(February 28, 2026 – 13:55)
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a severe statement mourning the “heartbreaking tragedy” at the Shajareh Tayyebah elementary school. Describing the bombing of the facility while it was “full of innocent pupils” as a “savage act,” the president vowed it would become an indelible part of the aggressors’ history of crimes against Iran. The statement strongly condemned the “inhumane act” and called for immediate, prioritized medical attention for the wounded.
At least least 40 people were killed in a strike on an Iranian girls‘ school in the southern region of the country. State media reported another strike in Northwest Iran.
It was the clearest sign yet that Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has vocally opposed Mr. Trump on immigration enforcement matters, holds enough sway with the president to bend a highly charged situation through personal relationship and persuasion.
Aghayeva’s release comes after Mamdani shared his concerns about her arrest with Trump, after which the president informed him “that she will be released imminently,” Mamdani wrote in a Thursday afternoon X post. Mamdani’s advocacy came during an unannounced meeting about housing with Trump at the White House.
Columbia celebrated the news in a Thursday X post, writing that it was “thrilled” about Aghayeva’s release. The University added that it would have “additional details” to share Thursday evening.
(…)
A DHS official wrote in a Thursday statement to Spectator that the DHS terminated Aghayeva’s student visa in 2016 during the administration of President Barack Obama, CC ’83, for “failing to attend classes.”
(February 26, 2026)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Elmina “Ellie” Aghayeva, GS ’26, in a Columbia Residential building Thursday morning, after acting University President Claire Shipman, CC ’86, SIPA ’94, announced that agents had lied in order to enter a residential building and detain an affiliate.
A person with knowledge of the situation told Spectator that ICE agents impersonated New York Police Department officers in order to enter Aghayeva’s dorm.
Aghayeva’s arrest marks the fourth of a Columbia affiliate amid the federal government’s immigration crackdown, which has continued to target international students at the University.
History will remember who stood up and who stayed silent against state sanctioned murder.
(April 1, 2024)
Und auch im idyllischen Heidelberg hat sich der Polizist Simon B. 2010 eigens an der Universität immatrikuliert, um linke Studierende auszuspähen, die nicht im Traum damit gerechnet hätten, einmal ins Fadenkreuz staatlicher Überwachung zu geraten.
Eindrucksvoll erzählen die Protagonisten aus ganz unterschiedlichen Perspektiven ihre Geschichten.
Minneapolis Public Schools on Wednesday canceled classes district-wide for the remainder of the week “due to safety concerns,” following the killing of a woman Wednesday by an ICE agent. The district said it was acting “out of an abundance of caution.”
The move came after officials at Roosevelt High School said armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.
The school official also told MPR News that the agents handcuffed two staff members at the school, and they described getting into a physical confrontation with an agent as they were trying to tell them to leave school property.
“The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down,” the official said. “They don’t care. They’re just animals. I’ve never seen people behave like this.”
(…)
The reasons for the raid on the high school were unclear, and the US Department of Homeland Security did not respond to KSTP Eyewitness 5 News’ or MPR News’ requests for comment.
Italian dockworkers and the Union of Base Trade Unions (USB) vowed that they would respond with strikes and class struggle in the event of an attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla, and they delivered. On October 3, Italy exploded in a day of “wildcat” strike actions across many sectors.
Despite intimidation from the authorities, who declared the strike illegal and deployed heavy repressive operations, the USB and the dockworkers managed to get Italian workers across sectors to stop and take to the streets, forcing the bureaucracy of the main labor union (CGIL) to call for a strike and demonstrations. Following the important day of struggle on September 22, over two million workers demonstrated and walked off the streets on Friday, especially in the metalworking, logistics, and education sectors.
According to the CGIL union, 300,000 people marched through the streets of Rome alone, while the national average participation in the general strike stood at around 60%, halting all the main services in key sectors including transportation and schools.
(today)
Here’s what you should know:
The shooter is dead: The gunman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, O’Hara said at the news conference. The shooter, who was in his early 20s but has not been publicly identified, was clad in black and armed with a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol. Police are still investigating a possible motive.
(June 5, 2025)
ICE last week raided two San Diego restaurants in a search for workers allegedly living in the country illegally, setting off a confrontation with protesters outside. Immigration agents in April showed up trying to speak with students at two Los Angeles elementary schools; school administrators turned them away. That month they also detained a group of day laborers in the parking lot of a Pomona Home Depot.
The lawmakers’ proposals sailed through the Legislature so far, and passed the Senate this week with near-unanimous support from Democrats. They now head to the Assembly.
A Boston federal judge said at a hearing May 29 that she planned to issue a preliminary injunction that blocks the Department of Homeland Security from revoking Harvard‘s ability to enroll foreign exchange students.
The comments from U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs came as the Trump administration attempted to walk back its May 22 directive that immediately revoked Harvard‘s participation in a federal exchange student program.
The database, which is operated by the Department of Homeland Security, tracks the immigration status of international students and is used by universities to maintain information about the students’ enrollment.
The SEVIS revocations occurred alongside visa cancellations for many students, putting them ultimately at risk for deportation, multiple attorneys representing students have said in court documents. The DOJ continues to claim that SEVIS changes did not cause visa terminations.
The Trump administration began to cancel visas and launched deportation proceedings in March, which initially targeted students who participated in protests against the Israel-Hamas war on college campuses last year.
(April 10, 2025)
Hundreds of Arab and Jewish students gathered on Tuesday, April 8, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to protest the war in Gaza as they accused Israel of committing genocide. The university initially approved the anti-war protest but then decided to cancel it due to the “inability to guarantee the protesters’ safety” and “concerns about a violent eruption during the demonstrations.”
On Tuesday, Hadash students’ cells, in the universities of Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Haifa, together with partners in the struggle against fascism and occupation – initiated a series of protests against silencing “massacre and war.” The protesters waving signs and banners in Hebrew and Arabic that read, “Stop the War” and “Stop the genocide.”
Lawyers for Khalil said they plan to keep fighting. The judge gave them until April 23 to seek a waiver.
Dozens of students take part in a protest at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, calling for an end to the war in Gaza and accusing Israel of committing genocide.
Footage from the scene shows students holding signs reading “stop the genocide” and “stop the war” and chanting in Arabic.
Academia for Equality is a members‘ organization working to promote democratization, equality, inclusion, representation, and access to higher education for all communities living in Israel/Palestine. We believe that furthering our mission in academia will promote justice and equality in our society and region as a whole. Recognizing the rights of both peoples in Israel-Palestine according to international law, we struggle against the complicity of Israeli academia with the occupation, war, and apartheid, strive for academic freedom, and stand against the silencing of critical voices in Israel and the wider academic world. We criticize the neoliberalization and fascization of academic life and the degradation of academia as a public institution. We combat all forms of discrimination and exploitation in academia; abusive labor relations, sexual harassment, abuse of power and marginalization of minority groups. Our collective activities, bringing together faculty and students of all ranks, identities and groups across institutions in Israel-Palestine and internationally, seek to lay the foundations for solidarity across class and institutional differences in a range of intersecting struggles aimed at changing the face of academia and society.
Academia for Equality published a call to Israeli scholars to reject US President Donald Trump’s attacks on students and academic freedom under the false pretense of “combatting antisemitism.” Academia for Equality is an organization with 800 Jewish and Arab academics in Israel members organization working to promote democratization, equality, inclusion, representation, and access to higher education for all communities living in Israel and Palestine.
The call said: “We, Israeli professors, educators, researchers, graduate students, and members of academia, hailing from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, possessing diverse political views, living in and outside Israel, are deeply concerned about the recent actions undertaken by the US Administration against Columbia University and other US universities. We are alarmed by the persecution of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students and faculty, including the illegal arrests and threats to deport activists without any specific charges or due process, at times in clear violation of court orders, especially under the pretext of combating antisemitism.
On Saturday, ICE agents abducted Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil from his home.
Several Jewish organisations are protesting at Trump Tower in New York – in support of detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.
Police have arrested several protesters.
Dozens of Jewish demonstrators are inside the building – and chanting slogans in support of Palestine.
Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident, is facing deportation via a rarely used foreign policy law. He is a Palestinian student who has been organising along with fellow pro-Palestinian supporters. Mahmoud has US residency via a green card which are rarely revoked without a criminal conviction. Khalil has no such criminal conviction and is instead facing deportation regardless because the US government:
has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.
ADC has answered the call of several students for legal support against repression and discrimination by their universities, and more support is needed.
On Dec. 11, over a dozen NYU students and faculty dropped flyers and hung banners throughout the Bobst Library while 13 people sat in on the administrative floor of thelibrary. The actionists were demanding a meeting with administrators, who had, in the spring during the Gaza solidarity encampment movement at NYU, promised students to disclose the university’s endowment, including all its investments in weapons manufacturers and ties to Israel and companies that profit off its occupation of Palestine.
The direct action was organized by student group Shut It Down NYU, which challenges what it sees as NYU’s ties to imperialism. Not only were the students’ demands ignored, but yesterday, 11 of them were suspended for a year on the pretext of participating “in coordinated and collective disruptive action” — the non-violent action at the library. Several more NYU students are currently going through disciplinary proceedings that could result in similar punishments.
Here is the press release we received from Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine:
(December 17, 2024)
In the petition, Adalah Attorney Salam Irsheid argued that the law is clearly racist in intent, especially given the widespread persecution and criminalization of hundreds of Palestinian citizens by Israeli authorities and other entities since the outbreak of the war 7 October 2023, for merely expressing entirely lawful opinions. The law’s deliberate vagueness, and the fact that it only addresses “incitement to terrorism”—which is used almost exclusively to target Palestinians—while excluding incitement to violence or racism, highlights its discriminatory purpose. By granting broad, unchecked powers to political and administrative authorities, the law enables punitive actions to be taken against Palestinian educators for expressing views that fall outside the mainstream consensus, thereby severely undermining their basic right to freedom of expression. Adalah further argued that the law breaches the principle of the separation of powers, as it grants the Education Ministry the authority to infringe on teachers’ rights to freedom of expression and occupation, effectively requiring a determination of whether they have committed a criminal offense, even if no charges have been filed against them.
Hadash MKs opposed the proposed legislation, calling it “dime-store fascist populism and McCarthyism.” According to Hadash MK Aida Touma-Sliman, “The Knesset is advancing two bills targeting critical students and professors, aimed primarily at Palestinian and leftist voices in academia. These bills seek to silence any remaining voices resisting the government’s policies of occupation and war. This marks another step in the fascist agenda to suppress any real opposition to the extreme right. Heads of universities, professors, and students recognize the danger of such legislation and are voicing their opposition.
On past week, the Knesset plenum, in a preliminary reading, passed a proposed law that would amend the Students Rights Law, allowing most Israeli higher education institutions to implement gender separation. MK Son Har-Melech proposed the law, which 55 members of the Knesset (MKs) supported and 45 MKs opposed.