Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature passed redistricting maps on Thursday, eliminating the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district a week after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
The move cracks Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which covers Memphis, into three pieces, each of which contains almost exactly a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean that all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are Republican-leaning.
The district had closely occupied the south-west corner of the state. Now three districts snake out from Memphis’ dense center, with two crossing the Tennessee River to reach Nashville’s suburbs 200 miles away.
“If Republican policies are so great, why are we changing the lines to rig elections?” asked Vincent Dixie, a state representative from Nashville, during debate on Thursday, pleading for Republicans to refrain. “Where is your humanity in this?”
Anunciata Schwebel could only watch in horror on FaceTime while her friend and tenant slunk into a bathtub to take cover from one of several tornadoes that slammed into Mississippi just after sunset Wednesday.
A Muslim man, 
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday slammed an Israeli real estate expo at a local synagogue one day earlier, which had been promoting homes and land in the occupied West Bank.
On Wednesday, Ireland’s lower house of parliament, the Dáil Éireann, ratified the Convention establishing an International Claims Commission for Ukraine.
A mega tsunami in Alaska last year in a fjord visited by cruise ships is a stark warning of the risks of coastal rockslides and glacier retreat fueled by the climate crisis, a new study warns.
