Sharkticon

The U.S. has paused bombing Iran for a third straight night after senior Trump administration officials reportedly warned the president about dwindling munitions stockpiles. In response, Iran said it would pause retaliatory strikes against U.S. bases across the Middle East. Over the weekend, the Pentagon updated its official war casualty database, adding more than 140 wounded service members. The new figures show that 18 U.S. troops have been killed and 624 wounded since the U.S. launched its war against Iran back in February. The Pentagon is separating the casualty figures: Deaths and injuries after the ceasefire ended on July 7 are listed in a separate database labeled generically as “overseas operations casualties.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Ministry accused Ukraine of attacking an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea, saying one sailor was killed and another injured. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia ⁠of passing on to Iran its satellite observations in the Middle East, allowing Iran to launch attacks across the region. This comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to visit the White House Tuesday for the first time since the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran in February.

Despite the lull in fighting, Britain said its armed forces were ready to defend itself after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps warned the U.K. not to allow U.S. bombers to fly from U.K. bases. On Thursday, the IRGC claimed that the U.S. had flown bombing missions against Iran from Fairford Air Base in southwest England.

Texas’ higher education commissioner signaled last week that the state could expand the use of the conservative-favored Classic Learning Test in public university admissions even though an independent review found far less evidence linking the exam’s scores to college performance than SAT and ACT scores.

In a letter to campus leaders on Thursday, Commissioner Wynn Rosser clarified that universities can immediately consider CLT scores for any applicants who fall outside the top-10% automatic admissions window. While the letter did not alter current statewide rules that currently recognize only the SAT and ACT, it signaled the state’s plan to formally approve the CLT by fall 2028 as a new test option for home school, private school or out-of-state applicants.

Rosser issued the letter one day after the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board voted to send an independent review of the CLT, SAT and ACT to legislative leaders. The board did not vote to approve CLT’s use or change the state’s admissions rules.

The review, required by a law passed last year, did not put the CLT on equal footing with the SAT and ACT.

The Texas A&M Public Policy Research Institute conducted the review of college entrance exams, warning that the three tests were not “equally ready, equally comparable, or equally defensible.”

Researchers found less evidence supporting CLT’s use in statewide admissions, noting that more research was needed on the exam before colleges could rely on those scores in the same way they do the SAT and ACT scores.

The difference was especially stark when examining how well each test’s scores could predict students’ college performance, according to the report. The CLT received 1.4 out of 4 possible points, compared with 3.8 for the ACT and 4 for the SAT.

CLT representatives, however, attributed the low score to the limited amount of Texas data available, saying the review excluded evidence from outside the state.

The CLT submitted evidence covering 259 students at five private Texas universities, while the College Board submitted data covering more than 117,000 students at 14 public universities.

Jeremy Tate, the CLT’s founder and CEO, told the board this week that the exam aligns with Texas’ new social studies standards and instructional materials. Approving it would create an educational pipeline that “honors the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty,” he said.

Guards at an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, could see a detainee in his cell with one end of a bedsheet wrapped around his neck and the other tied to the door handle. If they opened the door, the sheet would tighten and strangle him.

The detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, had been in detention at Camp East Montana for a month by then. The facility itself was still relatively new and had been opened as part of the Trump administration’s plans to house and quickly deport thousands of immigrants at a time.

Almost immediately after being admitted, the 55-year-old Cuban immigrant began expressing frustration about his care, according to a nearly 300-page unpublished medical examiner’s investigative report.

The report, reviewed by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, includes dozens of notes that detail medical staff interactions with Lunas Campos, who had a history of mental illness and had been previously institutionalized in New York.

The report and the records it contains offer a rare and disturbing look at how immigrant detention facilities — erected rapidly and with little oversight — manage detainees with serious mental health needs. The records paint a portrait of a man in a crisis and a facility whose staff, on several occasions, discussed transferring him to a facility where he could get a higher level of care.

The Texas Stock Exchange will commence trading on Monday, kickstarting the first real test of one of the most well-funded new exchanges to launch in decades.

The Texas Stock Exchange, a Dallas-based startup, will initiate a phased rollout to take place over the course of July. On Monday, the public can start trading as thousands of stocks come online over the course of the month. By the third quarter, exchange officials hope to have Exchange-Traded Products, or ETPs, listed on the exchange and corporate listings available during the fourth quarter of this year, according to a statement from the exchange.

Both Texas state government and stock exchange officials hope the Texas Stock Exchange, or TXSE, launch will solidify Dallas’ attempt to become a national financial hub and boost the Texas economy by growing the financial services industry in the state and making money for any Texas companies and investors that are doing business through the exchange.

“With the start of full production trading, any last notions that TXSE is theoretical are instantly swept away,” a TXSE official wrote in a statement Thursday.

Monday’s start of trading is critically important to test-run and demonstrate to companies interested in listing on TXSE that it can provide a viable alternative to the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, said Sriram Villupuram, a University of Texas at Arlington associate professor of finance.

For more than 50 years, the Education Department has revealed a host of realities about how students are being treated in every public school across America: which kids are being bullied, which ones are being harassed and which students can access the internet, among other things. The agency's Civil Rights Data Collection is intended to do just that — help keep schools accountable.

The latest information, collected about the 2023-24 school year, was supposed to be published last December, according to the Education Department's own deadline.

But it hasn't been.

CORPUS CHRISTI — Black Democrats caucusing at the Texas Democratic Party convention Friday cheered when state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, said November would bring an end to three decades of one-party statewide rule.

But some of the most emphatic applause he received during his remarks came when he acknowledged the Democratic Party’s “troubling history of taking Black voters for granted.”

“Let’s just be very honest,” Talarico said Friday to a room in Corpus Christi packed full of Black Democrats from around the state. “I am committing to you to not make those mistakes. I am committed to working with the members of this caucus to show up for, invest in and fight for the votes of every Black Texan.”

Nearly four months after defeating U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas — one of the state’s most prominent Black politicians — for the U.S. Senate nomination, Talarico’s quest to coalesce Black Democrats behind his candidacy was still ongoing among the party’s rank-and-file activists at a convention where Texas Democrats were looking to present a forceful show of unity.

The unease about Talarico’s standing with Black Texans stems from a primary in which polls consistently showed the Austin Democrat with meager support — sometimes under 10% — from Black voters. The rest went to Crockett, forming the basis of her 46% vote share in the March primary. She endorsed Talarico the day after her loss and urged Democrats to “rally around” their nominees.

More recently, however, Crockett has cast doubt on whether Black voters have unified behind Talarico and the broader statewide ticket. Ahead of this week’s convention, which she skipped, Crockett also declined to commit to campaigning for Talarico, telling the Dallas Morning News she was “more focused on down-ballot races.”

Texas elementary and middle school students mostly stagnated in reading this school year while their performance on math and social studies exams improved, according to STAAR results released Tuesday.

The Texas Education Agency published results from the annual State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, for grades 3–8, which aim to measure whether students learn material in core subjects at levels appropriate for their grade. High school results released last week showed gains in all areas.

This year’s results show children making some progress but that more work remains, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said in a statement.

“We are encouraged by continued gains in mathematics,” Morath said, “especially with the growing number of students participating and succeeding in advanced mathematics courses.”

The state tests showed that 49% of third graders scored on grade level in reading — a 1-percentage-point decline from last year. Fourth through sixth grades remained flat at 52%, 57% and 54%, respectively. And 54% of seventh graders met grade-level expectations — a 2-percentage-point increase — while eighth graders improved from 56% to 59%.

Students’ overall performance in reading continues to surpass pre-COVID levels.

More than 100 days into hostilities, Iran and the United States say they have reached a preliminary deal to end the war. Israel, however, is not a party to the tentative deal and says it plans to keep occupying areas of southern Lebanon — a position still contested by Iran and the key sticking point to the partial ceasefire deal agreed to by the U.S. and Iran in April. Although the new agreement is set to be signed Friday, Israel’s unrelenting assault on Lebanon could once again spoil any deal.

“This is going to become the center of whether any actual agreement takes place,” says Drop Site News's Jeremy Scahill, who joins Democracy Now! to break down what we know about this latest round of diplomacy. As the U.S. now intends to end the war without accomplishing its initial goals of regime change and nuclear capitulation, it appears that Trump has “finally accepted some version of his manufactured and almost entirely false victory narrative.” Scahill, who has spoken extensively to Iranian officials about the negotiations, says it remains to be seen if Iran can successfully “decouple” the U.S.-Israeli alliance from Israel's expansionary front in Lebanon, or whether it has relinquished too much of its own “strategic leverage” by agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

WASHINGTON — With little ideological daylight between the two candidates, the runoff between Democratic Reps. Al Green and Christian Menefee has focused on a more symbolic debate: the influence of big money in politics.

Green has criticized the more than $4 million that a cryptocurrency super PAC spent on behalf of Menefee, a whopping total that has given Menefee the money edge and made the 18th Congressional District home to the most expensive House runoff in Texas. In the meantime, Menefee has called out Green for accepting contributions from corporate PACs, or groups that raise money from a company’s employees and donate it to political candidates.

The clash is emblematic of a broader wedge between Democrats, many of whom rely on large fundraising hauls to remain competitive, even as they denounce the outsized influence big money plays in the political arena.

“We’ve built incredible momentum without taking any corporate PAC dollars,” Menefee said in an interview. “At the same time, I believe Citizens United was a mistake and should be overturned, and not a single super PAC should exist.“

DUBAI/WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters) - Israel and Lebanon extended their ceasefire for three weeks at a meeting at the White House brokered by President Donald Trump, ​who said he was prepared to wait for "the best deal" to end his conflict with Iran.

Fighting between Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon has ‌been one of a number of sticking points to resolving the wider eight-week regional conflict, along with Iran's nuclear ambitions and control of the crucial Strait of Hormuz.

Trump said he was in no rush to reach a peace agreement and wanted it to be "everlasting," while continuing to assert that the U.S. had a clear upper hand in the naval stand-off in the Strait.

A day after ​Iran flaunted its tightened grip over the key shipping corridor, Trump dismissed the threat posed by Iran's "little wise-guy ships" and said he believed Tehran was ​hamstrung from making a deal because its leadership was in turmoil. On Thursday, he said the U.S. Navy has orders to "shoot and ⁠kill" Iranian boats laying mines in the strait and the U.S. could knock out in a day any refurbishing of weapons that Iran may have made during ​a ceasefire in place since April 8.

But navigation in the passage remained effectively blocked, and the Iranian capture of two huge cargo ships was a reminder that the ​U.S. struggles to keep control of the strait and Tehran continued to cause trouble for oil markets and pose major strains to the global economy. The U.S. has maintained a blockade

LONDON, April 23 (Reuters) - Iran's use of a swarm of small, fast boats to seize two container ships near the Strait of Hormuz could undermine suggestions U.S. forces have ​disabled its naval threat and reveals the challenges facing reopening one of the world's most important oil export routes.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday acknowledged that ‌while Iran’s conventional navy had been largely destroyed, its "fast-attack ships" had not been considered much of a threat.

He said any such vessels coming near a U.S. blockade set up outside the strait would be "immediately ELIMINATED" using the "same system of kill" deployed in the Caribbean and Pacific where U.S. air strikes have hit suspected drug boats and killed at least 110 people.

Those boats were not attacking large, unarmed commercial ships, however, ​nor nearly as heavily armed, with Iran's Revolutionary Guards packing heavy machineguns, rocket launchers and, in some cases, anti-ship missiles.

Speedboat attacks now form part of a "layered system ​of threats," alongside "shore-based missiles, drones, mines and electronic interference to create uncertainty and slow decision-making," Greek maritime security company Diaplous told Reuters. Iran ⁠was estimated to have hundreds, if not thousands, of these boats before the war, often hidden in coastal tunnels, naval bases or among civilian vessels, according to maritime security specialists.

Some 100 ​or more may have been destroyed since the Iran war began of February 28, said Corey Ranslem, chief executive of maritime security group Dryad Global.

On March 4, the day after the Texas Senate Republican primary, President Donald Trump was resolute — he would be endorsing “soon” in the runoff between Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton, and he wanted the contest to end quickly.

More than a month later, the president has been noncommittal about the runoff. He has stayed on the sidelines well past the deadline for candidates to drop off the May ballot and downplayed the threat of Democratic nominee James Talarico.

“I believe that any human being running against him, sick, incompetent, close to death or even a child, would win,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on March 22. “He may be the Worst candidate I have ever seen.”

That missive was a notable shift from Trump’s message the day after the primary, when he said he’d expect the candidate he did not endorse to drop out for “the good of the Party,” adding, “We must win in November!!!” The president’s posture at the time appeared to bode well for Cornyn, whose allies have tried to convince Trump that Paxton would be a weaker candidate in the general election.

But since then, Paxton supporters and activists in the MAGA movement have loudly campaigned against a Cornyn endorsement, and the attorney general was seen discussing the runoff with Trump himself at a GOP fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, Politico reported.

The notoriously unpredictable president could still weigh in over the next seven weeks. But his inaction before last month’s dropout deadline has only hardened the rivalry.