Washington
Pro-Palestinian encampment grows on George Washington University campus
Pro-Palestine protests continue at GWU
Pro-Palestinian student protesters encampment continues at George Washington University.
WASHINGTON – The pro-Palestinian protest at George Washington University is showing no signs of letting up but has for the most part remained peaceful, unlike what’s been seen at other college campuses around the country.
The block of H Street between 20th and 21st streets, NW, remained blocked off by D.C. police Tuesday. It’s part of the large tent city on the campus of GWU that seems to be entrenched, for now.
“The fact that this is allowed to keep occurring is absolutely ridiculous,” said GWU student Sabrina Soffer.
The encampment at GWU is now on its sixth day. Pro-Palestinian students from universities around the D.C. region are leading the protest, causing more than concern for some students of the Jewish faith.
“It’s anti-Semitism,” Soffer told FOX 5. “The ideas have been thrifted but it has a shiny new fashionable outerwear and the fact that this is given the moral high ground — it’s exactly how it happened in Germany. In the Nazi era, anti-Semitism was intellectualized, it was moralized, it was legalized and then it was normalized and that’s what we’re seeing right now. There’s blatant anti-Semitism on our campus and it’s being normalized.”
One of the student leaders of the protest is Jewish. She has a different take on the movement.
“Personally, I feel more safe being Jewish in here in this encampment than I do outside this encampment and the reason for that is because everyone here believes in collective liberation of the safety of all people are intertwined with each other and I know that as a Jew I’m included in that,” GW student Miriam said.
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The dozens of tents occupy the entire university yard in the heart of GW’s campus in Foggy Bottom. Barricades that had surrounded the perimeter late last week are now piled in a heap.
“It’s important that we are still being disruptive to the University and disrupting business as usual because there cannot be business as usual during the genocide and we’re now up to 200 hundred days into a genocide and students are fed up,” Miriam said.
But some of the recent protests on college campuses around the country have turned violent — Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and Columbia University in New York among them.
Students attending a nearby high school use the yard as a cut-through and are still doing so right now.
“I walk to Western Market for lunch every day and I just walk through. It is very peaceful. Everyone’s very quiet and I think it’s kind of cool for me to see the movements and stuff happening downtown in this space,” high schooler Kai Hardy-Kanegis said.
There have been calls from some in Congress for D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Police Chief Pamela Smith to clear the block of H Street that’s been claimed by the protestors and to assist GW in dismantling the encampment in its quad. But those calls appear to be falling on deaf ears.
“I’m upset. I’m outraged,” Soffer said. “I mean the fact that the mayor isn’t allowing the police to intervene is absolutely ridiculous and I feel like every step that needs to be taken to get police presence there right now to remove this needs to be done.”
Washington
Washington Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury announces she’s pregnant
Trinity Rodman signs record deal with Washington Spirit
USWNT forward Trinity Rodman signed a three-year deal with the NWSL’s Washington Spirit. The deal makes Rodman the highest-paid female footballer in the world.
unbranded – Sport
Washington Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury has announced that she and her husband Matt are expecting a baby in July.
The couple made the announcement in a video on the Spirit’s social media channels, holding a baby goalkeeper jersey on the pitch at Audi Field.
Kingsbury becomes the most recent Spirit star to go on maternity leave, following defender Casey Krueger, midfielder Andi Sullivan and forward Ashley Hatch.
Sullivan gave birth to daughter Millie in July, while Hatch welcomed her son Leo in January.
Krueger announced she was pregnant with her second child in October.
Kingsbury has served as the Spirit’s starting goalkeeper since 2018, and has been named the NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year twice (2019 and 2021).
The 34-year-old has two caps with the U.S. women’s national team, and was named to the 2023 World Cup roster.
The club captain will leave a major void for the Spirit, who have finished as NWSL runner-up in back-to-back seasons.
Sandy MacIver and Kaylie Collins are expected to compete for the starting role while Kingsbury is on maternity leave.
The Spirit kick off their 2026 campaign on March 13 against the Portland Thorns.
Washington
Washington state board awards Yakima $985,600 loan for Sixth Avenue project design
YAKIMA, Wash. — Yakima could soon take a major step toward redesigning Sixth Avenue after the Washington State Public Works Board awarded the city a $985,600 loan.
The loan was approved for the design engineering phase of the Sixth Avenue project. The funding can also be used along Sixth Avenue for utility replacement and updated ADA use.
The Yakima City Council must decide whether to accept the award. If the council accepts it, the city’s engineering work will move forward with the design of Sixth Avenue.
The cost of installing trolley lines is excluded from the plan. The historic trolleys would need to raise the funds required to add trolley lines.
The award is scheduled to be discussed during next week’s City Council meeting.
Washington
Microsoft promises more AI investments at University of Washington
Microsoft will ramp up its investment in the University of Washington.
Brad Smith, the company’s president, made the announcement at a press conference with University of Washington President Robert Jones on Tuesday.
That means hiring more UW graduates as interns at Microsoft, he said.
And he said all students, faculty, and researchers should have access to free, or at least deeply-discounted, AI.
“ Some of it is compute that Microsoft is donating, and some of it is pursuant to an agreement where, believe me, we give the University of Washington probably the best pricing that anybody’s gonna find anywhere,” Smith said. He assured the small group of reporters present that it would be “many millions of dollars of additional computational resources.”
The announcement today didn’t include any specific numbers.
But Smith said Microsoft has already invested $165 million in the UW over several decades.
He pointed to Jones’ vision to spur “radical collaborations with businesses and communities to advance positive change,” and eliminate “any artificial barriers between the university and the communities it serves.”
Microsoft’s goal is for AI to help UW researchers solve some of the world’s biggest problems without introducing new ones.
At Tuesday’s announcement, several research students were present to demonstrate how AI supports their work.
Amelia Keyser-Gibson is an environmental scientist at the UW. She’s using AI to analyze photographs of vines, to find which adapt best to climate change.
It’s a paradox: AI produces carbon emissions. At the same time, it’s also a new tool to help reduce them.
So how do those things square for Keyser-Gibson?
“ That’s a great question, and honestly, I don’t know the answer to that,” she said. “I’m highly aware that there’s a lot of environmental impact of using AI, but what I can say is that this has allowed us to make research innovations that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”
“If we had had to manually annotate every single image that would’ve been an undergrad doing that for hours,” Keyser-Gibson continued. “And we didn’t have the budget. We didn’t have the manpower to do that.”
“AI exists. If we don’t use it as researchers, we’re gonna fall behind.”
Microsoft reports on its own carbon emissions. But like most AI companies, it doesn’t reveal everything.
That’s one reason another UW student named Zhihan Zhang is using AI to estimate how much energy AI is using.
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