Pro-Palestine protests at US universities continue, over 60 arrested in a day

Here are the latest developments:

• Georgia State Patrol officers arrested 28 people on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta on Thursday, CNN reported. The State Patrol said officers had to resort to pepper balls to control the unruly protesters as some of them threw bottles at the personnel.

• At least 33 people were arrested on the campus of Indiana University after they refused to halt their encampment protests despite several warnings from the police. The Indiana University Police Department said the protesters were warned on Thursday morning and afternoon to remove their structures, but to no avail.

• Palestine Legal, an organisation that seeks to protect the rights of people in the US to speak out on behalf of Palestinians, has filed a federal civil rights complaint against Columbia University demanding a probe into the treatment of students after last week’s mass arrest of anti-war protesters, Reuters reported.

• The University of Southern California on Thursday announced its decision to cancel the main graduation ceremony. The move came 10 days after administrators said the student valedictorian who had expressed support for Palestinians would not be allowed to speak, reports The Associated Press.

• Ellen M. Granberg, president of George Washington University, said that DC Metropolitan Police were asked to help in the relocations of an “unauthorised protest encampment” on campus after multiple directions to move to an alternate protest site “went unheeded by encampment participants”.

• US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said President Joe Biden’s administration “supports the right of anybody to peacefully protest”, adding that “harmful rhetoric, whether it be rooted in antisemitism, Islamophobia, is incredibly problematic and needs to be condemned and called out”.

• Former US President Donald Trump has criticised the mass anti-Palestine protests and described them as “tremendous hate”. He said the campus protests were far worse than the violent clashes in Virginia in 2017 between white nationalists and counter-protesters that killed one woman.

• The Northeastern University in Boston and the University of California, Los Angeles, witnessed the formation of fresh encampment protests on Thursday, where students were seen forming human chains and chanting anti-war slogans.

• With just over nine months into her tenure, Columbia University president Minouche Shafik is facing calls to step down over her handling of the protests. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and Harvard University president Claudine Gay have both stepped down over their responses.

• According to a tally by the Reuters news agency, nearly 550 arrests have been made in the last week at major US universities amid the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests.