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The election of Iran's next president will take place a year early, on June 28, following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month. The vote will lead the Islamic republic towards a new leadership amid internal discontent, voter apathy and regional turmoil.While the country's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has the final say on all state matters, the Iranian president sets domestic policy and has some influence on foreign policy.Here’s what to know about Friday’s presidential election in Iran. Why are these elections important?The election offers Iran’s leadership an opportunity to demonstrate that it can handle a disaster like the unexpected death of a president without destabilizing the country, despite domestic protests and tensions with the United St...

The hard-fought resolution of thousands of lawsuits against Purdue Pharma came close to collapsing Thursday after the Supreme Court rejected liability protections for the company's owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family. The ruling effectively prevents the release of billions of dollars that could help alleviate the harm of opioid addiction.The future of the cases, some of which date back a decade, is now in limbo as states, local governments, tribes and more than 100,000 individuals who have sued the company, best known for its painkiller OxyContin, try to figure out their next moves.The court struck down a condition the Sacklers had long insisted on: immunity from all current and future opioid lawsuits in exchange for payments of up to $6 billion to the plaintiffs.In a st...

May has been a particularly deadly month for the Russian military in Ukraine, with an average of more than 1,000 soldiers wounded or killed every day, according to U.S., British and other Western intelligence agencies.But despite the losses, Russia is recruiting 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month — about as many as are leaving the battlefield, U.S. officials said. This allowed his army to continue sending waves of troops against Ukrainian defenses, hoping to overwhelm them and break through the trenches.It's a style of warfare that Russian soldiers have likened to being put through a meat grinder, with commanding officers seemingly unaware that they are sending infantry soldiers to their deaths.At times, this approach proved effective, leading the Russian army to victories at Avdii...

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Central Tehran is ablaze this week with posters and billboards for the six candidates in Friday’s presidential election, and the streets are packed with buses carrying supporters to campaign rallies, but it’s hard to muster any enthusiasm for voting, much less for any individual candidate.Iranians will go to the polls in a special election to choose the successor to former president Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.The election comes at a critical time for Iran’s leadership. The economy has been weakened by years of sanctions, and under Raisi’s ultraconservative leadership, personal freedoms and expressions of dissent have been increasingly repressed. Yet the government is eager to persuade more Iranians to show up to the polls in large numbers because voter turnout is ...

The Supreme Court appears poised to temporarily allow emergency abortions in Idaho when a woman's health is at risk, according to a copy of what appeared to be the opinion that appeared briefly Wednesday on the court's website.The unsigned opinion dismissed the case on procedural grounds, saying the court would not, for now, address the merits of the dispute, according to the 22-page document, published by Bloomberg News. Such a decision would reinstate a lower federal court ruling that had suspended Idaho's near-total abortion ban and said the state's hospitals could perform emergency abortions if necessary to protect the mother's health.The case centers on whether a federal law requiring emergency care for any patient trumps Idaho's strict abortion ban, which bar...

In his nearly 15 months in Moscow's infamous Lefortovo prison, Evan Gershkovich explored Russian literary classics like "War and Peace" and played chess slowly by mail with his father in the United States. He tries to stay fit during the hour of exercise he is allowed each day.Friends who correspond with him describe Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, as positive, strong and rarely discouraged, despite facing the official wrath of President Vladimir V. Putin's Russia.“He may have ups and downs like everyone else, but he remains confident in himself, in his rightness,” said Maria Borzunova, a Russian journalist and friend of Mr. Gershkovich.Mr. Gershkovich went on trial Wednesday, facing up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. Stat...

The Supreme Court handed the Biden administration a major practical victory Wednesday, rejecting a Republican challenge that sought to block the government from reaching out to social media platforms to combat what it said was misinformation.The court ruled that the states and users who had objected to such interactions had not suffered the kind of direct harm that gave them the right to sue.The decision, by a vote of 6 to 3, left for another day fundamental questions about what limits the First Amendment places on the government's power to influence technology companies that are the primary gatekeepers of information in the Internet age .The case arose from a flurry of communications from administration officials urging the platforms to remove posts on topics such as the coronavirus v...

Tuesday's ruling by Israel's Supreme Court ending a decades-long exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews from the country's military service could herald a seismic shift in the country's trajectory, with social, political and security implications.The ruling will likely further test Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's fragile governing coalition, which depends on the support of two ultra-Orthodox parties that support the exemption, even as Israel is at war in Gaza.The issue of the ultra-Orthodox exemption has long polarized a country where most Jewish 18-year-olds, both men and women, are conscripted for years of compulsory service. Mainstream Israelis have long chafed at the lack of equality.More recently, the months-long war in Gaza and looming conflicts on other fronts ha...

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, called on a government watchdog to investigate why insurance companies continue to charge women for birth control, a move that brought access to contraceptives back into the spotlight.In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, the senator noted that insurance companies are charging Americans for contraceptives that, under federal law, should be free — and that they are also denying appeals from consumers seeking to have their contraceptives covered. Some experts estimate that such practices could affect access to birth control for millions of women.Since 2012, the Affordable Care Act has required that private insurance plans cover the “full range” of Food and Drug Administration-approved contr...