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Members of the Iranian parliament are repudiating last night’s government attack on students in dormitories at Tehran University, and the parliament’s speaker has appointed a committee to investigate the event.
According to a report by INSA, the Iranian Students News Agency, a group of parliamentarians visited the university today, taking testimony from students who witnessed the previous night’s events.
After their trip to the campus the group made a statement calling “for the damages [to dormitory buildings] to be repaired … arrested students to be released and those who carried out [these] unfortunate events to be arrested.”
In response to the lawmakers’ call, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani constituted the group as a formal committee charged with investigating the “unfortunate incidents.”
5 pm update: Larijani is a longtime rival of Ahmadinejad, but he conspicuously congratulated the president on his re-election over the weekend. His appointment of this committee may suggest that he believes the political winds are shifting.
10 pm update: The Guardian (UK) says it has received an unconfirmed report that five Tehran University students died in the dorm assault. It names the five students, and reports that they are believed to have been buried today. The Guardian also reports that seven people involved in a student protest are said to have been killed by riot police in Shiraz, and that students at Isfahan University may have been thrown from upper-story windows.
11 pm update: According to this site, two of the five students killed were women. The female students who were said to have died were Mobina Ehterami and Fatemeh Barati, and the men were Kasra Sharafi, Kambiz Shoaei, and Mohsen Imani.
Iranian students are taking to the streets to protest the apparent theft of their country’s presidential election by hard-line incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iran’s students overwhelmingly supported challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, and they are deeply distrustful of government results that show Ahmadinejad winning re-election in a landslide. In Tehran there are reports of police beating students with batons, and even of police and student demonstrators throwing rocks at one another.
It remains unclear what steps Mousavi will take next, and how the nation’s students will react as the situation develops — some believe that a meek response by Mousavi could further inflame student anger, creating further instability in the system.
More on this story as it develops.
3 pm update: It’s now midnight in Tehran. Very little solid news has emerged in the last few hours. There are reports that Iranian mobile phone service has been cut off, and that that internet access has been restricted or degraded. Time magazine has eyewitness reports of the fatal beating of a protester, and rumors that Mousavi has been placed under house arrest are circulating widely.
Since their founding in the 19th century, California’s public colleges and universities have been tuition free for in-state students. For the last several decades, however, “tuition free” has been a hoax.
Over the course of the 20th century legislators and administrators imposed more and more new fees on California’s students, and in the 1960s and after those fees grew to match the tuition charged at other states’ universities. No politician wanted to be responsible for “ending free tuition” in the state, though, so today students pay nearly $4500 a semester in fees — including a $3130 “Educational Fee” — instead.
This kind of political cowardice is usually just annoying, but every once in a while it actually causes measurable harm to students, and right now is one of those times.
Congress passed a new GI Bill earlier this spring that pays the tuition of US veterans. The bill covers the full cost of tuition and fees at public institutions, and uses public tuition and fee rates to determine reimbursement rates for privates.
And yes, the tuition and fee rates are calculated separately.
So if you’re a California veteran and you get accepted to Stanford, the GI Bill will cover none of your $24,020 tuition. It will, however, cover all of your $84 student government fee. (In fact, it’ll cover up to $6,586.54 in fees every semester, far more than Stanford charges any student.)
There’s an effort underway to change the law, but no real movement yet.
The National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida, who staged a protest on May 1 against West Palm Beach’s weird youth curfew ordinance, have given the city one week to address their complaints before they formally file suit.
In a letter to the city’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Barry Silver, representing NYRASEFL, wrote yesterday that the curfew law is “unconstitutional, and thus unenforceable.” He urged them to rewrite the law or “better yet to scrap the idea altogether,” and said that if NYRASEFL does not hear from the city by Tuesday, May 26, they will initiate legal proceedings.
Police at Northwestern University will no longer notify federal authorities when they encounter suspected undocumented immigrants except in cases involving felonies or human trafficking.
Student groups had been pressing for a new policy since NU police stopped Ramiro Sanchez-Zepeda on suspicion of DWI on April 26 and turned him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement when he was unable to produce a driver’s license or visa.
Students had planned a Thursday rally to push for the reform, but NU police chief Bruce Lewis requested a meeting with student leaders on Tuesday and announced the new policy on Wednesday.
The planned protest rally was recast as a celebration of the change in policy and a call to continued activism.
studentactivism.net 
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