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Police in New York have cleared a pro-Palestinian protest by students at Barnard College’s library after a fake bomb threat.
The New York police department said the threat was reported at the upper Manhattan college’s Milstein Center, which serves as the hub for academic life on campus. The department said anyone refusing to leave during the evacuation would be subject to arrest.
Barnard’s president denounced the protest, Associated Press reports. Student organizers say they launched the protest in response to the expulsions of student activists and other recent actions taken by school officials.
In a separate development, Columbia University is reported to have launched a flurry of investigations, led by a new disciplinary committee to identify students who have expressed criticism of Israel.
In a chilling infringement on the right to protest and free speech, in recent weeks it has sent notices to dozens of students for activities ranging from sharing social media posts in support of Palestinian people to joining so-called “unauthorized” protests. One student activist is under investigation for putting up stickers off campus, another faces sanction for co-hosting an art exhibition off campus that focused on last spring’s occupation of a campus building.
Columbia University senior Maryam Alwan has been accused of harassment, having wirtten an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for divestment from Israel. “It just felt so dystopian to have something go through rigorous edits, only to be labeled discriminatory because it’s about Palestine,” said Alwan, a Palestinian-American comparative studies major. “It made me not want to write or say anything on the subject anymore.”
Associated Press reports that Jewish students are among those under investigation for criticizing Israel.
Department of Education braces amid reports of imminent closure order
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that president Donald Trump is expected this week to direct the secretary of education to dissolve the US Department of Education by executive order, according to reports.
ABC News reports that sources familiar with a draft of the executive order say it instructs Linda McMahon to close the department by taking all the available steps “permitted by law”.
McMahon herself has previously suggested it would require congressional approval to shutter the department, which has over 4,000 employees and an annual budget of about $240bn.
ABC News reports the draft order says “The federal bureaucratic hold on education must end. The department of education’s main functions can, and should, be returned to the states.”
The order is then reported to describe the agency as an “experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars.”
Education has been a cabinet level department in the federal government since the 1860s, with the department taking its present form in 1980 after a reorganisation by the late president Jimmy Carter.
Trump’s order is expected to say that this has “failed our children, our teachers, and our families”. McMahon is a former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment.
In other developments:
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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has said that Republicans cannot meet their own budget target to pass Trump’s legislative priorities without imposing cuts on Medicare or Medicaid
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Hundreds of diplomats at the state department and US Agency for International Development USAid have written to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, protesting against the dismantling of USAid, saying it undermines US leadership and security and leaves power vacuums for China and Russia to fill
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The supreme court has upheld a federal judge’s order that USAid disburse $1.5b in payments to its partners, a setback in the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the agency
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US president Donald Trump has temporarily spared carmakers from sweeping US tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, one day after an economic strike on the US’s two biggest trading partners sparked warnings of widespread price increases and disruption
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An independent federal board has ordered the US Department of Agriculture to temporarily reinstate nearly 6,000 employees who were fired as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce
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A congressional hearing designed to criticize sanctuary city policies unexpectedly shifted yesterday, as a planned attack by Republican lawmakers instead dissolved into a platform that amplified Democratic mayors’ arguments about immigration and urban safety
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Trump has posted a fresh ultimatum to Hamas, bypassing the Israeli-Hamas negotiating teams, demanding the release of all hostages held in Gaza. The White House confirmed that the US is in direct negotiations with Hamas for the first time since the group was formed, despite it being a designated foreign terrorist organization since 1997
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Senate Democrats introduced a series of resolutions condemning Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, and daring Republicans to object. Republicans did object
