Day: June 17, 2024

WFISD offers iteach Texas alternative teacher certification sessions to combat teacher shortage  KFDX – Texomashomepage.com

Studio Session: Dominick Antonelli  KGNU

Federal judge blocks Biden’s new Title IX rule expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students  PBS NewsHour

TEHRAN, Iran — Six presidential candidates on Monday discussed Iran’s economic problems in a four-hour live debate on state TV, ahead of the June 28 presidential election following a helicopter crash last month that killed President Ebrahim Raisi and seven others. 

It was the first of five debates planned in the 10 days remaining before the vote in a shortened campaign to replace Raisi, a hard-line protege of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei once floated as a possible successor to the 85-year-old cleric. 

The candidates were to discuss their proposals and plans for Iran’s spiraling economy, struggling under sanctions from the United States and other Western nations. 

They all promised they would try and get the sanctions lifted and introduce reforms, but none offered any details. The candidates also discussed inflation, the budget deficit, Iran’s housing problem and ways to fight corruption. 

The June 28 election comes at a time of heightened tensions between Iran and the West over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its arming of Russia in that country’s war on Ukraine and its wide-reaching crackdowns on dissent. 

Iran’s support of militia proxy forces throughout the wider Middle East, meanwhile, have been increasingly in the spotlight as Iran-backed Yemen’s Houthi rebels attack ships in the Red Sea over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

Five of the candidates are hard-liners while the sixth candidate, lawmaker Masoud Pezeshkian, 69, is a heart surgeon who has the support of some pro-reformers. 

The most prominent candidate remains Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, 62, a former Tehran mayor with close ties to the country’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. However, many remember that Qalibaf, as a former Guard general, was part of a violent crackdown on Iranian university students in 1999. He also reportedly ordered live gunfire to be used against students in 2003 while serving as the country’s police chief. 

Among those running for president are also Iran’s vice-president, Amir Hossein Qazizadeh Hashemi, 53, and the current Tehran mayor, Ali Reza Zakani, 58. A member of Supreme National Security Council, 58-year-old Saeed Jalili and cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi, 64, a previous interior minister under former relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani, are also in the race. 

Qalibaf promised he would be a “strong” president who would support the poor, better manage the economy and work to remove sanctions through diplomatic means. 

Pezeshkian said the sanctions were a “disaster” and also lobbied for less restrictions on the internet. Iran has long blocked Facebook, X, Instagram, Telegram and other major social media platforms and messaging systems, mainly over security concerns. 

All of the candidates pledged to strengthen the country’s currency, the rial, which has plunged to 580,000 against the dollar. The rial was 32,000 to the dollar when Iran and world powers reached a deal in 2015 on capping Tehran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions. 

The six stayed away from the topic of the tattered nuclear deal. Khamenei has final say on all major state matters, including nuclear, foreign policy, space and military programs. 

Pro-reform figures such as former President Mohammad Khatami and former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal, have backed Pezeshkian, though votes in his favor in his parliamentary constituency in the northwestern city of Tabriz declined from 36% to 24% of the vote in elections over the past eight years. 

Raisi won Iran’s 2021 presidential election in a vote that saw the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history.

seattle — BNSF Railway must pay nearly $400 million to a Native American tribe in Washington state, a federal judge ordered Monday after finding that the company intentionally trespassed when it repeatedly ran 100-car trains carrying crude oil across the tribe’s reservation. 

U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik initially ruled last year that the railway deliberately violated the terms of a 1991 easement with the Swinomish Tribe north of Seattle that allows trains to carry no more than 25 cars per day. The judge held a trial earlier this month to determine how much in profits BNSF made through trespassing from 2012 to 2021 and how much it should be required to disgorge. 

The company based in Fort Worth, Texas, said in an email it had no comment on the judgment. The tribe, which has about 1,400 members, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

The tribe sued in 2015 after BNSF dramatically increased, without the tribe’s consent, the number of cars it was running across the reservation so that it could ship crude oil from the Bakken Formation in and around North Dakota to a nearby refinery. The route crosses sensitive marine ecosystems along the coast, over water that connects with the Salish Sea, where the tribe has treaty-protected rights to fish. 

Bakken oil is easier to refine into the fuels sold at the gas pump and ignites more easily. After train cars carrying Bakken crude oil exploded in Alabama, North Dakota and Quebec, a federal agency warned in 2014 that the oil has a higher degree of volatility than other crudes in the U.S. 

Last year, two BNSF engines derailed on Swinomish land, leaking an estimated 3,100 gallons (11,700 liters) of diesel fuel near Padilla Bay. 

The 1991 easement limited rail traffic to one train of 25 cars per day in each direction. It required BNSF to tell the tribe about the “nature and identity of all cargo” transported across the reservation, and it said the tribe would not arbitrarily withhold permission to increase the number of trains or cars. 

The tribe learned through a 2011 Skagit County planning document that a nearby refinery would start receiving crude oil trains. It wasn’t until the following year that the tribe received information from BNSF addressing current track usage, court documents show. 

The tribe and BNSF discussed amending the agreement, but “at no point did the Tribe approve BNSF’s unilateral decision to transport unit trains across the Reservation, agree to increase the train or car limitations, or waive its contractual right of approval,” Lasnik said in his decision last year. 

“BNSF failed to update the Tribe regarding the nature of the cargo that was crossing the Reservation and unilaterally increased the number of trains and the number of cars without the Tribe’s written agreement, thereby violating the conditions placed on BNSF’s permission to enter the property,” Lasnik said. 

The four-day trial this month was designed to provide the court with details and expert testimony to guide the judge through complex calculations about how much in “ill-gotten” profit BNSF should have to disgorge. Lasnik put that figure at $362 million and added $32 million in post-tax profits such as investment income for a total of more than $394 million. 

In reality, the judge wrote, BNSF made far more than $32 million in post-tax profits, but adding all of that up would have added hundreds of millions more to what was already a large judgment against the railway.

lima, peru — The government of Peru said Monday that it would investigate sex abuse allegations leveled by hundreds of Indigenous children against teachers in a jungle region of the South American country.

A total of 524 cases of rape and abuse dating as far back as 2010 have been reported by girls and boys from the Awajun Indigenous group who attended public schools in the Condorcanqui province in Peru’s north.

The alleged crimes at school residences were revealed last month by Rosemary Pioc, representative of an Awajun women’s association.

“We have to investigate the facts. We’ll stand with the victims,” government spokesman Alberto Adrianzen told foreign correspondents Monday. “We reject all forms of sexual abuse.”

The announcement of an investigation came after two government ministers provoked widespread anger by equating the alleged abuse with “cultural practices.”

“To say that these are cultural practices is to endorse these actions. … Rape is not a practice in our community,” Pioc told RPP radio on Monday.

Adrianzen said the victims “will have to receive comprehensive health care,” including psychological help and HIV treatment if necessary.

Peru’s human rights ombudsman called Monday for implicated teachers to be “immediately removed” from the schools at which they taught.

Trumpist Candidate Carl DeMaio Collected Donations for 5 Ballot Measures, Didn’t Submit Any Signatures, Yet Kept All …  OB Rag

Hillary Clinton jokes about losing 2016 election in Tonys appearance  MSN