Politics
Adams, NYPD cite 'global' effort to 'radicalize young people' after 300 arrested at Columbia, CUNY
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York Police Department (NYPD) leadership cited a “global” movement to “radicalize young people” in announcing approximately 300 arrests at Columbia University and City College that took place overnight.
“I know that there are those who are attempting to say, well, the majority of people may have been students. You don’t have to be the majority to influence and co-opt an operation. That is what this is about. And so, if we want to play the word police, you could do so. I’m going to play the New York City police,” Adams said at a press conference. “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it. This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children. And I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the city of New York.”
Adams made clear that making arrests at schools and removing those who did not belong on campus is far from the end of the problem.
“We know that this is only a comma in the full sentence of public protection in this city. This is not a celebratory, a moment,” Adams said. “We can’t create environments while children could be in danger, and we must push back on all attempts to radicalize our young people in this city like we’re seeing across the entire globe.”
TWO COLUMBIA STUDENTS WHO FACED OFF WITH MOB SPEAK OUT, CLAIM A CAR FULL OF ‘MASKED PEOPLE’ SURVEILLED THEM
NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban, right, and Mayor Eric Adams appear at a press conference as Caban holds up chains and a lock removed by officers during their operation to clear protestors from Columbia University on May 1, 2024. (REUTERS/Mike Segar)
The day after Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was hauled before the House Education and the Workforce Committee in Washington, D.C., about growing antisemitism at the Ivy League school, Columbia leadership allowed police onto their private campus on April 18 to arrest over 100 people. However, as protesters reorganized and an anti-Israel encampment – involving even some professors who Shafik testified before Congress had been fired or reprimanded over antisemitic remarks praising Hamas’ Oct. 7 slaughter of about 1,200 Jews – persisted for about two weeks, the university president opted to keep police out.
Shafik instead had administrators attempting negotiations with protest organizers demanding the university “divest” from Israel. That was until demonstrators took over Hamilton Hall.
Approximately 300 people were arrested at Columbia and nearby City College overnight. Preliminary charges range from trespass to criminal mischief to burglary, police said.
In an apparent reference to Columbia University locking its gates to keep police out on the sidewalk, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban held up chains at Wednesday’s press conference.
Anti-Israel agitators block bystanders’ views as protesters are placed in the back of a police vehicle in New York City on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Roughly 300 protesters were arrested at Columbia University and City College overnight. (John M. Mantel for Fox News Digital)
“They tried to lock us out. But the NYPD and the people of the city of New York will never be locked out. And we will always work together to keep our city safe,” he said, slamming down the chains afterward.
Over the past week, Columbia leadership acknowledged in discussions with NYPD officials that “outside agitators were on their grounds training and really co-opting this movement,” Adams said, and, “at the request of Columbia University,” police conducted an operation to “to remove those who have turned the peaceful protest into a place where antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes were pervasive.”
The mayor told reporters that those who broke into Hamilton Hall were “led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university,” and Columbia needed the assistance of the NYPD to clear the building and the encampment outside through a “dual operation.”
NYPD officers detain dozens of anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University after they barricaded themselves at the Hamilton Hall building near Gaza Solidarity Encampment earlier on April 30, 2024. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Recognizing “similar indicators” from the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020, the mayor said campus protests involved “external actors with a history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos.”
“Students have a right to protest, and free speech is the cornerstone of our society,” Adams said. “But as our major concern, we knew, and we saw that there were those who were never concerned about free speech. They were concerned about chaos. It was about external actors hijacking a peaceful protest and influence students to escalate. There’s nothing peaceful about barricading, building, destroying property or dismantling security cameras.”
Since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, the NYPD has responded to more than 2,400 protests, about 1,000 of which focused on the situation with Israel and Palestinians, Caban added.
ANTI-ISRAEL MOB AT COLUMBIA REVEALS EXACTLY WHAT THEY WILL TARGET NEXT AFTER TAKING OVER ACADEMIC BUILDING
Police dismantled an anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University after protesters barricaded themselves at Hamilton Hall on April 30, 2024. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
NYPD Assistant Commissioner Rebecca Weiner cited how a number of individuals who law enforcement know from over the years as being associated with protests in New York City and elsewhere in other cities have been “doing training around the change in tactics.” Pointing to the campus organization effort, she referenced how demonstrators wore “Black bloc attire,” broke windows, engaged in vandalism and property destruction, barricaded themselves and how “makeshift weapons” were recovered from the encampment. Tactics used by anti-Israel agitators also included “fomenting chaos” and “squatting.”
“That change in tactics combined with the presence of known individuals on campus in the lead up to what happened in Hamilton Hall is why we had a real elevated concern around public safety,” she said, turning to why officers needed protective gear. “When you’re going into a situation that you don’t fully understand what might greet you on the other side of the door. So this is important, and it is not just a New York City issue. It’s obviously not just a Columbia issue. We saw it spread to CCNY last night, but this is unfolding across the country and in Europe as well. So this is a challenge we’re all going to be dealing with for some time.”
Adams said the NYPD “cannot get caught up on what’s the political correct terminology” and instead must focus on public safety and removing “individuals on campus who should not have been there.”
The NYPD at the Hamilton Hall building at Columbia University on April 30, 2024. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“We saw evidence of training. We saw a shift in tactics that were being used,” Adams said. “And when you start using the intelligence that intel was able to supply, we knew it was time to communicate directly with the school and say, you have more than a peaceful protest on your hands.”
NYPD officials praised the officers’ professionalism, saying that an “overwhelming majority” of those approximately 300 arrests happened without any injuries or serious scuffles with police.
Adams also blasted how protesters took down the American flag and erected a Palestinian flag at campuses.
“That’s our flag folks. Don’t take over our buildings and put another flag up,” the mayor said. “That may be fine to other people, but it’s not to me. My uncle died defending this country and these men and women put their lives on the line and it’s despicable that schools will allow another country’s flag to fly in our country. So blame me for being proud to be an American. And I thank, Commissioner [Kaz] Daughtry, for putting that flag back up. We’re not surrendering our way of life to anyone.”
President Donald Trump on Thursday used a medical metaphor to describe the status of his “reciprocal tariffs” plan implemented on what he dubbed “Liberation Day.”
“THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING,” Trump wrote on TRUTH Social. “THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened more than 1,000 points lower on Thursday morning after Trump unveiled his most severe levy of tariffs yet during a White House Rose Garden ceremony a day earlier, but administration officials remained optimistic in early morning TV interviews. They touted an anticipated impact of onshoring U.S. manufacturing and further bolstering American jobs.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN the United States “is no longer going to be cheated by foreign nations around the world,” reiterating that Trump had declared the issue a “national emergency.”
SENATE APPROVES RESOLUTION AGAINST TRUMP’S CANADA TARIFFS HOURS AFTER ‘LIBERATION DAY’ EVENT
President Donald Trump holds a chart as he delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled “Make America Wealthy Again” at the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 2025. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
“We have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit and counting. We’ve had 90,000 factories close in the last couple of decades,” Leavitt told CNN. “Since 1997, Americans have been put out of five million manufacturing jobs. These are not just statistics. These are real American lives that have been impacted. And it’s about time we have a president who actually does something about it. This is going to restore more wealth, more jobs, more economic prosperity to our great country.”
Leavitt said that the countries targeted by Trump’s reciprocal tariffs have had “70 years to do the right thing by the American people, and they have chosen not to.”
“They have ripped off American workers. They have taken our jobs overseas,” Leavitt said.
She also told CNN that Trump has already launched a “massive deregulatory agenda” that has “saved the American taxpayer millions of dollars.” Leavvitt said that the president is “unleashing the might of our American energy industry,” arguing that a stifled energy industry drove inflation during former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Vice President JD Vance told Fox & Friends on Thursday morning that critics during Trump’s first term warned that tariffs would be inflationary, but instead inflation dipped to 1.5% until the “four terrible years of the Biden administration.” Vance said the “globalist economy” has resulted in the United States “incurring a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make for us.”
An American flag is displayed on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
“To make it a little bit more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture,” Vance said. “That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It’s not a recipe for low prices, and it’s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America.”
SOME COUNTRIES TARGETED BY TRUMP TARIFFS SEEK NEGOTIATIONS, CHINA SAYS ‘NO WINNERS IN TRADE WARS’
The vice president said the “Joe Biden globalist pathway” has resulted in the U.S. having $2 trillion in peacetime debt and deficits and manufacturing “disappearing,” promising that Trump is taking the country in a different direction.
Addressing criticism from Wall Street following Trump’s “Liberation Day” event in the White House Rose Garden, Vance said, “a lot of people have gotten rich from American jobs moving overseas, but American workers have not gotten rich” and American companies “have not gotten wealthy from the increasing growth of foreign competitors manufacturing overseas.”
“They charge us ridiculous tariffs. They engage in a lot of non-tariff practices like currency manipulation,” Vance said. “That has been awful for Main Street in the United States of America.”
President Donald Trump signs two executive orders during a Make America Wealthy Again event in the Rose Garden of the White House on Wednesday, April 2, 2025. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
On concerns about tariffs potentially driving up costs, Vance said the administration is “fighting very hard to bring prices down” and usher in “the biggest deregulation in the history of this country.”
Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News that “when tariffs come into place, foreign goods may become a little more expensive, but domestic goods do not.”
“For the first time in your lives, you’re going to actually think about the Americans who make the products, the Americans who produce these products and work in these factories,” he said. “It’s time for us to take care of them instead of taking care of the world.”
Trump said that his administration secured about $5 trillion of committed investment, which Lutnick told CBS meant “people are going to start building factories right now.”
“That means all that construction work begins now,” Lutnick said, vowing that the president’s plan would build on the 150,000 jobs already added to the U.S. economy in March. “That starts to employ Americans today. You’re going to see plants being built, factories rebuilding. All shifts are going to be running hot across America now. You’re going to see employment leaping starting today.”
The self-professed “Make America Great Again” president is yet again reaching back to some bad old days in his chaotic quest for this never-defined national greatness. And yet again, Donald Trump is shaming what actually is (was?) a great nation.
With punitive tariffs this week, he’s ushering in not his promised “Golden Age” but a global trade war. Predictably, consumers and businesses are collateral damage, suddenly facing higher prices, layoffs, depressed retirement accounts and fears of recession. Some “Liberation Day.”
Separately, Trump is overseeing migrant roundups, detentions and deportations that lack any semblance of constitutional due process. His agents are sweeping up legal residents in their opaque nets, labeling the whole unidentified lot as terrorists and shipping most of them off by planeloads to a Salvadoran megaprison. Scores of families plead that the government is mistaken, and this week the Trump administration uncharacteristically did concede to one “administrative error:” It told a federal judge that it wrongly nabbed a 29-year-old Maryland man after he’d left work and picked up his 5-year-old son, who has autism.
And yet the same U.S. government that pays El Salvador millions to do its dirty work — and whose president is a strongman wannabe — told the court that it can’t get Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia out of the foreign prison and back home to Maryland.
Less noticed amid the economic chaos and extrajudicial deportations is yet another travesty that strikes at the foundation of the country’s proud legacy as a world leader — the world leader — since World War II: The ever-transactional Trump’s sordid, neocolonial attempt to extort Ukraine of its wealth of oil, gas, critical minerals and rare-earth elements as repayment for the United States’ support in the Ukrainians’ defense against Russia’s invasion.
Americans may be distracted but foreigners and global market-watchers have noticed. As Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky resists Trump’s latest one-sided demands, which dropped on Friday, Bloomberg News’ headline was “U.S. Seeks to Control Ukraine Investment, Squeezing Out Europe.” More colorfully, the Telegraph of London reported, “America holds gun to Zelensky’s head with unprecedented reparation demands.” Its article quoted Alan Riley, an expert on global energy law at the Atlantic Council, who damned the proposal as “an expropriation document” and added, “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Certainly nothing like it has been seen since 1948, when the United States solidified its postwar leadership and banked global goodwill with the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt war-ravaged Europe, including former enemies. Over four years, President Truman and Congress provided bipartisan aid roughly equivalent to $175 billion today. All the while, U.S. politicians persuaded Americans that the aid they were paying for was neither selfless nor a giveaway: In reviving Europe, the United States was recovering markets for its products and stabilizing democratic allies to withstand further world wars.
As the law’s advocate, Secretary of State George C. Marshall Jr., stated, the program reflected “a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibilities which history has clearly placed upon our country.”
How far we’ve fallen. You’d have to go back several centuries — when European powers colonized and plundered Africa, Asia and the Americas — to find the sorry model for Trump’s attempt to extract Ukraine’s resources (and Greenland’s) valued at trillions of dollars. But it’s all the worse considering that Ukraine, a democratic ally, has spilled its own blood and treasure to withstand and weaken Russia, a U.S. adversary, and asks only for aid — not troops — to hold the line against would-be Czar Vladimir Putin’s dreams of empire.
In fairness, Trump is arguably following up on overtures from Zelensky last year to the Biden administration for U.S.-Ukraine cooperation in developing his country’s minerals and energy riches. But Zelensky’s offer was always in exchange for a U.S. guarantee of its security, perhaps NATO membership or American peacekeeping troops. Trump has refused to agree to that.
The tension over a security guarantee was behind Trump’s and Vice President JD Vance’s February Oval Office pile–on that humiliated Zelensky and sickened U.S. allies. That debacle derailed a minerals deal, but negotiations resumed in recent weeks. After all, Zelensky doesn’t have much choice — “You don’t have the cards,” Trump mocked him.
This much is true: Ukraine’s future relies on U.S. help, despite Europe’s talk of filling the void.
Trump’s 55-page proposal calls for a U.S.-controlled investment fund to develop Ukraine’s resources, including minerals such as lithium and titanium that are essential for electric cars and other products based on modern technology. From Ukraine’s half of all proceeds, it would have to repay the United States for all past aid — none of which was provided on such terms, and most of which went to U.S. defense plants for weaponry — plus 4% interest.
All with no U.S. security guarantee for Ukraine. And, just like Trump’s purported peace talks with Russia, the proposed minerals deal cuts out Ukraine’s more stalwart European allies, who, contrary to his repeated falsehoods, have collectively contributed more to Ukraine than the United States has — asking nothing in return.
On Sunday, Trump told reporters that Zelensky is “trying to back out” of a deal. He added, for thuggish effect, “If he does that, he’s got some problems. Big, big problems.”
Yes, Zelensky has big problems. But he and his country have their pride. Which is more than America will be left with if Trump has his way.
@jackiekcalmes
Alongside extensive reductions to the staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Trump administration has asked the agency to cut $2.9 billion of its spending on contracts, according to three federal officials with knowledge of the matter.
The administration’s cost-cutting program, called the Department of Government Efficiency, asked the public health agency to sever roughly 35 percent of its spending on contracts about two weeks ago. The C.D.C. was told to comply by April 18, according to the officials.
The cuts promise to further hamstring an agency already reeling from the loss of 2,400 employees, nearly one-fifth of its work force.
On Tuesday, the administration fired C.D.C. scientists focused on environmental health and asthma, injuries, violence prevention, lead poisoning, smoking and climate change.
Officials at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Abruptly cutting 35 percent of contracts would be tough for any organization or business, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, who advised the Biden administration during Covid.
“Sure, any manager can find small savings and improvements, but these kinds of demands are of the size and speed that break down organizations,” he said. “This is not the way to do good for the public or for the public’s health.”
The C.D.C.’s largest contract, about $7 billion per year, goes to the Vaccines for Children Program, which purchases vaccines for parents who may not be able to afford them.
That program is mandated by law and will not be affected by the cuts, according to one senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
But other C.D.C. contracts include spending on computers and other technology, security guards, cleaning services and facilities management. The agency also hires people to build and maintain data systems and for specific research projects.
Over the past several years, contracts have also supported activities related to Covid-19, one official said.
Separately, H.H.S. last week abruptly discontinued C.D.C. grants of about $11.4 billion to states that were using the funds to track infectious diseases and to support mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues.
At least some of the contracts may not be implemented because the people overseeing them have been dismissed.
The administration recently told the C.D.C. to cut grants to Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania, saying those institutions had failed to take action against antisemitism on campus.
“Funding grants and contracts are the mechanism by which we get things done,” said one C.D.C. scientist who asked to remain anonymous because of a fear of retaliation.
“They are cutting off our arms and legs.”
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