When US President Donald Trump this week attacked Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, two of America’s most prominent Black figures, he chose a particularly pejorative insult: “low IQ person”. Trump insults people all the time — online, in speeches, in official statements and directly to the faces of some reporters. But the “low IQ” jab, with distinct racial overtones in the United States, is especially jarring. Trump attacked Jackson — a double Harvard graduate and the first Black woman on the Supreme Court — on Wednesday as “that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench”. He has similarly assailed ethnic minority Democratic lawmakers, including Jasmine Crockett, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, Rashida Tlaib and Maxine Waters. While personally targeting Ilhan Omar — a Minnesota representative born in Somalia — the president has also broadly branded immigrants from the Horn of Africa nation as “low IQ peo...
Voting began on Thursday in two of India’s politically key opposition-held states, with tens of millions casting ballots in West Bengal and the southern Tamil Nadu. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ruling party in the national parliament, is hoping to make inroads in the opposition strongholds. In West Bengal, which has a population of over 100 million, polling opened in the first phase to elect members from 152 constituencies of the 294-seat legislative assembly. The second phase, covering the remaining 142 seats, will be held on April 29. “Nearly 36 million people are eligible to vote,” said Manoj Agarwal, the state’s chief electoral officer, adding that around 8,000 polling stations had been designated “supersensitive”. Modi’s BJP has waged an aggressive bid to dislodge West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the firebrand leader of the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), which has been in power in the state since 2011. Banerjee’...