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The Supreme Court appears ready to strike down Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, threatening the equal representation of Black voters, and potentially greenlighting Republican gerrymandering ahead of the 2026 midterm election. The case concerns Louisiana's six congressional districts, two of which are majority-Black, in approximate proportion to the Black population of the state. A previous map that gave Black voters only one district in which they were a majority was ruled to have violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last year. Now a group of conservative activists have brought the battle to the Supreme Court, challenging Section 2 itself. "The stakes of this case are enormous. This is a case about whether districts that represent all Americans fairly will remain possible in this country," says ACLU lawyer Megan Keenan, who is part of the legal team defending Louisiana's current congressional map. "We have a wretched history of racial discrimination in voting in this country," and "for 40 uninterrupted years, we have applied this rigorous, data-driven test to figure out when discrimination exists and how to stop it. That's the test that's at stake in this case."
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Renowned Israeli historian, author and professor Ilan Pappé discusses the postwar prospects of Palestinian statehood and of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under investigation for corruption in Israel and subject to an international arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. Despite the newly implemented Gaza ceasefire, says Pappé, Israeli political leaders have not changed their policy aim to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their remaining territory. "Nothing has changed in the dehumanization and the attitude of this particular Israeli government and its belief that it has the power to wipe out Palestine as a nation, as a people and as a country," he explains. Pappé's latest book is titled Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.
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