act

Judges are reviewing the UK government’s decision to ban the activist group Palestine Action under counter-terror laws. Al Jazeera’s Sonia Gallego was at the court where police were arresting people for displaying pro-PA signs.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court struck down a key part of the historic Voting Rights Act on Tuesday, ruling that Southern states may no longer be forced to seek federal approval before making changes in their election laws.

The ruling came on a 5-4 vote, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. speaking for the court.

Roberts said the 1965 law had been a “resounding success” and has ensured that blacks now register and vote at the same rate as whites.

But he said it was no longer fair or rational to subject these states and municipalities to special scrutiny based on a formula that is more than 40 years old.

“States must beseech the federal government for permission to implement laws that they would otherwise have a right to enact and execute on their own,” he wrote. This conflicts with the principle that all the states enjoy “equal sovereignty” and cannot be subjected to different federal laws, he said.

PHOTOS: 2013’s memorable political moments

“Our country has changed in the last 50 years,” the chief justice said. He said that Congress needs to “speak to current conditions.”

As it currently stand, nine states are covered by the law based on voting data from the 1960s and early 1970s.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined with the chief justice.

The decision may have an immediate impact. Texas has been fighting federal courts over its voter ID law and plans to redistrict its congressional districts. Those state actions were halted under the part of the law struck down Tuesday.

The decision leaves open the possibility that Congress could adopt a new formula to target states or municipalities for special scrutiny.

The decision leaves intact the rest of the Voting Rights Act, which makes it illegal to adopt or enforce laws that have a discriminatory effect on minority voters. But civil rights advocates say the provision struck down Tuesday was still needed because it stopped discriminatory measures before they could take effect.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke for the four dissenters. She said the court had made an “egregious” error by striking down a law that had been extended in 2006 by a near unanimous vote in Congress.

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Nov. 24 (UPI) — U.S. President Donald Trump issued a proclamation granting two years of regulatory relief from a stringent, existing Environmental Protection Agency on coke over facilities.

rump inked a proclamation Friday that exempts manufacturing facilities from Biden-era regulatory updates to the Clean Air Act that affect coal in steelmaking plants known as coke ovens.

The Coke Oven Rule, according to the White House, “places severe burdens on the coke production industry and, through its indirect effects, on the viability of our nation’s critical infrastructure, defense, and national security.”

A coke oven is a chamber in which coal is flamed to produce coke, which then fuels steelmaking. The Biden EPA estimated compliance cost would cost companies about$500,000 in additional fees.

The Trump administration’s new policy switch will absolve at least 11 U.S. coke oven plants from a need to cut back on release of toxic pollutants, including mercury, formaldehyde, soot and dioxins for two years.

“Specifically, the Coke Oven Rule requires compliance with standards premised on the application of emissions-control technologies that do not yet exist in a commercially demonstrated or cost-effective form,” Trump’s proclamation said.

A number of companies eligible for the exemptions include ABC Coke, EES Coke, SunCoke Energy, Cleveland Cliffs and U.S. Steel.

The previous administration under then-President Joe Biden argued the rule was critical to cut back on pollution and could curtail an increase in dirty air.

In March, the EPA set the stage for the coke oven proclamation by announcing it would allow Clean Air Act exemptions to be processed online.

Prominent environmental groups, meanwhile, say the exemptions will likely harm local communities.

It followed a slew of other Trump administration rollbacks on environmental regulations, most recently on wetland protection and other greenhouse gas emission standards for motor vehicles and engines.

In a social media world where fights between players in the handshake line, fights among fans in the bleachers and fights in the locker room always seem to receive the most clicks and attention, let’s hope a simple act of sportsmanship and kindness from Saturday’s South Gate-Dorsey football playoff game goes viral.

After South Gate won the City Section Division I semifinal 28-20, several Dorsey players were distraught.

The winning quarterback, junior Michael Gonzalez, heard a strange sound while shaking hands.

“I heard someone crying,” he said. “I looked to my right and saw two players, one I knew and one I didn’t.”

He went over to console both. The player he didn’t know, William Smith of Dorsey, was resting on one knee, head down, helmet off.

Gonzalez said he told him, “There’s more to life than just football. You got college. Keep your head up. It was a good game.”

Losing a semifinal game is tough. But winning and acting with class and respect also can be tough.

Asked where he learned about sportsmanship, Gonzalez said, “It’s what I was taught by my mom and coaches. Be a good person no matter what.”

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

Nov. 20 (UPI) — The Trump administration announced that it plans to roll back protection for some animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act, changes that officials say will make the law less confusing.

The U.S. Department of the Interior proposed four rules under the act that it says will strengthen U.S. energy independence, improve regulatory predictability and ensure federal actions align with “the best reading of the law.”

“This administration is restoring the Endangered Species Act to its original intent, protecting species through clear, consistent and lawful standards that also respect the livelihoods of Americans who depend on our land and resources,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said Wednesday in a press release.

The four proposed rule changes affect how endangered species are determined, listed and delisted; change the definitions for phrasing that describes the effects of a species being listed; eliminate the “blanket rule” in favor of requiring species-specific rules; and clarify how economic, national security and other impacts are weighed when deciding whether to list a species under the act.

In all four cases, the department is rolling back changes made under the Biden Administration to broaden the species that can be protected under the act. The Biden era changes were a restoration of changes made during the first Trump administration.

Although the changes are meant to simplify complying with the act, critics have challenged the changes are not about protecting animals to prevent them from going extinct.

“This isn’t about protecting endangered species,” Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Hill.

“This is about the biggest companies in the country wanting to drill for oil and dig coal, even if it causes wildlife like the polar bear and other iconic species to go extinct,” she said.

The proposed rules have been published in the Federal Register and are open for public comment for 30 days starting on Nov. 21.

Moscow accuses Poland of Russophobia, pledges to respond by reducing Polish diplomatic and consular presence in Russia.

Poland has announced it will close its last remaining Russian consulate in the northern Polish city of Gdansk following the targeting of a railway line to Ukraine from Warsaw, blaming Moscow for the incident.

“I have decided to withdraw consent for the operation of the Russian consulate in Gdansk,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told journalists on Wednesday.

Sikorski said he had repeatedly warned Russia that its diplomatic and consular presence would be reduced further if it did not cease hostile actions against Poland, Polish news agency PAP reported.

The move means the only Russian diplomatic mission that will remain open in Poland will be the embassy in Warsaw.

The Kremlin responded to the allegation by accusing Poland of “Russophobia”.

“Relations with Poland have completely deteriorated. This is probably a manifestation of this deterioration – the Polish authorities’ desire to reduce any possibility of consular or diplomatic relations to zero,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when asked about the consulate closure.

“One can only express regret here … This has nothing to do with common sense.”

Later on Wednesday, Russia’s state news agency TASS quoted Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying Moscow will respond by reducing Poland’s diplomatic and consular presence in the country.

‘Unprecedented sabotage’

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has described the weekend explosion on a line linking Warsaw to the border with Ukraine as an “unprecedented act of sabotage”.

On Tuesday, Tusk told the Polish parliament that the two suspects had been collaborating with the Russian secret services for a long time.

As a result of the investigation, we now know it was the Russian Secret Services that commissioned the blast of the Polish railway and recruited two Ukrainians to do it. We also know the identities of the perpetrators who immediately fled Poland for Belarus.

— Donald Tusk (@donaldtusk) November 18, 2025

He said their identities were known but could not be revealed because of the ongoing investigation, and that the pair had already left Poland, crossing into Belarus.

Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of attacks and other incidents across Europe since the invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago, according to data collected by The Associated Press news agency.

Moscow’s goal, Western officials say, is to undermine support for Ukraine, spark fear and divide European societies.

Published on
18/11/2025 – 8:00 GMT+1

A resolution opposing the Mercosur trade agreement is set to be voted on Tuesday in France in the parliamentary committee on European affairs at the National Assembly.

Facing growing domestic opposition, French President Emmanuel Macron has limited room for manoeuvre when it comes to the Mercosur trade agreement, which includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and Brussels wants to sign before the end of the year.

The resolution, signed by 103 French MPs, calls on the French government to refer the matter to the EU Court of Justice, arguing that the trade deal violates EU treaties.

According to the MPs, the European Commission’s decision not to submit the trade part of the agreement to national parliaments for approval is illegal.

It comes a week after Macron met with French farmers and gave them insurances he would not back the deal in Brussels.

The president “was extremely clear,” reported French Agriculture Minister Annie Genevard after the meeting on 12 November: “France cannot approve at this stage the draft agreement with the Mercosur countries because this draft agreement does not protect the interests of farmers.”

However, the French President softened his position after the Commission proposed attaching a strengthened safeguard clause to the agreement to control any disruptions to the internal market resulting from an increase in imports of products from Latin America.

The Mercosur agreement aims to create a free trade area across the Atlantic by eliminating tariffs. But France has opposed this deal for years citing the risk of competition distortion with European agricultural products and environmental concerns.

On a trip to Brazil on 7 November, Macron seemed to take a step toward the agreement.

“I am rather positive, but I remain vigilant because I also defend France’s interests,” he said before adding that France had been “heard by the [European] Commission” on several of its concerns.

A blocking minority against the deal is uncertain

If France were to oppose the agreement, it would need to move quickly to form a blocking minority in the Council, the institution that brings together the EU member states.

A blocking minority requires at least four member states representing 35% of the population. And it is not clear that he has the numbers.

So far, Hungary and Poland has said it opposed the deal, while Ireland, Austria and the Netherlands, say they wait for the text of the agreement to be fully translated before deciding. Translation work should be finalised on 11 December.

The key country is Italy and a change of heart from Rome could be game changer.

Since the President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen visited Uruguay in December 2024 for the political conclusion of the agreement, Rome has been cautious.

EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič travelled to Italy at the end of October and gave assurances that the deal will not harm Italian farmers.

Supporters of the agreement, led by Germany and Spain, argue that it is necessary in the face of Chinese competition in the region and the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on EU exports to the US.

But the issue is far from settled in the EU Parliament as well.

A group of 145 MEPs submitted a resolution last Friday also calling for a referral to the EU Court of Justice. If it were adopted by all MEPs at the end of this month, the referral would suspend the ratification process of the agreement.

New Delhi, India – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet late Wednesday described the car explosion which jolted New Delhi earlier in the week as a “heinous terror incident, perpetrated by antinational forces”.

The Indian government’s words, two days after a slow-moving car blew up near the Red Fort, an iconic 17th-century monument in New Delhi, killing at least 13 people and wounding several, have since led to questions about how it might respond, raising concerns over the prospect of a new spike in regional tensions.

Earlier this year, in May, the Indian government had declared a new security doctrine: “Any act of terror will be treated as an act of war.”

That posture had come in the aftermath of an intense four-day air war between India and Pakistan, after India blamed Islamabad for an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 civilians.

Now, six months later, as India grapples with another attack – this time, in the heart of the national capital of the world’s most populous country – the Modi government has so far avoided blaming Pakistan.

Instead, say political analysts, New Delhi’s language suggests that it might be veering towards intensifying a crackdown on Kashmir, at a time when Islamophobia and anti-Kashmiri sentiments have skyrocketed across India in the aftermath of the car explosion.

A crackdown in Kashmir

Even before the blast in New Delhi, police teams from Indian-administered Kashmir had been carrying out raids across the national capital region, following a lead from Srinagar, which led to the seizure of a significant amount of explosives and arrests of nearly a dozen individuals.

Among the suspects are several Kashmiri doctors – including Umar Nabi, a junior doctor who is suspected of being the driver of the car that exploded – who were serving in hospitals in satellite towns outside New Delhi.

Since the explosion near the Red Fort, police in Indian-administered Kashmir have detained more than 650 people from across the Valley as they dig deeper into what sections of the Indian media are describing as a “white-collar terror module” that had gathered enough explosives for the biggest attack on India in decades, if members hadn’t been arrested.

Police teams have raided several locations, including the residences of members of banned sociopolitical outfits.

Indian forces on Thursday also demolished the home of Nabi, the alleged car driver. In recent years, Indian authorities have often demolished homes of individuals accused of crimes without any judicial order empowering them to do so, even though the Supreme Court has ordered an end to the practice. Rights groups have described the act of demolishing the homes of suspects as a form of collective punishment.

Students of medicine and practising doctors in Kashmir are also increasingly facing scrutiny – more than 50 have been questioned for hours, and some have had their devices seized for investigation.

“There is a sense of complete disbelief among all of us,” said a junior doctor at a government-run hospital in Srinagar, the capital of the federal territory of Indian-administered Kashmir.

The doctor requested anonymity to speak, fearing repercussions from the police.

The 34-year-old has seen conflict in Kashmir up close, treating injured protesters firsthand for weeks on end, during previous clashes with security forces. “But I never thought that we would be viewed with suspicion like this,” he said, adding that the explosion that killed 13 in New Delhi was “unfortunate and should be condemned”.

“It is unreal to us that a doctor can think of such an attack,” the doctor said. “But how does that malign our entire fraternity? If a professional defects and joins militants, does it mean that all professionals are terrorists?”

‘Away from Pakistan, towards an enemy within’

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir since the nations were partitioned in 1947 as the British left the subcontinent. Today, India, Pakistan and China all control parts of Kashmir. India claims all of it, and Pakistan seeks control of all of Kashmir except the parts held by China, its ally.

After the April attack in the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, India had launched missiles deep inside Pakistan. Modi claimed that the attacks killed more than 100 “terrorists”. Pakistan insisted that civilians and soldiers, not armed fighters, were killed. Pakistan, which had rejected Indian accusations of a role in the April killings in Pahalgam, hit back.

Over four days, the nuclear-armed neighbours fired missiles and drones across their contested border, striking each other’s military bases.

When the Modi government agreed to a ceasefire on May 10, it faced domestic criticism from the opposition – and some sections of its own supporters – for not continuing with attacks on Pakistan. The government then said Operation Sindoor is “only on pause, not over”.

Six months later, though, New Delhi has been significantly more cautious about who to blame for the Delhi blast.

“There is a lot of due outrage this time, but there is no mention of Pakistan,” said Anuradha Bhasin, a veteran editor in Kashmir and author of a book, A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370, about how the region changed under the Hindu majoritarian Modi government. The Kashmir administration has banned her book in the region.

“This time, it is not about a crackdown on Pakistan,” she told Al Jazeera. “The public anger is being directed away from Pakistan, towards ‘an enemy within’.”

She said the Modi government appeared to be aware that finger-pointing at Pakistan “would create pressure from the public to take [military] action” against the neighbour.

Instead, she said, “public anger can be assuaged by creating any enemy.”

‘Pandering to domestic gallery’

Analysts point to the Modi government’s use of the term “antinational forces” to describe the alleged perpetrators of the Delhi attack.

That’s a phrase the Modi government has previously used to describe academics, journalists and students who have criticised it, as well as other protesters and dissidents. Since Modi took office in 2014, India has continuously slid in multiple democracy indices for alleged persecution of minorities in the country and its crackdown on press freedom.

To Sumantra Bose, a political scientist whose work focuses on the intersection of nationalism and conflict in South Asia, the Indian cabinet resolution was significant in the way that it shied “away from naming and blaming Pakistan, which was a rather reflexive reaction for decades”.

After the fighting in May, the Indian government learned, the hard way, Bose said, that “there is no appetite and indeed no tolerance anywhere in the world for a military escalation in South Asia.”

Bose was referring to the lukewarm global support that India received after it bombed Pakistan without providing any public evidence of Islamabad’s links with the attackers in Pahalgam.

Instead, India was left disputing the repeated assertions of United States President Donald Trump that he had brokered the ceasefire between New Delhi and Islamabad, even as he hosted Pakistan’s army chief, praised him, and strengthened ties with India’s western neighbour. India has long held the position that all disputes with Pakistan must be resolved bilaterally, without intervention from any other country.

The contrast in New Delhi’s response to this week’s blast, so far, appears to have struck US State Secretary Marco Rubio, too.

Reacting to the Delhi blast, Rubio said “it clearly was a terrorist attack,” and “the Indians need to be commended. They’ve been very measured, cautious, and very professional on how they’re carrying out this investigation.”

India’s new security doctrine – that an act of terror is an act of war – “was a dangerous, slippery slope”, said Bose, who has also authored books on the conflict in Kashmir. His last work, Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict, published in 2021, is also banned in Kashmir.

The doctrine, he said, was aimed at pandering to Modi’s “domestic gallery” – a way of showing muscular strength, even at the risk of “serious military escalation” between India and Pakistan.

Now, by using terms like “white-collar terrorism”, analysts said Indian officials risked blurring the line between Kashmiri Muslims and armed rebels fighting Indian rule.

“The term doesn’t make sense to me, but it does put the needle of suspicion on young, educated Muslim professionals,” said Bose.

“The fact has been for decades that militants come from all sorts of social backgrounds in Kashmir – from rural farming families, working-class backgrounds, to educated professionals,” Bose argued. “If anything, it reflects the discontent that has been in the society across the groups.”

Bhasin, the editor from Kashmir, said the Indian government’s posture would lead to “adverse economic impact for Kashmiri Muslims and further ghettoisation, where they find it harder to get jobs or a place to rent”.

‘Everyone is so scared’

Kashmiris across India are already facing the brunt of hate and anger following the Delhi blast.

Since the bomb exploded on Monday in New Delhi, Indian social media platforms have been rife with rampant hate speech against Muslims.

Nasir Khuehami, the national convener of a Kashmiri student association, has spent four days fielding calls from Kashmiri Muslims.

“Across northern Indian states, Kashmiris are being asked to vacate their homes, there is active profiling going on, and everyone is so scared,” Khuehami told Al Jazeera, speaking from his home in Kashmir.

This is only the latest instance of this pattern playing out: An attack in Kashmir, or by a Kashmiri armed rebel, has often led to harassment and beating of Kashmiri Muslims – students, professionals, traders, or even labourers – living in India.

Khuehami said “to end this endless cycle of crises for Kashmiris” – where they are detained at home and abused outside – “the government needs to take confidence-building measures.”

Otherwise, Khuehami said, the Modi government was marginalising Kashmiris in India. By doing that, he said, India would be playing into the hands of the very country it accuses of wanting to grab Kashmir: Pakistan.