About 700 students, faculty, & community members held a 6-hour protest at Ohio State University campus yesterday. Protesters called OSU to divest investments from companies with links to Israel.  The protest ended when nearly 70 police officers and Ohio State High Patrol brutalized protesters while they were performing "Isha" Muslim prayers and arrested nearly 40 protesters, including students, faculty, one Jewish protester, and community members. There were 20 members who were not affiliated by OSU. Those were parents and other family members of the protesters who came to support the students and be there for them in the event of arrest.  After all, it makes no difference if they were students, faculty or not. OSU is public university and is supported by our tax-payers money. 

The TCM Classic Film Festival, which turned 15 this year, annually presents primo pictures from yesteryear along with panels and talents linked to those movies at venues in Hollywood. TCM’s 2024 film fete included personal appearances by John Travolta, Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Tim Robbins and even highlighted Jodie Foster “cementing” her place in Tinseltown history with a hand and footprint ceremony in the hallowed courtyard of what previously was Grauman’s Chinese Theater (now TCL Chinese Theatre Max, where Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Shawshank Redemption and Hitchcock’s North By Northwest were screened during the Festival). Enhancing the Festival’s heady ambiance is the great motion picture bonhomie among the film fans attending this movie-palooza, which also includes parties in Club TCM at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. 

The outcome of the Palestine vote and the American veto at the United Nations Security Council on April 18 was predictable. Though European countries are becoming increasingly supportive of a Palestinian state, the United States is not yet ready for this commitment. 

 These are some of the reasons that the US deputy envoy to the UN, Robert Wood, vetoed the resolution.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”--The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified Dec., 15, 1791.

An open assault on the First Amendment is occurring across America, as college students who are peacefully exercising their Constitutional right to freedom of speech, challenging government policies, are being arrested in droves.

The self-appointed Congressional Overseers of Higher Education, who hauled politically naïve university presidents into their star chambers and publicly castigated the savants for not admonishing their students to be sufficiently sympathetic to genocide, essentially demanded loyalty, not to America, but to the deadly agenda of a country not our own. 

Leading government officials have expressed dismay at the furor which has erupted on campuses and have encouraged the use of repressive tactics.