The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled to reverse a lower court's decision that said a South Carolina redistricting map was unconstitutional, rejecting the idea that it was racially discriminatory.

In a 6-3 decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito, the high court said that, "a party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith."

"In this case, which features a challenge to South Carolina’s redistricting efforts in the wake of the 2020 census, the three-judge District Court paid only lip service to these propositions," the decision states.

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"That misguided approach infected the District Court’s findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard," Alito wrote.

The case stems from a challenge by the ACLU and the NAACP claiming that the redrawn maps following the 2020 census were illegally gerrymandered and had urged the justices to rule in time to impact upcoming congressional races.

But a federal court panel that had initially struck down the maps as unconstitutional said in late March it was "plainly impractical" to wait for the Supreme Court to decide, and allowed the disputed maps to stand.

It is unclear the extent the high court's ruling may will have on other 2024 elections, with many states already holding primaries or setting deadlines for early voter registrations.

The high court's conservative majority in its ruling expressed concern over a federal court ruling that initially ordered South Carolina to create a new congressional map in time for the November 2024 election.

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That three-judge panel found the coastal 1st Congressional District now held by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., was an unlawful racial gerrymander, when Republican lawmakers shifted about 30,000 Black voters from Charleston County over to the state’s 6th Congressional District, which became more solidly Democratic than it was before.

That seat is held by Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., a longtime member of Congress who is Black.

But the high court’s delay in issuing its ruling means the disputed map will remain in place for the 2024 elections.

Justice Elana Kagan, backed by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying, "In every way, the majority today stacks the deck against the Challengers. They must lose, the majority says, because the State had a 'possible' story to tell about not considering race—even if the opposite story was the more credible."

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"And they must lose again, the majority says, because they failed to offer a particular form of proof—which they did not know would be relevant and which this Court recently told plaintiffs was not required," she said. 

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"It does not matter that the Challengers offered extensive evidence, including expert statistical analyses, that the State’s districting plan was the product of racial sorting."

Poverty in Lebanon tripled over the course of a decade during which the small Mediterranean country slid into a protracted financial crisis, the World Bank said Thursday.

The percentage of people in Lebanon living below the poverty line rose from 12% in 2012 to 44% in 2022, the bank said in a report based on surveys conducted in five of the country's eight governorates.

The data provided the most detailed snapshot to date on the economic circumstances of the country's population since the crisis that began in late 2019, although World Bank officials acknowledged it was incomplete as surveyors were not given access to three governates in the south and east of the country.

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The findings showed stark differences in poverty levels between different areas of the country and between Lebanese citizens and the country's large population of Syrian refugees.

In the Beirut governate, in contrast to the rest of the country, poverty actually declined from 4% to 2% of the population during the decade surveyed, while in the largely neglected Akkar region in the north, the rate increased from 22% to 62%.

Among Lebanese surveyed, the poverty rate in 2022 was 33%, while among Syrians it reached 87%. While the survey found an increase in the percentage of Lebanese citizens working in unskilled jobs like agriculture and construction, it found that most Lebanese still work in skilled jobs while the majority of Syrians do unskilled labor.

The report also measured "multidimensional poverty," which takes into account access to services like electricity and education as well as income, finding that some 73% of Lebanese and 100% of non-Lebanese residents of the country qualify as poor under this metric.

Beginning in late 2019, Lebanon's currency collapsed, while inflation skyrocketed and the country's GDP plummeted. Many Lebanese found that the value of their life savings had evaporated.

Initially, many saw an International Monetary Fund bailout as the only path out of the crisis, but since reaching a preliminary agreement with the IMF in 2022, Lebanese officials have made limited progress on reforms required to clinch the deal, including restructuring the ailing banking sector.

An IMF delegation visiting Beirut this week found that "some progress has been made on monetary and fiscal reforms," the international financial institution said in a statement, including on "lowering inflation and stabilizing the exchange rate," but it added that the measures "fall short of what is needed to enable a recovery from the crisis."

It noted that reforms to "governance, transparency and accountability" remain "limited" and that without an overhaul of the banking sector, the "cash and informal economy will continue to grow, raising significant regulatory and supervisory concerns."

The World Bank has estimated that the cash economy makes up 46% of the country's GDP, as Lebanese distrustful of banks in the wake of the crisis have sought to deal in hard currency.

The flourishing cash economy has created fertile ground for money laundering and led to concerns that Lebanon could be placed on the Paris-based watchdog Financial Action Task Force’s "grey list" of countries with a high risk of money laundering and terrorism financing.