Under Joe Biden, the Iranian regime raked in billions from its "shadow fleet" of tankers ferrying illicit crude. Enter Donald Trump, who imposed sanctions targeting that fleet and its leader, Iranian oil minister Mohsen Paknejad.
The sanctions mark the first time Paknejad has been personally sanctioned, our Adam Kredo reports. He oversees "the export of tens of billions of dollars' worth of Iranian oil and has allocated billions of dollars' worth of oil to Iran's armed forces for export," the Treasury Department wrote in a press release.
The move came just a day after the White House warned Iran of a military response if it rebuffs negotiations around its nuclear weapons program. A spokesman for the National Security Council told Kredo there are "two ways Iran can be handled: militarily or by making a deal."
No melanin, big problem: Illinois is already fending off a lawsuit over a state scholarship program that provides financial aid to minorities pursuing teacher licenses. A second active suit targets racial hiring quotas at the University of Illinois Chicago. A third could be coming soon, based on information we’ve obtained about a program known as Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois.
The program, our Aaron Sibarium reports, provides financial aid to "members of traditionally underrepresented minority groups," including "African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander." At participating universities, an "institutional representative" helps "verify" that applicants meet "all eligibility criteria." You know what that means.
"That structure means that participating institutions, which include the top public and private universities in the state, are directly involved in an application process that violates federal law, according to five attorneys who reviewed the program requirements," Sibarium writes.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Gail Heriot had this to say: "This isn't a hard one. The program was illegal and unconstitutional since its inception" back in 2004.
Two decades later, the Trump administration is threatening to pull funding for schools with race-based programs. Tick tock, J.B. Pritzker.
First, Lydia Mugambe was a human rights fellow at Columbia University. Then she became a UN judge. Now she's a convicted slaveholder. A British court on Thursday found her guilty of trafficking a young Ugandan woman to the U.K. and forcing her to work as an unpaid maid and caregiver.
In 2017, Mugambe became an Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability fellow with Columbia's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, which works to develop "human rights leaders, organizations, and universities around the world." As part of the program, she developed "a project around women in northern Uganda who have suffered severe human rights abuses."
Her stint at Columbia came in the wake of a much-celebrated judgment Mugambe handed down while sitting on the High Court of Uganda. She ruled against a local hospital accused of neglecting a newborn baby, and it earned her a Gender Justice Uncovered award for "advancing the rights of women and girls."
READ MORE: UN Judge, Onetime Columbia University Human Rights Fellow, Found Guilty of Slavery
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