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 Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty ImagesKHARKIV, Ukraine—After months of infighting on Capitol Hill, President Joe Biden has finally been able to sign off on a huge new $61 billion military aid bill for Ukraine. Delays to the bill, which got bogged down in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, were widely blamed for impacting Kyiv's ability to defend itself from Russian advances.
After its passage last week, some members of the House waved Ukrainian flags while others cheered in celebration that Ukraine will soon receive new weapons ahead of Russia's expected counteroffensive. Signing it into law at a White House ceremony on Wednesday, Biden promised the arms shipments would begin immediately and hailed what he called "a good day for world peace."
The reaction here, near the front lines of the war, felt very different.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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Donald Trump's comments marked his latest downplaying of a 2017 white supremacist event that he declared had "very fine people on both sides."
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 Reuters/Elijah NouvelageVideo taken by a witness and confirmed by local reporters captured the moment Noëlle McAfee, the chair of Emory University's philosophy department, was dragged from a pro-Palestine campus protest in handcuffs Thursday evening—as she called on a student to let her peers know she'd been arrested.
McAfee, who's also the president-elect of the Emory University Senate, can be heard calling out to a stranger—who recorded the whole ordeal—and telling him she was merely observing the protest and was not participating.
While McAfee spoke, she was drug in the opposite direction down a sidewalk by an officer who'd concealed his face with a balaclava. The onlooker recording repeatedly told her he was sorry as she was whisked away.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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Student protests calling for university divestment from Israel and the U.S. arms industry have rocked campuses from coast to coast. The nonviolent protests, which have been characterized as "antisemitic" for their criticism of Israel, have been met with an intensifying police crackdown as university administrators threaten academic discipline and arrests. On Wednesday, local and state troopers violently arrested dozens at the University of Texas at Austin. Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University in New York City, the site of a high-profile student encampment and one of the first to be met with police action, where he called on university president Minouche Shafik to resign. We hear from two Jewish students involved in protests at their schools. Joshua Sklar, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and an organizer with Jewish Voice of Peace Austin, says concern over campus antisemitism is insincere, and that, in fact, "The people who are being targeted are Muslim students, Arab students, and especially Palestinian students." Sklar and Sarah King, a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest who was arrested at the campus's Gaza Solidarity Encampment, also point out that a large percentage of protesters are Jewish anti-Zionists concerned about their safety from state repression. "The threat is really coming from Columbia University, which has set the police on hundreds of its students who are entrusted to its care," says King.
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 Elijah Nouvelage/Getty ImagesDemonstrators at Emory University protesting in support of Palestinians and against a planned "Cop City" training center were subject to increasingly violent arrests on Thursday as Atlanta police attempted to shut down their protests.
Around 10:20 a.m., officers from the Emory Police Department, Atlanta Police Department, and state troopers used tear gas, tasers, and zip ties to disperse an encampment set up that morning on the university's quad, Emory's student-run newspaper The Emory Wheel reported.
One disturbing video from the event showed a trio of police officers tasing a protester, who was handcuffed and held down on the ground.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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Amnesty International has released its annual report assessing human rights in 155 countries. The report highlights Israel's assault on Gaza with evidence of war crimes continuing to mount, as well as U.S. failures to denounce rights violations committed by Israel. It also points to Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine, and the rise of authoritarianism and massive rights violations in Sudan, Ethiopia and Myanmar. We speak to Agnès Callamard, the organization's secretary general, who warns "the international system is on the brink of collapse" and decries the failure of rights mechanisms and Israel's top ally, the United States, to rein in its "unprecedented" assault on Gaza.
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