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Excerpt from www.foxnews.com

Anti-Israel protests linger across college campuses nationwide nearly three weeks after they first appeared at Columbia University.

In the chaotic weeks since April 18, more than 2,600 people have been arrested on 50 campuses. The protesters have said they want their schools to cut all ties with Israel over its war in Gaza.

Administrators have shown mixed reactions with some universities like UT Austin and Emory University cracking down almost immediately, while others have shown more restraint.

Police block pro-Palestinian protesters from returning to their encampment at the University of Chicago, on Tuesday, May 7.  (AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)

But many colleges in the latter camp have started to lose patience amid the increasing combativeness of some of the protesters. Anti-Israel agitators at a George Washington encampment for instance, have called for the “guillotine” for school administrators.

Campuses have tried tactics from appeasement to threats of disciplinary action to resolve the protests and clear the way for upcoming commencements.

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Excerpt from amp.theguardian.com

Extreme weather

Severe thunderstorms bring hail and structural damage, with tornadoes hitting cities including Kalamazoo and Battle Creek

Tornadoes that hit Michigan on Tuesday evening ripped the roof off a FedEx building in Portage, partially collapsing the structure and trapping 50 people inside, Kalamazoo county authorities said. Elsewhere in the state, thousands of residents are without power and face a deluge of hail and tornado warnings amid severe thunderstorms.

“TAKE COVER NOW,” the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids warned in a post directed at Portage residents on their Facebook page.

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Excerpt from www.ft.com

Disney shares tumbled 9.5 per cent on Tuesday even as it reported the first profit in its core streaming business since it leapt into a battle with Netflix five years ago.

The Disney+ and Hulu streaming unit earned an operating profit of $47mn in the quarter to the end of March, compared with a $587mn loss a year earlier. Disney achieved the milestone months earlier than expected thanks to cost-cutting and the popularity of Hulu programmes including Shogun and The Bear.

But investors appeared to be more focused on a potential slowdown in the company’s theme parks, which have rebounded strongly since the pandemic restrictions began to lift.

Bob Iger, chief executive, highlighted the quarterly improvement in streaming and its experiences division, where theme parks outside the US, including Shanghai Disney, performed well. “We are turbocharging growth in our experiences business with a number of near- and long-term strategic investments,” he said.

In a call with investors, Hugh Johnston, Disney’s chief financial officer, said higher expenses from the launch of two new cruise ships would limit growth in the current quarter. He also said the post-pandemic travel boom could be running out of steam.

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Excerpt from www.washingtontimes.com

China’s Communist rulers intend to replace America, establish new world order  Washington Times

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Excerpt from nebraskaexaminer.com

The top lawyers for Arkansas and Missouri on Tuesday announced the filing of a lawsuit with four other states, including Nebraska, against the U.S. Department of Education’s change to Title IX that, among other things, codifies protections for LGBTQ+ students.

The federal rule, announced in April, protects students and school employees from sex-based discrimination, requires schools to offer support for people who make complaints, sets guidelines for schools and includes transgender students in the law’s protections. It is expected to go into effect Aug. 1.

The 60-page lawsuit alleges the education department has exceeded its authority by rewriting the statute. It also claims the rule violates the First Amendment, is arbitrary and capricious by going against “decades” of understanding of Title IX and presents “an actual controversy” by redefining “sex” to include gender identity.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, seeks to ultimately stop the federal rule’s effective date.

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Excerpt from ca.movies.yahoo.com

• A FedEx driver dropped off boxes containing .30 caliber M1 rifles at Chester High School.
• The guns sat inside the school over the weekend before the driver returned to collect them.
• The error was caused by the school having an address similar to the intended recipient’s.

A FedEx driver mistakenly left boxes containing a half-dozen military-style rifles at a public high school outside Philadelphia last Friday, according to police and school officials.

The guns, identified as .30 caliber M1 rifles, sat inside the Chester High School loading dock over the weekend, staff believing the unopened boxes to contain textbooks, CBS News reported.

The driver returned on Monday to collect the packages.

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Excerpt from abcnews.go.com

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk says he is calling a special meeting of the secret services to discuss alleged Russian and Belarusian influence

May 7, 2024, 1:24 PM ET

• 3 min read

WARSAW, Poland — WARSAW, Poland (AP) —

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk called Tuesday for a special meeting of the secret services to discuss alleged Russian and Belarusian infiltration after a Polish judge who had access to sensitive state information defected to Belarus.

Authorities in NATO and European Union member Poland are investigating the judge, Tomasz Szmydt, on suspicions that he was acting on behalf of a foreign intelligence service.

The Polish government said in a statement Tuesday that “Szmydt had constant and direct access to classified information. He has also been in contact with Belarusians for a long time. This situation should be of the utmost concern.”

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Excerpt from www.army-technology.com

China stands accused of hacking the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in a major cyberattack on armed forces’ SSCL payroll data system.

The data breach compromised the names and bank details of current military personnel and veterans, Sky News reported.

When addressing the House of Commons today (7 May), UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said a “malign actor” was responsible for the attack, but that the government “cannot rule out state involvement”. He added that there was “no evidence that any data has been removed”.

Shapps has announced a “multi-point plan to support and protect personnel”, an MoD spokesperson told Army Technology.

The MoD has been working urgently to grasp the scale of the cyberattack over the last three days since discovering the data breach.

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Excerpt from tvpworld.com

Russia may incite provocations ahead of Victory Day: Lithuanian intelligence  TVP World

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Excerpt from www.independent.co.uk

A new vaccine could be effective against coronaviruses which have yet to emerge, with hopes it could be used to battle future pandemics, research suggests.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Caltech in the US are developing a novel approach called “proactive vaccinology”, which aims to train the body’s immune system to recognise several different coronaviruses.

The vaccine used antigens – a substance that triggers an immune response in the body – found in eight different coronaviruses, including those circulating in bats. This trains the immune system to go after the parts of the antigens that are shared across the viruses and other similar ones, including those not included in the vaccine.

The vaccine, for instance, does not include the Sars-CoV-1 virus, which led to the 2003 SARs outbreak, but can produce an immune response to it.

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Excerpt from www.technologyreview.com

But bovines may not be far behind. There’s a large assisted-reproduction industry in cattle, with more than a million IVF attempts a year, half of them in North America. Many other beef and dairy cattle are artificially inseminated with semen from top-rated bulls. “Cattle is harder,” says Jiang. “But we have all the technology.”

ANTONIO REGALADO

The thing that came out of cow #307 turned out to be damaged, just a fragment. But later that day, in Jiang’s main laboratory, students were speed-walking across the linoleum holding something in a petri dish. They’d retrieved intact embryonic structures from some of the other cows. These looked long and stringy, like worms, or the skin shed by a miniature snake.

That’s precisely what a two-week-old cattle embryo should look like. But the outer appearance is deceiving, Jiang says. After staining chemicals are added, the specimens are put under a microscope. Then the disorder inside them is apparent. These “elongated structures,” as Jiang calls them, have the right parts—cells of the embryonic disc and placenta—but nothing is in quite the right place.

ticle
Excerpt from www.mining.com

Additionally, the researchers emphasized the safety advantages of their aqueous battery over non-aqueous lithium batteries, notorious for their high flammability.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, the water-based battery “shows promising potential for the development of next-generation high-energy-density and safe rechargeable aqueous batteries,” as quoted by the researchers.

One of the authors, Li Xianfeng, a professor at the CAS Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, stated that their findings “may expand aqueous battery applications in the power battery field.”

Currently, most electric vehicles rely on lithium-ion batteries to operate.

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Excerpt from www.forbes.com

The United States military has invested tens of billions of dollars over a half-century in the research and development of directed energy weapons. Now, it’s actually using them in battle.

The Army has used lasers to take down hostile drones in the Middle East, Doug Bush, the Army’s head of acquisitions, recently told Forbes. It’s the first time the Defense Department has acknowledged that such weapons have been used in combat.

“They’ve worked in some cases,” Bush said. “In the right conditions they’re highly effective against certain threats.”

He declined to detail the weapons used, but one appears to be a system called P-HEL. It’s based on the defense contractor BlueHalo’s Locust laser, a boxy pallet-mounted device for fixed-site defense that’s commanded with an Xbox gaming controller. The weapon is designed to discharge a relatively low-powered 20-kilowatt laser beam that melts a critical point on a drone in seconds, knocking it from the sky.

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Excerpt from www.thecollegefix.com

Modern equivalent of ‘scrawling cruel rumors on the bathroom wall,’ president says

The University of North Carolina System plans to ban anonymous social media apps across its 16 campuses, arguing the technology companies have a “reckless disregard” for students’ wellbeing.

Other universities are considering similar bans, prompting concerns from free speech advocates.

UNC System President Peter Hans announced the plan in a two page statement to the UNC Board of Governors earlier this semester. Hans said social media apps are the modern equivalent of “scrawling cruel rumors on the bathroom wall,” and the most destructive ones will be blocked by the UNC System infrastructure.

His statement did not include a timeline for the social media block. The College Fix reached out to UNC three times via email and phone call for comment in the past two weeks, but the university did not respond.

“We’re targeting a handful of smaller, hyper-local platforms that have shown reckless disregard for the wellbeing of young people and an outright indifference to bullying and bad behavior,” Hans said in his statement.

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Excerpt from www.iraqinews.com

Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) – The Iraqi Ministry of Interior began purchasing medium-range weapons from citizens after opening 697 registration offices in Baghdad and the rest of the Iraqi governorates.

The Interior Ministry announced earlier that it allocated one billion Iraqi dinars (more than $763,000) for each governorate to complete the purchasing process, according to Alsabah Daily, the official newspaper in Iraq.

The secretary of the committee tasked with weapon control, Brigadier General Mansour Ali Sultan, said in November that 70 percent of a database related to arms possessed by individuals has been completed.

“The Iraqi law allows every citizen who is 25 years old or older to possess weapons,” Sultan explained.

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Excerpt from apnews.com

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Campus protests by pro-Palestinian activists spread across Europe on Tuesday as some called for a break in academic ties with Israel over the war in Gaza, while schools increasingly faced the question under debate in the U.S.: Allow or intervene?

German police broke up a protest by several hundred pro-Palestinian activists who had occupied a courtyard at Berlin’s Free University. Protesters occupied a university building in Amsterdam hours after police detained 169 people at a different campus location. Two remained in custody on suspicion of committing public violence.

Elsewhere in Europe, some student camps have been allowed to stay in places like the lawns of Cambridge. In recent days, students have held protests or set up encampments in Finland, Denmark, Italy, Spain, France and Britain.

In Berlin, protesters put up about 20 tents and formed a human chain around them. Most covered their faces with medical masks and draped keffiyeh scarves around their heads, shouting slogans such as “Viva, viva Palestina.”

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Excerpt from www.ctvnews.ca

A knife attack at a hospital in southwestern China on Tuesday killed two people and injured 21 others, authorities said.

No motive was given for the attack at Zhenxiong County People’s Hospital in Yunnan province. The suspect is a male from a village in the same county, a Zhenxiong police statement said. The injured were being treated, it said.

A witness told Red Star News, an online outlet, that he had narrowly escaped the attack and that a doctor or doctors were among the injured. Video from the witness showed people who were bleeding and had fallen to the ground, and one older person trying to help another, the Red Star social media post said.

Earlier media reports said 23 people had been injured, but the police statement said the total was 21. A video posted online by Guizhou Province Television showed a man being taken away by police.

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Excerpt from www.nbcsandiego.com

The headline of this story originally stated that protesters had been pepper-sprayed, which has not been confirmed. Video shows people rinsing the eyes out of at least one person, but, if they were hit with pepper-spray, it’s not clear why. — Ed.

After arrests earlier in the morning, a large crowd of protesters gathered near UC San Diego’s Price Center on Monday, where a bus with barred windows that is operated by the San Diego Sheriff’s Department had been brought on campus, likely to transport those whom had been taken into custody.

At least one person was spotted using a water bottle to rinse out another protester’s eyes.

The large crowd, while not surrounding the bus, certainly impeded its departure after several of those in attendance began banging on the sides of the coach.

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Excerpt from www.bbc.com

Columbia University has cancelled its main graduation after weeks of protests on campus over the Israel-Gaza war.

The Ivy League school said it was ditching the 15 May commencement in favour of smaller celebrations to focus on “keeping them safe”.

The New York City university said it had arrived at the decision after consultations with student leaders.

Colleges across the US are bracing for disruptions at graduations amid pro-Palestinian protests.

Columbia University said in a statement on Monday: “Our students emphasized that these smaller-scale, school-based celebrations are most meaningful to them and their families.

“They are eager to cross the stage to applause and family pride and hear from their school’s invited guest speakers.