Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
Columbia University's embattled president came under renewed pressure on Friday as a campus oversight panel sharply criticized her administration for clamping down on a pro-Palestinian protest at the Ivy League school.
President Nemat Minouche Shafik has faced an outcry from many students, faculty and outside observers for summoning New York police to dismantle a tent encampment set up on campus by protesters against Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza.
After a two-hour meeting on Friday, the Columbia University Senate, approved a resolution that Shafik's administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members by calling in the police and shutting down the protest.
"The decision ... has raised serious concerns about the administration's respect for shared governance and transparency in the university decision-making process," it said.
The senate, composed mostly of faculty members and other staff plus a few students, did not name Shafik in its resolution and avoided the harsher language of a censure.
There was no immediate response to the resolution from Shafik, who is a member of the senate but did not attend Friday's meeting. Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang said the administration shared the same goal as the Senate -- to restore calm to the campus -- and was committed to "an ongoing dialog."
Police arrested more than 100 people that day and removed the tents from the main lawn of the school's Manhattan campus, but the protesters quickly returned and set up tents again, narrowing Columbia's options on dismantling the encampment.
Since then, hundreds of protesters have been arrested at schools from California to Boston as students set up camps similar to the one at Columbia, demanding that their schools divest from companies involved with Israel's military.
Like-minded protests against Israel's actions have spread overseas. At the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, pro-Israeli protesters came to challenge pro-Palestinian students occupying the building on Friday. Police kept the two sides apart.
A few blocks from the White House, about 200 protesters at George Washington University remained gathered for a second day on Friday. The school said students did not follow directions to leave and several were temporarily suspended and barred from campus.
The White House has defended free speech on campus, but Democratic President Joe Biden denounced "antisemitic protests" this week and stressed that campuses must be safe.
Some Republicans in Congress have accused Shafik and other university administrators of being too soft on protesters and allowing Jewish students to be harassed on their campuses.
State troopers try to break up a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Texas, April 24, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Jay Janner / Austin American-Statesman via AP)
The president of the University of Texas at Austin, Jay Hartzell, faced a similar backlash from faculty on Friday, two days after he joined with Republican Governor Greg Abbott in calling in police to break up a pro-Palestinian protest.
Dozens of protesters were taken into custody, but charges were dropped because authorities lacked probable cause -- or reasonable grounds -- for making the arrests, the Travis County Attorney's office said.
Nearly 200 university faculty members signed a letter expressing no confidence in Hartzell because he "needlessly put students, staff and faculty in danger" when police in riot gear and on horseback moved against the protesters.
Hartzell said he made the decision because protest organizers aimed to "severely disrupt" the campus for a long period.
The clash in Texas was one of many this week between demonstrators and police summoned by university leaders, who say the protests jeopardize the safety of students and at times, subject Jewish students to antisemitism and harassment.
Civil rights groups have condemned the arrests and urged authorities to respect free speech rights.
But one member of the encampment at Columbia, Khymani James, on Friday apologized for saying in a January social media video that "Zionists don't deserve to live."
"What I said was wrong," James said in a statement. "Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification." A university spokesman said James had been banned from campus and faced disciplinary action.
Three protesters were arrested for criminal trespass at an encampment at Arizona State University, the university said.
(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York, Kia Johnson and Doina Chiacu in Washington, Andrew Hay in N.M., Jonathan Allen in New York and Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colo.; Editing by Frank McGurty and Bill Berkrot)
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.