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“This article is being written with the belief that our experiences can be absorbed and used, and, what is most important, the Movement can go on to higher levels, evading old mistakes in order to commit the mistakes of the future.”
— Mark Rudd, President of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society, 1969.
The last of a group of students who had been occupying a grove of trees on the University of California Santa Cruz campus abandoned their protest site on Saturday. The protesters had been sitting in on three platforms in the redwood and oak grove since November 2007 to block construction of a biomedical facility on the site.
Three of the four protesters left the site before police arrived on Saturday morning, and the fourth was taken into custody. By noon the site had been fenced off and university employees were preparing to begin work cutting down the trees.
Alexandros Grigoropoulos, the fifteen-year-old whose death at the hands of police has sparked four days of student and youth rioting across the country of Greece, is being buried today. Protests are continuing.
The two police officers who were involved in the Grigoropoulos shooting have been indicted, one of them for murder.
Greek schools are closed today in an expression of mourning for Grigoropoulos. Children, parents, and teachers held a peaceful demonstration in Athens this morning to protest his death.
Government forces have still not entered the nation’s campuses, which have been off-limits to the police and army since the fall of the Greek junta in the 1970s, and which have as a result been used as staging areas for protesters and rioters.
The tag “griots” is being used to identify material pertaining to the ongoing Greek crisis on Twitter, Flickr, and various blogs.
The New York Times and the BBC are reporting that leftist youth and student rioting in Greece is entering its third day.
The riots, sparked by the police killing of a 15-year-old in Athens on Saturday, have spread to other major cities, and multiple demonstrations are planned for Monday.
Protesters are using gasoline bombs and rocks against the police, and dozens of officers have been injured since Saturday.
In 1973 the military sent tanks onto the campus of Athens Polytechnic University to suppress a student revolt against the country’s ruling junta, killing at least 22 civilians. Since then, the police and army have been barred from Greece’s college campuses.
The protesters this week have used campuses as safe havens, retreating to them when pursued by police, and even throwing Molotov cocktails at officers from behind their gates.
Students and youth are co-ordinating their protests online and posting reports on events at indymedia.org. According to accounts at that site, at least three buildings at Athens Polytechnic are currently under occupation by protesters.
After the jump, a listing of Friday’s panel sessions at the Youth Movement Summit at Columbia Law School. A full schedule, with links to live streams, can be found here.
studentactivism.net 
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