Category World News

California Governor Gavin Newsom has said that the country’s most populous state will promote a partisan redistricting scheme aimed at countering controversial Republican-led redistricting efforts in Texas ahead of the United States’ 2026 midterm elections.

Speaking at a news conference on Thursday, Newsom took a combative stance against US President Donald Trump and said that Democrats must respond to what he said were conservative efforts to politicise the electoral process.

“Today is liberation day in the state of California,” Newsom said, appropriating a term used by Trump to refer to the imposition of tariffs on foreign countries.

Newsom and Trump have frequently sparred as the US president seeks to exert pressure on Democrat-led states that have pushed back against his political agenda on issues such as immigration enforcement.

During his remarks, Newsom said that masked immigration enforcement agents had gathered around the venue, which he depicted as a form of intimidation. Trump prompted outrage in California earlier in the year when he deployed the military and National Guard to Los Angeles during a round of aggressive immigration raids, and suggested at the time that Newsom should be arrested.

“Donald Trump, you have poked the bear, and we will punch back,” said Newsom, who is seen as a possible Democratic contender for the presidency in 2028.

Newsom said that the redistricting scheme, which would favour the Democrats and could net them five additional seats in the 2026 midterm elections, will go before voters in a special election on November 4.

The California governor said the scheme was a direct response to a similar redistricting effort in the Republican-led state of Texas, which would help secure five additional likely seats for the Republican Party.

He stressed that, unlike in Texas, it would be up to California voters to approve or shoot down the new maps, and that they would only go forward if Texas and other states move forward with their own partisan redistricting efforts.

He added that the planned maps, which are expected to be released on Friday, would be in effect until 2030.

Earlier this month, Democrat lawmakers in Texas fled the state to block a House vote on redistricting efforts that would create an additional five Republican-leaning districts.

On Thursday, the lawmakers moved closer to ending their nearly two-week walkout that has blocked the GOP’s redrawing of US House maps and put them under escalating threats by Republicans back home.

The Democrats announced they will return so long as Texas Republicans end a special session and California releases its own redrawn map proposal, both of which were expected to happen on Friday.

Democrats did not say what day they might return.

Newsom’s move underscores calls within the Democratic Party to take a stronger stance against Trump and the Republicans, including moves that violate previously held norms and rules that Democrats say the US right has long since abandoned.

“We cannot unilaterally disarm,” he said, calling on other Democrat-led states to join California.

Healthcare providers in the war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) treated more than 17,000 victims of sexual violence over just five months last year, according to a United Nations report.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s annual report on conflict-related sexual violence, released on Thursday, said the cases were registered in the province of North Kivu between January and May last year, as fighting between Congolese forces and Rwanda-backed M23 rebels intensified.

“Many survivors sought care after violent sexual attacks, including penetration with objects, perpetrated by multiple perpetrators,” said the report, which charted crimes like rape, gang rape and sexual slavery.

The conflict, which has killed thousands this year alone and displaced millions, is still ongoing despite a Qatar-mediated agreement between DRC and M23 last month that was supposed to pave the way to a ceasefire, running parallel to United States efforts to broker peace between Kinshasa and Kigali.

Last year’s figure marked a continued surge in sexual violence as the Rwanda-backed M23 rampaged through the east, with a total of 22,000 cases registered throughout 2023. That figure was more than double the previous year’s tally.

In 2023, the spike in violence occurred as the conflict spilled over from North Kivu into South Kivu, forcing UN peacekeeping mission MONUSCO to withdraw from the latter.

The report said that MONUSCO’s operations narrowed, “owing to military operations and widespread insecurity”. The mission had documented 823 cases of sexual violence in 2024, affecting 416 women, 391 girls, seven boys and nine men.

The UN said that 198 of last year’s cases were perpetrated by DRC “state actors”, including the army. It found that “M23 elements”, which “continued to receive instructions and support from the Rwanda Defence Force”, were implicated in 152 cases.

According to the report, survivors reported that they were exposed to the threat of sexual violence while searching for food in the fields and areas around displacement sites.

Many displaced women had resorted to prostitution to survive, “highlighting the nexus between food insecurity and sexual violence”.

Denis Mukwege, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his work combating sexual violence in DRC, told The Times newspaper this year: “When you have people raping with complete immunity – and think they can go on and on without any consequence, nothing will change.”

Guterres’s report charted violations in 21 countries, with the highest numbers recorded in DRC, the Central African Republic, Haiti, Somalia and South Sudan.

The United States Supreme Court has declined to put on hold a Mississippi law requiring that users of social media platforms verify their age and that minors have parental consent.

The high court made the decision on Thursday not to accept the challenge by NetChoice, a trade group that included tech giants such as Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Alphabet which owns YouTube, and Snapchat.

The justices denied a request to block the law while the Washington-based tech industry trade association’s legal challenge to the law, which, it argues, violates the US Constitution’s protections against government abridgement of free speech, plays out in lower courts.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a statement about the court’s order said the Mississippi law was likely unconstitutional, but that NetChoice had not met the high bar to block the measure at this early stage of the case.

In a statement, Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said Kavanaugh’s view “makes clear that NetChoice will ultimately succeed” in its challenge. Taske called the Supreme Court’s order “an unfortunate procedural delay.”

NetChoice had turned to the Supreme Court after the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals let the law take effect even though a judge found it likely runs afoul of the First Amendment.

NetChoice sued in federal court in 2024 in a bid to invalidate the law, which was passed unanimously in the state legislature amid concern by lawmakers about the potential negative effects of social media use on the mental health of children.

Its emergency request to the justices marked the first time the Supreme Court was asked to consider a social media age-verification law.

The law requires that a social media platform obtain “express consent” from a parent or guardian of a minor before a child can open an account. It also states that regulated social media platforms must make “commercially reasonable” efforts to verify the age of users.

Under the law, the state can pursue civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation as well as criminal penalties under Mississippi’s deceptive trade practices law.

Multiple lawsuits

US District Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden in Gulfport, Mississippi, last year blocked Mississippi from enforcing the restrictions on some NetChoice members.

Ozerden issued a second order in June pausing the rules against those members, including Meta and its Instagram and Facebook platforms, Snapchat and YouTube.

The 5th Circuit on July 17 issued a one-sentence ruling that paused the judge’s order, without explaining its reasoning.

Courts in seven states have preliminarily or permanently blocked similar measures, according to NetChoice.

Some technology companies are separately battling lawsuits brought by US states, school districts and individual users alleging that social platforms have exacerbated mental health problems. The companies have denied wrongdoing.

NetChoice said the social media platforms of its members already have adopted extensive policies to moderate content for minors and provide parental controls.

In its request to the Supreme Court, the state told the justices that age-verification and parental consent requirements “are common ways for states to protect minors”.