CAMPUS CLASHES: Students at Columbia University have taken over a campus building in an escalation of their protest in support of Palestinians in Gaza. They smashed some windows and put bicycle locks through door handles.

  The students said in a statement on Instagram that they have “taken matters into their own hands” and plan to remain in Hamilton Hall until Columbia divests from investments in Israel. They said they want “divestment, financial transparency, and amnesty.”

  Hamilton Hall is the same building taken over by anti-war protesters in 1968.

  Columbia said yesterday that it is not going to divest and began suspending students in the protest encampment occupying a portion of the New York campus. The University had said it will not divest investments from Israel and set a 2 pm deadline for the protest camp to be dismantled before suspensions would begin. The protesters voted to ignored the university’s ultimatum.

  Hundreds of students encircled the camp to protect it. After a tense afternoon in anticipation of police action that never came, the students outside the perimeter left and the roughly 80 tents in the camp remained. A student organizer said, “We do not abide by university pressures. We act based on the will of the students.”

  Protests continue at universities across the country as the end of the semester and graduation approach. As many as 90 people were arrested at Virginia Tech and suspensions were meted out at Cornell.

  At the University of Texas at Austin, state and local police moved in yesterday on the pro-Palestinian protesters, at times using pepper spray. The cops selected the protesters one by one, cuffed them with zip ties, and escorted them away. At least 43 were arrested.

IT’S POLITICAL: Former Attorney General Bill Barr recently told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that President Trump threatened to execute leakers who revealed that he had retreated to the White House bunker during protests of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police. 

  “The president would lose his temper and say things like that,” Barr said. “I doubt he would have actually carried it out.”

  Barr’s thinking about Trump is one of those mysteries that hangs over the Trump phenomenon. He said, “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

  However, last year, Barr told Collins that after Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, “Someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system and to our self-government shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”

THE SHOOTING GALLERY: Eight law officers were shot yesterday and four of them died as a US Marshals fugitive task force attempted to serve a warrant in Charlotte, North Carolina.  It was one of the deadliest days for law enforcement in recent years. The suspect the officers sought to arrest also was killed.

  The officers had gone to serve a warrant on a man for being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. When they approached a home, the man opened fire and gunshots also came from within the house. Two other people were taken into custody.

TRUMP ON TRIAL: The New York criminal trial of Donald Trump is expected to resume today with more testimony from Gary Farro, the banker who helped Trump lawyer Michael Cohen open an account that he used for the $130,000 payment to silence porn actress Stormy Daniels about an alleged fling with Trump.

  Cohen is expected to testify soon.

  Speaking of Cohen, the right wing One America News network retracted their report claiming that Trump’s former fixer was the man who actually had an affair with the Daniels. The retraction came after Cohen hired a leading defamation lawyer to take on OAN.

  Cohen receives no monetary damages, but the story is being removed from the OAN’s website “and all social media,” the network said in a statement.

THE SPIN RACK: Lawyers for presidential son Hunter Biden sent a letter to Fox News demanding that they remove from their platforms sexually explicit images that the younger Biden says are private. The letter alleges a conspiracy to defame and unlawful publication of “hacked” images taken from the laptop Biden left in a repair shop. They also want corrections and retractions on air as well as in online articles claiming that Hunter and his father, the President, engaged in an international bribery scheme. — A federal appeals court in Richmond became the first in the country to rule that state health-care plans must pay for gender-affirming surgeries.  The decision came from cases out of North Carolina and West Virginia, where state officials claimed such surgeries were too expensive. Writing for the majority, Judge Roger Gregory said, “In this case, discriminating on the basis of diagnosis is discriminating on the basis of gender identity and sex.” 

THE OBIT PAGE: Robbi Mecus, a New York State forest ranger who led search-and-rescue missions and was a prominent voice LGBTQ mountaineers, was killed last week in a 1,000-foot fall while climbing a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. She was 52.

  Mecus, who worked mostly in the Adirondacks, was a specialist in search and rescue for climbers and hikers in the wilderness. Just last month, she helped rescue a frostbitten hiker lost overnight in the Adirondack Mountains.

  At age 44, Mecus came out as transgender. She then worked to foster support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender climbers in the North Country of New York.

BELOW THE FOLD: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is the target of pundits, comedians, and animal rights activists after revealing in her new memoir that she once shot her 14-month old dog because she thought it was untrainable and “less than worthless” for hunting.

  In her defense, Noem has said that sometimes you have to make hard decisions down on the farm. But as Noem herself might say, “That dog won’t hunt.” 

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