Police continue to arrest pro-Palestine student protesters across the US

 

Police continue to arrest pro-Palestine student protesters across the US

www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/02

More than 1,600 people have been arrested at 30 schools, most recently at UCLA and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire

Police arrested dozens of pro-Palestine demonstrators on college campuses across the US on Wednesday night into Thursday morning.

Dozens of students were arrested at the University of California, Los Angeles, as police cleared a fortified encampment. At least 90 students were arrested at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

More were arrested at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Buffalo in New York. In Oregon, police moved into the school’s library, which has been occupied by demonstrators since Monday.

The protests are part of a movement to force schools to divest from businesses that support the war in Gaza, and reflect how the war has become a major flashpoint in US politics. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel began a campaign to dismantle Hamas, the Gaza health ministry has said. More people in Gaza have been thrust into near starvation, as Israel has limited food aid to the area.

On 7 October, Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and took roughly 250 hostages in an attack on Israel. Since the campaign again Hamas began, the US has provided substantial military support to Israel, including most recently in a $15bn aid package.

Student protests have grown across the country since an encampment sprung up at Columbia University in New York in mid-April. In many cases, police and universities have responded with force to demonstrations that threaten to continue into commencement season. Hundreds have been arrested in the weeks since the protests began.

California highway patrol officers detained dozens of protesters at UCLA on Thursday morning after a 24-hour standoff, CNN reported, after university authorities apparently told police the fortified encampment was an “unlawful assembly”.

California police tore down plywood and pallets that protesters used to reinforce their encampment, and also reportedly used stun grenades, also know as flash-bangs, to try to disperse the crowd and zip-tied detained protesters. By early morning, police had “full control” of the encampment area, according to one witness.

The night before, counter-protesters attacked the encampment, but police did little to stop the violence, a scene that has since prompted criticism of police and university authorities.

“The community needs to feel the police are protecting them, not enabling others to harm them,” Rebecca Husaini, chief of staff for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said in a news conference on the Los Angeles campus on Wednesday.

At Dartmouth, where an encampment had only recently sprung up, a professor said the university responded with “full force”, and posted a video of a white-haired colleague being grabbed and dragged away by police.

“In the hour or so it was allowed to exist, this was the model of a peaceful, inclusive protest,” Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth College, told the Washington Post. “They obstructed nothing; disrupted nothing; menaced nobody; and neither used nor displayed hate speech.”

The chaotic scenes at UCLA came after New York police burst into a building occupied by anti-war protesters at Columbia University on Tuesday night, breaking up a demonstration that had paralyzed the school.

By Wednesday, a scrum had also broken out at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after police with shields removed all but one tent and shoved protesters. Four officers were injured, including a state trooper who was hit in the head with a skateboard, authorities said. Four were charged with battering law enforcement.

Protests began at Columbia on 17 April. An Associated Press tally counted at least 38 times since 18 April when arrests were made at campus protests across the US. More than 1,600 people have been arrested at 30 schools.

In one rare example of authorities de-escalating protests, Brown University in Rhode Island agreed to a divestment vote in October – apparently the first US college to agree to such a demand.

Authorities have also made arrests and cleared protest encampments at City College, Fordham University and Stony Brook College in New York; Portland State in Oregon; Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona; Tulane University in New Orleans; and the University of Texas, Dallas.

Student protests have also sprung up in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Lesson 1

Task 1. Read the article, write out the words in bold and translate them into Russian.

Task 2. Consult the dictionary and be ready to explain the meaning of the words in bold.

Task 3. Make up your own sentences with the words in bold (at home).

Task 4. Make up dialogues using the words given in bold (in class).

Lesson 2.

Task 5. Think over and divide the text of the article into logical parts.

Task 6. Make up and write a question to each logical part.

Task 7. Be ready to render the article.

Task 8. Learn by heart the words in bold and be ready for a dictation translation.