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WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court on Thursday banned the use of race and ethnicity in university admissions, dealing a major blow to a decades-old practice that boosted educational opportunities for African-Americans and other minorities.
One year after overturning the guarantee of a woman’s right to have an abortion, the court’s conservative majority again demonstrated its readiness to scrap liberal policies set in law since the 1960s.
The ruling against “affirmative action,” delivered by a court heavily influenced by three justices appointed by Donald Trump during his presidency, drew cheers from conservatives but was blasted by progressives.
President Joe Biden expressed his “severe disappointment,” and criticized the justices as “not a normal court.”
“Discrimination still exists in America,” he said at the White House. “I believe our colleges are stronger when they are racially diverse.”
However, in an interview with MSNBC he pushed back on liberal demands to reorganize the powerful Supreme Court, including by adding to the nine justices, all of whom serve lifetime appointments.
“That may do too much harm,” he said. “If we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that’s not healthy.”
The justices broke six to three along conservative-liberal lines in the decision, seen as a heavy defeat to efforts to expand diversity in school admissions and business and government hiring.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that while affirmative action was “well-intentioned” it could not last forever, and amounted to unconstitutional discrimination against others.
“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote.
The court said that universities were free to consider an applicant’s background — whether, for example, they grew up experiencing racism — in weighing their application over more academically qualified students.
But deciding primarily based on whether the applicant is white, Black or other is itself racial discrimination, Roberts wrote.
“Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” he said.
In a scathing rebuttal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the majority of being colorblind to the reality of “an endemically segregated society.”
“Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal,” she wrote.
The court sided with an activist group, Students for Fair Admissions, that sued the oldest private and public institutions of higher education in the country — Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) — over their admissions policies.
The group claimed that race-conscious admissions policies discriminated against Asian Americans competing to enter the two universities.
Harvard and UNC, like a number of other competitive US schools, consider an applicant’s race or ethnicity as a factor to ensure a diverse student body and representation of minorities.
Such affirmative action policies arose from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s aiming to help address the legacy of discrimination against African Americans.
Some conservatives argue that the policy has outlived its need due to significant gains by Black people and other minorities.
“This is a great day for America,” said Trump, who often celebrates his success at building the court’s conservative majority.
Kenny Xu, a member of the board of Students for Fair Admissions, said the judgment will reduce prejudice against Asian-American students.
“They discriminate against Asians to make room for Black Americans,” he told CNN.
“If you’re an Asian-American, you had to score 273 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a Black person at Harvard. Is that fair?” he said, referring to the standard university exam.
But the ruling was another major setback to progressives after the court overturned the landmark 1973 “Roe v. Wade” decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to abortion.
The end of federally guaranteed abortion rights almost immediately led to half of the 50 states banning or severely curtailing the practice.
The affirmative action ruling could have the same effect of many states and institutions, halting programs designed to give disadvantaged minorities extra consideration in the competitive admissions process.
Sotomayor said it would also chill any university’s effort to weigh admissions on values other than test scores.
Democratic Senator Cory Booker, an African American, called it a “devastating blow” to the US education system.
“Affirmative action has been a tool to break down systemic barriers and we must continue to advance our ideals of inclusivity & opportunity for all,” he said on Twitter.
At Harvard, summer school student Mayan McClinton, 17, said that pushing for minorities like herself helps all people.
“It’s pretty unfair to assume that we’re sort of taking these spots away from wealthier white students who do have other opportunities,” she said.
MOSCOW: A blast at an explosives factory in the central Russian region of Samara killed six people and injured two others, Russian news agencies reported Friday.
The explosion occurred at the Promsintez plant in the city of Chapayevsk. “Eight people were injured, six of whom died,” the RIA Novosti news agency cited emergency services as saying.
They said the blast occurred “as a result of the dismantling of equipment during repair work.”
Promsintez is one of the main manufacturers of industrial explosives in Russia and the former Soviet Union.
The company employs 1,300 people and supplies the mining and oil and gas sector, according to its website.
The company that owns the factory was created in 1997, but the plant dates back to pre-revolutionary Russia, founded by the country’s last tsar, Nicholas II, in 1911.
Accidents at Russian factories — including deadly ones — are relatively common, with an often-lax approach to safety rules.
Last month, four people were killed in an explosion at a gunpower factory in the Tambov region, southeast of Moscow.
Many factories have been running at full speed in Russia since the start of the offensive in Ukraine.
MANILA: Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Friday wrote off $1.04 billion in land-related debt owed by more than half a million farmers, a move aimed at boosting food production.
The “New Agrarian Emancipation Act” he signed into law waived all property-related debt owed by farmers who had been given land on 30-year payment terms under a 1988 land reform program, but had been unable to pay.
“We know these farmers do not have the means to pay this huge debt. So putting it under the government’s tab is the right thing to do,” Marcos said at a signing ceremony at the presidential palace.
The writing off of the loans, which were issued by government banks, meant “we are doing everything in order to feed our people,” he added.
Under a law passed in 1988, about 4.8 million hectares (11.9 million acres) of plots were distributed to almost three million landless farmers.
The total was equivalent to 16 percent of the country’s land area.
Congress passed the new legislation because nearly 1.2 million hectares of redistributed farmland had gone unpaid for, with the farm sector’s contribution to the country’s economic output shrinking.
The write-off will benefit more than 610,000 land reform beneficiaries but will cost the government $1.04 billion (57.65 billion pesos), Marcos said.
The government will spend another 206 million pesos to compensate landowners whose properties were transferred to tenants, he added.
“We need to revitalize the agriculture sector,” said Marcos, who is also the agriculture minister.
After his election last year, the archipelago nation was wracked with shortages and soaring prices of farm commodities, including onions and sugar, while imports of rice, a food staple, also surged.
BRUSSELS: EU negotiators on Friday sealed a plan to boost ammunition production in the bloc, as part of a push to arm Ukraine and restock depleted arsenals.
The $545 million (500 million euros) Act in Support of Ammunition Production — or ASAP — is aimed at ramping up the manufacture of artillery shells and missiles.
“This is yet another proof of the EU’s unwavering commitment to supporting Ukraine,” said Margarita Robles, the defense minister of Spain, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency.
Brussels says it hopes to boost production capacity in the bloc to a million shells a year within the next 12 months as European allies struggle to keep up supplies for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
Negotiations between EU member states and lawmakers were pushed through at express speed to put the plan in place.
It now needs final approval from the European Parliament and capitals.
The program will provide money to firms looking to bolster their production capacity.
EU states have also implemented another two-billion-euro plan to send a million shells to Ukraine from their stocks over this year and purchase ammunition together for Kyiv.
So far the bloc is still far off its target of sending a million howitzer shells to Kyiv.
Ukrainian forces complain they are facing a shortage of ammunition as they seek to dislodge Moscow’s troops from occupied territories in a grueling counter-offensive.
The EU says that overall it has already supplied weaponry worth around 15 billion euros to Kyiv since Russia’s all-out invasion last February.
MILAN: An overnight fire in a retirement home in Milan killed six people and injured around 80, including three who are in a critical condition, Italian authorities said on Friday.
The fire started in a first-floor room of the facility. It was put out quickly and did not spread to the rest of the building, yet produced a vast quantity of toxic fumes.
Two residents burned to death in their room, while four others died from intoxication, Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala said, speaking to reporters on the scene.
“It could have been (even) worse. Having said that, six dead is a very heavy death toll,” Sala said, indicating that the facility housed 167 people.
Firefighters’ spokesman Luca Cari said the cause of the fire was under investigation, but added that it was likely accidental.
Firefighters intervened at the “Home of the Spouses” residential facility in the south-eastern Corvetto neighborhood shortly after 1 a.m.
They evacuated about 80 people, including many in wheelchairs, while another 80 or so were taken to hospital, local firefighters’ chief Nicola Miceli told RAI public television.
He described rescue operations as “particularly complicated” due to heavy smoke, which limited visibility, and the fact that many residents could not stand without aid.
Lucia, a local resident, said she saw some of them “gasping for air” at their windows, holding rags over their faces to protect themselves from the fumes.
She said rescuers “were wonderful” as they helped everybody. “Those who could walk, they walked them out, those who could not, I think they were carried out in their bed sheets.”
NEW DELHI: A high court in western India on Friday rejected an appeal by opposition leader Rahul Gandhi to suspend his conviction in a defamation case, quashing for now his hope of returning to parliament and contesting national elections due next year.
Gandhi can now take his appeal to a larger bench of the same high court and then to the Supreme Court, his last option.
Gandhi was convicted in March in a case brought by a state lawmaker from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after comments he made in 2019 were deemed to be insulting to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other people surnamed Modi.
The 52-year-old scion of India’s Congress party was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment but the jail term was put on hold and he was given bail.