Rights

Adelmo Becerra is a Venezuelan trade union representative from the National Institute for Training and Socialist Education (INCES) and also a member of David Hernández Oduber Revolutionary Current (CREDAHO). In the past, he worked as an instructor at INCES and as a worker in the steel industry in Ciudad Guayana. In this interview, Becerra discusses the Venezuelan government’s recent labor policies under US sanctions, the growing labor reform prospects, and the present struggles and challenges facing the working class.

On May 1, the Venezuelan government raised non-wage bonuses while maintaining the minimum wage frozen. What was your reaction to these announcements? How do you place them in the context of recent labor policies in Venezuela?

The announcements represent a continuity of the labor policies of recent years. There had been expectations for restoration of the minimum wage in the short term. According to Article 91 of the Constitution, it must be adjusted once a year. Naturally, it would be a partial and limited restoration. But it is important to place the announcements in the context of various processes currently unfolding in the labor sphere.

In Venezuela, the Social Dialogue Forum, a body coordinated by the International Labour Organization (ILO), has been in place since 2021. Several trade union federations participate in this forum, including the Independent Trade Union Alliance of Venezuela (ASI), to which the INCES union belongs, the Venezuelan Workers’ Confederation (CTV), the Bolivarian Socialist Workers’ Federation (CBST), as well as government representatives. The Social Dialogue Forum is not binding, but Venezuela has ratified conventions, including Convention 26, which establishes consultations with trade union organizations for setting the minimum wage. However, a mechanism for establishing it has not yet been agreed upon.

At the same time, the government led by Acting President Delcy Rodríguez has established the National Dialogue for Labor Consensus, which includes the CTV, ASI, and CBST labor federations, along with representatives from business associations FEDECÁMARAS and FEDEINDUSTRIA, and government officials.

Then there is the struggle on the streets that has unfolded in the country in recent years. I would single out the August 2018 Program for Growth, Recovery, and Economic Prosperity as a starting point. This program produced two instruments that have denied wage and labor rights established in collective bargaining agreements, even disregarding the Constitution and labor legislation. I am referring to Memorandum 2792, from October 2018, which sets out the broad guidelines regarding the suspension of collective bargaining rights. And then there is the 2021 ONAPRE Directive, which addresses its specific application. Both instruments remain in force, and their repeal has been a constant demand in the workers’ struggles.

So, back to May 1, there was no restoration of the minimum wage. However, the announcements stem from agreements reached at the National Dialogue for Labor Consensus. And the signed minutes refer to a “wage consultation process” that will begin in May. This indicates that the issue of the minimum wage is far from settled. Similarly, the agreements “urge” the private sector to establish this same US $240 income floor, specifying that it may be through “non-wage bonuses,” although in reality there are no mechanisms to enforce it.

But the minimum wage is not an isolated issue. We have heard spokespersons from both the government and the private sector speak of labor reform. Just in recent days, in a meeting of the Social Dialogue Forum, one of the agreements was to “coordinate consultations of labor-related laws with the National Assembly.”

Let us take a closer look at the issue of bonuses versus wages. What are the consequences of this “bonus-ization” policy?

The main impact is on workers’ entitlements, specifically in the form of social benefits. These benefits accumulate over the course of the employment relationship, and their primary function is to recognize seniority so that it can be taken into account when paying out benefits.

But there is also another concept: retroactivity. This means that benefits are paid based on the final salary. Thus, when an employment relationship ends at a private company, the benefits paid as compensation are calculated based on the final wage and the duration of the employment. The same applies to those retiring from the public sector, or from a private company that offers a retirement plan –which is very rare in Venezuela.

This issue is very important because it has been at the center of the historical Venezuelan working-class struggles following the oil-led industrialization and the 1936 Labor Law. Social benefits allowed Venezuelan families to have assets, purchase homes or other property, and also served as a safety net in contexts of unemployment or economic crisis. This safety net no longer exists today because the minimum wage has been effectively eliminated.

Then there are other important factors, such as social security contributions, which fund the Venezuelan Social Security Institute (IVSS). This is a universal solidarity-based system in which both employers and employees contribute, and it serves as the economic foundation for old-age pensions and other IVSS social support initiatives, such as in healthcare. So, this system is also in crisis because contributions are computed based on wages.

The result is that for the private sector, both social security contributions and severance pay are practically free right now, and that in turn affects job stability.

Speaking specifically about INCES, which is a state-run training institute, what is the current employment situation like? Do the staff work full-time?

According to data recently provided to us by the authorities, there are approximately 11,500 people on the payroll, 6,800 of them active workers, and the rest are retirees. The vast majority receive only the “economic war” and bonuses, now set at $200 and $40 a month, respectively. Through our collective bargaining agreement, retirees also receive the food bonus, which is not the case in general in the public sector.

In recent years, as a union, we have held discussions with INCES authorities and the Ministry of Labor –which oversees the institute –to ease the requirement that people come to work every day while we try to secure better conditions. Simply put, if their income isn’t enough, they should have the option of trying to find a second or third job. With the recent increases in bonuses, the authorities are putting more pressure on workers to return to full-time work, but it’s complicated.

We are still in that struggle to improve conditions, even though we have not even been able to make progress on a memorandum of understanding to improve the socioeconomic clauses of the current collective bargaining agreement. But that’s the priority.

Turning now to the private sector, you have participated in the Observatory for Labor Dignity, which has investigated current working conditions in Venezuela. In general terms, why the focus on the private sector? And what is the reality of that world?

The first reason is that unionization rates in the private sector have historically always been very low in our country. At its peak, in the 1970s, it reached 30%, and today it is likely below 15% –and that is being optimistic. We must take into account the massive migration of recent years. It is a very low unionization rate, and in sectors such as retail or services, there are practically no unions.

Consequently, the level of job insecurity and vulnerability is much higher, especially given the government’s policy of restraining official workplace inspections based on tacit agreements with the private sector under the pretext of “promoting employment.”

One issue that came up repeatedly was the lack of maternity protection which was one of the advances of the 2012 Labor Law. Right now, in the companies we investigated, such as [department store chain] Traki or [textile distributor] El Castillo, no woman wants to get pregnant because that would mean immediately losing their job. Not only that, but it would also make it impossible to get a reference letter or a recommendation for another job.

It is important to stress that the approach to undermine or marginalize collective bargaining agreements was not limited to the public sector. The private sector also adopted it. Under the guise of “protecting jobs”–claiming that companies would go bankrupt otherwise –many employers sent workers home on minimum wage, with some being called back to work at the employer’s discretion.

Given the context of crisis and precariousness, under US economic sanctions, that has persisted for several years now, is the impact on workers’ awareness noticeable?

Indeed, there is a very acute lack of awareness regarding labor rights. The new generation of workers is entering the workforce with virtually no knowledge of the rights they hold by law, in part because they have never had access to them.

So, issues like employment contracts, pay stubs, or even working hours themselves are a problem. It is very common to have 10, 12, or even 14-hour workdays, or for the two days off per week not to be upheld. At Traki, this is usually respected, although the two days are not necessarily consecutive. In El Castillo, the average is one and a half days. In El Castillo, there is also a practice of having workers sign their contract and a resignation letter at the same time, which is obviously illegal.

Another characteristic is high turnover. Fixed-term contracts have become the norm. Although after several contracts the law grants the right to continued employment, this is practically nonexistent. The vast majority of people move around a great deal between jobs. This is, of course, made possible by the fact that benefits are nearly non-existent and it is extremely cheap to dismiss a worker, which in turn keeps people in a much more precarious situation.

But there is an important factor to consider: the shift in subjectivity –and this, of course, is not a phenomenon unique to Venezuela. A few days ago, I watched an interview with a North American researcher who found that for young people in the US a job at Starbucks seems like a good opportunity –better than average. Here, in some of the testimonies we collected, young people expressed satisfaction with working at the Traki department stores. They earn some $250 a month, work 9- or 10-hour shifts –while conditions elsewhere are worse –have two days off a week, and would like to stay there. Therefore, the notion of work with rights has also eroded. Issues like overtime pay, not to mention social security, become irrelevant due to the precariousness of the present. The employment relationship, which includes rights and mechanisms to protect them, is beginning to be viewed simply as a commercial transaction.

Labor reform talks are underway. Government spokespeople talk about “updating” the law following the impact of US sanctions, while private sector spokespeople are also voicing their demands. What is currently at stake?

I think there are several aspects to consider. We are clearly witnessing an aggressive campaign being waged by the media, along with well-known economists and influencers, to impose a narrative that any wage increase will cause inflation. As such, the only way to raise wages is to reduce employers’ responsibilities and eliminate the retroactive nature of labor benefits.

The 2012 Labor Law reinstated the calculation of benefits based on the last salary. This had been modified, amid much controversy, during the Caldera administration in the 1990s. Still, unlike proposals we see now, retroactivity was not completely eliminated. There is a proposal to let workers choose between receiving benefits immediately or accumulating them, which completely distorts the concept and takes advantage of current economic difficulties. If wages are insufficient, workers obviously prefer to collect as much as they can right away. Even if the current $240 minimum income was turned into salaries, this would represent less than 50% of the food basket for a family, according to different estimates.

I believe it is essential to reject the narrative promoted by groups like Fedecámaras, to reject the premise that we must give up our rights and historic achievements because there are no conditions to sustain them. For starters, there is a lack of transparency and information. We do not even have reliable information on the size of the economically active population. The last census was in 2011, and following the massive migration over the past decade, we do not know what the current picture looks like.

According to 2021 data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), there were roughly 4 million workers in the formal private sector, just over 3 million in the public sector, and around 5 million pensioners. Therefore, with that precise data, and with transparent information on revenues, it would be possible to quantify whether or not there are resources. Because GDP was heavily hit by the US blockade but has been growing—according to the Central Bank, for 20 consecutive quarters –but the last adjustment to the minimum wage, to $30 per month, was in March 2022.

Another piece of data we lack is the distribution of surpluses among the workforce, private capital, and the state. According to research by former Minister Víctor Álvarez, the labor share reached 40% by 2010. Currently, according to estimates by researcher Carlos Dürich, that figure may be around 20%, which is what is typically observed in African countries with high levels of poverty and inequality.

We need all that data if we want to discuss what is possible or not, and how the wealth that is generated will be distributed. This is especially true in this context, where, outrageously, the US controls Venezuela’s oil sales. Now the Central Bank will be subject to external auditing, but the public still lacks information. So there is a second layer of opacity there.

In summary, under the present conditions, with an unfavorable correlation of forces and foreign control over the Venezuelan economy, it is not possible to restore the minimum wage and have it cover living costs, as established in Article 91 of the Constitution. Nevertheless, economists and trade union federations have argued that there are conditions for a partial restoration.

In this complex context, both domestically and internationally, what is the path forward for the workers’ struggle in the country?

For me, there is one fundamental factor –one that has been evident in recent years –and that is social pressure. Workers are the only force that has exerted pressure on the government, and to some extent on the private sector as well, particularly since 2022. In 2023, the government placated the protests by introducing the “economic war” bonus. The minimum wage had been devalued to $5 at the beginning of the year, and 15 days later the government set the bonus at $25, and then in May at $70. Even if it happens through non-wage bonuses, it is a struggle with the bourgeoisie over the country’s income.

The May 1 increase, again via bonuses, is also a response to pressure from the streets. We will now see what happens with the wage consultations and labor reform plans. The challenge is to sustain the actions and protests over time. But that sustainability depends on unity.

And what are the challenges to building unity around the labor agenda? A few weeks ago, we witnessed an absurd demonstration by certain union factions asking for support at the US Embassy.

Precisely. On May 1, there was a unified demonstration that likely drew 3,000 to 4,000 people in Caracas, along with smaller marches in other parts of the country. Various labor federations were present, ranging from the more left-wing ones like the CUTV to those social-democratic or Christian-democratic like the CTV or ASI.

On March 12, we also had a united mobilization, but since then the forces have split. And that weakens us because it reduces our impact; the business leaders rub their hands together.

This division has partly to do with issues of leadership and protagonism, and with the fact that not all federations understand that we must play on two chessboards at this moment: on one hand, the negotiating tables, and on the other, applying pressure in the streets.

But the division is also due to a particular factor: a group called the Coalición Sindical, whose main focus is not so much labor or wages, but politics. It serves as the vehicle within the labor movement for María Corina Machado’s political faction, which is obviously trying to capitalize on labor issues for its own agenda. This group has no interest in joint actions to secure better conditions –even if only partial –for the working class; rather, its priority is to stoke conflict.

That is why we see actions such as demonstrations in front of the US Embassy, calling on Trump to intervene. But right now, the priority for the US is stability, so it can advance its energy and mining interests. It views social pressure as something the Venezuelan government must handle on its own.

In short, it is essential at this moment to have a united force with a specific agenda: to fight for the restoration of wages, for the reopening of collective bargaining negotiations, for the release of unjustly imprisoned workers and trade unionists, and to defend labor rights against regressive reform efforts.

HARPER Beckham has been refused naming rights for her beauty brand in the US.

David and Victoria’s 14-year-old girl has got UK approval for Hiku By Harper.

But the US Patent and Trademark Office issued an “initial refusal” against the name because of the “likelihood of confusion” with existing companies.

It said “Harper” was already trademarked for the sale of brooms and scrubbing brushes, while “Haiku” is registered for fragrance and toiletry products.

Harper has been working on the project for more than a year and hopes to sell products for spot-prone teens.

The US application covers make-up and acne medications, as well as footwear and clothing, keyrings, stickers, hair decorations and brushes.

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She and her parents have six months to respond, after applying for the trademark in November.

Fashion designer Victoria, 52, this week spoke about her daughter’s plans, describing her as “very ambitious” and “a little entrepreneur”.

She said Harper came to her “two or three years ago and she was really struggling with her skin”.

She added: “I suffered with child acne, teenage acne, adult acne, every acne under the sun, I’ve been there. So I could really relate to her.

“And she said, ‘I want to create a brand because I don’t want other people to have to go through what I’ve been through’.”

Public workers blocked the streets of El Alto, Bolivia with buses, cars, and trucks during a national transportation strike. Union leaders are demanding the government guarantee clean fuel, end long lines at petrol stations, repair roads, and compensate drivers for repeated engine repairs.

JACKSON, Miss. — At 16, Edward Blackmon Jr. was arrested during a demonstration for voting rights in his Mississippi hometown. He was loaded with schoolmates into a truck once used to haul chickens and left in the summer heat before spending three nights in an overcrowded jail cell without a bed.

It was a moment that set him on a path to become a civil rights lawyer and one of the first Black lawmakers elected in the state since Reconstruction.

Blackmon was part of a generation of Black Americans across the South who fought in courtrooms and in the streets to dismantle barriers to voting and achieve political representation in a region scarred by the legacy of slavery and its aftermath.

One of the crown jewels of that struggle, the Voting Rights Act, was hollowed out by a Supreme Court ruling last week. The court’s conservative majority said states should not rely on racial demographics when drawing congressional districts, a ruling that opened the door to transforming how political power is distributed and making it harder for minorities to get elected.

The majority opinion described racism as a problem of the past. Others saw the decision as another example of its resurgence — “a defibrillator to the heart of Jim Crow,” as one Louisiana politician put it.

Blackmon’s son, Bradford, a 37-year-old state senator in Mississippi, said how the political lines are drawn “shapes who has a real chance before anyone ever votes.”

“It’s just sad that we made progress and then they are always trying to roll it back when it shows that minorities are making more progress than I would guess that those in charge think that they’re allowed to make,” he said.

The elder Blackmon, now 78, said he was resigned to the reality that the fight of his youth is not over.

“It’s just another cycle — an ongoing struggle without a foreseeable ending,” he said.

A legacy at risk

The case, involving a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map, clarified how the Voting Rights Act can be used to contest district lines that may weaken the voting power of Black residents.

For many Black Americans, the decision was a death knell for a cherished pillar of the Civil Rights Movement. Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black voters in the Deep South had no guarantee of equal access to the ballot. Within a year of its passage, more than 250,000 Black Americans had gained the right to vote. By 2024, nearly 22 million Black voters were registered nationwide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The United States is now witnessing the unraveling of nearly a century of organizing, civil disobedience and personal sacrifice by ordinary people who helped build Black political power to heights unseen since Reconstruction. Veterans of the voting rights movement — people who confronted police violence alongside John Lewis on the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Ala., or rallied with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — are seeing those hard-won victories stripped away from their descendants.

“I’m the first generation of Americans born with equal rights,” said Jonathan Jackson, a Democratic congressman from Illinois who is the 60-year-old son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the late civil rights leader. He said the idea that his children could grow up with fewer protections was “surreal and devastating.”

For Charles Mauldin, who was beaten by law enforcement as a teenager on Bloody Sunday, the ruling reflects a skirmish that was never as settled as some hoped.

“I’m disappointed but not surprised,” said Mauldin, 78, of Birmingham, Ala. “They’ve been chipping away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act for the last 60 years.”

Who holds power now

In Louisiana, younger Black politicians say the high court’s ruling could reshape not just who wins elections, but whether candidates can compete at all, particularly in down-ballot races that often serve as steppingstones to higher office.

Davante Lewis, a 34-year-old Democrat who serves on the state’s utility regulatory board, said he expects districts could be redrawn in ways that make it harder for candidates like him to win.

“They can target my communities … to ensure that I can’t get to an elected office,” said Lewis, one of several plaintiffs in the Louisiana gerrymandering case that went to the Supreme Court.

Jamie Davis, a Black farmer in northeast Louisiana and a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, said the decision risks discouraging voters already skeptical that their voices matter.

“I want to be optimistic, but how can you be optimistic when voter turnout in the past election cycles has been really low?” Davis said.

Tennessee is among the states bracing for new redistricting efforts. State Rep. Justin Pearson, who represents Memphis and is running for Congress, said people who struggled to pass the Voting Rights Act are “shocked and devastated that they’re having to relitigate the same fights that they fought 60 years ago.”

But he also predicted that efforts to reduce Black representation could “reinvigorate a civil rights movement in the South that demands equal representation, that demands fairness, that demands justice and equality.”

Supporters of the Supreme Court ruling said it reinforces a race-neutral approach to redistricting, and they say political lines should not be drawn primarily based on race.

Democratic Mississippi state Rep. Bryant Clark said that view ignores how race and party align in the state. In Mississippi, where most Black voters are Democrats and most white voters are Republicans, he said the two are often indistinguishable.

“It’s just a roundabout way to basically legalize racially discriminatory redistricting in the state,” Clark said.

In 1967, his father, Robert Clark Jr., became the first Black lawmaker elected to the Mississippi Legislature since Reconstruction.

With Black residents making up about 38% of Mississippi’s population, Edward Blackmon Jr. said the current maps allow Black voters to elect candidates in some districts while keeping Republican majorities intact across much of the state.

He said lawmakers have little incentive to change that balance because moving Black voters into more districts would make those seats less reliably conservative and force candidates to compete for a broader electorate.

“Where do you think the population goes? They don’t just disappear,” Blackmon said. “What incumbent wants that type of district right now?”

Fight continues

Blackmon was raised in Canton, “when Jim Crow was in full bloom.”

Black children attended separate schools, and during cotton-picking season, classes let out early as rickety trucks with wooden sides arrived to take students to the fields, where they spent hours working.

At home, he watched those inequalities play out in quieter ways.

His father, a World War II veteran who left the sharecropping farm where Blackmon’s grandfather had worked, struggled to find steady work in Mississippi after returning from military service and becoming involved in civil rights organizing. He eventually left for New York to make a living — part of a generation of Black veterans who faced barriers to jobs and opportunities their white counterparts received.

Blackmon remembers sitting nearby as his father and other community leaders gathered on the porch, talking late into the night about forming a local NAACP chapter.

“It was embedded in my memory and experience that it was worth the struggle,” he said.

When the Voting Rights Act passed, it did not immediately change those realities. In places like Canton, federal officials set up registration tables on downtown streets so Black residents could sign up to vote without facing harassment or intimidation from local authorities.

In the years that followed, Blackmon and other lawyers used the law to challenge at-large election systems that prevented Black communities from electing candidates of their choice. Cities and counties were forced to redraw maps into single-member districts.

When those districts still diluted Black voting strength, activists returned to court.

“Without the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi would look so much different than it looks now,” Blackmon said.

Willingham, Brook, Bates and Amy write for the Associated Press and reported from Boston, New Orleans, Jackson and Atlanta, respectively. AP writers Kristin Hall and Travis Loller in Nashville and Safiyah Riddle and Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Ala., contributed to this report.

Mohammadi has lost consciousness twice and suffered a severe cardiac crisis, her foundation has announced.

Iranian human rights activist and 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has been transferred from prison to a hospital due to a sharp decline in her health.

Mohammadi had two episodes of complete loss of consciousness and a severe cardiac crisis, her foundation announced on Friday.

“This transfer was done as an unavoidable necessity after prison doctors determined her condition could not be managed on-site, despite standing medical recommendations that she be treated by her specialized team in Tehran,” the Narges Mohammadi Foundation said.

Earlier on Friday, Mohammadi had fainted twice in prison in Zanjan in northwestern Iran, according to the foundation.

She was believed to have suffered a heart attack in late March, according to her lawyers, who visited her a few days after the incident. At the time, she appeared pale, underweight and needed a nurse to help her walk.

‘Life-threatening mistreatment’

Mohammadi, 53, has been imprisoned since December 12 after she was arrested during a visit to the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad.

In February, she was sentenced to more than seven years in prison. Her lawyer said six years of that sentence was for the accusation of “gathering and collusion to commit crimes”.

Her family said in February that her health was worsening in prison, in part because of an alleged beating she had endured during her arrest in December. They said multiple men hit and kicked her in her side, head and neck.

The Nobel committee condemned the “ongoing life-threatening mistreatment” of Mohammadi in a statement in February.

The Iranian government has not commented on the alleged attack.

Prior to her arrest in December, Mohammadi had already been serving a sentence of 13 years and nine months on charges of collusion against state security and propaganda against Iran’s government, but had been released on furlough since late 2024 due to medical concerns.

A Supreme Court decision striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana has amplified an already intense national redistricting battle by providing Republican officials in several states new grounds to redraw voting districts.

Louisiana has suspended its May 16 congressional primary to allow time for lawmakers to approve new U.S. House districts. Meanwhile, President Trump is pressuring other states to redistrict — potentially still ahead of the November midterm elections that will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the closely divided House.

Trump urged Texas Republicans last year to redraw U.S. House districts to give the party an advantage. Democrats in California responded by doing the same. Then other states joined the battle. Lawmakers, commissions or courts have adopted new House districts in eight states.

That total could grow following the Supreme Court’s decision that significantly weakened a provision in the federal Voting Rights Act.

Here’s a look at how some states are responding to the Supreme Court ruling:

Louisiana

Current House map: two Democrats, four Republicans

Early in-person voting was to begin Saturday for Louisiana’s primaries. But Republican Gov. Jeff Landry moved quickly Thursday to postpone the congressional primary while allowing elections for other offices to go forward.

A federal lawsuit filed later Thursday, on behalf of a Democratic congressional candidate and voter, asked a court to block Landry’s order and allow the House primary to occur as originally scheduled. Among other things, the lawsuit asserted that tens of thousands of absentee ballots already have been mailed to people and a substantial number have been filled out and returned.

Separately, a three-judge federal court panel that heard the case that was appealed to the Supreme Court also issued an order Thursday suspending Louisiana’s congressional primary.

Republican state House and Senate leaders said they are prepared to pass new U.S. House districts — and set a new primary election date — before their legislative session ends in a month.

Alabama

Current House map: two Democrats, five Republicans

Alabama officials on Thursday filed an emergency motion with the Supreme Court seeking an expedited review of a pending appeal in a redistricting case.

A federal court in 2023 ordered the creation of a new near-majority Black district in Alabama, resulting in the election of a second Black representative to the U.S. House. Alabama is under a court order to use the new map until after the next census in 2030.

An appeal pending before the Supreme Court argues that the map is an illegal racial gerrymander, a claim similar to that made in Louisiana.

The state is seeking to lift an injunction blocking the use of the 2023 map drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature that did not include the new district.

The state’s primaries are set for May 19. Republican Gov. Kay Ivey said Wednesday that the state is “not in position to have a special session at this time” on redistricting.

Florida

Current House map: eight Democrats, 20 Republicans

Hours after the Supreme Court’s decision, Florida’s Republican-led Legislature approved new U.S. House districts that could help the GOP win up to four additional seats in November.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called a special legislative session without knowing when the Supreme Court would issue its opinion in the Louisiana case. But DeSantis expressed confidence that the court would rule as it did. Among other things, the new map reshapes a southeastern Florida district that DeSantis said was created to help elect a Black representative in an attempt to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act.

A Florida constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2010 prohibits districts from being drawn to deny or diminish the ability of racial or language minorities to elect the representatives of their choice. DeSantis said he considers that amendment a violation of the U.S. Constitution. That question is expected to be decided by the courts.

Tennessee

Current House map: one Democrat, eight Republicans

The Tennessee General Assembly recently ended its annual session. But pressure is growing to bring lawmakers back to revise the state’s congressional districts.

Trump posted on social media Thursday that he had spoken with Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who he said would work hard for a new map that could help Republicans gain an additional seat. Democrats currently hold only one seat, a district centered in Memphis, which is majority Black.

Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, said he is in conversations with the White House and others while reviewing the court’s decision.

The state’s candidate qualifying period ended in March. The primary election is scheduled for Aug. 6.

Mississippi

Current House map: one Democrat, three Republicans

Mississippi held its U.S. House primaries in March. But the Supreme Court’s decision could affect elections for other offices.

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves announced previously that he would call a special legislative session to redraw voting districts for the state Supreme Court that would begin 21 days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Louisiana case. That would put the special session’s start at around May 20.

A federal judge last year ordered Mississippi to redraw its Supreme Court voting districts after finding that they violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters. Mississippi lawmakers had been waiting on a decision in the Louisiana case before moving forward, but their legislative session ended in April.

Reeves said in his proclamation that the Supreme Court’s decision would provide guidance to lawmakers on whether “race-conscious redistricting” violates the U.S. Constitution.

Georgia

Current House map: five Democrats, nine Republicans

Early in-person voting began April 27 and continues for the next few weeks ahead of Georgia’s primary elections on May 19.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said it’s too late for Georgia officials to try to change congressional districts for this year’s elections, because voting already is underway. But he said the rationale in the Supreme Court’s decision “requires Georgia to adopt new electoral maps before the 2028 election cycle.”

Lieb writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Jeff Amy and Kim Chandler contributed to this report.

Turkish authorities violently crackdown on May Day demonstrations at Istanbul’s Taksim Square, firing tear gas from riot-control vehicles into the crowd. A Turkish legal organisation says at least 370 people were arrested on Friday.

Workers are gathering in cities around the world to mark International Labour Day, with some demonstrations, such as those in Istanbul, Turkiye, turning to scuffles with police.

Trade Unions are calling for solidarity and the protection of workers’ rights as the United States-Israeli war on Iran and rising energy costs raise concerns about the global economy.

“Working people refuse to pay the price for Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East,” the European Trade Union Confederation, which represents 93 trade union organisations in 41 European countries, told the media. “Today’s rallies show working people will not stand by and see their jobs and living standards destroyed.”

Josua Mata, leader of the SENTRO umbrella group of workers’ groups in the Philippines, said: “Every Filipino worker now is aware that the situation here is deeply connected to the global crisis.”

Renato Reyes, a leader of the left-wing political group Bayan in the Philippines, told The Associated Press: “There will be a louder call for higher wages and economic relief because of the unprecedented spikes in fuel prices.”

In Indonesia, Said Iqbal, president of the Indonesian Trade Union Confederation, told reporters: “Workers are already living pay cheque to pay cheque.”

Some of the largest demonstrations are being held in South America, including in Chile, Bolivia and Venezuela. In Argentina, angry workers protested on Thursday in the capital of Buenos Aires over President Javier Milei’s recent overhaul of long-held labour protections.

In Cuba, the foreign ministry held a gathering on Thursday in defiance of what it called the US’s “aggressions, threats, intensified blockade, and energy siege”.

On Friday, Cubans are expected to mark International Labour Day with a mass rally and a march in Havana.

In many countries, Labour Day rallies attract large crowds because May 1 is a public holiday. In the Turkish city of Istanbul, roads around Taksim Square were closed to make way for marches during the day. Later on Friday, demonstrators clashed with police, international media reported.

In France, where most people have the day off for May Day, workers’ unions using the slogan “bread, peace and freedom” called for protests in Paris and other cities.

Global recession fears

Fears of a global recession are looming over Labour Day rallies at a time when income inequality is growing.

In Gaza, Palestinian workers have cancelled May Day events because of the economic crisis caused by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and poor conditions on the ground.

The Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions said that about 550,000 workers across Gaza and the West Bank have no income and that the situation is unprecedented.

The International Trade Union Confederation has reported that at least four CEOs of major corporations each pocketed more than $100m in pay and bonuses last year, while many workers are facing potential job cuts.

Workers’ rights coalitions are calling for urgent action to curb extreme wealth. They want governments to impose higher, fairer taxes on the wealthiest and limit excessive executive pay.

While Labour Day began in the US, when workers protested for an eight-hour workday in the 1880s, the US does not count May Day as a public holiday.

However, an umbrella group of activist and workers’ groups known as May Day Strong has called for protests under the slogan, “workers over billionaires”. Hundreds of demonstrations and marches have been planned across the US.

April 30 (Asia Today) — U.S. Rep. Young Kim on Tuesday pledged to work for the swift reauthorization of the North Korea Human Rights Act, which has lapsed for more than six years, vowing to serve as a “voice” for North Korean defectors.

Kim made the remarks while chairing a roundtable at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington attended by 11 North Korean defectors as part of North Korea Freedom Week.

“I will do my best to ensure the North Korea Human Rights Act is reauthorized as soon as possible in this Congress,” Kim said.

Kim stresses urgency of reauthorization, shifts from English to Korean

Kim opened the meeting in English, noting that she has been involved in North Korea human rights issues for more than 30 years, including 21 years as a congressional staffer and later as an elected lawmaker.

After listening to defectors’ testimony, she switched to Korean without an interpreter, appearing to emphasize her commitment more directly.

“The most important thing from what you said is that we must work together to reauthorize the North Korea Human Rights Act,” she said in Korean.

She highlighted that a key component of the legislation is funding for broadcasting into North Korea.

“Broadcast resources are essential,” Kim said, noting that transmissions into North Korea have weakened, including those from outlets such as Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.

“I will be your voice and speak with my colleagues to ensure the act is reauthorized,” she said.

Susan Scholte, head of the North Korea Freedom Coalition and the Defense Forum Foundation, said Sen. Tim Kaine is preparing to introduce a Senate version of the bill corresponding to the House legislation.

Kim says human rights conditions worsening despite greater information access

Kim said North Korea’s human rights situation has not improved over decades and has in some respects worsened.

“Even after decades, nothing has changed,” she said. “If anything has changed, it is that North Korean people now know more about the outside world than ever before, while crackdowns on external media have reached unprecedented levels.”

She argued that any meaningful change in North Korea must come from within, driven by the spread of information.

“If regime change happens, it must come from inside,” Kim said. “It should begin with people like those here who share information through broadcasting.”

Defectors recount hardships, escapes and role of outside information

Defectors at the roundtable shared personal accounts of life in North Korea and their paths to escape.

One defector said he came to understand the reality of the regime after listening to foreign radio broadcasts, which ultimately influenced his decision to flee.

Another described being detained in Russia after drifting into its waters while fishing and later seeking help from human rights groups after exposure to South Korean media via USB devices.

Others recounted losing family members to starvation, enduring forced labor and being trafficked into China before eventually reaching South Korea.

One defector said she had been forcibly repatriated to North Korea eight times and was separated from her young child, whose fate remains unknown.

Survey shows role of broadcasts, concerns over China surveillance

Kim Ji-young, head of Free North Korea Radio, presented survey results of 75 defectors who arrived in South Korea after 2022.

She said 66% reported accessing foreign broadcasts at least once a week, which inspired aspirations for freedom and motivated their escape.

All respondents said North Korea’s so-called “three major repressive laws” reflect fears of regime instability and efforts to maintain authoritarian control.

Kim also raised concerns about defectors in China, including cases in which children born to North Korean women and Chinese fathers are left stateless, as well as reports that Chinese authorities use artificial intelligence-based facial recognition to track and repatriate defectors.

One participant said she has avoided traveling to China due to fears of abduction or poisoning, adding that South Korean authorities have advised her against visiting.

U.S. lawmaker calls for stronger joint efforts

Rep. James Moylan said the United States and South Korea should strengthen cooperation to bring about meaningful change in North Korea without another decades-long delay.

In an interview with Voice of America, Moylan said radio broadcasting is an effective tool for change, adding that increased access to information, combined with support from advocacy groups and the United States, can help drive transformation.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260430010009822

WEST MEMPHIS, Ark. — Dr. Susan Ward-Jones observed something remarkable not long after the East Arkansas Family Health Center opened a new clinic in this small city by the Mississippi River.

“People used to come in unkempt, sloppily dressed. They look better now,” said Ward-Jones, the clinic’s director. “I think people have a new pride in themselves. Maybe they see we’re doing better and they say, ‘I’ll try to do better, too.’”

With a two-story glass atrium and soaring brushed metal portico, the clinic — whose patients are mostly poor and African American — has nearly twice as many exam rooms as the health center’s old location in a cramped storefront down the road. Nine dental suites, a pharmacy and a state-of-the-art demonstration kitchen branch off the sun-dappled atrium. A shaded exercise track winds through a stand of tall oaks out back.

As nationwide protests highlight the continued impact of racism in criminal justice, the struggle to create and maintain health centers like this one — and over the law commonly known as Obamacare — offers a window into the tangled history of race and healthcare in the U.S., as well. The clinic opened in 2014, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, which also helped thousands of its patients get health insurance.

The entrance of the East Arkansas Family Health Center.

(William DeShazer / For The Times)

“The Affordable Care Act empowered people who didn’t have power. It’s given people a measure of self-respect. That’s been very profound,” said Dr. David Satcher, the former U.S. surgeon general who grew up in the South when many hospitals didn’t allow black physicians like him to admit patients.

More darkly, the reaction to the law — whose passage in March 2010 was shadowed by racist outbursts from some opponents — also has revealed troubling fault lines that remain.

The 14 states that continue to oppose expansion of Medicaid insurance made possible by the law are concentrated in the South, effectively maintaining large racial disparities in access to care. Most of those same states are suing in federal court to have the law invalidated.

“It may be too simplistic to say that opposition to the Affordable Care Act in the South is just about race,” said Thomas J. Ward Jr., a historian who has written about healthcare and civil rights. “But you can’t look at opposition to expanding health services, and not see that some of that opposition is rooted in race in a significant way — not necessarily straight racial animosity, but fear of racial empowerment.”

Anita Earvin gets her teeth cleaned at East Arkansas Family Health Center.

(William DeShazer / For The Times)

Today, a new chapter in this complicated story is being written as the coronavirus outbreak disproportionately affects African American communities across the country, once again spotlighting the racial disparities that shadow American healthcare.

The connection between healthcare and race has been particularly resonant along the Mississippi River, where access to medical care was long a dividing line as rigid as separate schools and drinking fountains, and where federal healthcare initiatives half a century ago helped end segregation.

Clifton Collier, who ran a health center in Marianna, Ark., 50 miles south of West Memphis, lived a good part of this history.

Collier, 66, grew up in the heart of the Arkansas Delta, an expanse of dark, fertile earth stretching over bayous and through thick stands of cedar and live oak along the west bank of the Mississippi.

This was one of the last bastions of the Jim Crow South, a ferociously segregated place where former plantation homes still dot the landscape and a commanding statue of Robert E. Lee on the town square bears testimony to the persistence of the old system.

Collier’s was better off than most black families. His father ran a juke joint that did a brisk business, particularly on Sundays. And just outside town, in a place called Black Swamp, the family owned land it had bought after the Civil War. Some in the family say part of the money came from a white man who fathered one of Collier’s ancestors.

As children in the 1960s, Collier and his siblings worked the cotton fields around Black Swamp, lugging burlap sacks up and down long rows and pulling white bolls from between the plants’ needle-like stems.

If anyone got sick, they’d see a local black woman who practiced folk medicine. “We didn’t have money for a doctor,” Collier recalled. “Nobody did.”

None of the town’s four white doctors would see a black patient who didn’t have cash. “We just had to take care of ourselves,” Collier said.

Dr. Judy Ali, a pharmacist at East Arkansas Family Health Center, answers patient calls.

(William DeShazer / For The Times)

That didn’t seem to trouble the physicians, who told a CBS News crew that visited Marianna in 1969 that black patients got what they needed. “They get adequate medical care if they come seeking it,” one doctor said. “So many times, they’re sick, and they don’t seek it because of ignorance or laziness.”

Cracks in this system began to emerge following passage of the 1965 law that created Medicare, the government insurance plan for the elderly and disabled. The law barred federal money for segregated institutions, forcing hundreds of hospitals across the South to desegregate waiting rooms, patient floors and nurseries almost overnight.

A second federal initiative helped bring community health centers such as Collier’s clinic to many of the poorest quarters of America, offering reliable medical care to black patients in places like the Arkansas Delta for the first time.

These clinics weren’t universally welcomed. When volunteers tried to open the Lee County Cooperative Clinic in Marianna in 1968, white landlords refused to rent space.

The local medical society blocked the clinic’s first doctor, a young physician from St. Louis, from admitting patients to the hospital in Marianna, forcing them to travel to Memphis or Little Rock, more than an hour away. Several workers at the clinic were beaten up outside a local restaurant.

But the clinic endured. Such health centers were designed to empower the low-income patients they served, with federal money funneled directly to the clinics, bypassing white-controlled state governments. In Lee County, clinic volunteers helped develop a slate of black candidates for local office.

“The clinic turned out to be the opening chapter of the civil rights movement in Lee County,” recalled Dr. Dan Blumenthal, the clinic’s first doctor, who taught at Atlanta’s Morehouse School of Medicine until he died last year.

Pharmacy technician Precious Parker fills patient prescriptions.

(William DeShazer / For The Times)

The health centers — and federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid — had a profound impact on the lives of black Americans.

Across the Mississippi River from Marianna, a federally funded health center in Mound Bayou, Miss., helped cut the infant mortality rate among African Americans in the surrounding county by more than a third in just four years, researchers found.

Nationwide, access to care also improved dramatically. In 1964, white Americans were nearly 50% more likely than their black counterparts to have seen a doctor in the previous two years. Three decades later, that reversed, with African Americans more likely than whites to have been to a doctor recently.

Nevertheless, by the time President Obama and congressional Democrats began pushing for the Affordable Care Act, substantial racial inequalities in healthcare remained.

Black Americans were more likely to be uninsured, more likely to report financial barriers to getting care and more likely to die from treatable diseases.

Obama didn’t cite these disparities, focusing instead on the promise of guaranteed health coverage for all Americans.

“Race wasn’t the focus,” a former senior Obama aide recalled. “We didn’t go there.”

But race was never far in the background of the debate.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other conservative commentators who vigorously opposed the health law repeatedly claimed it was part of Obama’s strategy to make the federal government compensate African Americans for slavery.

“This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations, whatever you want to call it,” Limbaugh told his listeners in 2009.

Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, deliberately linked their healthcare fight to past struggles for racial equity.

Before the critical March 2010 vote on the law, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon who had participated in the famous 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., when marchers were beaten by police, walked arm-in-arm with other lawmakers to the Capitol to pass the bill.

Adding to the historical echoes that day, several black lawmakers reported hearing racial epithets as they walked through the crowd of protesters outside the Capitol, many from the then nascent tea party movement. One lawmaker was spit on.

“It was like going into a time machine with John Lewis,” Rep. Andre Carson, a black Democrat from Indiana, observed at the time.

A decade later, some of that vitriol has faded. And the health gains made possible by the law have been striking.

“I think people have a new pride in themselves,” says Dr. Susan Ward-Jones, director of the East Arkansas Family Health Center.

(William DeShazer / For The Times)

Between 2013 and 2015, the share of African Americans without health insurance dropped by nearly half, falling from almost 25% to less than 14%, according to data assembled by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund.

At the same time, African Americans reported skipping care less frequently because of concerns about cost, almost cutting the gap between blacks and whites in half.

And new research shows that inequalities in how quickly white and black patients start treatment for advanced cancers almost disappeared in states that fully expanded coverage through the health law.

“The law dramatically lessened disparities by race,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins University and former chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society.

In Arkansas, which was the first Southern state to expand Medicaid coverage through the law — Louisiana and Virginia have since followed — the impact has been particularly large.

The share of poor residents without health insurance tumbled from nearly 42% to just 19% between 2013 and 2014, researchers found.

The coverage gains allowed clinics like the ones in West Memphis and Marianna to expand services such as dentistry and behavioral health. They added more nurses, more case managers, more health educators and others to help the neediest patients.

Patients, in turn, are more frequently getting checkups and filling their prescriptions more regularly.

Mary Clarksenior gets an eye exam from Dr. Norman Denton.

(William DeShazer / For The Times)

“What we’ve experienced in the last few years has been nothing short of amazing,” said Terrence Aikens, who led efforts at the West Memphis clinic to enroll patients in health insurance through the 2010 health law.

And yet, even now, as the Affordable Care Act enters its second decade, the gains feel tenuous to many here. The law’s opponents — including Arkansas’ governor and the Trump administration — are working to get the Supreme Court to overturn it.

“It is such a difficult history, and we have come so far,” said Ward-Jones, the director of the West Memphis clinic. “Sometimes, though, it feels like we take two steps forward and one step back.”

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Wednesday sharply limited a part of the Voting Rights Act that has forced states to draw voting districts to help elect Black or Latino representatives to Congress as well as state and local boards.

In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana vs. Callais, the court ruled that creating these majority-minority districts may amount to racial discrimination that violates the 14th Amendment.

When weighing what the Voting Rights Act requires, “we start with the general rule that the Constitution almost never permits the federal government or a state to discriminate on the basis of race,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the court.

Alito said states may draw election districts for partisan advantage but may not use race as a basis for redistricting.

The ruling in a Louisiana case appears to clear the way for Republican-led states across the South to redraw their election maps and eliminate voting districts that favor Black or Latino candidates for Congress, state legislatures and county boards.

UCLA law professor Rick Hasen said, “It is hard to overstate what an earthquake this will be for American politics,” adding that the decision makes the Voting Rights Act a “much weaker, and potentially toothless law.”

Hasen said it’s unclear how the decision will affect the November election because in many states early voting has already started and primaries have already taken place.

But the ruling’s long-term consequences for minority representation in Congress, state legislatures and local government are almost “certainly” going to be felt in 2028, Hasen said.

Republican leaders in states across the South have already signaled they intend to move quickly to redraw congressional maps in the wake of the ruling.

Alabama Atty. Gen. Steve Marshall said the state will “act as quickly as possible” to ensure its congressional maps “reflect the will of the people, not a racial quota system the Constitution forbids.” Marshall called the decision a recognition of how much the South has changed since the civil rights era.

“The court rightly acknowledged that the South has made extraordinary progress, and that laws designed for a different era do not reflect the present reality,” he said in a statement.

Florida was already in motion before the ruling came down. But Gov. Ron DeSantis celebrated the decision and said it was all the more reason for state lawmakers to redraw its congressional maps, in a manner that could give Republicans up to four more seats in Congress.

The proposed congressional maps, drawn by DeSantis’ office, were first unveiled to Fox News on Monday. On Wednesday, both chambers approved the maps, and readied them for DeSantis’ final approval.

In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves had already called lawmakers into a special session at the end of May in anticipation of a court ruling on the Voting Rights Act. In a post on X, Reeves underscored the ideological underpinnings to the ruling’s potential implications.

“First Dobbs. Now Callais. Just Mississippi and Louisiana down here saving our country!” Reeves wrote.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) speaks at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol after the Supreme Court ruling.

(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call / Getty Images)

At issue was how to ensure equal representation for Black and Latino citizens.

About one-third of Louisiana’s voters are Black, but the state seeks an election map that will elect white Republicans to five of its six seats in the House of Representatives.

Lower courts said that map violated the Voting Rights Act because it denied fair representation to Black residents.

The state had one Black-majority district, in New Orleans.

Two years ago, judges upheld the creation of a second Black-majority district that stretched from Shreveport to Baton Rouge on the grounds that it was required under the law.

The state’s Republican leaders appealed and argued that race was the motivating factor in drawing the second district.

Alito and the conservatives agreed and called that district an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

The three liberals dissented. The consequences of the ruling “are likely to be far-reaching and grave,” said Justice Elena Kagan, adding that it will allow “racial vote dilution in its most classic form.”

She said the decision means “a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”

But she said states across the South may draw electoral districts that deprive Black voters of equal representation. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.

The decision was the latest example of a partisan political dispute in which the court’s six Republican appointees vote in favor of the Republican state plan, while the three Democratic appointees dissent.

The ruling is likely to have its greatest impact in the Southern states, where white Republicans are in control and Black Democrats are in the minority.

The court’s divide over redistricting is similar to the long dispute over affirmative action.

For decades, university officials said they needed to consider the race of applicants to achieve diversity and equal representation.

But in 2023, the court by a 6-3 vote struck down college affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina and ruled race may not be used to judge applicants.

The historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 succeeded in clearing the way for Black citizens to register and vote across the South, but it took longer for Black candidates to win elections.

The dispute was highlighted in a 1980 case from Mobile, Ala. Its three commissioners were elected to six-year terms, and each of them ran countywide.

Even though one-third of the county’s voters were Black, white candidates always won.

The Supreme Court upheld this arrangement as legal and constitutional. In dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall said Black residents were left with the right to cast meaningless ballots.

In response, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to say states must give minorities an opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

Four years later, the Supreme Court interpreted that to mean that states had a duty to draw voting districts that would elect a Black or Latino candidate if these minorities had a sufficiently large number of voters in a particular area.

In recent years, the court’s conservatives, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, have chafed at the rule on the grounds it sometimes required states to use race as a factor for drawing election districts.

Alito’s opinion adopted that view and said states are not required or permitted to use race as a basis for drawing districts.

Hours after the ruling came out, President Trump met with reporters in the Oval Office and said he had not yet seen the decision. He was visibly excited, however, when a reporter explained the decision favored Republicans.

“I love it!” he said. “This is very good.”

Former President Obama said in a statement that the court’s decision “effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities — so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit racial bias.”

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in Los Angeles, also denounced the decision.

“The Supreme Court’s decision blesses racially discriminatory gerrymandering, and dismantles the legal protections for minority voters,” said Nina Perales, the group’s vice president for litigation. It “openly invites states to dilute minority voting strength, and undermines our democracy.”

WASHINGTON, April 28 (UPI) — Supreme Court justices appeared divided Tuesday morning about whether a U.S. tech company can be held liable for aiding the Chinese government’s alleged torture of a spiritual minority.

The case is centers on whether practitioners in China of the Falun Gong religion — also called Falun Dafa — can sue California-based tech company Cisco Systems for aiding and abetting violations of the 18th-century Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act, which was enacted in 1992.

Cisco attorney Kannon Shanmugam called for barring aiding and abetting liability. He argued that allowing liability to be implied would harm the government’s separation of power.

Much of Tuesday’s debate hinged on whether the statute’s 200-year-old “law of nations” wording was applicable to the relatively more modern concept of human rights abuses, as well as whether the first Congress meant for the victim protection act to include second liability for aiding and abetting torture.

The case marks the latest attempt to define the scope of the statue, which for over two centuries has allowed foreigners to bring lawsuits in U.S. courts for serious violations of international law.

More than 20 years ago, Cisco developed and sold to the Chinese government a surveillance system, which the government used to find, interrogate and allegedly torture Falun Gong practitioners.

During arguments for Cisco Systems Inc. vs. Doe I, some justices emphasized Cisco’s awareness of their technology’s role in persecution, while others said that including liability for aiding torture in the alien tort statue contradicted with historical precedent and had foreign policy risks.

But no clear majority converged around either position in the conservative majority court.

“We’ve maybe misled Congress into thinking, ‘Oh, we don’t need to do anything about these human rights things, the courts are taking care of it,'” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.

“I’m concerned at a separation of powers level that we’re not really allowing suits to go forward, but Congress thinks we are because of a lack of clarity in our case law.”

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sotomayor appeared more supportive of those who brought forward the original lawsuit — several Chinese nationals and one U.S. citizen.

Addressing the wording of the Torture Victim Protection Act, Sotomayor told Shanmugam: “I’m not sure how you get to your position that ‘subjects to’ can’t mean aiding and abetting because command liability doesn’t necessarily require subjecting someone to the torture.”

“It makes someone who’s in a command position who knows of the torture and permits it to happen … aiding and abetting. We’ve defined aiding and abetting as an active step in permitting and encouraging the substantive act.”

The Alien Tort Statute grants federal district courts original jurisdiction over any civil action in which an alien sues for a tort “committed in violation of the law of nations or of a treaty of the United States.”

“What’s the point of previous [Supreme Court] decisions that determined U.S. corporations could be defendants?” said Sophia Cope, senior staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, who helped write an amicus brief in support of the Falun Gong members.

“Excluding second liability from the ATS would be a huge loophole for companies to sell services which are used for human rights violations.”

By rejecting judicially created aiding and abetting liability, the court would close the last major loophole that the plaintiffs’ lawyers have “exploited” to keep cases with such claims under the ATS and TVPA alive, said Cory Andrews, vice-president of litigation at the Washington Legal Foundation. The foundation submitted a brief in support of Cisco in February.

“It would reaffirm that the ATS is a narrow 1789 statute, not a modern vehicle for global human-rights enforcement,” Andrews said.

The case had its origins 15 years ago. In 2011, the plaintiffs — 13 Chinese nationals and one U.S. citizen — filed the original suit in the District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming they were targeted using Cisco’s technology and then detained and tortured.

The district court dismissed the claims, but it was brought to the Supreme Court after a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed in 2023 that the plaintiffs had met a legal threshold to continue with the lawsuit.

A decision is expected by the end of June.

Some airlines have confirmed they will be operating fewer flights

Six major airlines have confirmed they will be cancelling and cutting back on flights to and from the UK due to the rise in jet fuel costs triggered by the war in Iran. As a result, many travellers may have to prepare for their plans to be disrupted as they anxiously await updates from their airlines.

However, the Government has confirmed the full list of rights passengers have when their flight is cancelled due to an act of war. This includes what compensation or rebooking options people should be given.

Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department for Transport, Keir Mather, clarified: “Where UK law applies, if a flight is cancelled by the airline, then passengers would be entitled to a choice between a full refund or to be re-routed. These rights would apply if disruption were linked to war.

“Information on air passenger rights is already available in the Department’s Air Passenger Travel Guide, and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) recently provided specific advice to passengers in response to the Middle East disruption.”

The MP had been responding to Liberal Democrat Sarah Dyke who requested the DfT layout guidance on the “Act of War” clause which is meant to protect customers who should receive appropriate refunds for holidays they cannot take due to conflict.

According to the Civil Aviation Authority, if your flight is cancelled your airline must let you choose one of two options under UK law:

• Receive a refund for the parts of the journey you haven’t used
• Choose an alternative flight

If your flight is cancelled with less than 14 days’ notice, you may be entitled to some compensation if it is deemed to be the airlines’ fault. Issues like extreme weather, employee strikes or ‘extraordinary circumstances’ won’t count.

UK law around cancelled flights usually applies to airlines departing from or arriving in the UK as well as flights arriving in the EU on a UK airline. Under this law, your airline must also provide you with ‘care and assistance’ if your flight is cancelled.

This ‘care and assistance’ is separate from compensation and can include:

• Reasonable amount of food and drink, usually vouchers
• Means to communicate, such as refunding the cost of phone calls
• Accommodation if your replacement flight is the next day
• Transport to and from the accommodation or your home if you’re able to return

The UK Civil Aviation Authority notes: “The airline must provide you with these items until it is able to fly you to your destination, no matter how long the delay lasts or what has caused it.”

According to the BBC, six airlines have said they will operate fewer flights including KLM, Air Canada, Asiana Airlines, Delta Airlines, Lufthansa and SAS. Other airlines, such British Airways owner IAG, EasyJet and Jet2Holidays, have assured that they don’t plan to make any changes at the moment as of April 25.

Some airlines have said they will increase charges as a result of the jet fuel supply disruption. These include:

• Air France-KLM
• Indigo
• Pakistan International Airlines
• Thai Airways
• Turkish Airlines-Sun Express
• Virgin Atlantic

Amnesty International and dozens of U.S. civil and human rights groups issued a “ World Cup travel advisory” Thursday, warning tournament visitors of “rising authoritarianism and increasing violence” in the United States during President Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement.

The groups said the advisory was necessary “in light of the deteriorating human rights situation in the United States and in the absence of meaningful action and concrete guarantees from FIFA, host cities, or the U.S. government.”

The advisory says visitors may be arbitrarily denied entry to the country, detained in “inhumane” conditions or subjected to invasive phone and social media searches. It points to the aggressive immigration surges in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis that led to accusations of racial profiling and the violent suppression of protests.

The message was condemned by tourism officials, who said the groups were threatening the livelihoods of service industry workers in an attempt to achieve their political goals.

Geoff Freeman, president & CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, said there are legitimate concerns about U.S. entry policies but they’re being blown out of proportion. There were 67 million international travelers to the United States last year, he said in a statement.

“The notion that visiting America poses a meaningful safety risk is not a good-faith warning, it’s a political tactic designed to cause economic harm,” Freeman said.

A FIFA spokesperson pointed to several statements and policies, including the federation’s governing documents, which say, “FIFA is committed to respecting all internationally recognized human rights and shall strive to promote the protection of these rights.”

The U.S. has seen a decline in international travelers since Trump returned to the White House last year and offended U.S. allies with talk of making Canada a U.S. state, taking control of Greenland and questioning the value of NATO. The tourism industry is counting on a major boost from World Cup visitors, even as Trump’s travel ban for citizens of 19 countries has injected further uncertainty.

The administration is betting that its push to expedite visa processing for visitors and excitement about the tournament will outweigh concerns that Trump’s immigration messaging undercuts the theme of global unity that the World Cup is meant to represent.

The tournament kicks off June 11 with games spread across North America, including 11 stadiums in the U.S. along with two in Canada and three in Mexico.

Cooper writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The criminal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center this week was met with much outrage but little surprise from civil rights leaders, who have for more than a year prepared for heightened legal scrutiny from the Trump administration, and how to mount a coordinated response.

In rounds of calls immediately following the indictment, civil rights leaders discussed how to support the SPLC, a Montgomery, Ala.-based civil rights group founded in 1971 that has tracked white supremacist groups and been outspoken on voting rights, immigration and policing. Organizers on one call agreed that winning in the court of public opinion would be crucial as judicial proceedings began, leading to dozens of public statements of support and planned rallies.

And legal advisors to civil rights groups urged organizers to prepare themselves for similar criminal indictments, protracted legal action that may exhaust their resources and audits of their staff and internal documents.

The flurry of behind-the-scenes coordination represented a marked escalation and mobilization of plans for activist groups that have been at odds with the Justice Department since President Trump’s return to the White House last year. Organizers say they are prepared to back the SPLC in its legal fight.

“It’s a blatantly obvious attack on civil rights and civil liberties to whitewash the foot soldiers of the great replacement theory and other extremists. This coalition isn’t going silent,” said Maya Wiley, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella organization of hundreds of civil rights groups.

Without addressing the indictment, a coalition of more than 100 activist groups on Tuesday published a letter vowing solidarity with groups that are “unjustly targeted” by the federal government. SPLC was a signatory to the pact.

“An attack on one is an attack on all,” the coalition declared. “We will share knowledge, resources, and support with any organization threatened by abuses of power.”

DOJ alleges criminal conduct in SPLC’s longtime informant network

The Justice Department alleges that the SPLC, which rose to prominence for its work prosecuting and tracking hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, violated federal law through its network of paid informants in extremist groups. The DOJ claims the payments funded hate groups and misled the SPLC’s donors.

The SPLC now faces charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought in the federal court in Alabama, where the organization is based.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche at a news conference announcing the charges. Blanche promised the department “will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable.”

Longtime civil rights activists found the claims to be a disingenuous and partisan move that may empower extremist groups.

“The indictment is nakedly political and represents the Justice Department turning on itself,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “It places the Justice Department in the posture of, in effect, defending white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and others.”

Advocates also view the indictment as part of the administration’s broader upending of civil rights law and the Justice Department’s prosecution of Trump’s political opponents.

The SPLC in recent years became a bogeyman among conservatives who resented that the watchdog designated several rightwing organizations that engage in Republican politics as hateful or extremist.

In October, FBI Director Kash Patel canceled the agency’s longtime anti-extremism partnerships with the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, which combats antisemitism. Patel at the time called the SPLC a “partisan smear machine.”

The Justice Department and SPLC did not respond to requests for comment.

Indictment represents marked shift for civil rights work

Advocates dispute the DOJ’s characterization of the SPLC’s work, which civil rights activists credit to combating extremist groups across the country.

“The problem is that the indictment essentially claims that it was a fraud on SPLC’s donors to use their funds to fight the Klan, the neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups, when that is exactly why people gave to the organization,” said Norm Eisen, founder of Democracy Defenders Action, a legal group that works with organizations in legal disputes with the Trump administration.

Eisen added: “The notion that there’s something wrong with using informants and protecting their identities to prevent white supremacist violence is belied by the fact that that is not only what the SPLC did, but it is also the stock and trade of the FBI itself.”

Civil rights organizations are now preparing for further legal action against other organizations that disagree with or actively oppose the Trump administration. Organizations have reviewed their document retention, tax compliance and auditing policies over the last year to safeguard against any probes or lawsuits.

Some civil rights organizations have also floated creating new organizational structures that may better withstand legal scrutiny. On another recent call, activists floated restructuring some groups into for-profit entities, or potentially crafting new financial conduits for donors to give through to ensure that staff could receive pay if an organization’s assets were seized or frozen.

The preparations represent a marked shift for many civil rights leaders, who in recent years counted the Justice Department under both Democratic and Republican administrations as a reliable ally in key civil rights battles.

“What we are seeing in real time is an administration seeking to leverage its position to target individuals and organizations that do not agree with its political thought,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who said the Justice Department has been “weaponized by dangerous forces.”

But for other leaders, the SPLC indictment raised the specter of a return to a previous era, when the Justice Department monitored — and at times prosecuted — civil rights leaders to disrupt their activities.

“We’re not backing down, but we are clear-eyed. Everyone could be in some form of jeopardy if you’re in the crosshairs of this administration,” said Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights group suing the Trump administration over executive orders addressing birthright citizenship and mail-in voting.

“That’s what they’re looking for; they want this to have a chilling effect,” Proaño said.

Brown writes for the Associated Press.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — There is no little irony in the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent holding that racial redistricting is permissible as long as race is not the sole or dominant factor. With the Senate equally divided and Republicans holding a razor-thin advantage in the House of Representatives, the court’s ostensibly liberal ruling, one backed by civil rights organizations and opposed by the court’s four conservatives, could not be more dear to the hearts of Southern Republicans. The 5-4 decision will buttress GOP efforts to retain control of Congress by making the election and reelection of Republicans in the South easier after congressional districts are redrawn to reflect the 2000 census.

The strategy of racial redistricting, or creating “minority majority” congressional districts, was put into full play after the 1990 census. Racial gerrymandering isolates blacks, who vote overwhelmingly for liberal Democrats, in awkwardly shaped districts that often cut across the entire width of some states, particularly in the South. In turn, white conservative voters are placed in surrounding districts, which virtually guarantees the election of Republicans in those districts. As a result, although more minorities may be elected to Congress, fewer Democrats and more Republicans end up in the House of Representatives.

During the first Bush administration, the Department of Justice hit upon racial redistricting as a way to both increase minorities’ representation in Congress and elect more Republicans at the expense of the Democrats. The 1965 Voting Rights Act requires that all redistricting in Old South states not dilute black votes. Somewhat perversely, the department parlayed this standard into an affirmative action policy to benefit Republicans. By forcing Southern state legislatures to redistrict along racial lines, it slightly increased the number of minority-majority districts while greatly boosting the number of those disposed to vote Republican.

The Congressional Black Caucus welcomed the Bush administration’s innovative compliance with the Voting Rights Act, but white Democratic politicians in states like Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia were left in a no-win situation. On the one hand, they could not argue, at least vehemently in public, against the creation of such minority-majority districts without inviting charges of racism. On the other, they faced losing seats in districts that lacked their most reliable supporters.

Make no mistake, this affirmative action strategy worked for Republicans. Following the 1990 census, 26 new minority-majority districts were created. More blacks and Latinos were elected to Congress. But so were Republicans like Newt Gingrich; in 1994, the Grand Old Party won control of the House in large part because of their wins in the South.

Ever since, the Republican National Committee has pushed its self-serving version of affirmative action to maintain party hegemony in the South. Although not widely known, the committee has even developed computer programs and models–so-called “Max Black” plans–to help Southern legislatures draw racially gerrymandered districts for distribution to black politicians.

Ironically, during the last decade, the Supreme Court’s five most conservative justices voted to strike down such districts. The lead case, Shaw v. Reno (1993), involved a challenge to North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District. As redrawn in 1992, it was overwhelmingly black and slithered, snake-like, about 160 miles along Interstate 85, from Charlotte to Winston-Salem and to Durham. Writing for the court in that case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. She held that “bizarre,” ’tortured” and “irregular” minority-majority districts run afoul of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

O’Connor’s bare majority hung together in rejecting other racial gerrymandered districts in the 1990s. But she never completely ruled out race as a factor in redistricting. By contrast, Scalia and Thomas, the court’s most conservative justices, have held that race-based redistricting is never permissible.

The more liberal members of the court–Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer–steadfastly dissented. They argued for judicial self-restraint and deference to politics in determining the shape and composition of congressional districts.

The court’s latest ruling on North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District is its fourth. Redrawn three times since the 1993 case, the district is currently about 40% black and more compact, stretching across only one-third of the state, from Charlotte to Winston-Salem.

But this time, O’Connor abandoned her more conservative colleagues and joined with the more liberal dissenters. Race may be considered in redistricting, according to the court’s new majority, but only as long as it’s not the “predominate factor.” In other words, race may be a factor in redistricting but not the sole factor, and blacks apparently may not constitute a majority in the district.

With congressional redistricting underway, the decision in Hunt v. Cromartie could not be more timely. But it is certain to be a hollow victory for liberal Democrats, because, as O’Connor knows, it signals Republicans to press ahead with their brand of affirmative action in racial redistricting to hold onto their control of the House.

It’s noteworthy that the ruling turned on the vote of the justice with the most political experience and, arguably, the vote of the most political justice on the court. Before her appointment in 1981 by former President Ronald Reagan, O’Connor served on state courts and in Arizona’s state legislature, where she must have learned something about the politics of redistricting.

Moreover, she is at the court’s center stage, casting the pivotal vote on such hotly contested political issues as abortion and affirmative action. Recall, too, that on election night in November at a cocktail party, O’Connor reportedly became upset when news organizations initially announced that Vice President Al Gore had won the presidency. Her husband explained that she had planned to retire if Bush was victorious. Time will tell whether O’Connor will give President George W. Bush his first opportunity to make his mark on the Supreme Court.

WASHINGTON, April 22 (UPI) — The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday whether immigration officers can place permanent residents charged with a crime on parole if they leave and then re-enter the country.

In immigration, parole is a temporary, discretionary permission granted by the Department of Homeland Security that allows a person to enter or remain in the United States, even though they are not formally admitted.

Parole does not cancel a person’s green card, but essentially gives the Department of Homeland Security time to decide whether the person should be admitted or deported based on how the issue is resolved.

The court is poised to hear oral arguments in Blanche vs. Lau, which would determine when immigration officers can demote a permanent resident’s status to parole, a temporary status that can be revoked and result in deportation.

Lau is Chinese immigrant Muk Lau, a permanent resident with a green card. Blanche is Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. attorney general and named defendant in the case.

Typically, permanent residents are allowed to leave and re-enter the United States as they wish, with a few exceptions. If these immigrants have committed certain kinds of crimes, for example, officers can have them placed on parole when they return to the country after going abroad.

The case stems from an event on June 15, 2012, when 69-year-old Lau, who had gained permanent residency five years earlier, landed in a New York-area airport after traveling to China.

He presented his green card and passport to border control. His entry triggered an FBI match because a month earlier, Lau was charged with third-degree trademark counterfeiting for selling nearly $300,000 of fake designer shorts.

“I was arrested at a warehouse that contained some merchandise I had stored there,” Lau told the Customs and Border Protection agent, according to court documents. “I went to the warehouse to retrieve the merchandise because I had not paid rent, and when I got there, the cops were there and arrested me.”

The agent declared Lau inadmissible as a returning permanent resident due to the crime exception, and decided to let him in on parole, instead. A year later, Lau pled guilty to the counterfeiting, and in 2014, the Department of Homeland Security began deportation proceedings against him.

At the time, the Customs and Border Patrol agent did not know whether Lau was guilty — just that he had been charged with a crime. The crux of Lau’s case is whether the CBP agent needed “clear and convincing” evidence of a crime when placing him on parole or whether just charges were enough without such evidence.

Immigrant advocates argue the agent erred.

“Mr. Lau was absolutely, unequivocally, at that time, admissible,” said Jonathan Weinberg, who worked on the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s brief to the court. “He just was. He hadn’t been convicted of a crime. There was nothing else that would render him inadmissible.”

After an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals sided with the government, Lau appealed to the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court, agreeing with Weinberg’s reasoning, granted Lau’s petition in March 2025.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit advocating for lower immigration rates, also submitted a brief to the court. It argued that the border patrol officer did the right thing by paroling Lau into the country, and that the clear and convincing standard was too high.

“If you’re going to say that the officer in an airport is supposed to have all this information, you’re assigning that individual with an impossible task,” FAIR spokesman Ira Mehlman said. “You have thousands of people coming through the airports every day, and these are decisions that have to be made on the spot.”

Mehlman also said that the decision “shouldn’t be a problem” for green-card holders without any criminal history.

“When you come to the United States as a non-citizen, you are here on a conditional basis,” Mehlman said. “Even if you’re a green card holder, you’re subject to removal if you violate the terms of your presence here in the United States.”

There are nearly 13 million legal permanent residents in the United States. Legal immigrants, including green card holders, commit crimes at lower rates than natural-born citizens, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute. However, Weinberg said the ultimate decision would impact all legal permanent residents, including those who have not been convicted of any crime.

“If the government can admit Lau on parole, then the government can basically admit any returning green card holder on parole if it chooses to,” Weinberg said.

Lau’s case joins several immigration-related issues, including birthright citizenship and temporary protected status, which have made their way to the Supreme Court this spring.

“The immigrant advocacy community is, I think, fighting an uphill battle,” Weinberg said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t give it your best shot.”

April 21 (UPI) — The Southern Poverty Law Center announced via YouTube Tuesday that it is now the target of an investigation by the Department of Justice.

“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” said CEO Bryan Fair in the video. “This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence. In 1983, our offices were firebombed, and in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit advocacy and litigation organization that tracks White supremacist and other hate groups in the United States. Republicans have criticized the nonprofit for acting as a far-left entity that they say targets conservative organizations and people. It was founded in 1971 by Morris Dees, Joseph Levin Jr. and Julian Bond as a civil rights law firm in Montgomery, Ala.

The case is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama, CBS News reported.

Fair said the probe is targeting the organization and its employees.

“For decades, we engaged in unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups. In light of that work, we sought to protect the safety of our staff and the public,” Fair said in the video. “We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. We did not, however, share our use of informants broadly with anyone, to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families.

“And while we no longer work with paid informants, we continue to take their safety seriously. These individuals risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups,” Fair said.

Fair said the organization will fight the allegations.

“We stood in the vanguard then, and we stand in the vanguard today,” he said. “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission or the communities we serve.”

What exactly is President Bush trying to achieve on civil rights?

Against the backdrop of the racial controversy that cost Trent Lott (R-Miss.) his job as Senate majority leader, Bush’s own intentions have come under closer scrutiny. But the president has sent such mixed signals that some critics believe he’s playing a double game — moderate on decisions that can be traced directly to him and much more conservative on judicial appointments that will profoundly affect the reach of civil rights law, but only gradually and far away from the White House.

Bush drew praise even from his staunchest critics in the traditional civil rights community for his strong condemnation of Lott’s wink toward segregation. Indeed, while the White House always said publicly that Bush didn’t want Lott to resign, the president’s sharp rebuke during a speech in Philadelphia probably did more to doom the Mississippi senator than anything else that happened since Lott’s remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party Dec. 5.

But since Bush’s speech, the liberal civil rights community has repeatedly insisted that the president’s stirring words in defense of equal opportunity needed to be measured against his actions. Just minutes before Lott stepped down Friday, a coalition of civil rights groups held a news conference in Washington to pound at that message.

Conservatives rightly argue that support for the agenda of the liberal civil rights community isn’t the only measure of commitment to equal opportunity. But it’s reasonable for the civil rights groups to insist that a president’s actions should always be weighed more heavily than his words.

So far, Bush has moved cautiously on the civil rights issues most directly under his control. He has appointed conservatives to most key civil rights positions, and liberals charge that the administration isn’t enforcing the laws as aggressively as Bill Clinton did when he was president.

But Bush’s record hasn’t generated the intense conflict that characterized the liberal response to the enforcement of the civil rights laws under Ronald Reagan, and even Bush’s father. William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a leading liberal group, says that Bush’s record shows “a policy that is largely inert, not moving forward, and in a few areas is regressing.” Considering the source, that’s mild criticism.

Nor has Bush moved to retrench the key federal programs that promote affirmative action — policies meant to expand opportunities for minorities in hiring and government contracting. For years, conservative thinkers have viewed these programs as unfair to whites and counterproductive — a group entitlement that exacerbates social divisions.

But Bush has made no effort to repeal the executive order requiring federal contractors to establish goals and timetables for hiring women and minorities. Conservatives have long accused that program, which affects fully one-fifth of all workers in America, of encouraging quotas. Nor has the administration retrenched the programs providing minorities preferences in federal contracting. In all, Bush has done little to disturb the “mend it, don’t end it” balance on federal affirmative action programs that Clinton established in 1995.

Likewise, even before Lott, the administration was hesitant about joining a lawsuit opposing racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan now heading toward the Supreme Court. After Lott, officials say, it’s even less likely that Bush will use the suit to argue for a sweeping rollback of affirmative action.

Bush has had such a hands-off policy on these issues that conservatives are starting to grumble. “Conservatives are going to be very disappointed if two years from now there hasn’t been any positive movement,” says Roger Clegg, general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative group.

Clegg probably shouldn’t hold his breath. While Bush has always declared himself against quotas and preferences, he’s never shown any enthusiasm for direct combat on this front. His calculation seems to be that conflict over affirmative action would eclipse efforts to reach minority voters on other issues, such as education and homeownership. “Once you enter this thing,” one Bush political advisor says, “it’s hard to move the ball on anything else.”

But liberal groups take little comfort in Bush’s cautious approach to direct action. Their fear is that Bush is filling the federal courts with conservative judges who will reshape the civil rights laws in ways he wouldn’t risk through executive or legislative initiatives that carry his fingerprints.

It’s not an unreasonable fear. Many of Bush’s judicial nominees have records on civil rights much more conservative than the views Bush has expressed. Civil rights groups argue that Bush appellate court nominees such as Carolyn Kuhl, Jeffrey Sutton and Charles W. Pickering Sr. have displayed a determination to narrow the way civil rights laws are enforced.

All of these nominations will generate fireworks in the new year (especially if Bush fulfills his promise to renominate Pickering, whom the Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee rejected last year largely around accusations of racial insensitivity). But this conflict will really come to a head if Bush receives an opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice.

“That’s the big one,” insists Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group. “If they get a firm [conservative] Supreme Court majority, it will render the progressive agenda moot for decades. This is the whole ballgame for them. That’s why they are willing to make compromises legislatively or in the executive branch.”

Bush is under no obligation to support Neas’ agenda on civil rights. But voters have a right to demand accountability from elected officials. If Bush wants to roll back affirmative action, it’s hard to explain his executive actions; if he doesn’t, it’s hard to explain his court nominations.

Bush is sending dissonant signals, perhaps intentionally. But in the end, it’s his decisions on the courts that will speak loudest. Words matter, but words fade. When he condemns Lott, Bush is writing in sand. When he picks judges, he is carving in granite.

*

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.

The Dept. of Justice is investigating the NFL’s media deals with streaming companies as more of its games go behind subscription pay walls.

The investigation first reported by the Wall Street Journal centers on the financial impact of live sports streaming on consumers and whether the league’s traditional broadcast partners are getting fair treatment.

The Justice Dept. did not respond to a request for comment. A government official told NBC News the DOJ’s investigation into the NFL is “about affordability for consumers and creating an even playing field for providers.”

Early last month, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah requested the investigation in a letter to the DOJ, and issued a statement Thursday on X saying he was glad to see it move forward.

The Sports Broadcasting Act passed by Congress in 1961 allowed professional football teams to collectively license the TV rights of their games to national broadcast networks without running afoul of anti-trust laws. Lee noted that courts have recognized the act refers to broadcasts “financed through advertising and made available free to the public.”

Lee said sports packages that go behind subscription paywalls “no longer align” with the intention of the act which was passed when the public only had access to three TV networks.

The NFL has not received a letter from the DOJ saying it is under investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment. But the league issued a statement asserting that fans can see every NFL game played by the teams in their markets for free on broadcast TV unlike every other major sport.

“The NFL’s media distribution model is the most fan and broadcaster-friendly in the entire sports and entertainment industry,” the league said. “The NFL has for decades put our fans front and center in how we distribute our content.”

The NFL said 87% its games can be watched on free TV. The other 13% on streaming and cable platforms are made available on the local TV stations of the teams involved in those contests.

The sports rights landscape has shifted dramatically in the last 10 years as deep pocketed tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Netflix have provided the NFL with significant leverage in its negotiations with its longtime TV partners NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN.

While streaming companies initially eschewed live sports because of the high cost of rights fees, they have found them to be an effective way to bring a massive number of viewers to their platforms.

Amazon Prime Video is paying $1.5 billion a year for the rights to “Thursday Night Football,” a package that was a money loser when carried by the broadcast networks. Netflix has picked up the rights to games on Christmas Day, while Google’s YouTube became the home of the Sunday Ticket package that gives subscribers access to out-of-market games.

The pressure from the newer competitors comes at a time when companies with traditional TV networks depend on the NFL more than ever as it provides the highest rated programming by a wide margin. The NFL packages also give TV station groups with leverage in negotiating carriage deal fees with cable and satellite companies.

Tensions over the rising rights fees are growing as the NFL has the right to open up the deal with Paramount, because the company underwent an ownership change last year when acquired by Skydance Media. The league is reportedly looking for another $1 billion annually from Paramount which is already paying $2.1 billion a year for its package of games on CBS.

The league has also made it clear it plans to exercise its option in 2029 to open the current 10-year media rights contract that runs through the 2032-33 season.

Fox Corporation — home of the Trump-friendly Fox News Channel — heavily depends on the NFL for programming on its TV stations — has already raised concerns about the renegotiation.

Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch has said he believes the $2.5 billion a year Fox pays the NFL is “fair market value.” But he has also told Wall Street analysts the company may have to re-examine its other sports deals in preparation to pay more to the NFL going forward.

Last week, Fox and station group owner Sinclair Broadcasting filed a statement with the FCC asserting that the NFL’s antitrust exemption does not apply to streaming platforms that require paid subscriptions.

“Congress provided a valuable exemption from the antitrust laws for leagues that bargain collectively for sports broadcasting,” wrote Joseph Di Scipio, Fox Corp.’s senior VP, legal and FCC compliance. “But on its face, the statute does not exempt negotiations that the leagues may have with streaming services.”

Memorial was co-winner of 2022 Peace Prize for its work in documenting human rights abuses in Russia.

The committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize has condemned attempts by Moscow to designate the human rights group and Peace Prize laureate Memorial as an “extremist organisation”.

The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, said in a statement on Wednesday that it was “deeply alarmed by the Russian authorities’ latest attempts to destroy Memorial – a co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize – by seeking to designate [it] as an extremist organisation”.

The statement was issued as Russia’s Supreme Court is expected to examine a petition from the Ministry of Justice on Thursday to add Memorial to Russia’s list of “undesirable” entities.

The designation would ban the organisation from operating in Russia, with those affiliated with it could face up to four years in prison and fines.

Memorial has already been declared a “foreign agent”, and the Supreme Court ordered it dissolved in Russia at the end of 2021.

Frydnes stressed that if the latest petition by the Justice Ministry is upheld, “all activities of Memorial will be criminalised. Anyone taking part in, or funding, Memorial’s work – or even sharing its published materials – will risk imprisonment.”

“To designate such an organisation as extremist is an affront to the fundamental values of human dignity and freedom of expression,” he added.

The committee called “on the Russian authorities to immediately withdraw this claim and to cease all harassment of Memorial and its members”.

Memorial won the Nobel Peace Prize with the Ukrainian human rights organisation Centre for Civil Liberties and Ales Bialiatski, who has worked to promote democracy and human rights in Belarus. Memorial, established in 1987, focuses on documenting human rights abuses in Russia.

Before it was banned in Russia, Memorial formed a network of about 50 organisations across Russia and outside its borders. Some of its constituents based in Germany, France and Italy continue to operate.

Several Russian Memorial leaders have been subjected to criminal proceedings – including Oleg Orlov, who was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2024 after being imprisoned for speaking out against the Ukraine war – are now working outside Russia to continue documenting human rights abuses.

Arrest comes after Roberts-Smith lost case against journalists who said he was involved in murders of unarmed Afghan men.

Former Australian special forces soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested at Sydney airport and is expected to face charges for alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

The 47-year-old was expected to appear in a court in New South Wales later on Tuesday over five counts of the war crime of murder, related to unarmed Afghan nationals who “were not taking part in hostilities at the time of their alleged murder”, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett told reporters in Sydney on Tuesday, according to the ABC.

Barrett said the charges followed a “complex” investigation by the AFP news agency and the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) dating back to 2021.

The arrest comes after Roberts-Smith lost defamation proceedings he brought against journalists who had reported he was “complicit in and responsible for the murder” of three Afghan men.

An Australian judge found in 2023 that those journalists had not defamed Roberts-Smith, a ruling that was upheld by the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia in May last year.

Rawan Arraf, the executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, said the arrest was a “significant and long-awaited step for victims and affected communities” in Afghanistan, where Roberts-Smith was deployed multiple times.

“The proper investigation and prosecution of alleged war crimes by members of the Australian special forces in Afghanistan are essential to ensuring justice for Afghan victims and to Australia meeting its obligations under international law,” Arraf said in a statement.

About 39,000 Australian soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan as part of the United States and NATO-led operations against the Taliban and other armed groups over two decades.

Roberts-Smith’s case has drawn considerable scrutiny in Australia, including because prior to the charges, he had received the Victoria Cross medal for his fifth tour of Afghanistan, and was reportedly the most-decorated living Australian war veteran.

Meanwhile, former Australian army lawyer David McBride remains imprisoned in Australia over his role in revealing information about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.

Australian Senator David Shoebridge responded to the news of Roberts-Smith’s arrest by saying “Release David McBride” in a short post on X.