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Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew to Rome this week after an unexpected spat between President Trump and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, once one of the president's best friends in Europe.
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(Second column, 3rd story, link)
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Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a new congressional map into law on Thursday that slices up Memphis to scatter Black voters into neighboring districts, a move intended to eliminate the state's last Democratic House seat.
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(First column, 1st story, link)
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Republicans in the state could hold a 9-0 advantage in the U.S. House with their new map, after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act last week.
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"The country's most important civil rights law no longer effectively exists, and that's going to have ramifications on American democracy for a very long time." Mother Jones correspondent Ari Berman reacts to the Supreme Court's recent 6-3 decision rejecting key principles of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since the court issued its ruling last week, Republican-controlled states have begun to redraw their voting maps in a "gerrymandering arms race" that "could lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the Jim Crow era," explains Berman. "We're returning to the days of literacy tests and poll taxes — not through those devices, but through specifically trying to eliminate Black office holders. And Southern legislators are very clear they are going to do this. They feel unshackled by the Supreme Court ruling. They are being pressured by President Trump to do it, and they feel like all the guardrails are off right now."
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The State Department said it would review all Mexican consulates in the United States, following claims in conservative media that the consulates interfere in politics.
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Relations between the United States and the Vatican are at a low point over President Donald Trump's attacks on Leo, who is a leading critic of the war in Iran.
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(Second column, 6th story, link)
Related stories: Federal and State Officials Discuss Closing Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz'... ICE MASK BAN NY... Traffic cams used for immigration enforcement in Ohio...
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won big in state-level elections this week, with the Hindu nationalist BJP now controlling over 70% of the country. Leading opposition politician and Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee has refused to recognize the results as legitimate, accusing the Modi government of mass disenfranchisement. Ahead of elections, 9 million names were deleted from the rolls under a process called "Special Intensive Revision" (SIR). The process, conducted by India's Election Commission, "vitiates and creates an electoral advantage by pitting Hindu voters against Muslim voters," says political scientist Gilles Verniers. Rather than the advertised purge of deceased and duplicate voters, SIR appears to have primarily affected Muslims and other minorities. Nearly 3 million voters in West Bengal, where more than a quarter of the population is Muslim, were unable to cast their vote.
From New Delhi, journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani says blatant election interference has destroyed Indians' faith in democratic elections. "The general public does not think the elections are free and fair in India," she explains. "So this is a sad day for democracy, for people who believe that not only today, but tomorrow's India should also be democratic."
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The new map could give Republicans as many as four new seats in the state's 28-member delegation, which already has 20 Republicans.
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The regulation would change how much of the United States builds homes.
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