Those who did not follow the Bible would go to hell when they died, they were told. Continue reading...

Instead of ramping up the threats, western nations should be offering Vladimir Putin a ladder to climb downThe current western narrative on the Ukraine crisis is that Russia is a machiavellian power with an expansionist agenda. That view is shaping our response: we are matching Vladimir Putin’s aggression, meeting strength with strength and threats with threats. But what if we tried to get inside the mind of the enemy, and ask what was motivating the aggression? By doing so, could we break this cycle – and offer Putin a way out, too?When the USSR deployed ballistic missiles to Cuba in the 1960s, their proximity to the US nearly unleashed a third world war. Sitting in Moscow today, does Putin see being encircled by Nato as an equivalent threat? After all, one of his core demands is that Nato curbs its expansion close to the Russian border, and that Ukraine must not join. Russia claims that the US repeatedly told Soviet leaders it would incorporate Russia into a cooperative European security framework. In practice, Nato emerged as a US-dominated security frame with about 75,000 US troops still on European soil. Great powers always treat with suspicion and hostility the presence of rival great powers on their borders.Gabrielle Rifkind is a specialist in conflict resolution and the director of Oxford Process Continue reading...

The disgraceful smear against Keir Starmer has strong echoes of the former president’s attacks on Hillary ClintonIn 2007, Boris Johnson took a shot at Hillary Clinton, then a candidate for the Democratic US presidential nomination, in his Telegraph column. He wrote that Clinton’s eyes put him in mind of a “sadistic nurse in a mental hospital” and that she represented “everything I came into politics to oppose,” not least “purse-lipped political correctness”.He even threw in a reference to “the position of poor Vince Foster’s gun”. Foster was a Clinton-era White House counsel, and his suicide in 1993 has fed wild conspiracy theories – including that the Clintons had him murdered – ever since.Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes the Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter The Media Today Continue reading...

French president’s statement that Russian leader vowed not to escalate crisis met with scepticism in Kyiv. Plus, A-ha moments could trigger fast climate action

Their sunny pop-optimism and ‘Army’ of fans are giving millions of people hope – and may even be luring some people away from the far-rightA battle is raging in front of our eyes, but this is no ordinary war. While the combat may be bloodless, no one should be fooled. This clash is fierce and unforgiving, representing the ideological struggle of our age. On one side we find men wearing animal horns and dressing in furs. On the other are legions of devotees draped over their computer screens. This contest of wills is the ultimate postmodern showdown. I’m talking, of course, about the fight for our future, namely, the legendary battle of far-right conspiracy theorists v K-pop.And the good news is that, in this war, K-pop – that globally renown, highly engineered, synthesiser sounding, toe-tapping, arm-snapping, bubblegum pop music – keeps winning.Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York Continue reading...

After he was stabbed and lay dying on a train, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche said, ‘tell everyone on this train I love them.’ I will never forget his wordsIt was 26 May 2017 on the Portland MAX light rail service when a white supremacist named Jeremy Christian began threatening two teenage girls; one of the girls was black, the other in hijab. Three other men, all strangers on the same train, stood up to Christian, defending and ultimately saving the girls. Christian attacked the three men with a knife, killing 53-year-old Ricky John Best and 23-year-old Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and injuring Micah David-Cole Fletcher.As Taliesin was bleeding, another passenger, a woman named Rachel Macy, knelt with him, comforting him and staunching his wounds. Taliesin knew he was dying. “Tell everyone on this train I love them”, he said to Macy in his final moments.Maeve Higgins is a Guardian US columnist and the author of the book Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them Continue reading...

Adams appears to have had some personal success with a vegan diet after a health scare, but can he replicate it among all New Yorkers?One morning in March 2016, before Eric Adams burst onto the national stage as the charismatic new mayor of New York City, he had a very rude awakening.The then Brooklyn borough president was startled to find that he could barely see the alarm clock that was sounding his morning call. His bedroom looked shrouded in mist. Continue reading...

The quarterback is finally on a team that can make the best use of his talents. But his former team, the Lions, have also benefited from trading himSpeaking of compelling Super Bowl LVI angles, Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford finds himself in the big game just one year after he asked the Detroit Lions, who won their last NFL championship nine years before there even was a Super Bowl, to trade him.As he pointed out Monday, though, “Just because I came here doesn’t mean we were going to get to this point.” Continue reading...

Just like their bland aesthetic, social media stars’ low-risk, high-gain activism has become a core part of how they attract attentionWho should be famous? There are people who are so brilliant at – and dedicated to – what they do that their work makes the world seem bigger and more exciting. Watching them act, hearing them sing, reading their writing or seeing their art can make you feel like something inside you is waking up – like there is more to life than work, bills and shopping. It really hits you. There are people who live wild, fascinating lives, full of stories that remind you rules can be broken.There are people who are so beautiful they seem to come from a different planet. You see a face like this and it stays with you. You find yourself, months later, in a supermarket queue, smiling and wondering about them, still. There are people who are very brave. Who will do the right thing, whatever the personal cost, because someone has to.Rachel Connolly is a London-based journalist from Belfast Continue reading...

Gynaecologist James Heaps accused of groping and assaulting hundreds of women over 35-year careerThe University of California has agreed to pay $243.6m (£179m) to settle allegations that hundreds of women were sexually abused by a former UCLA gynaecologist.The settlement covers about 50 cases involving 203 women who said they were groped or otherwise abused by Dr James Heaps over a 35-year career. Each will receive $1.2m, attorneys said. The deal was reached with the assistance of a private mediator after substantial litigation, the parties said. Continue reading...

A Super Bowl win could cement the Rams’ place in the city – and the hearts of its residents – which had once exiled themThe stereotype about Los Angeles sports fans is that they only love their teams when they’re winning. For decades, this hasn’t been much of a football town.“It was never cool to be a Rams fan growing up in LA,” said Ryan Nixon, 40. “It was like this safe team your grandparents liked to watch.” Continue reading...

Leaked documents show that about 18 out of 87 applicants, or 21%, to Patriot Front were currently or formerly affiliated with militaryNearly one in five applicants to the white supremacist group Patriot Front claimed to hold current or former ties to the US military, according to leaked documents published and reviewed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and alternative media collective Unicorn Riot.Some 18 out of the 87 applicants, or 21%, said they were currently or previously affiliated with the military. One applicant, who claimed to be a former Marine, also said he currently worked for the Department of Homeland Security, according to the SPLC’s Hatewatch, a blog that tracks and exposes activities of American rightwing extremists. Continue reading...

Scotty David, who was Juror 50, made comments about prior sexual abuse that prompted a request for a new trialGhislaine Maxwell’s lawyers once again called for the temporary sealing of legal arguments involving the juror who might not have disclosed childhood sexual abuse during jury selection.“With the constitutional right to a fair trial at stake, it is of paramount importance for the court to ensure the integrity of any fact-gathering process that may take place so that the inquiry is safeguarded and can uncover the truth of what happened,” her attorneys said in a letter Tuesday. Continue reading...

The Republican National Committee chastised Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, irking the Senate minority leaderMitch McConnell criticized the Republican National Committee for censuring Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger over their work for the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which he characterized as a “violent insurrection”.The Senate minority leader said it was not the party’s place to single out members over their views. Speaking with reporters outside Senate Republicans’ closed-door weekly lunch, McConnell rebuked the RNC for its characterization of the deadly riot at the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse”. Continue reading...

Jennifer Crumbley’s boss testified she asked to not be judged ‘by what my son did’ and was more worried about losing jobA day before four students were killed at a Michigan school, the mother of the teenager charged with carrying out the mass shooting sent him a text message asking if he had showed teachers a “pic of your new gun”, an investigator testified on Tuesday.The text was one of several between Jennifer and Ethan Crumbley on 29 November after school officials left a voicemail informing her that the 15-year-old was looking up ammunition on his phone. Continue reading...

Second gentleman was at Dunbar high school in DC for Black History Month event when he was escorted outDoug Emhoff, the husband of Vice-President Kamala Harris, was whisked out of an event Tuesday at a Washington high school by Secret Service agents following an apparent bomb threat.Emhoff was at Dunbar high school for an event in commemoration of Black History Month. He was in the school’s museum for about five minutes before a member of his security detail approached him saying, “We have to go.” Emhoff was removed from the building into his waiting motorcade. Continue reading...