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A federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought by UC Berkeley activists who claim the they were unconstitutionally targeted for arrest in a 2009 campus protest can go forward.
Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler says the students have made a “plausible” case that the university’s police chief and vice chancellor for student affairs violated their First Amendment rights during the Wheeler Hall occupation, in which sixty-six peaceful demonstrators were arrested, cuffed, and transported two counties away for booking.
This isn’t a full victory for the students, just permission for the lawsuit to go forward — technically, a denial of the defendants’ motion to dismiss the suit. But it’s still a major vindication of the activist perspective on an event that many of us have long seen as an appalling violation of students’ rights.
Syrian forces fired live ammunition into crowds protesting the government at the Aleppo University campus Wednesday night, killing at least four. The BBC reports:
One student in Aleppo, Thaer al-Ahmed, said there was panic and chaos as security forces personnel and members of the Shabiha militia fired live rounds and tear gas to disperse a protest by about 1,500 people outside their dormitories on Wednesday night.
“Some students ran to their rooms to take cover but they were followed to their rooms, beaten up and arrested,” he told the Associated Press. “Others suffered cuts and broken bones as they tried to flee.”
Activists say the killings followed a shift in government tactics at Aleppo, a city that the Associated Press says “has remained largely loyal to President Bashar Assad and has been largely spared from the violence that has plagued other Syrian cities.” Until a few days ago used only tear gas and batons against protesters at the university.
Some two hundred students are said to have been arrested yesterday, and new protests against the violence are taking place today.
Quebec’s ten-week student strike, now the longest in the province’s history, is reaching a critical point.
Although government officials continue to reject students’ demand that they reverse a planned tuition increase, Quebec education minister Line Beauchamp said Sunday that she is willing to meet with student leaders to discuss demands for reform in university governance. That concession was echoed the next day by Quebec’s premier, Jean Charest. Both insisted, however, that they would not meet with representatives of CLASSE, the group which represents the largest share of the striking students.
Various acts of vandalism and disruption have taken place in connection with the student strike in recent days, walls spray-painted and windows broken at a government minister’s office and the placing of bags of bricks on subway tracks. There have also been allegations, so far unconfirmed, that unused molotov cocktails were found at one minister’s office during the investigation of an act of vandalism.
Charest said Monday that he would not meet with CLASSE because it “refused to condemn the acts of violence like the ones we witnessed in recent days.” At a press conference earlier that day, however, a CLASSE spokesperson characterized “physical violence” as “totally unacceptable.” It remains unclear whether the other two student organizations will participate in talks if the government continues to exclude CLASSE.
Meanwhile, the length of the strike is raising questions as to whether the current semester will be able to be completed. Some Quebec campuses have closed their doors during the strike, while others have continued to hold classes. Students at some closed campuses have requested court injunctions forcing the universities to reopen. At campuses that haven’t closed, activists have asked university officials to make accommodations for striking students.
At McGill University in Montreal, where the final exam period for the current semester began today, activists blocked four campus entrances for an hour this morning.
Utterly bizarre, yet somehow unsurprising.
George Zimmerman, the self-proclaimed neighborhood watch leader who shot Trayvon Martin, has made his first public comments since the killing, on a website he’s created “to provide an avenue to thank my supporters personally” and solicit funds for legal and living expenses.
One page of that website is a photo album “dedicated to persons whom have displayed their support of Justice for all.” At the time of this writing, the album has just two pictures in it — an image of a poster reading “Justice for Zimmerman” and one of the words “Long Live Zimmerman” spray-painted in white on a red brick wall.
That’s right. George Zimmerman, the guy who once called the cops on a group of kids popping wheelies, is now thanking supporters for vandalizing a building on his behalf.
And it’s not just any building, as it turns out. This particular pro-Zimmerman graffiti was scrawled on the side of Ohio State University’s black cultural center last week, in an incident that the university’s president denounced as racially motivated.
Not long ago, Zimmerman’s defenders leaped to condemn Trayvon Martin over allegations that he once drew on a school locker. It’ll be interesting to see what — if anything — they have to say about Zimmerman’s public embrace of vandalism.
Update | As the blog Plunderbund notes, the “Long Live Zimmerman” graffiti went up on the night of April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
A couple of decades ago, Spy magazine pioneered the Nexis search as journalism — they’d gin up a query and publish the results as a chart in the front of the book, telling you (for instance) which dozen outlets had recently described vaguely blond public figures as Robert Redford look-alikes. (The LA Times said it of Cary Elwes and Fortune of Dick Gephardt in mid-1989.)
Think about that for a moment. America’s paper of record found more than a hundred reasons to refer to black men as “giant negroes” in the 20th century, and they didn’t stop doing it until the late sixties.
Most of the Times’s giant negroes appeared in crime reporting, where they could be seen Attacking Police, Going Mad On Liners, or merely In Prison, but a few — like five-time NYT “giant negro” Paul Robeson — won lasting fame. Robeson received the GN treatment four times during the course of his college football career, and got a final nod in the 1926 write-up of his London stage debut in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. (Robeson, of course, would go on to a world-changing career as a singer, actor, and activist. He was only six-foot-three, by the way, and weighed just 190 pounds when he enrolled at Rutgers.)
David Mills did a whole series of Giant Negro posts back in 2007, and they’re all worth reading. I can think of a lot worse ways to celebrate Paul Robeson’s birthday.
studentactivism.net 
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