Tag: protests

Violent student protests spread from France to Belgium

Student protests have spread from France to Belgium, with demonstrations over education conditions marred by vandalism, fires, and arrests in the Liege region on Monday.

The unrest follows weeks of violent school protests across France, where students began protesting in mid-September over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings, and long school days. Belgian students have raised similar grievances while also opposing local education reforms, higher public transportation costs, and rising tuition fees.

Hundreds gathered outside schools across Liege, blocking entrances and marching through the city. Shops in the center closed as a precaution, while protesters attempted to damage shutters at the Saint-Michel Institute. Firefighters also reported scooter fires in nearby Herstal and Chenee.

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Failing San Antonio Public School Hosts Democrat-Backed Anti-ICE Protesters with Vulgar Displays

In yet another chapter of the saga to stop a planned U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in San Antonio, protesters organized by the Bexar County Democrats held a march and rally that began and ended at a local public middle school. Protesters, some carrying signs with vulgar messages, fanned out in front of the campus shouting anti-ICE slogans during the early Saturday morning protest.

The anti-ICE protest, dubbed the “March for Freedom and Justice” and held at Davis Middle School, featured an appearance by U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX). Protesters carried multiple signs and included static displays on the campus with vulgar messages.

One static display over a table under a tent read, “Fuck DHS,” while another prominently displayed a large Mexican flag with similar messaging critical of ICE. The rally concluded after San Antonio police officers escorted the group of more than one hundred protesters to the proposed ICE facility and back to the public-school campus.

Breitbart Texas attended the event at the Davis Middle School campus, which is part of the San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD). A request for information from SAISD about the partisan-sponsored anti-ICE event on the Davis campus, which included a voter registration drive, remains unanswered as of press time.

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U.S. Marine Arrested in Okinawa on Suspicion of Robbing and Murdering 39-Year-Old Japanese Woman — Japan Lodges “Strong Protest” with United States

A 20-year-old U.S. Marine stationed in Okinawa has been arrested by Japanese authorities on suspicion of robbing and murdering a 39-year-old woman inside a hotel in Naha, triggering a formal protest from the Japanese government.

Lance Cpl. Devin Jacob Ballard, assigned to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, was taken into custody early Sunday in connection with the death of Anna Yagi, 39, a resident of Naha.

According to Stars and Stripes, Okinawa Prefectural Police allege that Ballard killed Yagi at the Naminoue Crystal Hotel in Naha’s Wakasa district sometime between approximately 2:10 a.m. and 4:17 a.m. Saturday. Police also accuse him of stealing her wallet and another personal item.

Police say surveillance footage showed Yagi entering the hotel with a man before the man later left alone carrying her belongings.

When Yagi failed to leave by checkout time, a hotel employee entered the room and discovered her unresponsive. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Authorities later located Ballard walking alone in an entertainment district and detained him before formally arresting him on suspicion of robbery and murder. Ballard has denied the allegations.

The precise cause and circumstances of Yagi’s death have not yet been publicly disclosed, and investigators are still working to determine the relationship, if any, between Yagi and Ballard.

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Far-left French mayor says ‘violence can be legitimate’ as schools burn

At Lycée Léonard de Vinci, a high school in Roubaix, the front door burned while teenagers filmed on their phones. In Nantes, the entrance hall of Lycée Nelson-Mandela was gutted. In Lille, masked men in black kicked a chemistry teacher in the back and chased him down the street. In Marseille, Reuters reported, the principal of Victor Hugo high school was doused in petrol.

On Wednesday, Sept. 30, alone, 356 high schools were blockaded. Police made 625 arrests, about two-thirds of them minors. Eighty-three police officers and gendarmes were hurt, along with 119 students and staff. Île-de-France put school damage near €1 million, including more than €100,000 at Lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis.

There are real grievances about schools in the region. In the Créteil school district, classes have 32 to 35 students, and teachers go missing. But overcrowded classrooms do not explain masked operators moving from school to school. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described troublemakers travelling between campuses to incite violence. And yet Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left La France Insoumise party, called the students “harmless.”`

The unmasked face of the week was Bally Bagayoko, 53, mayor of Saint-Denis, elected in March with 50.77 percent for La France Insoumise. He showed up at the gate of the blockaded Lycée Paul-Éluard beside a burning dumpster, laughing and handing out high-fives as teenagers cheered. Since then, he has denied lighting anything and calls the viral framing “fake news.”

What he said on camera the next day is not in dispute, and prosecutors are now investigating it: “Violence can be legitimate, but whenever you can avoid it, that is better.” He called the students children with a right to make mistakes, then told a reporter, “If I slap you, you’re going to react.”

The same day, students surrounded a BFMTV crew, roughed up two journalists and forced the crew out under escort. A girl on camera called BFM a “racist” outlet. The mayor posted three words: “Elle a raison !” She’s right.

Paris police prefect Patrice Faure referred Bagayoko to prosecutors under Article 40 for incitement to commit a crime. Emmanuel Macron said no politician may legitimize violence. Nuñez said violence is never legitimate. Valérie Pécresse said she would send Paul-Éluard’s repair bill to the mayor’s city.

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Protests Explode As France Arrests 625 Schoolchildren

As high-school students all over France are protesting the lack of teachers, crowded classes, long school days and wretched conditions in their schools, the French authorities have detained 625 people. Most of them were minors and were detained the day before in 356 schools throughout France.

The protests, which began last week in Paris, have been characterized by “an escalation of violence” including “projectiles, attempted arson and other forms of urban violence” against police, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on Wednesday. In total, 83 police officers and gendarmes were injured, said the minister. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said that 119 students and staff members were injured by protesters since the start of the unrest, reported Reuters.

According to the education minister,Édouard Geffray, most of the injured staff were principals or teachers who were attacked as they tried to put a stop to the disturbances at their schools. Geffray claimed that “agitators” were “moving from school to school”. The students’ union, Unity for High School Students, a union of high school students, said that the disturbances were caused by a lack of teachers and other staff at schools, as well as by the poor conditions at many of them, including dilapidated buildings and overcrowded classes. A 16-year-old student in Paris told AFP that the education system was “completely broken” and that he and his friends were fed up with being forced to attend classes of 34 or more and with the overworked teachers who tried to teach them, added BBC.

In Marseille this morning a headteacher was attacked with petrol at Victor Hugo high school and seriously injured, the regional authorities said. Seven others including the school’s deputy head, its head of administration and four other managers were also attacked inside the school with petrol. At Saint-Exupéry high school hundreds of young people surrounded a fire truck called to the scene of a blaze and drove the firefighters out. Later a school fire was reported in Nantes. Meanwhile school and public transport have been attacked in Marseille with bus, tram and metro services suspended throughout the city because of damage to vehicles and attacks on drivers. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has called an interministerial crisis meeting at Matignon this evening to deal with the crisis. All ministers will be expected to cancel their travel plans for the night so that they can be with their regional prefects.

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Bottoms: We Had Crime Spike in Atlanta When I Was Mayor in 2020 Due to Things Like ‘Social Justice Protests’

On Monday’s edition of CBS’s “The Takeout,” Democratic Georgia gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms responded to a question on crime during her tenure as the mayor of Atlanta by saying that there were drops in crime and then Atlanta “experienced spikes that we can only attribute to what was happening in 2020, between the social justice protests, between watching George Floyd be murdered before our eyes, in Georgia, watching Ahmaud Arbery be killed in the middle of the street, Breonna Taylor.”

Host and CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett asked, “So, you were mayor of Atlanta. Being governor of Georgia is a promotion. For every leader in this country, COVID and everything around it was a crucible of leadership. Everyone was tested, and everyone made mistakes, I think. You would agree with that? When you look back at that, as you ask for a promotion to be governor of Georgia, what would you want the voters of Georgia to know you would do better, do differently?”

Bottoms responded, “What I would say to the voters of Georgia is to remember I was the woman in the arena. I was making very tough decisions there was no blueprint for. But any leader worth her salt is going to always look back and wonder, could I have done something differently? Should I have done something –?”

Garrett then cut in to ask, “Have you identified an answer to that question?”

Bottoms responded, “There are a lot of things. Hindsight gives us this great lens that we don’t always have in the moment. So, there are things, big and small, that I wonder, should I have made a different decision, could I have made a different decision in that moment? But what I will say is that every decision that I made was based on what I truly believed to be the best decision in that moment, and just reminding people, even during that time, this huge economic downturn and all the uncertainty that came with the pandemic in 2020 and Trump 1.0, I still left the city with four years of balanced budgets. We didn’t lay off employees. We didn’t raise property taxes. We created a child savings account for our public school kindergarteners. We even closed the largest real estate transaction that’s currently the largest public-private partnership happening in the southeastern United States. And out of that, we created an affordable housing trust fund and created 7,000 units of affordable housing. So, there [was] a long list of accomplishments, even in the midst of all of the uncertainty that was happening in the world. But you don’t grow as a leader without doing your own self-assessment and considering how you can be better and stronger.”

Garrett then asked, “Your Republican opponent, Rick Jackson, hammers you on crime, and the crime rate rose in Atlanta. It rose nationwide in many urban areas. Public safety’s a part of a governor’s job. What would you say to the state — voters in the state of Georgia and the sheriffs across the counties of Georgia about your attitude and what you learned about public safety in that crucible of COVID?”

Bottoms answered, “Yeah. And it’s interesting, prior to COVID, I was being called a public safety mayor, because I had given our police and firefighters the largest pay increases they had ever received in the history of the city. I was very supportive of law enforcement. And then 2020 came, and Atlanta, like so many other cities across the country and across Georgia, experienced spikes that we can only attribute to what was happening in 2020, between the social justice protests, between watching George Floyd be murdered before our eyes, in Georgia, watching Ahmaud Arbery be killed in the middle of the street, Breonna Taylor. There was thing after thing after thing. But I can say, even in 2021, when we were still in the midst of the pandemic, my first meeting in the White House in the Oval Office with President Biden, we were there to talk about the rolling out of vaccines. There were governors, Republican leaders, governors and mayors, to talk about this rollout. And I took the opportunity to advocate for more funding, for federal funding for us to put towards public safety, because I knew that people were emerging from the pandemic in a way that we didn’t go into the pandemic. I remembered looking at a draft of my State of the City address that I was scheduled to give at the beginning of March of 2020, and we ended up canceling that address. But, in that draft, I had talked about these drops in our crime numbers and how well we were trending, and then there was 2020, summer of 2020.”

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 Actresses Susan Sarandon and Hannah Einbinder Handcuffed While Protesting Netanyahu’s UN Speech

Actresses Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon were taken into custody Thursday outside the United Nations in New York during a protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the General Assembly.

Jewish Voice for Peace organized the protest, which took place a few blocks from the UN headquarters on Thursday.

Protesters wore matching shirts that read “Fund people not bombs” and carried banners including “Stop Arming Israel” and “End the Genocide.”

Chants captured on video included “Netanyahu, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide,” “Let Gaza live,” and “Stop arming Israel.”

An NYPD spokesperson said Community Affairs officers warned the crowd to leave.

“They continued to block the intersection. Multiple individuals who didn’t comply were taken into custody,” the spokesperson said, without giving a final headcount.

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15 Years After Occupy, the Case Against the System Has Never Been Clearer

As we mark 15 years since Occupy Wall Street, it is worth remembering that the movement against inequality has a long lineage. The Gen Z-led protests flooding the streets of India, Kenya, Bolivia, and Tunisia today have been building for generations.

On the last day of November 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Trade unionists marched alongside environmentalists, students locked arms with farmers, and for a few extraordinary days the people who run the global economy could not get into their own meeting.

The press called protesters a rabble with no coherent demand. They were wrong. The demand was simple and it has not changed: an economy that works for the many, not for a handful at the top.

That demand lands differently when you cannot afford the basics of life. In Seattle, the debate centred on trade rules. Today, people are doing the maths as they stand in front of a grocery food shop not knowing what they can afford to buy, tackle rents that consume the entire salary, and face energy bills that arrive like a threat. What was once an abstraction has become a household emergency.

Seattle did not come from nowhere. Five years earlier, the Zapatistas had risen in Southern Mexico on the day a free trade deal took effect, declaring that ordinary people had a right to refuse the terms being set for them from above.

The Jubilee movement had brought millions of people onto the streets and into churches to demand the cancellation of crushing debts owed by the world’s poorest countries.

By 2001 a hundred thousand people were meeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil under the banner “another world is possible,” and that same year a young man named Carlo Giuliani was shot dead protesting the G8 in Genoa, Italy.

The powerful learned early that this movement would not simply ask politely. It would demand systemic change.

Then came the crash. In 2008, the same financial system that had been sold to us as untouchable collapsed, and ordinary people were handed the bill while the bankers who broke it kept their bonuses. Out of that betrayal came the next great wave of action.

2011 brought Tahrir Square, the Spanish Indignados, the Greek fight against austerity, the Chilean students, and, in September, a small camp in the shadow of Wall Street.

The Occupy Wall Street movement gave the whole movement its slogan—“We are the 99%.” A single phrase that did what a thousand policy papers could not. The protesters drew the line. There is them, and there is the rest of us, and the rest of us are almost everyone.

Occupy’s camp was eventually cleared. Critics declared the moment over, the movement a failure, the slogan a fad. Look closer and you see something different.

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Palestine Action: From UK Direct Action to US Terror Designation

On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Palestine Action, a UK organization proscribed as a terrorist group in July 2025. The designation also included the transnational group Masar Badil and the Italy-based digital services provider Autistici Inventati as part of a broader action against the growing threat of violent far-left terrorism.

Palestine Action was founded in 2020 by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard as a UK-based direct-action group. It describes itself as targeting “corporate enablers of the Israeli military-industrial complex” to “make it impossible for these companies to profit from the oppression of Palestinians.”

The group has targeted Israeli and Western defense manufacturers, a global logistics firm, a British military base, the office of a pro-Israel advocacy organization, a university, and a golf resort owned by President Trump.

Since its founding, the group has forced the permanent closure of Elbit’s Oldham factory and pushed the company to abandon its London headquarters. In 2021, American activist Max Geller was arrested in Kent for chaining himself to a van outside an Elbit-owned weapons factory. In 2022, the group attacked a factory in Glasgow, causing what UK officials later described as millions of dollars in damage.

In May 2023, activists broke into the Kuehne + Nagel offices at Leicester’s Meridian Business Park. They spray-painted the building and dismantled equipment, including phones and computers. In a separate action, a man drove to the gate of Elbit’s UAV Tactical Systems factory with his hands glued to the steering wheel while a woman locked herself inside the car. The protest camp at the site brought the total number of arrests to 43.

In May 2024, activists at the same business park rammed a truck through the factory’s perimeter fence. They climbed onto the roof, broke through it with tools, and sprayed red paint across the building. Seven people were arrested.

On August 6, 2024, seven people aged 20 to 51 broke into Elbit’s Filton facility near Bristol. They were charged with criminal damage, violent disorder, and aggravated burglary. One was also charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent for allegedly striking a police officer with a sledgehammer.

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Founder of British Flag Flying ‘Raise the Colours’ Campaign Charged with 14 Offences

The creator of the campaign to raise British and English flags across the country to protest against illegal migrants being housed in hotels at taxpayer expense has been charged with 14 criminal offences, including using “threatening, abusive or insulting words”.

Thames Valley Police said on Sunday evening that Ryan Bridge, 45, of Blackwell has been charged with 14 offences relating to alleged incidents between January 31 and March 31 of this year in Oxfordshire.

According to GB News, Bridge was the founder of the Operation Raise the Colours campaign, which began last year in opposition to the government policy of taking alleged asylum seekers and placing them in hotels across the country at taxpayer expense.

The police force said that Bridge was charged with seven counts of using threatening words or behaviour to cause harassment, alarm or distress and three counts of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause fear of, or provoke, unlawful violence.

He was also charged with two counts of racially aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress, one count of racially aggravated fear of violence, and one count of common assault.

Thames Valley Police said that they had decided to submit the case to the Crown Prosecution Service following a review of the evidence, witness statements, and video footage.

It comes as the left-wing-run Birmingham city council that they plan on spending around £2.6 million to remove British and English flags from the streets of the UK’s second city.

According to the Daily Telegraph, around 20,000 flags were raised by members of the public on street infrastructure as a part of the Raise the Colours campaign.

The decision to spend millions removing the national flags comes despite the Birmingham currently being in around £3.5 billion in debt, the most of any local government in Britain.

Meanwhile, in Oxfordshire — where the campaign begun — secured an injunction in July to bar anyone from attaching flags to lampposts or to pain the flag on the road.

Those who breach the injunction against raising the flag face potential prison sentences, fines, or even having assets seized, the BBC reported.

The Liberal Democrat leader of the Oxfordshire City Council, Tim Bearder, said at the time: “This is a welcome judgement. We’re very pleased with the result… This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity.”

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