Worldcrunch
With two dramatic actions, the “Religious Right” is suddenly prodding the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its historic 2015 Obergefell decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Such a radical and unpopular switch after only 10 years might seem implausible. A close parallel already happened in the 2022 Dobbs decision when the Court ended its former Roe v. Wade mandate on legal abortion and allowed each state to set its own policy.
As it recently did with Brazil, the United States is now dissing a court ruling against another conservative politician, in Colombia, and showing the Trump administration’s reluctant respect not just for state sovereignty, but for the rule of law.
Families in Ciudad Nueva unknowingly drank arsenic-laced water. Now, they live with the scars — and they’re losing faith in the government’s ability to solve the problem.
Organizations that advocate against DEI programs in education are suing universities and research facilities that seek diversity in their scholarship and research grant practices. The Supreme Court fired the starting gun.
Trump’s media company Truth Social and the far-right video platform Rumble have joined forces in a U.S. lawsuit against a Brazilian judge. The case, packed with conspiracy theories and legal acrobatics, is less about law and more about politics, turning the American courts into a stage for Bolsonaro’s allies and Trump’s broader war on institutions.
Trump’s series of executive orders, from asylum laws to federal grants cuts, not only defy the U.S. Constitution, but hint to the President’s will to gather more — if not all — executive power to the point that it no longer resembles democracy.
North Dakota’s last abortion clinic was forced to move to neighboring Minnesota two years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal protection of this right, guaranteed since 1973. Ahead of the presidential election, the fight for women’s rights is rallying Democrats.
Israel’s aggression over the past few months, no matter how successful, is ultimately a sign of its weakness. Yet it is able to achieve its goals from the support it receives from a number of players inside and outside the region, whether they realize it or not. That even, paradoxically, includes Iran.
The outgoing Sri Lankan government had signed an agreement in secret for the Indian conglomerate Adani to build a wind farm in the north of the country. Now the newly elected President Anura Kumara Dissanayake arrives with plans to scrap the massive project.
Mexico’s ruling party has reformed the constitution, forcing judges to run for office, supposedly to make them accountable to the people. But given the country’s history and singular problem with crime, it may turn them instead into ordinary politicians vulnerable to bribery and mob terrorism.
Updated August 10, 2024 at 11:50 a.m. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice on this day in 1993. She was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, following Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed in 1981. Ginsburg was nominated by President Bill Clinton. How long did Ruth Bader […]
Laws in the late 1990s ended bans on women from wearing pants in Brazil’s courts and legislature, a practice that de facto has continued in many place. Female judges and legislators discuss how dress codes hinder women’s access to power, and the battle to change habits.
Updated May 17, 2024 at 11:25 a.m. The first legal same-sex marriages ever in the U.S. were performed on this day in 2004 in the state of Massachusetts. Where were the first legal same-sex marriages performed in the United States? The first legal same-sex marriages in the United States were performed in the state of […]
In the wake of India’s landmark decision to reject marriage equality, the authors suggest that the way forward for the queer community, perhaps, is not to insist on a right to marry but to challenge laws that put marriage over other forms of familial and kinship bonds.
Although it emphasized the rights of India’s LGBTQ+ to live free of discrimination, India’s top court declined to legally recognize same-sex marriage, leaving the decision to Parliament. What does verdict mean in real terms for the people affected.
If anything, the fourth indictment leveled against former U.S. President Donald Trump will only increase the fervor among his diehard fans.
The third indictment against Donald Trump raises the legal dispute between the United States and its former president to a new level. While Trump cries foul play, drawing shameful comparisons with Nazi persecution 1930s Germany, the consequences of the trial can’t be predicted.
Bollywood film The Kerala Story has done huge numbers at the Indian box office after public support by Hindu nationalist parties. But the film is facing claims it is Islamophobic propaganda that peddles conspiracy theories about Muslims.
The Polish-French writer Marek Halter addresses a letter to Israel’s leader warning him against the undercurrents of his government that threaten the very essence of the Jewish state.
What do we make of the echos from the U.S. Capitol assault on Jan. 6? Will Lula be able to heal Brazil’s democratic institutions?
As a child of IVF in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S., fearing for the future of infertility treatments.
Boris Johnson’s resignation is another example of the political crises in the democratic world. But that does not necessarily mean that dictators and despots will win.
For families learning their child will be born with a debilitating condition, new legal issues create additional trauma.
Anti-abortion activists celebrated the end of the U.S. right to abortion, hoping it will trigger a new debate on a topic that in some places had largely been settled: in favor a woman’s right to choose. But it could also boomerang.
Among the most immediate effects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade is that women who find themselves in states where abortion is outlawed will travel to where it is legal. But that of course requires the right information and economic means to do so.
The expanding movement to denounce sexual assault is a symptom of the problem, not the cure.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The subject was supposed to be the selection of a new justice on the Supreme Court. Instead Thursday’s showdown on Capitol Hill was a raw, scorched-earth confrontation across the nation’s most emotionally wrenching divides. This was men against women, right against left, a cascade of recriminations, explosions of anger, hours of tears and sobs. A hearing that was supposed to bring clarity instead erupted in thunderclaps from the nation’s built-up tensions over how the sexes are supposed to behave with each other. Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and the woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her came […]
WASHINGTON — It is not hard to see similarities between President Donald Trump“s last two Supreme Court nominees: They are both white male conservatives who attended Ivy League law schools, clerked for retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and went to the same exclusive private prep school. The elite background does not end with them. If the Senate approves Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, every justice sitting on the Supreme Court will have attended either Yale’s or Harvard’s law school. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg started at Harvard and transferred to another Ivy, Columbia.) The shared elite backgrounds of Supreme Court justices, some experts […]
-OpEd- Frustration is the lifeblood of dictatorship. Just look at what’s happening in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro recently declared that he had readied a decree to revoke the institutional immunity from criminal prosecution of “all public positions,” including members of parliament of course. As you may recall, since the last elections in January, the majority […]
Some 70% of prisoners in India’s jails are still awaiting trials, or verdicts of trials long passed. In some cases the wait goes on for decades. For around 100,000 prisoners, the wait may end.
The Supreme Court in Argentina is weighing the case brought by María Belén Rodríguez, whose name redirects to X-rated sites in the major search engines.
–OpEd– BEIJING – China’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Zhou Qiang recently declared that any miscarriage of justice is an affront to social fairness. The Chief Justice also announced a preliminary plan for promoting independent and impartial trials, respecting and protecting the rights of lawyers, and establishing a sound mechanism for preventing and correcting wrongful convictions. […]
ADKRONOS, AGI, CORRIERE DELLA SERA, LA REPUBBLICA, LA STAMPA (Italy), AP Worldcrunch ROME – Italy’s highest court has overturned the acquittal of American exchange student Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito for the 2007 murder of Knox’s roommate Meredith Kercher. La Repubblica reports that the judges in Italy’s Court of Cassation ruled Tuesday […]