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Columbia Scolds Students for “Unsanctioned” Gaza Rally Where They Were Attacked With Chemicals

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Columbia Scolds Students for “Unsanctioned” Gaza Rally Where They Were Attacked With Chemicals

Administrators at Columbia University responded to reports of students being injured by a chemical attack against an on-campus rally for Gaza by chiding students for holding protests without official authorization. Meanwhile, students told The Intercept that even as the school’s public safety department has said it is investigating the incident, school administrators themselves have yet to contact the victims — some of whom have had to seek medical care for their injuries. 

During a rally on Friday, according to attendees, two individuals sprayed a hazardous chemical that released an odious smell. Dozens of students have reported an array of symptoms, such as burning eyes, nausea, headaches, abdominal and chest pain, and vomiting.

The campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine publicized the incident on Saturday morning, identifying the substance as “skunk,” a chemical weapon used by the Israel Defense Forces against Palestinians and one that U.S. police departments have reportedly acquired in the past. SJP also alleged that the assailants have ties to the Israel Defense Forces, a claim that The Intercept could not independently confirm.

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In a statement to The Intercept, a university spokesperson seemed to blame the students for the attack. “Friday’s event was unsanctioned and violated university policies and procedures which are in place to ensure there is adequate personnel on the ground to keep our community safe,” the spokesperson wrote.

The incident marks the latest escalation against students protesting for Palestinian rights at Columbia. Last semester, the university suspended the student groups Jewish Voice for Peace, or JVP, and SJP for holding an “unauthorized event” (a walkout and art display in support of a ceasefire). More broadly, students at campuses across the country have been met with university discipline and even criminal charges as they have called for their universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel’s military — or at least for their universities to have public meetings about their investments.

Public officials have devoted extensive resources to discussing reports of antisemitism on university campuses, including in a headline-grabbing congressional hearing. The repression of student protests for Gaza has gotten comparatively little attention, not to mention abject acts of violence, including the stabbing of a 6-year-old boy in suburban Chicago and shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont. 

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Rashid Khalidi, a renowned Palestinian American historian who teaches at Columbia, said that university administrators should respect the student protesters’ motivations. “For a lot of young people, this is one of the most significant events, worst humanitarian crises, certainly in their lifetimes,” said Khalidi. “And many of them have a strong sense of justice and see injustice. I think university administrators — whatever alumni and whatever donors and whatever trustees are telling them, and whatever the politicians are saying, and whatever the media bias leans towards — I think they have to respect that that’s what’s driving a lot of these students: a strong sense of injustice.”

On Monday morning, interim university provost Dennis Mitchell sent a campus-wide email that did not reference the attack but seemed to be in response to it. Mitchell noted that placing someone in, or risking, bodily harm is a violation of school rules, while also describing school rules around unauthorized protests. “Columbia University is committed to defending the right of all members of our community to safely exercise their right to expression and to invite, listen to, and challenge views, including those that may be offensive and even hurtful to many of us,” he wrote. 

The message followed a vague Sunday night statement from the school’s Department of Public Safety, which is investigating the attack after receiving reports from students. The department noted that it is working with local and federal authorities, with the New York Police Department taking the lead. The NYPD and the Department of Public Safety did not respond to requests for comment. 

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“This message does not even mention that a hazardous illegal chemical was sprayed, let alone that a hate crime occurred,” Maryam Alwan, a member of SJP, told The Intercept.

On Friday, Columbia students gathered on the steps of Low Library in below-freezing temperatures and snow flurries to demonstrate at a “divestment now” rally, organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of 94 student groups that was revived after SJP and JVP were banned. They called for financial transparency from the university, which has a $14 billion endowment, working to mobilize students for a tuition strike to push the administration to divest from companies implicated in Israel’s occupation of Palestine and retaliatory war on Gaza. (Students at Columbia College and at Barnard College voted in favor of divestment from Israel in recent years; both efforts were dismissed by the administration.)

At the protest, some Jewish students raised a banner that read “CU Jews for ceasefire.” They were approached by two individuals who called them “traitors” and “self-hating Jews,” according to Layla, a student who asked The Intercept to identify her only by her first name due to safety concerns.

“They kept on going up and harassing people. They were filming people, they were calling people Jew killers,” Layla said. “They were also referring to people as terrorists. And they really did not like my Jewish friends in particular.”

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“NYPD hasn’t made any arrests, even though we have multiple witnesses. It’s been a nightmare.”

According to students, the people who were harassing the protesters were the same ones who later sprayed the chemical. “I’ve been having to look stuff up on Reddit to figure out what’s going on. [The university] didn’t even tell us, like, ‘Oh, we should go to urgent care or anything,’” Layla said. “We were the ones that figured it out. We were the ones — I actually took the photos of the people and helped identify them. They haven’t done anything. NYPD hasn’t made any arrests, even though we have multiple witnesses. It’s been a nightmare.”

Suffering from nausea and fatigue, Layla went to urgent care over the weekend. She said she attended the protest to honor the memory of 14 of her family members who were killed by Israeli bombings on Gaza. “I wanted to attend this protest as a way to honor their memory and just to fight for the human rights of Palestinians. And I just — I never imagined it would end up this way at all. It still feels like a nightmare. And I remember there was just this mist in the air. And I remember just thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, like, it smells like somebody died.’”

Skunk is notorious for its intense side effects. “Skunk is liable to cause physical harm, such as intense nausea, vomiting and skin rashes, in addition to any injury resulting from the powerful force of the spray,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz once reported. “Examinations by police and army medical teams in the past also indicated that the excessive coughing caused by exposure can result in suffocation.”

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Layla said her account of the incident was met with skepticism by the NYPD, who asked that if the weapon was as serious as she said, why she did not go to the hospital right away. The lack of clear police action has left her and others feeling uneasy. “I don’t really feel safe, frankly, going back on campus. I’m supposed to go back on campus today to report to public safety and go to campus health, but my body — like when I went on Saturday after it happened, my body physically recoiled at being on campus.”

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Another student who is involved with JVP and requested anonymity out of safety concerns told The Intercept that while campus public safety seemed sympathetic and receptive, the NYPD investigators they spoke with were less interested.

“The frustrating part was that they seemed to not really care about what evidence we did have because no one actually saw them holding the spray canisters and using them,” the student told The Intercept. Even after another student told NYPD investigators that they saw one of the alleged perpetrators holding an object and heard a spraying sound before smelling the odor, that did not seem to be enough.

“They kept saying ‘so none of you ACTUALLY witnessed the crime?’” said the student, who is still suffering from headaches and nausea three days later. She said that she’s been unable to get the smell out of her clothes, including a coat her grandmother handed down to her before she died.

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Trump keeps decrying rampant crime. Here’s how his misleading claim has shifted.

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Trump keeps decrying rampant crime. Here’s how his misleading claim has shifted.

By former President Donald J. Trump’s account, the country is awash in crime. But in fact, under President Biden, the rate of violent crime has fallen.

It is a refrain that dates to Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, when he often cited false statistics to claim historically high murder rates and record-breaking urban crime. After he was elected, those warnings waned, even though the country had its biggest one-year increase in murder in 2020, when he was in office.

Once he lost that election, though, Mr. Trump wasted no time in falsely claiming crime records, saying in a 2022 address that “our country is now a cesspool of crime.”

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In making the case for a second term, Mr. Trump has stuck to that message, though his argument has evolved this election cycle from false claims on crime rates to an attack on the credibility of any evidence that refutes him. Here’s how.

March 2, 2024

Mr. Trump selectively homes in on crime in cities, including at a rally in Greensboro, N.C.

Mr. Trump had a point that violent crime in Washington had increased in 2023. But it was one of few outliers. Violent crime overall decreased across the country by 3 percent, and the number of homicides declined on average by 10 percent across 32 cities tracked by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. In Washington and seven other cities, though, the number of homicides increased.

April 13, 2024

Mr. Trump, at a rally in Pennsylvania, falsely balloons the level of crime in New York.

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Crime, in fact, decreased in the year before March 2024 by 5 percent, and murders by 19.4 percent, the city reported just days before Mr. Trump’s remarks. And in 2023, overall crime declined by 0.3 percent and murders by 11.9 percent, to 386 in 2023 from 438 in 2022.

Those numbers also pale in comparison to the height of crime in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr. Trump was a mainstay of the city and when it regularly recorded more than 1,500 murders annually. Homicides peaked in 1990 at 2,245.

May 18, 2024

As the general election nears, his claims grow more hyperbolic.

“There’s too much crime in the country. We’ve never seen crime like this before.”

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Mr. Trump, in an interview with a Dallas news station, warns more broadly of a nationwide crime wave. That is false. Violent crime and property crime are near the lowest level in decades, despite public perception to the contrary. And while there was an increase in crime during the pandemic, violent crime was higher in 2020 under Mr. Trump than under Mr. Biden so far.

May 18, 2024

That same day, he attributes the increase to Democratic policies.

Speaking to the National Rifle Association, Mr. Trump vividly and baselessly casts blame on his political opponents.

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June 15, 2024

Mr. Trump wrongly blames methodological changes for obscuring crime trends.

The claim, made at a conservative gathering in Detroit, is misleading. Days earlier, the F.B.I. released a preliminary assessment estimating that crime had fallen in the first three months of 2024. But Mr. Trump insisted the data was fraudulent.

In 2021, the F.B.I. started relying on a new data collection system, aggregating crime data from local and state police departments. Many agencies had yet to fully transition, resulting in reporting from only 68 percent of agencies, which covered about 66 percent of the population. So Mr. Trump has a point that data collection in 2021 was unusually incomplete, but the reported national crime rate that year did not simply omit a third of the country, as he said. Rather, the F.B.I. used a standard statistical process to fill in the blanks and estimate crime for the missing jurisdictions to generate a national rate.

The F.B.I.’s national estimates included data from more agencies in subsequent years: 93.5 percent of the population in 2022 and 94.3 percent in 2023. Both years continued to show a decline in crime compared with 2020.

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June 22, 2024

At a rally in Philadelphia, Mr. Trump insists that the official statistics are “fake.”

“The F.B.I. crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake.”

Minutes later, he points to a different data set, also from the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump was cherry-picking those statistics and referring to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which showed a 43 percent increase in the violent crime rate, from 16.4 per 1,000 people in 2020 to 23.5 in 2022. (Unlike the F.B.I.’s crime rate, which relies on crimes reported to the police, this rate relies on responses to a survey.)

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Left unsaid: The 2022 rate was comparable to rates under the Trump administration (23.2 in 2018 and 21.0 in 2019) and still lower than rates in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, in 2023, that rate declined to 22.5 per 1,000 people.

Aug. 3, 2024

He repeats those percentages during a rally in Atlanta.

“Nationwide, there’s been a 43 percent increase in violent crimes since I left office, including a 58 percent increase in rape, 89 percent increase in aggravated assault and a 56 percent increase in stone-cold robbery.”

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Sept. 6, 2024

Addressing the Fraternal Order of Police union in Charlotte, N.C., he again cites those figures.

“Since Kamala Harris took office, she has presided over a 43 percent increase in violent crime, including a 58 percent increase in rape and an 89 percent increase in aggravated assault.”

Sept. 10, 2024

Mr. Trump reprises his claims during the presidential debate.

Sept. 18, 2024

In a Fox News interview, Mr. Trump inaccurately cites an analysis to claim a huge increase in crime.

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“I was right. The following day, D.O.J. announced numbers — I don’t know who it was in D.O.J., but somebody over there likes me — that crime is up 45 percent, murders up, numbers like you wouldn’t even believe.”

Since the debate, Mr. Trump has seized upon and further inflated an analysis repeated in conservative news outlets of revised F.B.I. statistics.

In its September report estimating that violent crime had declined by 3 percent in 2023, the F.B.I. released revised figures for 2022, as it does every year. The revisions, according to an analysis published by Fox News, show a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022.

But even that 4.5 percent figure is misleading, as FactCheck.org has noted. That is because crime data from 2021 was incomplete, as police departments across the country transitioned to a different reporting system. Moreover, the revised data still show that violent crime had declined overall since 2020.

This dark assessment of soaring violence and lawlessness under Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris has been central to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign — even though the facts show otherwise.

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Ukraine says it has attacked North Korean troops in Kursk

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Ukraine says it has attacked North Korean troops in Kursk

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Ukrainian officials said on Monday that their forces had fired at North Korean soldiers in combat for the first time since their deployment by Russia to its western Kursk region.

The clashes mark the first direct intervention by a foreign army since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, as well as an expansion of what was already the largest land war in Europe since the second world war.

“The first military units of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] have already come under fire in Kursk,” Andriy Kovalenko, Ukraine’s top counter-disinformation official within the national security council, said on Telegram. A senior Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed the military engagement to the Financial Times but declined to provide further details.

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In Kyiv, foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said he had discussed with his visiting German counterpart Annalena Baerbock the “need for decisive action” in response to North Korea’s deepening involvement in the war.

“We urge Europe to realise that the DPRK troops are now carrying [out] an aggressive war in Europe against a sovereign European state,” Sybiha said in a news conference.

The US on Monday called out Russia and China at the UN Security Council for “shamelessly protecting” and emboldening North Korea. South Korea and the EU also condemned the deployment and expressed concern that Russia could reward North Korea with transfers of nuclear and ballistic technology.

Another senior Ukrainian official told the FT that Moscow was already providing military technologies to Pyongyang to help with its missile programmes, as well as “money”.

In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin met North Korea’s foreign minister, Choe Son-hui, in the Kremlin on Monday.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and North Korean foreign minister Choe Son-hui meet at the Kremlin on Monday © Mikhael Tereshchenko/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Choe passed on a greeting from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and signed a treaty with Putin in June that includes a mutual security assistance clause.

The foreign minister last week said that North Korea had “no doubt whatsoever that under the wise leadership of the honourable Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and people will surely achieve a great victory in their sacred struggle to defend the sovereign rights and security of their state”.

Putin has not confirmed the North Korean deployment but he hinted at it last month, indicating it fell under the security provisions in the treaty.

US and South Korean officials last week confirmed Ukraine’s assessment that around 8,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk last month to help Russia’s army push Ukrainian forces out of territory they have occupied since August. Senior Ukrainian intelligence officials told the FT that the forces were in barracks about 50km from the Ukrainian border and preparing to enter the fight within “days”.

Kyiv, Washington and Seoul said that Pyongyang had sent roughly 12,000 troops in all to Russia for its ongoing war effort, including 500 officers and three generals. The remaining forces are located in Russia’s far east, where they are undergoing training.

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The White House has said that the North Koreans would become “legitimate military targets” if they entered the fight against Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that Ukraine could see where Russia was gathering the North Koreans and urged western nations to lift restrictions on long-range weapons to “pre-emptively” strike them before they could attack his forces.

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The senior Ukrainian intelligence official declined to provide specifics about the first military engagement between his country’s forces and the North Koreans. But he said that it occurred within Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine controls some 600 sq km of territory, or a little more than half of what it previously held following the summer incursion that took Moscow by surprise.

Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, the GUR, said over the weekend that Russia had armed the North Korean troops in Kursk with 60mm mortars, assault rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles, anti-tank guided missiles and shoulder-launched anti-tank rocket launchers. The GUR said that some were also provided with night-vision devices and thermal imagers. A few hundred troops from North Korea’s special forces have also been deployed in Kursk.

Ukrainian officials and military analysts have raised questions about the quality and combat effectiveness of the North Korean troops, with most being described as inexperienced, low-ranking soldiers.

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“We will know soon” how well they can fight, said one of the officials on Monday.

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Both Candidates Exude Confidence, Trump Says He Doesn’t Mind if Reporters Are Shot

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Both Candidates Exude Confidence, Trump Says He Doesn’t Mind if Reporters Are Shot
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are exuding confidence as they head into Election Day. For Trump, that’s nothing new. He said over the weekend that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House at the end of his presidency – despite losing the 2020 election to President Joe …
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