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Is The War on Iran Unlawful And Unfair To U.S. Troops?

Is The War on Iran Unlawful And Unfair To U.S. Troops?

Protestors holding signs, many that say "Stop Bombing Iran."

Trump’s ‘Just for Fun’ War Talk Shows a Dangerous Trivialization

Disinformation Wins: Justifying ICE Murders through Transphobia

Disinformation Wins: Justifying ICE Murders through Transphobia

Republican scheming backfires in Texas election

Republican scheming backfires in Texas election

Three candidates vie to become the first Latino Representative for Illinois Congressional District

Three candidates vie to become the first Latino Representative for Illinois Congressional District

Black, Latino residents sue Mass. city for discriminatory election system

Worcester, Massachusetts
SeanPavonePhoto/Getty Images
Sara Swann
By Sara SwannFeb 08, 2021
Sara Swann

As a staff writer, Sara covers a variety of democracy reform issues, including voting rights, money in politics, gerrymandering and civic education. Prior to joining The Fulcrum in May 2019, Sara reported on local government on Maryland's Eastern Shore for the USA Today network. She is a native West Virginian and a graduate of Syracuse University.

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Black and Latino residents of Worcester, Mass., are suing the city, alleging its at-large system for electing School Committee members discriminates against communities of color.

People of color make up nearly half (44 percent) of Worcester's overall population, and the student population is even more diverse with three-fifths identifying as Latino or Black. However, all six current School Committee members are white, and only a few non-white members have ever been elected.

A group of residents, along with community organizations Worcester Interfaith and the city's chapter of the NAACP, filed the federal voting rights lawsuit Monday. The suit seeks to convert the six at-large School Committee seats into separate district seats to better reflect the city's diverse population.

Worcester is the second largest city in Massachusetts and one of the only jurisdictions in the Commonwealth to still use an at-large system for its School Committee. Most other cities and towns have switched to a system that includes at least some district-based seats.

Having only at-large seats makes it hard for minority candidates to garner enough support city-wide to win their elections, the complaint says. It also claims Worcester has a history of "polarized voting," in which the predominantly white electorate votes mainly for white candidates.

The most recent example of this, per the lawsuit, was the 2019 School Committee election in which the six winning candidates, all of whom were white, received the most support from the 10 whitest precincts in Worcester. But the candidates of color who received strong support from the 10 most diverse precincts were unable to secure enough votes citywide to win.

"The right of representation is fundamental to our democracy. Worcester's communities of color deserve to have their voices heard, especially as crucial decisions are made by the School Committee directly impacting the children and families of those communities," said Rebecca MacDowell Lecaroz, a partner at Brown Rudnick LLP and the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in this case.


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Biologist and author Paul Ehrlich, the most influential Chicken Little of the last century, died at the age of 93 this week. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” launched decades of institutional panic in government, entertainment and journalism.

Ehrlich’s core neo-Malthusian argument was that overpopulation would exhaust the supply of food and natural resources, leading to a cascade of catastrophes around the world. “The Population Bomb” opens with a bold prediction, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

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Bravado Isn’t a Strategy: Why the Iran War Has No Endgame

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One day before the United States began an ill-defined and illegal war of indefinite length with Iran, Pete Hegseth angrily attacked a different enemy: the Ivy League. The Secretary of War denounced Ivy League universities as "woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination” and then eliminated long-standing college fellowship programs with more than a dozen elite colleges, which had historically served as a pipeline for service members to the upper ranks of military leadership. Of the schools now on Hegseth’s "no-fly list," four sit in the top ten of the World’s Top Universities for 2026. So, why does the Secretary of War not want his armed forces to have the best education available? Because he wants a military without a brain.

For a guy obsessed with being the strongest and most lethal force in the world, cutting access to world-class schools is a bizarre gambit. It does reveal Hegseth doesn’t consider intelligence a factor–let alone an asset–in strength or lethality. That tracks. Hegseth alleges the Ivies infect officers with “globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks…” God forbid the tip of the sword of our foreign policy has knowledge of international cooperation and global interconnectedness. The Ivy League has its own issues, but the Pentagon’s claim that they "fail to deliver rigorous education grounded in realism” is almost laughable. I’m a veteran Lieutenant Commander with two Ivy League degrees, both paid for with military tuition assistance, and I promise: it was rigorous. Meanwhile, are Hegseth’s performative politics grounded in reality? Attacking Harvard on social media the eve of initiating a new war with a foreign adversary is disgraceful, and even delusional.

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