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About four hundred Greek police officers gathered in Athens on Thursday to the strains of the Beatles song “Let It Be, “carrying a banner that read “No To Violence.”
“We are protesting because we are part of society,” one officer said. “Violence against the Greek police is violence against Greek society. We’re against any kind of violence.”
Student and youth riots have convulsed Greece since the December police shooting of fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
The Thursday police rally took place not long before one thousand students staged their own protest in central Athens. Although some of those protesters threw rocks and oranges at police, there was no police response and the march ended without violence or arrests.
A sit-in protesting the current Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip is underway at the prestigious London School of Economics.
About forty students have been occupying the LSE’s Old Theatre since last night. They are demanding that the LSE…
- condemn the Israeli attack on Gaza and demand a ceasefire,
- divest from BAE Systems, a company that provides weapons to the Israeli military,
- provide five new scholarships to Palestinian students at LSE,
- conduct a fundraising campaign for the Medical Aid for Palestinians charity,
- donate surplus books and computers to Gaza educational institutions, and
- conduct no repraisals against protesting students.
The university released a formal response to the demands expressing concern over the humanitarian situation in Gaza while declaring that it “will not take a position” on the Israeli military action itself.
The Associated Student Government at Northwestern University has been busy this winter.
In recent weeks, ASG has gone live with four different online projects serving the student community — a ride share board, a ratings site for off-campus housing, a research assistance site, and a student guide to academic majors.
The new programs are part of a strategy to shift ASG’s emphasis toward student-directed projects, an ASG representative told the Daily Northwestern. The student government’s operations director estimates that the ride share program has already saved students $15,000 since it went live in early December.
Now, none of these projects stand at the cutting edge of radical activism, it’s true. But each is intended to make a positive practical difference in the lives of students at Northwestern, and several — I’m thinking specifically of the housing site and the academic majors guide — are designed to equalize information imbalances that put students at a disadvantage in dealing with other university community members.
Student services and student advocacy are too often treated as alternatives, or even opposites. In my experience, a strong student government is likely to be (or become) an activist student government, and serving students’ needs makes a student government stronger.
A morning grab-bag of stuff on the York University strike…
- Our post from last night on the announcement that a date has been set for the contract vote.
- An article from the Globe and Mail newspaper about an anti-strike Facebook group.
- A union parody of the York University website.
- The York Federation of Students has established a strike relief fund.
- The Toronto Star is running a series of profiles of students affected by the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
The union membership vote on the York University contract proposal has been scheduled for January 19 and 20, from 9 am to 1 pm and 3 pm to 7 pm each day. These are the dates the university requested, and are four days later than those the union had proposed.
York, the third largest university in Canada, has been shuttered for 68 days by a strike of teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and adjunct faculty. The university is using a provision in Ontario labor law to force CUPE, the union representing the strikers, to poll the membership on their latest proposal.
CUPE members rejected the proposal by a lopsided margin at a mass meeting last week, and are organizing to defeat it in this referendum. The three units of the union local will vote separately on January 19-20, and all three must approve the proposal to end the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
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