Trump administration claims Columbia violated Title VI, threatening school's accreditation
The Trump administration said Wednesday it has notified the accreditor for Columbia University that the school violated Title IV, threatening the university's accreditation status by saying it "no longer appears to meet the Commissions accreditation standards."
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights (HHS OCR) "determined that Columbia University acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students, thereby violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," according to press release from the Education Department.
The release says the school has been in violation since the start of the war in the Middle East that began on Oct. 7, 2023 when Hamas invaded Israel.
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Daily Mirror
36 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
'Trump let Iran make nukes he's mad about - he's at war for a Nobel Peace Prize'
If there is one disease which lies behind the constant spasms of horror with which our days our currently blighted, it is the human race's inability to remember what happened five minutes ago. Once upon a time, journalists would go to the pub, and then bed. Sometimes they'd go to bed with each other, because they'd been to the pub. But they'd wake up in the morning and go "blimey, an earthquake in Japan. I had better find a good story of my own about this". And they would have to go deeper into a story and its origins. Today they don't drink, barely know their colleagues, and wake up to emails from a 24-rolling news ecosystem that demands constant feeding. Journalists think "blimey, everyone else is ahead of me" and scramble to catch up. No-one has time to think, which is why no-one has told you that Donald Trump just bombed Iran for making nuclear weapons that Donald Trump let them make. I wish I was making this stuff up, but no-one's got time for that. It's imperative people start remembering how we got to the cliff edge, because we did it by skipping about blindfold and if we don't stop soon we're going to go right over. America gave Iran nuclear technology in 1957. The aim was 'atoms for peace', to create wealth, and allies in the Middle East. After years of the world's greatest democracy propping up a cruel monarchy, the shah fell, the mullahs arose, and Iran was in less-friendly hands. The 1980s was taken up with a war against Iraq, but in the 1990s two Gulf Wars and continued US tinkering led the mullahs to the not-entirely-mad opinion that a nuclear weapon was the best way of keeping the Great Satan at bay. Israel, quite reasonably, was less than chuffed. And as technology sped up it became imperative to find ways of stopping Iran getting a weapon that apocalyptic fundamentalists would see very little reason not to detonate, slap-bang in the middle of a resource-rich, conflict-heavy trade route. And so in 2015, six countries signed a deal with Iran. In return for checks that it wasn't building The Bomb, everyone was open for business. And for three years the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action worked. Germany, China, Russia, France, the UK, China and the US lifted economic sanctions, and every 90 days would ratify everything was non-nuclear and tickety-boo. But such a vague agreement could not withstand the arrival of Donald Trump, whose tiny hands happily dismantled everything that made Barack Obama look good. In 2018 when Benjamin Netanyahu - yes it really is all the same people - gave a speech claiming his spy agency Mossad had stolen 100,000 documents showing Iran had lied and was enriching uranium, Trump saw a 30-second clip and decided it must be true. It might have been. The other nations in the deal didn't think so. But rather than renegotiate, send in inspectors, react as any sane human might, Trump just went "nah", and pulled out of the deal. The other countries tried to keep it going. The International Atomic Energy Authority said there was no enrichment. But the US whacked the regime with sanctions, and Iran said it too would pull out unless they were lifted. They were not. In 2020 the IAEA said Iran had tripled its uranium stockpile, a year later it blocked access to inspectors, and by 2023 it had weapons-grade material. Over the same period, Iran's population suffered. A third were ground into poverty. The economic woes weakened the regime just enough to make it lash out. Iran was behind terror attacks worldwide, former Republican Guards were linked to planned assassinations of ex-Trump officials, and it faced internal protests too. Then Iran funded the October 7 massacre by Hamas. Cue Netanyahu, who was leading a rickety coalition and facing jail the moment it fell, cue the war in Gaza, cue pro-Palestine protests, and cue a lot of blaming Iran. This isn't hard to figure out or remember. It's just that the constant churn of new things to hold our attention never scrolls back to the start of the liveblog, or delves into the third page of search results. Iran is definitely run by a bunch of rotten eggs who could well have been pulling the radioactive wool over the world's eyes in return for a financial boost to stabilise their rule. But the best way of fixing that wasn't walking away from the only half-arsed deal anyone had. It was making a better deal, and if Trump had actually written his own biography rather than paying someone else to make him look good, he might have known how to do it. Trump's withdrawal was supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, with 63% of US voters, most of the planet and his own advisers screaming at him not to. It was "a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made", he insisted. "It didn't bring peace and it never will." And so he destabilised and raised the oil price with sanctions, screwed regional trade which meant the price of wheat rose and people starved across several countries, and gave fresh targets to jihadis. Back in office for a second time, Trump wants a legacy and more than anything he wants the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama got, largely for diplomatic efforts with the Muslim world. Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine "on day one" and it only got worse; he suggested building a golden beachside golf club in Gaza, and got laughed at. So his eye turned to Ayatollah Khameini, and the country which the US has done so much to make worse, for so long. Anyone with an ounce of realism in their body might wonder at the convenience with which the B-2 bombers and their bunker-busting payload were able to fly in unmolested, after the Israelis had suddenly switched attention from Gaza to take out the Iranian air defences a week earlier. It does seem odd that the imminent threat Netanyahu had predicted in 2018 bloomed 7 years later, 6 months after Trump returned to office and only after his other draft entries for the peace prize had evaporated. We might also ponder why the US president with the worst personal polls in history at this point in his leadership might be in want of some surgical strikes to appease his Muslim-hating base, and whether it would do him any harm if there were a couple of small terror attacks on US bases that would give an excuse to bomb the mullahs to the table. And having thought this far, we could ask ourselves how close to the edge of nuclear catastrophe Trump will allow the world to careen before he picks up the phone to "make a deal" which will be the bigliest, most beautiful peace deal of all time. And whether it will be worse than the one we used to have, before he ripped it to shreds out of petulance and exploited the disastrous consequences for the sake of vanity. With Iran alone, Trump has cost the world trillions. Now he is about to march an entire planet to the gates of hell, just so he can look good for marching everyone back again. And this plan works if he is a diplomatic genius able to unpick decades of crapola, and capable of remembering why and how it happened in the first place. But when all he watches is 24-hour rolling news, with constant updates about new stuff that isn't new at all, the best we can hope for is that the Nobel Committee gives him the prize now, just to make him stop.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
A protest in Venice and galaxies in space: photos of the day
A Palestinian man mourns as others transport bodies of people killed in strikes on Jabalia a day earlier, at al-Shifa hospital Photograph: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images A Palestinian girl reacts as people queue at a food distribution point. The Israeli blockade imposed in early March amid an impasse in truce negotiations has produced famine-like conditions across Gaza, according to rights groups Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images Members of the Iranian Red Crescent Society place flowers and petals on a Red Crescent vehicle that was attacked during an Israeli airstrike on 19 June in Tehran. Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire since Israel launched strikes across Iran on 13 June as part of Operation 'Rising Lion' Photograph: EPA Debris at the site of an apartment building hit during Russian drone and missile strikes Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters People take shelter in a metro station during a Russian drone and missile attack Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters Firefighters tackle a blaze at a multifamily home in the Bronx, which spread to two adjacent properties. Fourteen people were hospitalized including one firefighter, who remains in critical condition Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images Mahmoud Khalil in front of Columbia University after delivering a press conference two days after his release from custody. Khalil, one of the most prominent leaders of US pro-Palestinian campus protests, pledged to keep campaigning. A legal permanent resident in the United States who is married to a US citizen and has a US-born son, Khalil had been in custody since March facing potential deportation Photograph: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images Members of the public walk past the exterior of Invesco's offices after they are left covered with red paint following an action by Palestine Action. The activists accuse Invesco of supporting what they say is a Palestinian genocide in Gaza by investing in companies that supply arms to Israel. Members of the campaign group have called an emergency demonstration as Yvette Cooper reportedly prepares to proscribe the group, which would make it unlawful to join the organization Photograph:A bereaved person prays in front of the Cornerstone of Peace at the Peace Memorial Park in Okinawa prefecture, as Japan marked the 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa Photograph: Haruna Furuhashi/AP A large banner against Jeff Bezos is placed by Greenpeace Italy activists along with others in St Mark's Square, in advance of the expected wedding of the Amazon founder and Lauren Sánchez Photograph: Yara Nardi/Reuters A small section of NSF-DOE Vera C Rubin observatory's total view of the Virgo cluster. Visible are two prominent spiral galaxies (lower right), three merging galaxies (upper right), several groups of distant galaxies, many stars in the Milky Way and more Photograph: NSF-DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory/AFP/Getty Images Enrique Vega sits on his horse with his daughters Valentina and Carolina as his wife, Juliana, holds an American flag at the Human Rights Unity Ride, protesting the controversial ongoing federal immigration raids in Los Angeles county, California Photograph:Kraftwerk perform during Forever Now festival at the National Bowl Photograph:Spencer Duarte (in yellow) being tackled by members of the public after snatching a phone. Spencer, 28, of Saffron Walden, admitted one count of theft at Inner London crown court Photograph: City of London Police/PA The Herds, in which life-size animal puppets fleeing climate breakdown have visited cities on a 20,000km (12,400-mile) trip from Africa to the Arctic Circle, arrives in the French capital, with 100 puppeteers giving life to 40 animals. Their journey ends in Trondheim on 30 July Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
When US presidents talk of regime change, we must be careful what they wish for
US president Donald Trump once boasted that he was a 'stable genius'. Well, it never had much of a ring of truth to it. He is in fact, and probably always has been, extremely erratic, a trait lauded by his cult followers as a mystical style of instinctive leadership that all Maga disciples must simply trust, as if he were a latter-day Jesus Christ or, more likely, a tangerine Charles Manson. Either way, Trump is more dangerous than ever. Only a few days ago, we may recall, he was publicly taunting the Ayatollah Khamenei, head of the Iranian theocracy, an 86-year old mullah of unyielding, medievally cruel convictions. Trump took to social media to declare: 'We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.' It's almost as if the guy had spent all his life in the gangsterish world of New York real estate, isn't it? Then, at the weekend, having bombed the hell out of some mountains (the experts say those crafty Iranians cheated by getting their precious enriched uranium out before the bunker busters dropped), Trump allowed his closest lieutenants to go and tell the world it's all about the nukes, and not the old monster who rules the country – Khamenei, not Trump. JD Vance, for example, rumoured to be sceptical about intervention, said that 'has been very clear that we don't want a regime change '. Marco Rubio, secretly still more of a George W Bush style neocon, and thus probably more sympathetic to the idea of getting rid of the 'regime', nonetheless sought to please his boss with what was supposed to be the collective line on Operation Midnight Hammer: 'It was not an attack on Iran, it was not an attack on the Iranian people. This wasn't a regime change move.' Now? Not so much. Trump has revived the idea, in his trademark menacing-playful way, in a post of Truth Social: 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!'. Trump apologists say he was only kidding; but how do we know when to take the guy seriously – apart from 'always and never'? Perhaps Trump dreams of the Iranian people rising up and creating a new pluralistic democracy – a country where elections are free and fair, where the losers always gracefully accept the result and participate in the ceremonial peaceful transfer of power, and would never incite a mob to storm the parliament building where the will of the people is being ratified, and deny the parliamentary authorities the use of troops to defend themselves and the overwhelmed police officers…? The Iranians, especially, are unlikely to be impressed by such talk from the Americans, and, indeed, the Israelis. If they're paranoid about the CIA and MI5, they have reason to be. On numerous occasions in the past, the 'Great Satan' of America – and before that, Little Satan (Britain) – have interfered in Iranian affairs, including deposing two shahs and a prime minister, Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had the temerity to want take control of Iran's oil riches away from 'British' Petroleum. The various coups engineered by the imperialists – a fair description – worked, but not indefinitely; and the seeds of their own eventual destruction were sown in Iran as elsewhere. A period of misrule by the last shah ended up with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and all that has followed since. We should all be worried when an American president talks about regime change. To be fair, Trump is hardly the first, and it rarely ends well, whether it succeeds or not. Historically, the leader the Americans would most have loved to be rid of was their troublesome Communist neighbour Fidel Castro, parked from 1959 to his death in 2016 (natural causes) on what amounted to a giant Russian aircraft carrier 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The CIA considered all manner of ways to assassinate him, including, famously, an exploding cigar. Whether this was inspired by a trip to a joke shop is still classified. A more serious, but still bungled, attempt at an invasion and a coup d'etat in Cuba failed when the US-trained rebels were cornered in what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. That was in 1961, and was hardly the first or the last time they tried to oust Fidel, but this failed plot merely made him even more popular and humiliated the Kennedy administration, who inherited the plan from President Eisenhower's team: regime change has always been a bit of a bipartisan affair. JFK went on, a couple of a years later, to at least acquiesce in the murder of the Diem brothers who ran South Vietnam, replacing them with a chap named Nguyen Van Thieu, who was more to American tastes but no more democratic, nor effective in resisting the Communist conquest of his country. It was an even greater American humbling when they lost that war. The regime change sideshow in that Indo-China conflict was Cambodia, where the Americans helped depose the jolly Prince Sihanouk with a more pro-American general, who was, inevitably, himself deposed when the Khmer Rouge took over and the killing fields were filled with the corpses of more than a million Cambodians. Such disastrous CIA escapades during the cold war were why Congress in the 1970s passed laws banning such covert activities – including the War Powers Act, to try to prevent presidents circumventing the Congressional power to declare war. That oversight didn't persist, and minor, US-inspired coups followed in Grenada (1984) and Nicaragua (1989). The greatest blunder in regime change was, of course, Iraq. To be fair to the second President Bush and Tony Blair, as people tend not to be, it's only right that we recall that their definition of regime change was more nuanced. Regime change could mean a change of policy under an existing dictator. So if Saddam Hussein had genuinely renounced weapons of mass destruction (instead of pretending he had them to scare people away), and allowed comprehensive inspections by the UN, he might still be in business now, albeit unlikely. The alternative, increasingly obvious, was that he'd be forcibly removed. That would also end the mortal threat to the stability of the region. Which it didn't; it just created new ones. As we all know, things didn't turn out any better for the West when Islamic State turned up in post-Saddam Iraq, and turned the Middle East upside down. Much the same may be said about post-Gadaffi Libya, and post-invasion Afghanistan. It all sounds wearily familiar, doesn't it? The Americans upturn one unsatisfactory regime and somehow contrive to make matters worse. Rather like when they re-elected Trump last year.
