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More Than 170 Protesters Arrested at Northeastern and Arizona State University

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Nearly 200 protesters were arrested on Saturday at Northeastern University, Arizona State University, Indiana University and Washington University in St. Louis, according to officials, as colleges across the country struggle to quell growing pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments on campus.

More than 700 protesters have been arrested on U.S. campuses since April 18, when Columbia University had the New York Police Department clear a protest encampment there. In several cases, most of those who were arrested have been released.

At Washington University in St. Louis, the campus was locked down amid protests and several arrests were made on Saturday evening, according to the campus police and updates on the university website. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for the 2024 presidential election, was among the arrested, along with her campaign manager and another staff member, a spokesman for the campaign said. It was not immediately clear how many people were arrested.

Earlier in the day, at Northeastern in Boston, protesters had set up an encampment on the campus’s Centennial Common this week that drew more than 100 supporters. The administration had asked the protesters to leave, but many students did not.

Around dawn on Saturday, Massachusetts State Police officers arrived at the encampment and began to arrest protesters, putting them in zip-tie handcuffs and taking several tents down. They said they had arrested 102 protesters. It was unclear how many of those arrested were students, but the university said students who showed their university IDs were being released.

A Northeastern spokeswoman, Renata Nyul, said the demonstration had been “infiltrated by professional organizers” and that the “use of virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews,’ crossed the line.”

Protesters denied both claims, and a video appeared to show that it was a pro-Israel counterprotester who used the phrase, as part of his criticism of the pro-Palestinian protesters’ chants. In response to that video, Ms. Nyul stood by her initial comments, adding that “any suggestion that repulsive, antisemitic comments are sometimes acceptable depending on the context is reprehensible.”

After protesters had been removed from the encampment by the police and then handcuffed and brought into a nearby building, they moved to block a nearby alley where police vehicles were parked. They cheered in support when one of the arrested protesters — wearing a Northeastern sweatshirt — waved through the building’s windows with zip-tied hands.

Alina Caudle, a sophomore at Northeastern University, reiterated the protesters’ demands that the university disclose its investments and divest from companies that protesters view as supporting Israel’s war in Gaza.

“We want them to divest our money that we’re paying for our tuition,” Ms. Caudle said. “Our administration is not listening to us.”

Ms. Caudle said she believed the vast majority of students in the encampment were Northeastern students, along with a large amount of Jewish students and faculty supporting the protest.

By 11 a.m. on Saturday, the majority of the encampment was cleared. A moving company had been brought in to load up the tents, snacks and other items that had been scattered throughout the grounds.

The mass arrest at Northeastern was the second early-morning crackdown on protesters at a Boston campus in less than a week. Early on Thursday morning, Boston Police officers arrested 118 people at Emerson College after protesters refused to move and formed a barricade.

More than 2,500 miles away, at Arizona State University, the school police arrested 69 people early Saturday morning after they set up an unauthorized encampment, which was in violation of university policy, school officials said.

The school said that the protesters had created an encampment and that the group was instructed multiple times to disperse.

“While the university will continue to be an environment that embraces freedom of speech, ASU’s first priority is to create a safe and secure environment that supports teaching and learning,” school officials said in a statement.

Three people were also arrested at the school in relation to a protest on Friday, officials said.

At Indiana University Bloomington, where the university police had arrested 33 people at an encampment earlier this week, campus and state police arrested 23 more protesters on Saturday. Officials said that a group had “erected numerous tents and canopies on Friday night with the stated intention to occupy the university space indefinitely.”

Schools across the country have used differing strategies over the past week to tamp down protests. Some have backed off and sought to de-escalate tensions, while at other colleges, like the University of Southern California and Emory University, the police have rushed in to break up encampments and arrest students and faculty members, among others.

At some demonstrations, there were some reports of injuries, but in many cases, the arrests have been peaceful, and protesters have often willingly given themselves up when officers moved in.

On Saturday, there appeared to be increased police presence in several campuses, though not all of them have made arrests. At the University of Pennsylvania, more than a dozen campus police officers were stationed along barricades, with over 100 protesters in an encampment and about a dozen pro-Israel counterprotesters across the campus walk.

Across the country at the California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, officers were stationed all over the now-closed campus after protesters occupied two buildings earlier this week. About three dozen protesters were inside an encampment.

Beyond arrests, schools are using other measures to apply pressure. At Harvard, access to its historic Harvard Yard was restricted, allowing in only those who showed a university ID. The university also suspended a pro-Palestinian group, but the group and its supporters set up an encampment in the yard nonetheless.

On Saturday, Harvard’s dean of students sent an email to the student body warning that anyone participating in the encampment faced discipline. But there was no sign of any impending police operation.

At Cornell University, the student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, reported on Friday that four students connected with the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus had been suspended from the school. Cornell officials confirmed the suspensions were issued but declined to provide a number.

In a statement on Saturday afternoon, the university’s vice president for university relations, Joel M. Malina, said that the school had asked the protesters to move to an area “where noise would not disturb classes” and where people could easily avoid the encampment, but he said that offer was rejected.

Mr. Malina also said the university was prepared to issue additional suspensions, “as well as referrals to HR for employee participants.”

Nick Wilson, a student who said he was among those suspended, said in an opinion article for The Cornell Daily Sun that he and others had been withdrawn from their current courses and that they were not allowed on campus. Still, he wrote, the suspension “in an odd way” gave him hope. By his reasoning, institutions like Cornell would not have suspended him and others “unless they truly fear our movement may succeed.”

Halina Bennet, Andrew Spielmann, Jonathan Wolfe and Joel Wolfram contributed reporting.



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Russian Forces Push Deeper Into Northern Ukraine

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In the past three days, Russian troops, backed by fighter jets, artillery and lethal drones, have poured across Ukraine’s northeastern border and seized at least nine villages and settlements, ­and more square miles per day than at almost any other point in the war, save the very beginning.

In some places, Ukrainian troops are retreating, and Ukrainian commanders are blaming each other for the defeats.

Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are fleeing to Kharkiv, the nearest big city. A reception center that hummed with a sense of order and calm on Saturday had transformed into a totally different scene on Sunday, as exhausted people shouted at each other and families with no place to go spilled out onto the grass.

As the sense of panic spreads, especially in Kharkiv, some hard questions loom: How far will this go? Is it just a momentary setback for the underdog Ukrainians? Or a turning point?

Military experts say the Russian advance has put Ukraine in a very dangerous spot. Ukrainian troops have been complaining for months about severe shortages of ammunition — exacerbated by the tangles in the U.S. Congress that delayed the delivery of key weapons. And Ukrainian soldiers, by all accounts, are exhausted.

More than two years of trying to fight off a country with three times the population to draw from has left Ukraine so depleted and desperate for fresh troops that its lawmakers have voted to mobilize convicts, a controversial practice that Ukraine had ridiculed Russia for using in the first half of the war.

One Ukrainian commander took the unusual step on Sunday of blasting his colleagues for what he said were terrible border defenses.

“The first line of fortifications and mines just didn’t exist,” Denys Yaroslavsky, a reconnaissance commander, wrote on Facebook. “The enemy freely entered the gray area, across the border line, which in principle should not have been gray!”

(“Gray” areas are the contested zones between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines.)

Other Ukrainian officials denied that the country’s forces were unprepared, saying that reports suggesting so were outright disinformation benefiting Russia.

Commander Yaroslavsky added that street fights had broken out in Vovchansk, a small town near Kharkiv, and that it was now surrounded. “I say this because we can die and no one will hear the truth,” he wrote. “Then why is it all for?!”

The city of Kharkiv itself is safe — at the moment. It sits about 20 miles from the border. But just outside the city, people are running for their lives. The Russians are pressing on Lyptsi, another small town that is even closer to Kharkiv than Vovchansk. Residents who fled in evacuation vans on Sunday said the situation in Lyptsi was not looking good.

“For the last three days they were shelling us every 10 minutes,” said Halyna Surina, who escaped on Sunday afternoon. “There was artillery, airplane bombs and drones flying around. I could hear helicopters — and they were not our helicopters.”

Her voice was shaking and she could barely choke out the words.

Taking Lyptsi would put the Russians within artillery range of Kharkiv, a metropolis of more than a million people that was just struggling to come back to life. All this, for the Ukrainians, is a bad case of déjà vu.

The Russians created a similar situation in early 2022, storming across the northern border, occupying villages and small towns, and reaching the ring road that circumscribes Kharkiv. For months, the people of this city endured artillery and missile strikes, and hundreds were killed. The tall, empty apartment buildings on the eastern side of town stand as scorched monuments to those deadly days.

Part of the Russians’ plan with this overall attack, military analysts said, is to threaten Kharkiv and force Ukraine to divert troops from other battlefields, especially those in the eastern Donbas region.

And that’s exactly what is happening. A group of Ukrainian special forces soldiers were huddling at a gas station on Sunday afternoon, swigging energy drinks and trying to get the lay of the land. They looked tired. And they said they had just been redeployed from Donbas.

“The Russians have understood, just as a lot of analysts have, that the major disadvantage that Ukraine is currently suffering from is manpower,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst. “By thinning out the front line, you are increasing the odds of a breakthrough.”

There may be an even bigger, more strategic motive. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is fresh off an election victory that he billed as a referendum on launching this war. For his troops to threaten Kharkiv, again, and send miles of cars full of terrified civilians fleeing down the highways, again, and turn Ukraine’s second largest city into a shell of itself, again, could demoralize Ukrainians and its allies.

That hasn’t happened yet, but if it does it could give the impression that after two years and hundreds of thousands of casualties and billions of dollars, little has changed. That, in turn, would perhaps intensify pressure on Ukraine’s leaders to negotiate a truce with Russia, which they have so far insisted would achieve nothing but cementing Mr. Putin’s appetite for aggression. .

With fighting raging in the area, cross-border fire has intensified and Russia on Sunday accused Ukraine of shelling Belgorod, a mid-sized Russian city just across the Ukrainian border, killing 11 people, the regional governor said on Telegram.

In particular, an explosion collapsed part of an apartment building, leaving a gaping hole in its structure. The Russians blamed the Ukrainians; the Ukrainians denied it and provided videos that they said showed what was an explosion within the building and not an airstrike.

The Russians have cited previous strikes on their cities to justify taking more Ukrainian territory. Russian leaders want to push Ukrainians back from the border and carve out a buffer zone, a mission they began on Friday at dawn.

Russian infantry, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft, crossed the international frontier, and by Saturday, they had taken a handful of towns. By Sunday, more had fallen.

Another Ukrainian soldier serving near Kharkiv who spoke by telephone on Sunday said he and his comrades hadn’t slept in days and were in shock at how fast the Russians were moving.

Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top military commander, conceded that the situation had “significantly worsened” but said that Russian attempts to break through Ukrainian defensive lines had been unsuccessful so far.

Some analysts believe that however bad the situation looks at the moment for Ukraine, it won’t change the overall direction of the war.

Thibault Fouillet, the deputy director of the Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies, a French research center, said it would have “little impact on the war in general” and for now, the fighting remained at a “general tactical stalemate” with Russia making limited and costly gains.

The civilians in Russia’s path are not taking chances. Ukrainian officials reported on Sunday that 4,500 people had been evacuated from the border towns north of Kharkiv; that doesn’t count many more who have jumped into their own cars and gotten out.

“We could hear machine gun fire coming closer and closer,” said Zhenia Vaskivskaia, who had just arrived in Kharkiv from Vovchansk.

The Russians, she said, were “about to break in.”

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kharkiv.



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Russia blames Ukraine after blast flattens 10-storey apartment block

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At least two people are said to have been killed after a section of a 10-storey block collapsed in Belgorod.



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US Marine pilot arrested in Australia worked with Chinese hacker, lawyer says

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By Kirsty Needham

SYDNEY (Reuters) – A former U.S. Marine pilot fighting extradition from Australia on U.S. charges of training Chinese military pilots to land on aircraft carriers, unknowingly worked with a Chinese hacker, his lawyer said.

Daniel Duggan, 55, a naturalised Australian citizen, feared requests by Western intelligence agencies for sensitive information were putting his family at risk, the lawyer said in a legal filing seen by Reuters.

The lawyer’s filing supports Reuters reporting linking Duggan to convicted Chinese defence hacker Su Bin.

Duggan denies the allegations that he broke U.S. arms control laws. He has been in an Australian maximum security prison since his 2022 arrest after returning from six years working in Beijing.

U.S. authorities found correspondence with Duggan on electronic devices seized from Su Bin, Duggan’s lawyer Bernard Collaery said in the March submission to Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, who will decide whether to surrender Duggan to the U.S. after a magistrate hears Duggan’s extradition case.

The case will be heard in a Sydney court this month, two years after his arrest in rural Australia at a time when Britain was warning its former military pilots not to work for China.

Su Bin, arrested in Canada in 2014, pleaded guilty in 2016 to theft of U.S. military aircraft designs by hacking major U.S. defence contractors. He is listed among seven co-conspirators with Duggan in the extradition request.

Duggan knew Su Bin as an employment broker for Chinese state aviation company AVIC, lawyer Collaery wrote, and the hacking case was “totally unrelated to our client”.

Although Su Bin “may have had improper connection to (Chinese) agents this was unknown to our client”, Duggan’s lawyer wrote.

‘OVERT INTELLIGENCE CONTACT’

AVIC was blacklisted by the U.S. last year as a Chinese military-linked company.

Messages retrieved from Su Bin’s electronic devices show he paid for Duggan’s travel from Australia to Beijing in May 2012, according to extradition documents lodged by the United States with the Australian court.

Duggan asked Su Bin to help source Chinese aircraft parts for his Top Gun tourist flight business in Australia, Collaery wrote.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and U.S. Navy criminal investigators knew Duggan was training pilots for AVIC and met him in Australia’s Tasmania state in December 2012 and February 2013, his lawyer wrote.

ASIO and the U.S. Navy Criminal Investigation Service did not respond to Reuters requests for comment on the meetings. ASIO has previously said it would not comment as the matter was before the court.

“An ASIO officer suggested that while carrying on his legitimate business operations in China, Mr Duggan may be able to gather sensitive information,” his lawyer wrote.

Duggan moved to China in 2013 and was barred from leaving the country in 2014, his lawyer said. Duggan’s LinkedIn profile and aviation sources who knew him said he was working in China as an aviation consultant in 2013 and 2014.

He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2016 at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, backdated to 2012 on a certificate, after “overt intelligence contact by U.S. authorities that may have compromised his family safety”, his lawyer wrote.

His lawyers oppose extradition, arguing there is no evidence the Chinese pilots he trained were military and that he became an Australian citizen in January 2012, before the alleged offences.

The United States government has argued Duggan did not lose his U.S. citizenship until 2016.

(Reporting by Kirsty Needham in Sydney; Editing by William Mallard)



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