Last week the Orange County DA brought charges against nineteen participants in a sit-in at the University of California at Irvine.

The sit-in was last February. The charges were brought during finals week.

That’s right. The district attorney waited a total of 288 days to bring the charges, then brought them in the middle of finals. And set appearance dates during winter break.

This week a DA in San Francisco pulled a similar stunt, surprising several students who had been arrested at November’s protest at the UC Regents meeting with unannounced battery charges. Two of the students wound up having to post high bail. And yes, finals week at Berkeley was this week.

It’s the first parliamentary election since Britain’s governing coalition announced its plans for huge tuition fee increases and higher education budget cuts. It’s being held in a district with a university campus. And it’s scheduled for Christmas break.

The UK’s Liberal Democrats are the junior partners in the new British government, but they’re taking most of the student heat over the fee increases — they ran on a platform of eliminating tuition fees entirely, and won a high level of student support. (Many Lib Dem candidates, including the party’s leader, signed pledges not to vote to raise fees under any circumstances.)

So this local election in the district of Oldham East and Saddleworth, prompted by a vacancy in the seat, represents a big test for the party. In May, the Labour party candidate won by a 103 vote margin out of a total of 44,520 cast. The University of Huddersfield has a satellite campus in Oldham that enrolls 1200 students, so that constituency could easily swing the election.

Which is why the election is being held on January 13, before those students come back from break.

Fun Fact: The Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield is Captain Picard. Really.

Michael Moore has donated $20,000 to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s bail fund, claiming that the rape allegations against him are part of a “vicious attack” on Wikileaks orchestrated by “the powerful and the corrupt.” In announcing this donation, he gave little attention to the specifics of the allegations themselves, though he did characterize them as “strange.”

I’ve written before that there’s nothing particularly strange about the claims made against Assange, and that the public perception to the contrary is largely a result of misrepresentations proffered by Assange’s lawyers, combined with some deeply problematic reporting.

Today Sady Doyle of the website Tiger Beatdown has launched a Twitter campaign calling Moore out for his dismissive attitude toward the allegations. Some have claimed that Doyle is misrepresenting Moore’s position, and the passage in his blogpost is at least arguably ambiguous, but Moore has said more in other venues about the charges, and those statements demonstrate that Doyle’s analysis is on target.

Here’s what Moore said on BBC yesterday:

Interviewer: Everybody knows you are a very strong advocate of freedom of speech. But you’ve offered $20,000 to help bail him on sex charges, and you’re not in favor of sex crimes, obviously. So … that has got nothing to do with what he’s done in Wikileaks, has it? These allegations of sex crimes?

Michael Moore: Yeah, I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with anything. [laughs] Are you kidding me? I mean really. What? I mean, we’ve lived long enough, through enough of this kind of deception, these kinds of dirty tricks that governments and corporations play. And the issue here is that if he were any other just normal Brit, with this so-called “crime” that he’s been accused of — which I understand isn’t, wouldn’t actually be a crime if it was committed in Britain, a condom broke I believe is the “evidence.” He hasn’t even been charged with a crime. He hasn’t been charged with anything. And what is he doing sitting in a jail tonight? I think that’s just absurd, and it looks bad on Britain, frankly, to your court system somehow be played by another government, which is probably in cahoots with my government, perhaps your government. We don’t really know, but we will someday, because it’ll all come out on Wikileaks on the internet.

Moore is just wrong. The accusations against Assange aren’t “strange.” What he’s accused of would be a criminal act in the United States, or Britain. The claims have nothing to do with criminalizing the accidental breakage of a condom.

Moore is wrong. He should retract and apologize.

Students staged mass protests in Rome and throughout Italy yesterday as the Italian parliament voted on a confidence resolution that threatened the government of media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi, who has proposed huge cuts to higher education as part of a reform package condemned by many in Italy’s universities, prevailed by a mere three votes. As news of the result spread through the crowds, anger swelled — in all, more than a hundred protesters were injured.

Though Berlusconi, who has dominated Italian politics for more than a decade, survived yesterday’s vote, his ability to lead — and the fate of his controversial higher education policies — remain doubtful.

“Student power is not so much something we are fighting for, as it is something we must have in order to gain specific objectives. Then what are the objectives? What is our program? There is much variety and dispute on these questions. But there is one thing that seems clear. However the specific forms of our immediate demands and programs may vary, the long-range goal and the daily drive that motivates and directs us is our intense longing for our liberation. In short, what the student power movement is about is freedom.”

–Carl Davidson, National Secretary, Students for a Democratic Society, 1967