Also Monday, a group calling itself “Rachel Corrie’s Ghost Brigade” said people had cut through a fence at the bureau’s training facility and set 10 fires in anticipation of a police response at Portland State University’s Millar Library.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators had occupied the library for three days and the university administration asked city police to intervene. Police on Friday arrested 12 people, including four students, after the initial sweep.

Police said in an email that they are “aware of the online post claiming responsibility and that is part of the investigation.”

The Columbia University chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) demanded a no confidence vote Thursday against school President Minouche Shafik in response to ongoing controversy over the campus’s recent student protests.

“A vote of no confidence in the President and her administration is the only way to begin rebuilding our shattered community and re-establishing the University’s core values of free speech, the right to peaceful assembly, and shared governance,” the group said in a statement days after Shafik used the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to clear the pro-Palestinian encampment and remove protesters from Hamilton Hal.

The chapter takes issue with the use of the NYPD to make arrests Tuesday, especially without the approval from faculty Senate.

“This decision was made without consultation with the University Senate, in violation of established procedures, by recourse to so-called emergency powers. It also flew in the face of efforts by the AAUP and faculty trusted by the student protestors to de-escalate the situation on campus and to serve as observers in negotiations — efforts endorsed by the University Senate chair that continued into the afternoon before the assault,” the statement reads.

Mohammad Mozni, the president of Iran's Shiraz University, said on Monday that American and European students and faculty expelled from their institutions over their support for Gaza could continue their studies at his university, Iran International reported.

Noga Weiss, an 18-year-old former hostage, told N12 on Thursday that her terrorist captor had demanded her hand in marriage and insisted that she stay in Gaza to raise his children.

Weiss, who was released on her 50th day in captivity as part of a temporary ceasefire agreement, was kidnapped from Kibbutz Beeri on October 7.

After 14 days in captivity, her captor gave her a ring and demanded that she stay in Gaza to marry him and have his children.

“He told me, ‘Everyone will be released, but you will stay here with me and have my children,’” she recalled. “I pretended to laugh so he wouldn’t shoot me in the head.”

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.
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Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

ISTANBUL (AP) — A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.

The comments by Khalil al-Hayya in an interview Wednesday came amid a stalemate in months of talks for a cease-fire in Gaza. The suggestion that Hamas would disarm appeared to be a significant concession by the militant group officially committed to Israel’s destruction.

But it’s unlikely Israel would consider such a scenario. It has vowed to crush Hamas following the deadly Oct. 7 attacks that triggered the war, and its current leadership is adamantly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state on lands Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

New video evidence uncovered by CNN significantly undermines two Pentagon investigations, the latest of which was released last week, into an ISIS-K suicide attack outside Kabul airport, during the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

The incident was a gruesome coda to America’s longest war, leaving dead 13 United States military service members and about 170 Afghans who were desperately seeking US help to flee the Taliban takeover of Kabul. For two years, the US military has insisted that the loss of life was caused by a single explosion, and that troops who reported coming under fire and returning it were likely confused in the chaotic aftermath, some suffering from the effects of blast concussion.

But video captured by a Marine’s GoPro camera that has not been seen publicly in full before shows there was far more gunfire than the Pentagon has ever admitted. A dozen US military personnel, who were on the scene and spoke to CNN anonymously for fear of reprisals, have described the gunfire in detail. One told CNN he heard the first large burst of shooting come from where US Marines were standing, near the blast site. “It wasn’t onesies and twosies,” the Marine said. “It was a mass volume of gunfire.”

An Afghan doctor who spoke to CNN on the record for the first time said he personally pulled bullets from the wounded, and with his hospital staff counted dozens of Afghans who died from gunshot wounds.

Combined, the new evidence challenges the credibility of the two US military investigations and raises serious questions for the Pentagon, which has continued to dismiss mounting evidence that civilians were shot dead.