Anthony Weiner is looking more likely than ever to win the New York City mayoral race scheduled for later this year. According to the latest polls, the former congressman is the top contender among Democratic Party hopefuls.

Weiner, 48, announced last month that’d he be seeking the position of mayor of New York, a role which will be vacated by Michael Bloomberg when his third and final term expires at the start of 2014. Now only four weeks after officially throwing his hat in the race, Weiner is winning the support of 25 percent of registered Democrats, according to a just released poll conducted by Wall Street Journal-NBC New York-Marist.

The news puts Weiner at the top of his party’s race for the first time since he confirmed in May the long-standing rumors he’d be running for mayor, but the ex-lawmaker will likely face a battle through Election Day that’s largely uphill. Even if Weiner is winning the support of a quarter of his party, the high-profile scandal that prompted his resignation from the United States House of Representatives in 2011 is still fresh on the minds of voters.

Rep. Weiner was already eyeing the New York City two years ago when he was caught sending graphic photographs to women over Twitter. At first Weiner relentlessly denied allegations that he acted inappropriately, but after several weeks took responsibility and resigned from Congress.

When Mr. Weiner announced he’d be running for mayor last month, he said, "I made some big mistakes, and I know I let a lot of people down, but I also learned some tough lessons."

"I'm running for mayor because I've been fighting for the middle class and those struggling to make it my entire life. And I hope I get a second chance,” he said.

Before Weiner confirmed he’d be running for mayor, a March 2013 poll found that less than half of the city’s Democrats would even considering voting for the disgraced congressman. According to the latest numbers, though, Weiner is now the frontrunner, grabbing 25 percent of support among Democrats to the runner up’s 20 percent. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the party’s frontrunner up until recently, now has only one-fifth of her party’s support.

“Things are changing – the race has been scrambled by Weiner’s candidacy,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, told the Wall Street Journal. “Weiner’s candidacy has gotten more acceptable to voters since he announced, (and) Quinn’s having a difficult time reversing what has been a slow but steady decline in her numbers.”

Speaking to the New York Times earlier this year about his Democratic contenders, Weiner said, “I like them all.” In the same interview, though, Weiner took a jab at one stance in particular adopted by Quinn that doesn’t sit well with him. In 2008, Quinn supported removing a term limits law, which as a result allowed Mayor Bloomberg to successfully campaign for a third term in office.

“The term-limits thing, as an issue, was a deal breaker for me,” Weiner told the Times in April. “But, I think the polls are right: Chris Quinn is leading, and then someone will get into a runoff with her. I don’t like runoffs, and I don’t think we should have them so you don’t have these divisive primaries anymore.”

According to the latest poll, Weiner and Quinn are being trailed by Comptroller Bill Thompson with 13 percent of the party’s support, followed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and city Comptroller John Liu. Fewer than one in five Democrats are undecided, the poll found.

“This won’t change our focus one bit,” a spokesperson for Mr. Weiner told the Journal. “Anthony is going to keep talking about the issues and how to stand up for New Yorkers who want a middle class fighter in City Hall.”

Mike Morey, a spokesman for Ms. Quinn, told the New York Times, “We fully expect the polls to fluctuate throughout the campaign, but we are confident that on Election Day, when voters have to decide who they want to lead this city, they will choose someone who has demonstrated the ability to lead and deliver.”

A controversial voter identification law in Texas is expected to go into effect immediately, according to the state attorney general, in the wake of a Tuesday ruling handed down by the United States Supreme Court.

Only moments after the high court invalidated part of the Voters Rights Act of 1965 on Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said his state will begin “immediately” honoring local legislation that many say limits the ability for minorities to cast ballots.

Until this week’s SCOTUS ruling, states such as Texas have required federal preclearance to make changes to voting rules. With the invalidating of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 4, however, Texas and other locales are now in the free to enact their own rules for voters without awaiting permission from Washington.

“The section determined which states must receive clearance from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before they made minor changes to voting procedures, like moving a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts,” Adam Liptak wrote for the New York Times.

In a 5-4 decision this week, however, the court canned that section of the Voters Right Act, prompting Abbott to say his state will at once begin mandating photo ID cards inside of polling places.

"With today's decision, the state's voter ID law will take effect immediately,” Abbott said Tuesday. “Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas."

“Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government,” Abbott added.

Gov. Rick Perry, who unsuccessfully vied for the GOP’s nod as presidential nominee last year, called the ruling “a clear victory for federalism and the states.”

“Texas may now implement the will of the people without being subject to outdated and unnecessary oversight and the overreach of federal power,” Perry said, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Opponents of the Texas law feared that giving the state the ability to enact its own voter ID program would disenfranchise poor minority voters who would be unable to produce the documentation necessary to obtain a state sanctioned identification card. Last year a federal court said the state law imposed “strict, unforgiving burdens" on many Texas residents, but Tuesday’s ruling out of Washington will let Gov. Perry and his administration soon enforcing the ID program.

"The Supreme Court has effectively gutted one of the nation's most important and effective civil rights laws,” Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law chief counsel Jon Greenbaum told The Guardian. “Minority voters in places with a record of discrimination are now at greater risk of being disenfranchised than they have been in decades.”

"Today's decision is a blow to democracy. Jurisdictions will be able to enact policies which prevent minorities from voting, and the only recourse these citizens will have will be expensive and time-consuming litigation,” he said.

President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, called the SCOTUS ruling “deeply disappointing.”

Abbott plans to make the ID program mandatory as soon as possible, but Susan Frederick, a legal expert with the National Conference for State Legislatures, told the Houston Chronicle that the attorney general may have jumped the gun.

“For any state to be able to move forward with legislative that is previously adjudicated or dealt with in state court, [officials] certainly have to go back and make sure it didn’t fly afoul of the state constitution or any other currently valid federal law,” she said.

 A divided US Supreme Court voided a central part of the Voting Rights Act, a law put in place during the Civil Rights movement to prevent historically racist states from creating obstacles to voting, Tuesday.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the Supreme Court’s opinion in Shelby County vs. Holder on Tuesday. The 5-4 decision, evidence of clear partisan lines in the nation’s highest court, was celebrated by Southern states and criticized by President Barack Obama for declaring federal oversight on state election changes unconstitutional. Roberts did not specify which, if any, part of the Constitution the rule violated.

Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), invalidated by Tuesday’s decision, explained the formula used by Congress to identify regions of the US subject to extra scrutiny when local lawmakers try to change election rules. Section 4 was the precursor to Section 5, which gives the federal government the power to “preclear” any state or local changes in election rules that could potentially prevent minorities from voting.

Both the Justice Department and individual voters were able to file suit if they believed a state or local municipality was instituting a law that would put undue burden on a specific demographic, a protection that saw its end on Monday.

Under the formula, Congress singled out states based on their history of past abuses. Most of the states affected by the ruling are in the South, where politicians frequently signed laws meant to silence the black population by way of making their votes count less through redistricting and other tactics. The VRA of 1965 nullified the systemic discrimination allowed by the Jim Crow laws, adopted in the century following the abolition of slavery.

States that prevented African Americans from, in addition to other infractions, registering to vote, voting of running for office were singled out by Section 4.

The Supreme Court’s majority ruled that, because the VRA was enacted decades ago, Congress must use updated criteria to determine which states are subject to the federal oversight. In a seeming contradiction, the Court cited the VRA’s success in protecting an equal voting system as a reason to void Section 4. 

Mario Tama / Getty Images / AFP

  Roberts asserted that “things have changed dramatically” over time. Since 1965 voter registration, voter turnout and the number of African American political leaders have all vastly increased, Roberts claimed, “in large part because of the VRA.” Yet Roberts and four other justices called for new criteria not “based on decades-old data” and voter suppression methods, such as literacy tests, that have been rendered irrelevant by Section 4. Roberts' claims are wrong, though, some reporters pointed out on the day.

“The regions covered by the part of the Act that was struck down, Section 4, have, in recent years, been twice as likely as those not covered to have proven violations under other sections of the Act,” wrote The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson.

Without a new formula for Section 4, which most experts agree is unlikely after years of Congressional gridlock and polarization, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act cannot be implemented.

Roberts also wrote that Congress “cannot justify the considerable burdens created by Section 5,” despite overwhelming numbers in each chamber voting to reauthorize the VRA in 2006. In the seven years since that renewal, 31 discriminatory voting laws were blocked by Section 5, according to The Nation magazine, with six of the nine southern states covered by Section 4 enacting new voter suppression laws since 2010.

“Texas’ voter ID law, which was blocked under Section 5 by a federal court last year and could disenfranchise up to 800,000 registered voters without government-issued photo ID, will immediately go into effect,” wrote Ari Berman in The Nation. “The states of the Old Confederacy will return to the pre-1965 playbook, passing new voter suppression laws that can only be challenged, after years of lengthy litigation, in often-hostile Southern courts, with the burden of proof in those subject to discrimination, rather than those doing the discriminating.” 

Mario Tama / Getty Images / AFP

  Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, who serves in one of the states previously covered by Section 4, announced Tuesday that the “process for implementation of Constitutional Voter Identification begins today.”

Chief Justice Roberts was joined in his opinion by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented. Each of the Justices in the majority was appointed by a Republican president, while the dissenters were appointed by Democrats. 

President Obama said he was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling.

“Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” Ginsburg wrote in her dissent. “Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled … One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation’s signal piece of civil-rights legislation.”

Ginsburg, appointed by former president Bill Clinton in 1993, noted that the “racial polarization in voting” means the issue is especially pressing today. While Ginsburg delivered her remarks, though, Alito visibly rolled his eyes in dismissal, leading to gasps from several audience members.   

“His treatment of the 80-year-old Ginsburg, 17 years his senior and with 13 years more seniority, was a curious display of judicial temperament, or, more accurately, judicial intemperance,” wrote Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. “Typically, justices state their differences in words – and Alito, as it happens, had just spoken several hundred of his own from the bench. But Alito frequently supplements words with middle-school gestures.”   

Congressional leaders pledged discussions on Section 4 over the summer, but admitted doubts over whether Republicans and Democrats would be able to agree on the issue. 

The Russian State Duma has started to look into a draft law suggesting amnesty for those convicted of economic crimes, the adoption of which could lead to the release of about 10,000 prisoners and suspects.

The draft statement on 'economic amnesty' was submitted to the Lower House on Tuesday, shortly after President Vladimir Putin presented the document in a speech at St. Petersburg Economic Forum and asked the parliament to pass it before leaving for summer vacation.

The draft provides that punishment will be lifted from those who had been sentenced for or charged with economic crimes for the first time on the condition that they compensate for the damages inflicted by their illegal activities. However, the crimes committed with use of violence or threat of violence will not be covered by the amnesty and neither will be the cases where the damage was inflicted to the state budget.

Economic crimes mentioned in the draft are insurance fraud, business fraud, money laundering, illegal entrepreneurship and banking, copyright breach, bankruptcy fraud and tax evasion. The Lower House Committee for Criminal Law approved the bill and recommended that the Duma approves it in the first reading and as a whole, the head of the committee, Pavel Krasheninnikov told the press.

Lower House speaker Sergey Naryshkin said the economic amnesty bill will be considered next week which will be the last week of the current plenary session.

One of the main sponsors of the economic amnesty bill – the ombudsman for entrepreneurs’ rights Boris Titov told reporters earlier that Russia has about 110,000 prisoners serving time for economic crimes. The ombudsman estimated that about 10,000 of them can be released under the bill. Deputy head of the Lower House’s economic policy committee, MP Viktor Zvagelskiy stated in press comments that about 13,000 convicted businessmen could walk free once the bill comes into force.
After the bill was backed by President Putin, ombudsman Titov welcomed the move saying that it was good for morals and ethics. Titov also noted that this will be a signal for entrepreneurs who would lead the country to further development and prosperity.

Critics of the bill, such as the head of the major bank VTB, Andrey Kostin, suggested it was offering impunity to representatives of big business, which was wrong. Former finance minister and influential expert in business and politics, Aleksey Kudrin, said that he welcomed the initiative but was surprised by the demand to compensate for damages as not all economic crimes are connected with material damages.

A public opinion poll conducted by the VTSIOM research center in late May showed that only 33 percent of Russians supported the idea of a business amnesty with 36 percent opposing it and 31 percent remaining undecided over the issue.