logo
UC Berkeley antisemitism lawsuit can proceed, judge rules

UC Berkeley antisemitism lawsuit can proceed, judge rules

Reuters02-04-2025

April 2 (Reuters) - A federal judge said Jewish groups may pursue a lawsuit accusing the University of California, Berkeley, of tolerating an "unrelenting" stream of antisemitic harassment toward Jewish students and faculty.
In a decision made public on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge James Donato said two Jewish groups may pursue equal protection, free exercise of religion, and civil rights claims against school officials including University of California President Michael Drake and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ.
Donato said the plaintiffs plausibly alleged that Jewish students and professors were treated differently at UC Berkeley because they are Jewish, and that the school was "deliberately indifferent to the on-campus harassment and hostile environment."
The San Francisco-based judge also dismissed a contract-based claim.
Lawyers for the defendants did not immediately respond on Wednesday to requests for comment.
The plaintiffs are the nonprofit Louis D. Brandeis Center and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education, a nationwide group whose members include UC Berkeley staff and students.
Many top U.S. colleges and universities have been accused of tolerating antisemitism and mishandling protests following Hamas' October 7, 2023, attack against Israel.
Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump canceled $400 million of federal funding for Columbia University over its alleged failure to police antisemitism.
His administration also sent letters, opens new tab to 60 schools including UC Berkeley in March, warning of possible enforcement actions if they did not address antisemitic harassment and discrimination.
John Coghlan, a lawyer for plaintiffs in the UC Berkeley lawsuit, called Donato's decision "an overwhelming victory" for his clients.
"We're looking forward to continuing to fight for the Jewish community at Berkeley," he said in an interview. "To the extent there is greater momentum toward combating antisemitism, that helps our case."
The case is Louis D. Brandeis Center Inc et al v Regents of the University of California et al, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 23-06133.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Russia using horror AI kamikaze drone that ‘chooses its own target' as Ukraine now faces blitz of over ‘500 every night'
Russia using horror AI kamikaze drone that ‘chooses its own target' as Ukraine now faces blitz of over ‘500 every night'

Scottish Sun

time2 hours ago

  • Scottish Sun

Russia using horror AI kamikaze drone that ‘chooses its own target' as Ukraine now faces blitz of over ‘500 every night'

Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) VLADIMIR Putin has begun deploying kamikaze drones that select their own targets using AI in a fresh assault on Ukraine. The country now faces over 500 attacks every night, just days after Kharkiv was rocked overnight by a downpour of missiles. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 5 Fire and smoke rise in Ukraine following a Russian drone and missile strike Credit: Reuters 5 Kyiv is seen engulfed in flames following a Russian drone attack Credit: Reuters 5 Reports said the UAV-V2U is being used to close in on the northeastern city of Sumy, while Putin ramps up drone production and builds new launch sites. Some 70 units a day are now being made compared to just 21 last year, according to Ukraine's military intelligence. This is largely thanks to help from China, the agency has said, as the UAV is "mostly assembled from Chinese-manufactured components." Beijing has repeatedly denied supplying drones or weapon components to Russia, whilst Trump and Biden have both hit China with sanctions to stop it getting access to computer chips. Marking a new escalation in the war, the drones use camera images to navigate and AI to independently locate targets. The Defence Intelligence of Ukraine said: "The key feature of the drone is its ability to autonomously search for and select targets using artificial intelligence. "Its computing system is based on the Chinese Leetop A203 minicomputer, with a high-speed processor assembly built on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin module." This comes just hours after drones and missiles were launched at Kyiv as Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bombers were reportedly unleashed to rain hell on the infamous Snake Island in the Black Sea. Moscow launched a massive strike on Rivne using its Tu-22M3 and Tu-95MS strategic bombers to hit Dubny airbase. Squadrons of these fighter jets were targeted and destroyed last week in Kyiv's daring Operation Spiderweb. Russia bombs Kyiv killing 4 in blitz as Putin plots revenge for Op Spiderweb Another key Ukrainian military airport - Hostomel - was also attacked as Putin sought revenge for the humiliating attack. Polish armed forces command said Nato fighter jets were patrolling due to 'intensive air attack by the Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory'. Just days ago, Kharkiv was rocked overnight as 48 kamikaze drones, along with missiles and guided bombs, slammed into residential areas, according to the city's mayor. 'We have a lot of damage,' Ihor Terekhov said. More than 50 explosions rocked Kharkiv, with the mayor adding it was 'the most powerful attack' on the city of the 39-month war. In the latest terror strikes on civilians, 18 multi-story buildings and 13 private houses were hit and damaged. In Kyiv, a dramatic tower block video filmed by a resident showed the terror of another Putin strike on civilians as flames from the exploding drone shot some 80ft up the building. Three were killed and at least 21 wounded, including a six-weeks-old baby, and a 14-year-old girl. A woman, 26, trapped under a slab of concrete was eventually freed three hours after the strike, and was seen being stretchered to an ambulance. Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Sybiha described how hundreds of drones and missiles "rained down" on his country overnight. He wrote in a social media post: "Kharkiv had a particularly terrible night. "People were injured and killed, and the energy infrastructure was also damaged." Sybiha added there were further strikes in the Donetsk, Dnipro, Ternopil and Odesa regions. 5 The Kursk region after being struck by a Russian drone attack Credit: Reuters

Frederick Forsyth: Life as a thriller writer, fighter pilot, journalist and spy
Frederick Forsyth: Life as a thriller writer, fighter pilot, journalist and spy

BBC News

time7 hours ago

  • BBC News

Frederick Forsyth: Life as a thriller writer, fighter pilot, journalist and spy

Frederick Forsyth, who has died at the age of 86, wrote meticulously researched thrillers which sold in their millions.A former fighter pilot, journalist and spy, many of his books were based on his own wove intricate technical details into his stories, without detracting from the lightning pace of his research often embarrassed the authorities, who were forced to admit that some of the shady tactics he revealed were used in real-life espionage. Frederick McCarthy Forsyth was born on 25 August 1938 in Ashford, Kent. The only child of a furrier, he dealt with loneliness by immersing himself in adventure his favourites were the works John Buchan and H Rider Haggard, but Forsyth adored Ernest Hemingway's book on bullfighters, Death in the was so captivated that - at the age of 17 - he went to Spain and started practising with a cape. He never actually fought a bull. Instead, he spent five months at the University of Granada before returning to do his national service with the spent years dreaming of becoming a pilot, Forsyth lied about his age so he could fly de Havilland Vampire 1958, he joined the Eastern Daily Press as a local journalist. Three years later, he moved to the Reuters news Tonbridge School, Forsyth had excelled in foreign languages but little else. Fluent in French, German, Spanish, and Russian, he was a born foreign correspondent. Posted to Paris, he covered a number of stories relating to assassination attempts on the life of France's President Charles de Gaulle, by members of the Organisation de l'Armee Secrete (OAS).The group of ex-army personnel were angered at de Gaulle's decision to give independence to Algeria after many of their comrades had died fighting Algerian called the OAS "white colonialists and neo-fascists".And he decided that, if they really wanted to kill de Gaulle, they would have to hire a professional assassin. Forsyth joined the BBC in 1965. Two years later, he was sent to Nigeria to cover the civil war that followed the secession of the south-eastern region of the fighting dragged on far longer than had been expected, Forsyth asked permission to stay and cover it. According to his autobiography, the BBC told him "it is not our policy to cover this war"."I smelt news management," he said. "I don't like news management." He quit his job and continued to cover the war as a freelance reporter for the next two chronicled his experiences in The Biafra Story, which was published in 1969. He later claimed that, while in Nigeria, he began working for MI6, a relationship that continued for two decades. He also become friendly with a number of mercenaries, who taught him how to get a false passport, obtain a gun and break an enemy's these tricks of the trade would be incorporated in a tale of an attempted assassination of President de Gaulle, The Day of the Jackal, which he pounded out in his bedsit on an old typewriter in just 35 spent months trying to get it published but faced a string of rejections. "For starters, de Gaulle was still alive," he said, "so readers already knew a fictional assassination plot set in 1963 couldn't succeed."Eventually, a publisher risked a short print run and sales of the book, described once as "an assassin's manual", took off, first in the UK and then in the US. The Day of the Jackal showcased what would become the traditional hallmarks of a Forsyth thriller. It wove together fact and fiction, often using the names of real individuals and Jackal's forgery of a British passport, using the name of a dead child taken from a churchyard, was perfectly feasible in the days before electronic databases and tale was made into an award-winning film in 1973, staring Edward Fox as the anonymous gunman. Forsyth followed up his success with The Odessa File, the story of a German reporter attempting to track down Eduard Roschmann - a notorious Nazi nicknamed the "Butcher of Riga" - who is protected by a secret society of former SS men known as part of his research, Forsyth travelled to Hamburg posing as a South African arms dealer. "I managed to penetrate their world and was feeling rather proud of myself," he later said."What I didn't know was that the (contact) had passed a bookshop shortly after our meeting. And there, in the window, was The Day of the Jackal, with a great big picture of me on the back cover."The film of the book led to the identification of the real "Butcher of Riga", who was living in Argentina - after one of his neighbours went to see it at the local cinema. He was arrested by the Argentinian authorities, but skipped bail and fled to book also mentioned a hoard of Nazi gold that was exported to Switzerland in 1944. Twenty-five years after publication, the Jewish World Congress discovered this passage and, eventually, located gold valued at £1bn. According to the Sunday Times, Forsyth's third novel, The Dogs of War, drew on his experience of organising a coup in newspaper reported that Forsyth had once spent $200,000 hiring a boat and recruiting European and African soldiers of fortune for a raid designed to oust the President of Equatorial Guinea in plan was said to have failed when the arrangements broke down and the soldiers were intercepted by the Spanish police in the Canary Islands, 3,000 miles from their came Devil's Alternative, in which Britain's first female prime minister, Joan Carpenter, was firmly based on Margaret Thatcher, a politician Forsyth greatly admired. She later appeared, under her real name, in four Forsyth was a move into biography in 1982 with Emeka, the life story of Forsyth's friend Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the head of state of Biafra during that country's brief independence. In 1984, he returned to the novel with The Fourth Protocol: a complex tale of a Soviet plot to influence the British general election and install a hard-left Labour book so impressed Sir Michael Caine that he persuaded Forsyth to allow a film version, in which the veteran actor starred alongside Pierce the late 1980s, Forsyth separated from his first wife, the former model Carole Cunningham and was photographed alongside the actress Faye Negotiator, published in 1991, continued the successful run while The Deceiver, the tale of a maverick but brilliant MI6 agent, was made into a BBC two more thrillers, The Fist of God and Icon, Forsyth took an abrupt detour with The Phantom of Manhattan: a sequel to the Phantom of the Opera, which had been a successful was not a great success but, in 2010, Andrew Lloyd Webber took elements of it for his musical follow-up to Phantom, Love Never Dies. A second set of short stories, The Veteran, also had mixed reviews but Forsyth bounced back in his usual style with Avenger, a 2003 political thriller and, three years later, The Afghan, which had links with the earlier Fist of now, Forsyth had established a reputation as a broadcaster and political pundit. He was a frequent guest on the BBC's topical debate programme Question Time, as someone who held views on the right of the political spectrum.A committed Eurosceptic, he once derailed former Prime Minister Ted Heath on the programme - after proving that he had indeed, despite his denials, once signed a document agreeing to transfer UK gold reserves to Frankfurt. On turning 70, the pace of his writing began to slow. The Cobra, published in 2010, saw the return of some of the characters from 2013, Forsyth published The Kill List, a fast-moving tale built round a Muslim fanatic called The Preacher, whose online videos encouraged young Muslims to carry out a series of wrote all his books on a typewriter and refused to use the internet for his research. Ironically, his 18th novel, The Fox - published in 2018 - was a spy thriller about a gifted computer announced it was to be his final book, but he later came out of self-imposed retirement after the death of his second wife, Sandy, in said he was writing another adventure, and even suggested a raffle might give someone the chance to name a character after sold the film rights for £20,000 in the 1970s, Forsyth received no payment for Eddie Redmayne's version of The Day of the Jackal when it was re-imagined for television last year on into his 80s, he had long since agreed to stop research trips to far-flung parts of the world - when a trip to Guinea-Bissau left him with an infection that nearly cost him a leg."It is a bit drug-like, journalism," he admitted. "I don't think that instinct ever dies."It was an instinct that made his life as full and exciting as his thrillers.

Claire Hughes MP was gifted ticket to the BAFTA Games Awards
Claire Hughes MP was gifted ticket to the BAFTA Games Awards

North Wales Chronicle

time9 hours ago

  • North Wales Chronicle

Claire Hughes MP was gifted ticket to the BAFTA Games Awards

Ms Hughes, who was elected last July, has declared the ticket on her register of financial interests. This states that, on April 8, the UK Interactive Entertainment Association Ltd gifted the ticket, valued at £700, which she accepted the same day. The BAFTA Games Awards, which were this year held on April 8 and hosted by comedian Phil Wang, celebrates achievements in the video game industry in the last 12 months. Ms Hughes' Labour colleague, Warrington North MP Charlotte Nichols, was also gifted hospitality at the event, also worth £700. Ms Nichols stated in her own register of financial interests that this was 'in my capacity as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on video games and e-sports". Ms Hughes is not a member of this APPG. All of the other items on Ms Hughes' register of financial interests date back to last year. These include a £10,000 donation from Labour Together Ltd, which was 'to support campaign activities leading up to the general election'. Ms Hughes was approached for further comment by the Pioneer. She posted on her Facebook page this afternoon: "Wales is starting to become a significant player in the global gaming landscape. But I want North Wales to have a much bigger slice of the pie. "At the start of Easter recess, I attended the BAFTA Games Awards celebrating the best of the UK games industry with UK Interactive Entertainment. "I'm not a gamer myself. As someone who previously worked in the sector, though, I recognise the massive value of the sector and opportunity for growth; the video games sector is bigger than the music and film sectors combined, contributing almost £7bn a year to UK GVA. "Recent growth in video games in Wales is thanks partly to support from Welsh Government including the Games Scale Up Fund for Wales, which last week announced a total of £850,000 funding support for Wales-based developers via Creative Wales. "But with the creative industries highlighted as one of the key growth areas in the UK Government's upcoming Industrial Strategy, we could be doing much more to encourage young people to consider a career in immersive entertainment, and to support up-and-coming businesses to thrive. "We have brilliant opportunities for people to gain the skills to build a career in the industry in our area - Coleg Llandrillo have long offered highly respected courses in 3D arts and games development, and the recent investment in a state-of-the-art new campus in Bangor makes it clear the Welsh Government is serious about putting pounds behind promises. "I hope that in future years, we will see games made in Wales featured at the gaming BAFTAs. More than that, though - I want more young people in Bangor Aberconwy knowing that a career in video games is up for grabs. "I'll be doing more on this over the summer, including workshops for school-leavers and an industry roundtable. If this is something you're interested in being part of, get in touch."

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store