World Business Report IMF terminates a $175 million loan for Malawi
And we will look at President Trump saying that India offered to drop all tariffs on US goods, something India swiftly denied.
Total airline revenue for ancillary services like baggage and seat selection is set to reach 145 billion according to the International Air Transport Association.
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The Guardian
14 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Texas Republicans bring redistricting bill to house floor after finally reaching quorum
Texas Republicans brought a bill to the floor of the state legislature on Wednesday to redraw the state's congressional districts, making quick use of their regained quorum after the return of protesting Democratic legislators. Democratic state representatives filed a series of amendments to the bill which were voted down, but used the process to raise objections to taking up redistricting before flood relief, to house rules which require a police escort when leaving the chamber and to the proposal itself, a mid-decade change which they argue reduces the voting power of people of color in service to Republican political gains and further gerrymanders the state at the cost of democracy. 'We're ready to meet Trump where he is, which is on a dirt road,' said Democrat Nicole Collier, livestreaming from a bathroom off the legislative floor. 'We're ready to get down and dirty.' Collier refused to sign a pass and permit a police escort for leaving the House floor, and has been trapped in the chambers as a result. While on a Zoom call with the Democratic senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and the Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, Collier said she was being told she had to end the live stream or face a felony charge, abruptly leaving the meeting. It is emblematic of the unusual resistance Democrats in Texas have put up to the redistricting bill, and the response of the Republican-controlled Texas government to that resistance. 'This bill intentionally discriminates against Black and Hispanic Texans and other Texans of color by cracking and packing minority communities across the state of Texas,' said Chris Turner, a Democratic representative from Arlington. 'It is a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act and the constitution.' Republican leaders rejected racial animus as an element of the redistricting, noting that it increases the number of districts with a Hispanic voting age majority from seven to eight. Based on voting results from 2024, five congressional seats would change party from Democratic to Republican under the new map, which they argue is legally allowed. 'You want transparency,' said representative Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican who drafted the redistricting bill. 'The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance … We are allowed to draw congressional districts on the basis of political performance, as recognized by the US supreme court in Rucho v Common Cause. These districts were drawn primarily using political performance to guide the redrawing of districts.' The strong assertion that the genesis of the redistricting is about increasing the number of Republicans in Congress, and not to diminish the voting power of people of color, is an early defense to expected legal challenges to the proposal under the Voting Rights Act. 'When you say the word 'redistricting', I think you know there are going to be legal challenges,' Hunter said. Under the Voting Rights Act and longstanding court precedent, lawmakers needed to draw lines with great awareness of the racial composition of the electorate in order to avoid unconstitutionally packing them into single districts to reduce their influence on other districts, or to spread them across multiple districts – cracking – to dilute their voting strength as a group. Talk of a mid-decade redistricting began in Texas after the Department of Justice circulated a letter describing the use of race in the state's 2021 redistricting to be unconstitutional. Texas's governor, Greg Abbott, seized on this as a rationale to redraw district lines more advantageous to Republicans. Donald Trump has called for Texas and other states to redraw their lines for more partisan advantage, prompting California's governor, Gavin Newsom, and other Democratic governors to begin to counter with redistrictings of their own. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Democrats in the Texas house left the state last month, intent on denying a quorum to the legislature to block a vote on the redistricting bill. They abandoned their exile after the California legislature began advancing a redistricting bill of its own. In contentious discussion, state representative Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, ranking Democrat on the Texas house redistricting committee, pressed Hunter on the motivations behind the new map lines and on the absence of input from the Texas legislative into a map that would probably face a voting rights challenge. That drew a sharp response from Hunter. 'You left 17 to 18 days! You could have sat with me,' Hunter said. 'Now you're getting on the microphone saying why didn't I involve you? Well, I wasn't going to cross state lines to find ya! I was here … You own the walkout. You said you did that. But don't come into this body and say we didn't include you. You left us for 18 days.'
BBC News
16 minutes ago
- BBC News
Newshour DRC: Rights group alleges mass killings by armed group M23
A report by Human Right Watch alleges the M23 rebel group killed at least 140 people in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo last month in one of the worst atrocities committed since its insurgency in 2021. The overall number of victims could exceed 300. We hear from an eye witness and the DRC foreign minister, who says the alleged massacres violated a ceasefire agreement. Also in the programme: the Israeli Defence Force has called around 60,000 reservists in what is being seen as evidence of an imminent operation to take over Gaza City; and the scientific research giving hope to people who have lost their sense of smell. (Photo: a member of the M23 rebel group walks in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, March 2025. Credit: Reuters / Z. Bensemra)
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
To Americans, Britain is no longer the free country we thought it was
Every year, the US Department of State releases a report on human rights practices in other countries (CRHRP). One of my first assignments as a political officer at the US embassy was to coordinate and edit one country report. Not surprisingly, certain governments sometimes take issue with how their policies are characterised in the CRHRP. For example, South Africa claimed a recent CRHRP was 'inaccurate and deeply flawed' in criticising them for failing to 'investigate, prosecute and punish officials who committed human rights abuses … or violence against racial minorities'. President Cyril Ramaphosa seemed bewildered in May when President Trump took him to task for the murders of white farmers. His government's defence seems to be that South Africa's horrific levels of crime afflict everyone, not just white people, and that the motives are not racist but merely criminal. That is unlikely to mollify a country impoverished under an incompetent succession of ANC leaders, nor will Ramaphosa's explanation that they haven't actually used their sweeping new Land Expropriation Act inspire commercial farmers who feed the country to invest in their farms. But I digress. China doesn't just reject US criticism, they've cheekily published their own report criticising the US for 'the chronic disease of racism,' and 'basic rights and freedoms being disregarded'. Usually, the governments taking the most criticism in the CRHRP are repressive or feckless regimes, from China to Zimbabwe, that suppress free speech, stifle religious expression, or oppress women, minority groups, and political dissidents. That doesn't sound like the England in which I was born over half a century ago. But this year, the Country Report on the UK flags Britain as a risky place to speak your mind. The CRHRP claims that 'the human rights situation worsened in the United Kingdom during the year,' citing 'credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by anti-Semitism'. The report notes restrictions on speech – even silent meditation – near abortion clinics, and the Online Safety Act's curtailment of internet speech, policed by Ofcom. It calls out government censorship of speech deemed misinformation or 'hate speech', including in relation to migrants and crimes committed by foreign nationals. It could have gone even further. In its section on Worker Rights, the CRHRP doesn't discuss the people who have been sacked or disciplined for refusing to accept the forced speech codes of gender ideology, like prison officer David Toshack or nurse Jennifer Melle; or for social media posters who have criticised government action, like teacher Simon Pearson. Like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water, perhaps Brits can't see what is happening to their freedoms. But looking from the outside, we can, and the State Department has called it out. In reaction, I expect the British Left to be as indignant and in denial as the establishment in Washington DC is about crime. Now Donald Trump has temporarily taken over local law enforcement in the city, the Leftist establishment and the national media are claiming that violent crime is lower than in recent years. This ignores some inconvenient realities. First, unreliable numbers. The city has reportedly just settled a lawsuit from a whistleblowing police officer who had alleged that her supervisors were re-classifying serious crimes as lesser offences, to flatter the city's crime statistics. Second, even the supposedly lower murder rate puts Washington among the most dangerous cities in the nation. Like the DC establishment, the British government and much of the media are happy to ignore Lucy Connolly, who is still in prison after she made an unwise online post (and then deleted it); Hamit Coskun, who was prosecuted after he burnt a book; and the thousands of ordinary Brits who have been accused of 'Non-Crime Hate Incidents,' which is at the very least an astonishing waste of police time. The Left likes to pretend that the real villains in the fight for free speech are people like Kathleen Stock, Maya Forstater, and JK Rowling, who courageously state objective truth, rather than the gender ideologues trying to force women to accept men in their changing rooms, prisons, and shelters. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and other writers of the early 20th century predicted a future where the populace was dumbed down, repressed, and fed information by an authoritarian state. In the dystopian futures they imagined in 1984 and Brave New World, independent, critical thinking was banned and speech violators were punished. That sounds like the logical destiny of Britain if it maintains its present course. There is already a semi-official dogma on gender ideology, immigration, and crime which it is costly to challenge. Censorship and group-think get worse if not disrupted. Instead of rejecting America's criticism in high dudgeon, I hope Britain will heed the warning of its Atlantic cousins and return to the people their right to speak their minds. For the land of Magna Carta to slowly sink into repression and state control would be a great injustice to Britain's present inhabitants, and an insult to our ancestors' work of centuries. 'The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey)' from Academica Books.
