Tehran: Iran’s Intelligence Ministry has said its probe found no actual poisoning in the mass reports of students being poisoned at schools across the country.
The Ministry said on Friday in a statement published on its website that no toxic substance was found disseminated at schools after months of investigations into the incidents, during which suspects were either questioned or arrested and transferred to judicial authorities.
It added that the probe found no criminal groups were behind the poisoning cases, but dubious networks on social media which spread rumours to fuel fears and dissatisfaction among students’ parents, Xinhua news agency reported.
The Ministry noted these networks are either being or will be sued, claiming Iran’s enemy has played an evident and undeniable role in provoking turmoil.
During the past months, hundreds of students at dozens of schools across Iran were referred to medical centres with symptoms similar to those of poisoning. Most of the students said they had smelled either an unpleasant or a weird odour before the emergence of the symptoms. The first case was reported in Qom province on November 30, according to reports by Iranian media.
Most of the students were, however, soon released from the hospital after receiving treatment, according to the official news agency IRNA.
A word of advice for anyone who has worked hard to acquire a reputation they cherish: if Boris Johnson approaches, if he comes anywhere near, run a mile. Richard Sharp is the latest proof that, even out of office, Johnson continues to act as reputational napalm, laying waste to careers and turning good names bad.
Sharp joins a long list that includes Christopher Geidt, who had the poison task of serving as Johnson’s adviser on ethics; Allegra Stratton, whom the former prime minister said had “sickened” him when she joked about a party in Downing Street, even though he had attended several himself; and the one-time rising star civil servant and current cabinet secretary, Simon Case, quoted this week as having said of Johnson, “I don’t know what more I can do to stand up to a prime minister who lies”. Each entered Johnson’s circle as a respected figure; each was diminished by their contact with the reverse Midas, the man who rots everything he touches.
One question left by Sharp’s resignation as chair of the BBC is: what took him so long? He hardly needed to wait for today’s report by Adam Heppinstall KC, with its verdict that Sharp’s failure to disclose his role in brokering an £800,000 loan arrangement for Johnson represented “a breach of the governance code”, to know that he could not possibly continue in a job whose defining duty is to maintain the independence of the BBC. As the former director general John Birt said a month ago, Sharp was “unsuitable” for the role, thanks to “navigating a loan for the prime minister at exactly the same time as applying for the job at the BBC. It’s the cosiness of that arrangement that made it unsuitable, and I wish the cabinet secretary had called it out.” (The cabinet secretary being Case, serially Midased by Johnson.)
According to those inside the BBC, Sharp had been a capable chair. But the manner of his appointment meant he could never do the job properly. Witness last month’s row over Gary Lineker’s tweet, aimed at Suella Braverman’s language on migrants. That was a moment when you might expect the chair to lead from the front, publicly explaining either why impartiality is central to the BBC’s mission or why it was vital that the BBC not succumb to government pressure – or both. Instead, Sharp was mute and invisible, too hopelessly compromised as the man who had helped bail out a fiscally incontinent Tory prime minister to say a word.
It’s baffling that all of this did not occur to Sharp himself long ago – including right at the start, when he submitted his job application and was required to identify any conflicts, or perceived conflicts, of interest. The fact that he didn’t mention his role in the Johnson loan, even though he had discussed the issue with Case, suggests he knew that it looked bad – that it would give rise to the “perception that Mr Sharp would not be independent from the former prime minister, if appointed,” as Heppinstall puts it. Given he knew the importance of perceived, as well as actual, neutrality for the BBC, that silence was itself disqualifying.
‘Many have been diminished by their contact with Boris Johnson the reverse Midas, the man who rots everything he touches.’ Photograph: Charles McQuillan/PA
His grudging resignation statement suggests the penny has still not dropped. Dominic Raab may have started a fashion for passive-aggressive Friday departures, because Sharp was insistent that his breach of the rules was “inadvertent and not material”. Still, he invited our admiration for his decision “to prioritise the interests of the BBC” since “this matter may well be a distraction from the corporation’s good work were I to remain in post”. Er, yes, just a bit. Again, if preventing a distraction was Sharp’s concern, he should have gone the moment this story broke. As it is, he’s left multiple questions still to answer – including whether Johnson should not have recused himself from the appointment process on the grounds that he had an egregious conflict of interest, given that he knew Sharp had helped him out with the loan.
What’s needed now is not just a new BBC chair, but a new way of doing things. Even if he hadn’t got involved in Johnson’s personal finances, Sharp was hardly a non-partisan figure. He is a longtime, high-value donor to the Tory party, to the tune of £400,000. True, political parties, Labour included, have been appointing allies and chums to this role since the 1960s, but that practice needs to stop. Lineker distilled the case nicely: “The BBC chairman should not be selected by the government of the day. Not now, not ever.”
This goes wider than the BBC: there’s a slew of public jobs that might appear to be independently appointed, but that are quietly filled on the nod, or whim, of Downing Street. But it’s with the BBC that independence matters acutely. To understand why, look across the Atlantic.
This week’s announcement by Joe Bidenthat he will seek a second term had to fight for media attention with the firing of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. That’s because Carlson had become second only to Donald Trump in influence over the Republican party, able to make senior elected officials and aspirant presidential candidates bend to his agenda and ideological obsessions – even when mainstreaming previously fringe, and racist, ideas like the “great replacement theory”, with its claim of a deliberate, if shadowy, plot to replace white Americans with a more diverse and pliant electorate.
Fox News itself, with its repeated amplification of the big lie of a stolen election, is partly responsible for why nearly two-thirds of Republican voters do not believe a demonstrable fact: namely, that Biden won office in a free and fair contest in 2020. Today’s America is a land of epistemic tribalism: knowledge is not shared across the society, but rather dependent on political affiliation. There are red state facts and blue state facts, and which you believe comes down to which media you consume – which social media accounts you follow, which TV networks you watch.
In Britain, there have been efforts to lead us down that gloomy path. There are partisan, polemical TV channels now, desperate to do to Britain what Fox has done to America. And Johnson was Trumpian in his contempt for the truth, determined to create a world of Brexit facts that would exist in opposition to the real one. But if those efforts have largely failed – and if Johnson was eventually undone by his lies – that is partly down to the stubborn persistence in this country of a source of information that is regarded by most people as, yes, flawed and, yes, inconsistent, but broadly reliable and fair. Trust levels in the BBC are not what they were, and that demands urgent attention, but it is striking nonetheless that, according to a Reuters Institute study, aside from local news, BBC News is the most trusted news brand in the US. It seems that in an intensely polarised landscape, people thirst for a non-partisan source.
The BBC should be defended – and that process starts with governments treating it as the publicly funded broadcaster it is, rather than the state broadcaster some wrongly imagine it to be. That means giving up the power to pick its boss – and getting politicians out of the way. The BBC is a precious thing – so precious, we might not fully appreciate it until it’s gone.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
I am a woman in my late 30s, married with two small children with a rewarding and demanding career. I live some hours’ drive away from where I grew up and where my mum lives. I really love my life but I need some advice regarding my relationship with my mum.
My lovely dad died last year. He was much loved and I miss him a great deal, but he gave me so much over his lifetime that I am doing OK without him. My family has probably had more loss than most. One sister died before I was born, and another older sister in her early 30s.
My mum has called the loss of my dad the hardest of all – she says it compounds all the other losses (she was dealing fairly well with them all before his death). I love her very much but I feel responsible for her and guilty that I live so far away. She’s upset that we don’t live closer. She is in her mid-70s, in good health but always tired. She has an excellent friendship network, including great neighbours.
She wants to be thought of as helpful to me with the kids (but she isn’t really). I feel I have to tiptoe around her, validate her and let her critical comments go over my head. I often dread seeing her, but know I shouldn’t given I am all she has left. I feel very guilty about our relationship, but also powerless.
I feel I need to try harder, be kinder and more patient, but I really am trying my hardest and I do suspect that actually she is a bit angry with me and is pretty mean to me from time to time. I can’t win.
What a huge amount of loss you and your mother have suffered. I am so sorry. You are treading a very tight line and one a lot of readers will recognise, the one between retaining some sanity for yourself but being a “good enough” daughter. All while grieving.
Your mother probably has a lot of “caring” to give that is now fully focused in your direction; and I would guess she is actually quite scared to fully let herself care for you for fear of another loss, hence also being mean (this is not an excuse however). But you are not responsible for your mother. You have your own losses to deal with and you have young children and they are your priority. If you deplete yourself you won’t have very much left for yourself/your children.
I consulted clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist Poul Rohleder. He noted immediately the loss of a child born before you. “Maybe even as a baby you picked up an emotional atmosphere, that there was a grief you had to make better.” Babies are masters at picking up moods and non-verbal cues.
We wondered what growing up was like and if you felt the burden of making your mum happy, and if being with your mother [now] is possibly a reminder of the pain you want to get away from yourself?
Rohleder wondered how much your losses had been spoken of and how much your own grief “has been worked through. Sometimes it’s helpful to move away from pain but sometimes we have to face into it, and work through it.”
Have you and your mum (separately – Rohleder thought it was important for you to untangle your grief from your mum’s) looked into bereavement counselling? Perhaps if your mum had somewhere to “bring” her grief that would be one less thing for you to worry about.
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I also wondered what you were looking for with your mum? Can you accept that some visits/conversations won’t be ideal? Do you feel that she will die if you don’t stay in touch? That’s a very “young” feeling – that if you abandon her or ignore her, she will suffer – and one you may have picked up as a child.
A few practical solutions: is there an adopt a granny scheme where you live? Could your mum get a pet – it sounds trite but can work wonders. I’d also like you to listen to this podcast I did on dealing with a difficult older parent which may help.
Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.
Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article. Please be aware that there may be a short delay in comments appearing on the site.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Tucker Carlson, the far-right TV host whose embrace of racist conspiracy theories came to signify a shift further towards the right at Fox News, leaves behind a legacy of mainstreaming extremism after exiting the channel, and speculation is turning to any next step in an incendiary career.
The departure of Carlson, Fox News’ most-watched and highest-profile host, came as a shock. It is the second seismic moment at the news channel in a matter of days, after Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5m settlement to Dominion Voting Systems last week after airing election conspiracy theories.
Fox News announced the split in a terse statement on Monday, stating that the channel and Carlson had “agreed to part ways”. But the pithiness of the statement barely hinted at the dubious repercussions of Carlson’s seven-year tenure as a regular host: a spell in which he seemed to grow into a force that Fox News wouldn’t, or couldn’t, control.
“Tucker Carlson basically leaves a superhighway to the rightwing fever swamps,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, an organization that monitors rightwing media.
“Tucker took things from what otherwise would have been considered the fringes: Infowars [a far-right conspiracy theory website], these white nationalist communities online, he took that content and laundered it into the Fox News ecosystem, and basically built up an appetite for this amongst the Fox News audience.
“And once they sort of got a taste for blood, that’s all they wanted. That’s going to be a challenge for Fox moving forward, but what’s his legacy? His legacy is bloodthirstiness and bigotry.”
Carlson’s eponymous show, which aired at 8pm ET, averaged more than 3 million viewers a night, and was generally the most watched cable news program.
The 53-year-old might have been an unlikely hero to Fox News’ coastal-elite loathing audience. A multimillionaire who was privately educated in California, Switzerland and the Waspy environs of New England, Carlson hosted most of his shows from a specially built studio in Maine, where he spends much of the year (he also has a home in Florida).
Yet night after night, millions tuned in to watch Carlson’s furious, reddening face, under a neatly parted, country club hairstyle, as he fed viewers a daily dose of fury and victimhood and painted a dystopian picture of America.
Among Carlson’s most passionately pursued topics was the idea – contrary to all able evidence – that white people were being persecuted in the US.
Rupert Murdoch reportedly forced Carlson out in connection with a discrimination lawsuit. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
Across his tenure at Fox News, Carlson pushed the concept of the great replacement theory – which states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with people of color, in an effort to achieve political aims – in more than 400 of his shows, a New York Times analysis found.
“No singular voice in rightwing media has done more to elevate this racist conspiracy theory than Tucker,” Joy Reid, a MSNBC host, said in 2022, and his peddling of the claim brought multiple calls for him to be fired across the years, all of which Fox News ignored.
“Carlson positioned himself as the voice of the Maga base of the party and really leaned into the kinds of conspiracy theories, the white nationalist ideas that he thought would appeal to that base,” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.
“He really was able to give a voice to this kind of grievance that Donald Trump was so good at tapping into. It was Tucker Carlson who was out there saying: ‘They’re coming for you, white people.’”
Far-right host Tucker Carlson leaves Fox News in surprise announcement – video report
Fox News gave no indication as to the reason for splitting with Carlson, but on Monday the Los Angeles Times reported that Rupert Murdoch, the omnipotent chairman of Fox Corporation – the parent company of Fox News – had forced Carlson out of the news channel in relation to a looming discrimination lawsuit.
Another thing that may not have helped were the embarrassing disclosures of Carlson’s text messages and emails, published as part of the Dominion lawsuit. Those messages revealed that privately Carlson held very different views from those he espoused on air, including about Donald Trump.
“I hate him passionately,” Carlson said of the former president, describing Trump’s behavior in the weeks following the 2020 election as “disgusting”.
In another text, Carlson said of “the last four years” under Trump: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
It is difficult to say what comes next for Carlson. Newsmax and One America News Network, two other rightwing cable news channels, could be possible homes, but they have a much smaller audience, and would probably be unable to match Fox News’ salary.
“I don’t think he goes to a competing cable network,” Carusone said.
“He’s too sensitive to ratings and that would be an embarrassment – they could never match the ratings, they could never give him the reach.”
One thing that is likely, however, is that Carlson “attacks Fox”, Carusone said.
“He wasn’t shy about attacking his colleagues and management when he was at a company – he’s certainly not going to be shy about attacking them now,” Carusone said.
The idea of an aggressive response is “tightly tied into his brand”, Carusone said “And he’s also just a venomous, spiteful guy, so the reflex will be to take a shot.”
Carlson’s unexpected departure meant he had no opportunity to say goodbye to his viewers. On Friday, in what turned out to be his last show, he had once more voiced that issue which is so close to his heart: the great replacement theory.
“The defining strategic insight of the modern Democratic party is they don’t really need to convince anyone of anything,” Carlson said in his monologue on Friday’s show.
“What matters is demographics. To import enough people from elsewhere, people who are financially dependent on you in order to live.”
Perhaps Carlson can take some comfort in knowing that his persona on Fox died as he lived: sitting in a TV studio, looking upset, and pushing a racist conspiracy theory to an increasingly rabid rightwing audience.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
United Nations: China’s influence at the world body — a barometer of its global clout — measured by a recent secret electoral vote has shown a downward drift even as it maintains an iron grip on power at the Security Council because of its veto powers.
China went head-to-head against India in elections at the 53-member UN Economic and Social Council for the UN Statistical Commission India polled 46 votes, while China came in third with 19 votes, behind South Korea with 23.
And in a second round of balloting for the second seat on the commission for the Asia Pacific region, China tied with South Korea with 25 votes each, and Seoul got the seat in a draw of lots.
It was a big change for China pushing its goal of global dominance.
The difference between New Delhi and Beijing is stark in a changed situation where China’s largesse increasingly looks like a usurious power play while India is leading the efforts to restructure the crushing debts of the developing countries.
Beijing poured hundreds of billions of dollars into its web of One Belt One Road initiative across the world and the bills are coming due to the recipients.
As the president of the G20, India has positioned itself as the voice of the Global South, while avoiding strident anti-imperialist/anti-neocolonial rhetoric, and this has put India on the opposite side to China, which probably is the biggest direct lender, although other countries and multinational institutions are also in the ranks of lenders..
At the G20 finance ministers meeting in February, India pushed proposals for the big lenders — especially China — to take a “haircut”, write off portions of loans, to give relief to the debtor nations as they struggle from the economic crisis from the Covid pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war.
At the International Monetary Fund-World Bank meetings in Washington this month, India again took centre stage as a co-chair with the heads of those organisations of the Global Sovereign Debt Restructuring Roundtable to find a solution to the debt crisis.
As global polarisation accelerates, China is the leading force on one side of the divide and in a choice between India and China, especially if the ballot is secret, the preference appears to be to the sort of neutral country.
To counter China’s attempts to get elected to international bodies, especially in leadership positions, the foreign ministers of the Quad, made up of India, the US, Japan and Australia, declared their commitment last month to “independent” candidates.
After their meeting, they said in a joint statement: “We will support meritorious and independent candidates for elections in the UN and in international forums to maintain the integrity and impartiality of the international system.”
While China’s grip may loosen in anonymous elections, in open voting it still can use its position as a lender to advantage as it did at the UN Human Rights Council last October when a proposal to discuss China’s alleged human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang province was voted down.
It has a steely hold on the most important body of the UN, the Security Council where it can wield its veto as a permanent member or like any member on its committees like the ones for terrorism sanctions.
It has blocked several times attempts to designate Pakistan-based operatives behind attacks on India as global terrorists, which would place them under international sanctions.
But it has had to relent in some cases under international pressure.
Beijing agreed in January to designating Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) Deputy Chief Abdul Rehman Makki after having blocked it earlier.
In 2019, China lifted its block on Masood Azhar of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
But it continues to block adding to the international terrorist list LeT leaders Sajid Mir and Shahid Mahmood, and JeM leader Abdul Rauf Azhar.
In the long-range, Beijing can also block the expansion of the Security Council’s permanent membership, although it is already facing pressure from the African nations, a constituency it ha sought to cultivate.
Organisationally, China uses the power of the purse for influence. It is the second largest contributor to the UN’s budget sending $438 million last year.
It gets it a measure of deference from UN officials.
The former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet admitted that she had been under “tremendous pressure” over a report on China’s human rights violations against the Uyghurs.
She published the report only on her last day in office after delaying its release for several years.
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Matthew Karnitschnig is POLITICO’s chief Europe correspondent.
BERLIN — Europe’s worst-kept secret is that the Germans ultimately decide everything.
“I’ll never forget how all the other member states held back in anticipation, waiting to see what the Germans would do,” a senior U.K. official, recalling his time in Brussels, recently told a private dinner of MPs and other German officials in Berlin.
The recollection was meant as a compliment, one the official hoped would ingratiate him with the Germans around the table.
Sad thing is it worked.
The second worst-kept secret in Brussels is that for all the “peace project” kumbaya, the Germans actually enjoy dominating the place. That said, even stalwart veterans of the EU bubble were hard-pressed in recent days to cite a more blatant example of toxic Germanity than Berlin’s last-minute intervention to save the internal combustion engine.
To recap: Last week, EU countries were expected to rubber-stamp a package of measures aimed at ridding Europe’s roads of fuel-burning autos. Under the plan, the EU would prohibit new registrations of cars powered by internal combustion engines beginning in 2035. The sweeping deal, the culmination of years of painstaking negotiations in Brussels and European capitals, is a pillar of the EU’s ambitious goal to become carbon neutral by 2050.
Berlin’s 11th-hour intervention on a deal everyone believed was done and dusted not only left the EU’s environmental policy in limbo, it also laid bare the bloc’s power vertical in all its dubious Teutonic glory. The message: Germany is no longer even trying to hide its power.
Enter France.
“For the French, the situation also represents an opportunity and they are never ones to waste a good crisis,” an EU diplomat said. “The more they can contribute to the idea that Germany goes it alone, the more it strengthens the view that the Germans are an unreliable partner in Europe.”
Germany’s unprecedented move has given rise to fears that other countries will try to follow its example and hold EU reforms hostage by threatening a last-minute veto to win concessions, in effect rewriting the rules of engagement.
Germans may not be known for their finesse, but even so, Berlin’s bare-knuckle tactics to save the engine have not just shocked Brussels veterans, it’s angered them.
That’s why the real significance of the standoff has less to do with CO2 emissions than how Brussels works. One big concern among EU insiders is that the coalition Germany has assembled to save the car, which includes the likes of Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, will go rogue as a bloc on other fronts, with or without German support.
Berlin’s views on “the future of mobility” were so clear that Mercedes, VW and BMW pledged to shift to all-electric by 2035 | Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images
It’s easy to mock the circuitous nature of EU decision-making, the push and pull between the European Commission, Parliament and Council, communicated in the opaque dialect of Brussels’ earnest eurocrats.
Boring as it may be, the alchemy produces bona fide results that legitimize and sustain the EU.
That Germany is willing to tinker with this delicate balance betrays either ignorance in the current regime of how the EU works, ambivalence, or both.
One could argue with justification that Germany was never going to kill the golden goose. Invented and perfected in Germany over more than a century by the likes of Mercedes, BMW and Audi, the internal combustion engine has been the wellspring of German pride and prosperity for generations.
The image of a piston-fired Porsche 911 zooming down the autobahn is as core to German identity as sex is to the French.
Take that away, what’s left (aside from beer and bratwurst)?
Indeed, considering that the country’s automakers haven’t proved particularly adept at manufacturing electric cars (or more specifically the batteries at the heart of the vehicles), there was a strong case for Germany to develop low-emission synthetic fuels that would keep the internal combustion engine alive.
Berlin had at least a decade to do so.
Thing is, it didn’t, choosing instead to pour billions into subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles and the infrastructure to recharge them (full disclosure: the author is a beneficiary of such a subsidy).
What’s more, Germany also encouraged other European countries to follow suit. In fact, Berlin’s views on “the future of mobility” were so clear that Mercedes, VW and BMW pledged to shift to all-electric by 2035. The cluster of countries that have served as the workbench for those companies, from Slovakia to Hungary and Austria, all agreed to go along.
That’s why the German insistence this month that the EU carve out an exception to the engine ban for cars powered by synthetic, so-called e-fuels has caught the rest of Europe flat-footed.
Why now? In a word, politics.
Germans may not be known for their finesse, but even so, Berlin’s bare-knuckle tactics to save the engine have not just shocked Brussels veterans, it’s angered them | John Thys/AFP
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats have dropped below 20 percent in a number of recent polls, putting them more than 10 percentage points behind the first-place Christian Democrats.
Scholz’s smallest coalition partner, the business-oriented Free Democrats (FDP), are in even worse shape. The party fared miserably in a string of recent regional elections and in national polls, it is teetering perilously close to the 5 percent threshold parties need to surpass for entry into parliament.
Party leader Christian Lindner, who used to drive souped-up Porsches around the storied Nürburgring race track, has vowed to save the engine from the clutches of the Green lobby.
Scholz, keenly aware that his party’s base also remains attached to “das Auto,” has been happy to let him try and has so far not stepped in to intervene.
About 1 million Germans work in the auto industry and many of those jobs — especially at suppliers — would be lost if the engine is killed for the simple reason that electric cars have far fewer (and different) parts than traditional automobiles.
The real mystery is why the Greens, the other party in Germany’s governing triumvirate, have not done more to resolve the crisis. Not only has the environmental party championed the engine ban for years, but it is also the most pro-European party in the government and would normally be at pains to keep Berlin from even appearing to undermine Brussels.
Yet Green Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck has largely been silent on the issue. Far from the fray in Europe, he was last spotted in the Amazon having his face painted by an indigenous girl during a swing through the region.
In a bid to defuse the standoff ahead of next week’s EU leaders’ summit, the German government sent a letter to the Commission on Wednesday, spelling out what it wants in return for lifting its blockade. Its chief demand — a broad exception for e-fuels — was already rejected by the Parliament and other institutions during the original negotiations over the package.
Reversing that would require the deal to be reopened.
The French are sure to cry foul.
And then Germany will push ahead anyway.
Joshua Posaner contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
The plan gives Norfolk Southern President and CEO Alan Shaw something to present to senators when he appears before the Senate EPW Committee Thursday — but it’s not likely to satisfy Democrats on the panel.
Most of the six-point plan to be announced Monday involves improving the equipment Norfolk Southern uses along tracks to help sense when a train’s wheels are overheating, including boosting the number of detectors and reviewing how far apart they’re spaced. The railroad also says it wants to seek industry consensus on standards for this equipment, which now are determined by individual companies. And it says it wants to accelerate research on a new automated inspection technology.
In a statement accompanying the plan, Shaw said the preliminary findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency probing the disaster, made it clear that “a comprehensive industry effort” was needed to improve safety and that Norfolk Southern is “not waiting to take action.”
But that list of actions falls far short of the changes the Biden administration is seeking — such as upgrading to a faster braking system, providing more notification to communities about hazardous materials traveling through their areas and paying workers sick leave.
The Department of Transportation has said it also doesn’t just want railroads to upgrade their automated track inspection equipment. It also wants them to stop seeking to cut back on human inspections.
The Biden administration has asked Congress to make a series of additional changes as well, including increasing the current $225,000 cap on fines for safety violations.
Raising the cap is one of the provisions included in a bill introduced last week by a bipartisan group of senators, including the delegations from Ohio and Pennsylvania where the impacts of the derailment were felt. That bill would also subject more trains that carry hazardous materials to safety regulations designed to protect communities, and would require at least two crew members on board each train — changes the railroads have fought hard to prevent.
The bill also would mandate that railroads have detectors for overheating wheels every 10 miles of track — not every 15, as included in Norfolk Southern’s action plan.
Norfolk Southern hasn’t specifically discussed the bill or DOT’s requests beyond saying that the “rail industry needs to learn as much as we can from East Palestine,” as the company said in a statement to POLITICO.
“Norfolk Southern has committed to working with industry to develop practices and technologies that could help prevent an incident like this in the future,” the statement read. “This incident requires a broad industry response, and we will also work with the owners of the rail cars on the integrity and safety of the equipment we use.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
