Bedugul Coffee: Tuesday Briefing: U.S. Supreme Court mulls power of landmark law in major voting rights case

Today's top stories

Alarm as new U.S. COVID cases hit a plateau, scientists shed light on human origins, and a Zoom party for the last leader of the Soviet Union

U.S. Supreme Court justices will today consider whether to uphold two Republican-backed voting restrictions in Arizona in a case that could further weaken the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal law that barred racial discrimination in voting.

The case comes before the justices at a time when Republicans in numerous states are pursuing new restrictions after former President Donald Trump made false claims of widespread election fraud.

President Joe Biden's administration has backed Democrats’ efforts to overhaul voting rules and turn over the process of drawing congressional districts to independent commissions, saying the United States is facing an “an unprecedented assault on our democracy."

The United States has reported a 3% decline in new cases of COVID-19 last week, a much smaller drop than in the previous six weeks, and health officials have warned that progress against the global pandemic is stalling.

Meanwhile, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has retained a prominent white-collar criminal defense lawyer to represent his office in a federal investigation into the state’s misreporting of COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents.

↑ The first boxes of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine are ceremoniously transported to shipping at the McKesson facility in Shepherdsville, U.S., March 1, 2021

WORLD

↑ A girl who was kidnapped from a boarding school in the northwest Nigerian state of Zamfara shows her injured foot after her release, March 2, 2021

Gunmen have freed all 279 girls kidnapped from a boarding school in northwest Nigeria, as one of the victims told Reuters how their abductors had beaten her and her schoolmates with their weapons.

As Pope Francis prepares to visit Iraq, we look at how the clergy are leading a rare Christian revival in a town due to welcome him.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, is expected to throw a Zoom party today to celebrate his 90th birthday as President Vladimir Putin lauds him as an outstanding statesman who influenced the course of world history.

Sophisticated scanning technology is revealing intriguing secrets about Little Foot, the remarkable fossil of an early human forerunner that inhabited South Africa 3.67 million years ago during a critical point in our evolutionary history.

Business

Alibaba and Ant Group founder Jack Ma has lost the title of China’s richest man, as his peers prosper while his empire is put under heavy scrutiny by Chinese regulators.

A manager at Amazon.com has sued the online retailer for discrimination, saying it hires Black people for lower positions and promotes them more slowly than white workers. Charlotte Newman, a business development head, accused a male supervisor of using racial tropes by calling her “aggressive,” “too direct” and “just scary.”

In the tenth century, Erik the Red, a Viking from Iceland, was so impressed with the vegetation on another Arctic island he had found he called it “the green land.” Today, it’s Greenland’s rocks that are attracting outsiders - superpowers riding a green revolution.

To go electric, America needs more mines - but can it build them? We look at the political quandary for Biden's administration.