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A new analysis of Black voters in the south indicates that Republican attempts to dilute their political power is driving them to the polls in larger numbers and shifting their counties further left.

After the supreme court effectively gutted section 2 of the Voting Rights Act protections in late April, Republican legislatures across the south rapidly pushed to disenfranchise Black voters by redrawing congressional maps. Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama all immediately worked to pass new maps, while the Mississippi governor has said that he wants legislators to redraw maps before the upcoming midterm elections.

The analysis by VoteHub, a data-focused election organization, indicates that the efforts have only motivated Black voters in the 78 Black belt counties it tracked. All but one shifted left in partisan turnout compared with 2024. Further, majority-Black counties that voted after Louisiana v Callais, the landmark supreme court decision that triggered the Republican-led redistricting efforts, had a surge in voter participation.

Sullivan’s decision follows a ruling by US district judge Indira Talwani last week, in which the NAACP had also challenged the executive order. Talwani blocked the administration’s plan for mail-in voting across 23 states and the District of Columbia, which sued the administration to stop the proposed rule. The latest order appears to extend this injunction nationwide, as it is meant to enforce an agreement that bound the postal service as an agency until 2028.

In June, the Trump administration abandoned an effort to try to halt all wind projects and leases across the US, giving up a challenge in court to a judge tossing Trump’s executive order to freeze all permitting and leasing for wind projects.

The attorney general of New Jersey on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the private company operating the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, demanding access for health officials amid allegations of “inhumane and unsanitary conditions”.

Immigrants locked up at the federal detention center in Newark began a hunger and labor strike more than 10 days ago to protest against conditions, while demonstrations built up outside that veered into violent scenes after dark.

Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed by Jennifer Davenport, the state’s attorney general, asks the state superior court in Newark to order the private operator, the Geo Group, to grant the New Jersey department of health full access to the facility to conduct inspections.

Hungary’s new government, led by Péter Magyar, has put forward a constitutional amendment that would limit prime ministers to a maximum of eight years in office, in effect barring Viktor Orbán from returning to the role.

The draft amendment was submitted on Wednesday, just over a week after the new government took office. It marked Magyar and his Tisza party’s first step in dismantling a constitution that was unilaterally rewritten and amended more than a dozen times as Orbán and his Fidesz party worked to turn Hungary into what they called a “petri dish for illiberalism”.

Quilicura’s experience with datacentres has raised the alarm in other parts of the Santiago region. In 2024, residents in the district of Cerrillos succeeded in halting plans for a second Google datacentre. “In 2019, we learned about the project in our community. When we realised the scale of water it would require, we became alarmed,” says Tania Rodríguez, a teacher who lives in the area.

Google had secured water rights allowing it to extract up to 228 litres per second – roughly equivalent to the consumption of 40,000 households – from Cerrillos’s groundwater reserves. In 2024, residents succeeded in having the project halted on the grounds that it had failed to adequately consider the impacts of the climate crisis. The company also agreed to review its cooling system.

Accoladed director Andrey Zvyagintsev has sent a direct message to Vladimir Putin urging him to start listening to the Russian people and end the “senseless” war in Ukraine, continuing a war of words between Russia’s most revered living film-maker and the Kremlin that started at the Cannes film festival awards ceremony over the weekend.

Accepting the Grand Prix for his new film Minotaur on the French Riviera on Saturday night, Zvyagintsev had appealed to Putin to “stop this butchery […] the whole world is waiting for this.”

The hunger and work strike and protests come as the Trump administration continues its controversial, aggressive and increasingly unpopular mass deportation campaign, targeting immigrants nationwide to detain and deport them.

A letter from detainees was published by advocates on Tuesday morning. Two men recently released from Delaney confirmed in interviews with the Guardian their participation in the strike, despite denials by the Trump administration that any such strike was happening.

“We are detained, we are on hunger strike, demanding due process rights and the improvement of conditions,” one of the men said in an interview with the Guardian. “We are not criminals. We are people who enter [the facility] with a clean record. We pay our taxes. [We are] Fathers. Mothers. Spouses of citizens with existing petitions.”

Protests in Albania over a proposed luxury resort backed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are set to intensify after opponents rejected an offer from the country’s prime minister “to discuss solutions”.

Thousands took to the streets of Tirana for a third straight day on Wednesday, some of them brandishing inflatable flamingos in a nod to feared environmental damage, amid mounting calls for the project to be blocked.

Protests are also planned for the south of the country, where groundwork on the $1.6bn (£1.19bn) complex recently began in an area long seen as one of the Mediterranean’s most environmentally sensitive.

“From start to finish there has been a total lack of transparency,” said Aleksandr Trajce, executive director of the country’s leading conservation group, the Protection and Preservation of the Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA). “We have seen no public consultation or public documentation regarding permits, and so now what we are saying is, if they remove the bulldozers, remove the fence and restore the habitats to what they were, then we can start talking.”

The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

The House voted 215 to 208 in favor of the war powers resolution, as four Republicans voted with Democrats. The dissident Republicans were Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Tom Barrett of Michigan.

“Following repeated attempts to get sycophants in the Republican-controlled House to join us, House Democrats successfully passed our war powers resolution today to stand up for the American people and hold Donald Trump accountable,” the top three House Democrats – Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California – said in a joint statement. “It is now time for Senate Republicans to do the right thing.”