Trump slams Washington post over Kelly report
Washington, April 9:US President Donald Trump has slammed a Washington Post report on John Kelly's struggles in the administration and denied that the White House chief of staff was suffering from diminished credibility and influence.
"Story on John Kelly isn't true, just another hit job!" Trump tweeted and claimed the newspaper produces "far more fiction than fact".
His tweet however, was deleted and then re-published with a correction to a typo.
Bezos’s owned Washington Post on Saturday reported that Trump has started to bypass Kelly, who has sought to control access to the President in a variety of ways.
The Post report also said that Kelly threatened to resign in a heated argument with Trump where he attempted to dissuade the President from firing former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
But Kelly has told allies that he believes it is his duty to help implement the President's agenda.
In addition, the Post reported that Kelly angered first lady Melania Trump with the firing of John McEntee, a longtime aide to the President, in March.
The daily, citing administration officials, reported Melania was "upset over his sudden dismissal" of the aide, who had come under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for financial crimes.
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Columbia University expels, revokes diplomas, suspends pro-Palestine students for campus protests
New York (AP): Columbia University has expelled or suspended some students who took over a campus building during pro-Palestinian protests last spring and temporarily revoked the diplomas of others who have since graduated, officials said on Thursday.
The university said in a campus-wide email that a judicial board brought a range of sanctions against students who occupied Hamilton Hall last spring to protest the war in Gaza.
Columbia did not provide a breakdown of how many students were expelled, suspended or had their degrees revoked, but it said the outcomes were based on an "evaluation of the severity of behaviours".
The culmination of the monthslong investigative process comes as the university is reeling from the arrest of a well-known Palestinian campus activist, Mahmoud Khalil, by federal immigration authorities last Saturday in what President Donald Trump said would be the "first of many" such detentions.
At the same time, the Trump administration has stripped the university of more than USD 400 million in federal funds over what it calls a failure to combat campus antisemitism. Congressional Republicans have pointed specifically to a failure to discipline students involved in the Hamilton Hall seizure as proof of inaction by the university.
The building occupation followed a tent encampment that inspired a wave of similar demonstrations at college campuses across the country.
On April 30, 2024, a smaller group of students and their allies barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall with furniture and padlocks in a major escalation of campus protests.
At the request of university leaders, hundreds of New York police stormed onto campus the following night, arresting dozens of people involved in both the occupation and the encampment.
At a court hearing in June, the Manhattan district attorney's office said it would not pursue criminal charges for 31 of the 46 people initially arrested on trespassing charges inside the administration building.
But the students still faced disciplinary hearings and possible expulsion from the university. Some faced interim suspensions.
The final sanctions announced on Thursday followed a lengthy process that involved hearings for each student led by Columbia's long-running Judicial Board.
Separately, a newly-created disciplinary board has brought a flurry of new cases against students -- including Mahmoud Khalil -- who have expressed criticism of Israel, triggering alarm among free speech advocates. Khalil was not among the protesters accused of seizing Hamilton Hall.
The expulsion announcement drew praise from some faculty members, including Gil Zussman, chair of the electrical engineering department and member of Columbia's Task Force on Antisemitism.
"Finally demonstrating that breaking university rules has consequences is an important first step towards going back to the core missions of research and teaching," he said in a post on social media platform X.
