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Full details here.

My first video blog post — on Spirit Day, the “It Gets Better Project,” and my seven-year-old.

It’s Getting Better: Some Thoughts on Spirit Day.

The Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico, whose Humanities division was shuttered by student protesters on Tuesday, has now seen that shutdown spread to the divisions of Education and Social Sciences (article | translation).

Students in all three divisions have shut down classroom buildings, leaving them barricaded against entry. So far, neither administrators nor police have acted against the student strikers. A mass student assembly was scheduled for this morning.

The Occupy California blog has additional photos and details of the Humanities action.

I’ve been asked about this a couple of times, so here’s my take…

A new analysis of an audiotape recorded at the time of the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings suggests — to at least one researcher — that pistol shots were fired not long before National Guard troops opened fire on antiwar protesters on the Ohio campus, killing four students.

In my experience, acoustic analysis is as much art as science, and any one expert’s claim should be taken with a grain of salt. What’s on the tape may be gunfire, and it may not.

Representative Dennis Kucinich is promising to lead an investigation into this new evidence, and that seems warranted. There’s a lot that’s still not known about what happened that day. In particular, Kucinich’s request for FBI documents relating to the Bureau’s relationship with Terry Norman, a Kent State student who was then working as a police informant — and who is known to have carried a gun to campus that day — is welcome.

But this new piece of data doesn’t add much to what we know, at least not yet. It’s an opportunity to ask some questions that have not yet received satisfactory answers, but so far it’s not much more than that.

Last spring a student strike closed ten of UPR’s eleven campuses for two months, ending with student victories on tuition, budget, and other issues. And now things are heating up again.

At five o’clock this morning students blockaded [Google translation] the Humanities Division (Facultad de Humanidades) of the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico in protest against a planned $800 tuition increase. Administrators did not interfere with the student protesters, and the division remains closed at this hour.

Today’s strike was approved at a general assembly of Rio Piedras humanities students last week. In a separate meeting, students in the university’s Education Division voted to strike this Thursday.

More on this story as I get it.

Update | More background on today’s strike. [Google translation]