Also, the U.S. accused Russia of using chemical weapons. Here’s the latest at the end of Thursday.
President Biden speaking at the White House today.Credit…Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
President Biden delivered an unscheduled address from the White House today in which he denounced the violence and the antisemitism that have erupted on several college campuses. It is the first time the president has addressed at length the pro-Palestinian protests that have disrupted the end of the school year at dozens of universities coast to coast.
“There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos,” Biden said. “People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”
Biden, however, rejected the idea of deploying National Guard troops to quell the protests, a move some Republicans have suggested. He also said that the protests — which vary in their demands, but typically call for an end to the war in Gaza — had not influenced his views on the war between Israel and Hamas.
The demonstrations carried on: Hours ago, the police removed protesters who had been occupying a library at Portland State University in Oregon. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, activists erected 30 new tents, a day after a previous encampment was cleared. In total, nearly 2,000 arrests have been made nationwide. Here’s a breakdown of where the arrests have taken place.
Some colleges, including Brown and Northwestern, have ended encampments by striking deals with protesters, drawing criticism from some Jewish leaders.
For more: This is how Columbia University students seized Hamilton Hall.
Trump’s defense lawyers turned up the heat
The lawyers defending Donald Trump in his Manhattan criminal trial have spent much of it trying to delay the proceedings and to downplay the charges against him as mere bookkeeping oversights. But today, during cross-examination, Trump’s lawyers went on the offensive, questioning the reliability of one of the prosecution’s witnesses.
Trump’s defense team sought to cast Keith Davidson, a lawyer who negotiated the hush-money payment on behalf of Stormy Daniels, as a shakedown artist who had also taken aim at celebrities including Charlie Sheen, Hulk Hogan and Lindsay Lohan. Here’s more on what happened today.
Google’s antitrust trial is wrapping up
Lawyers for the Justice Department and Google began delivering their closing arguments in a trial that arose from a U.S. lawsuit accusing the tech giant of illegally maintaining a monopoly over online search. The decision, which could come in weeks or months, is likely to set a precedent for the government’s other efforts to rein in Big Tech.
During arguments today, the judge overseeing the case questioned the government’s position that Google’s dominance had hurt the quality of the experience for searching for information online. He questioned Google’s defense that there were alternatives: “Certainly I don’t think the average person would say, ‘Google and Amazon are the same thing,’” the judge said.
The U.S. accused Russia of using chemical weapons
The State Department said Russia had used chloropicrin, a “choking agent” widely used during World War I, and tear gas against Ukrainian troops. Both gasses are banned under a decades-old chemical weapons treaty signed by Russia.
Officials said that the U.S. was planning to impose sanctions on three state entities linked to Russia’s chemical and biological weapons programs and four companies that support them.