Think twice before throwing out your leftovers.

A billion meals are wasted every single day, according to a recent report from the United Nations. And that’s a conservative estimate.

It’s not just food down the drain, but money, too. The 2024 UN Food Waste Index report — which measured food waste at the consumer and retail level across more than 100 countries — found that over a trillion dollars worth of food gets thrown out every year, from households to grocery stores to farms, all across the globe.

Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food — the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution that goes with it — is horribly intensive on the planet. Food waste squanders those efforts, and then makes it worse: as it rots in landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Food waste alone is responsible for an estimated 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report. To put that into perspective, if food waste were a country, it would be third in emissions produced, behind only the United States and China.

Perhaps the most immediate harm, though, is the more than 780 million people who went hungry around the world in 2022, even as hundreds of billions of meals were wasted that same year. The world has become more efficient at producing a lot of food, so much so that there’s more than enough to go around for everyone. But in 2022, nearly 30 percent of people were moderately or severely food insecure, defined by the Food and Agricultural Organization as lacking regular access to safe and nutritious food.

Food waste reduction is “an opportunity to reduce costs and to tackle some of the biggest environmental and social issues of our time: fighting climate change and addressing food insecurity,” the authors of the report write.

Food waste might seem like an easy problem to solve — just stop wasting food. But in order to snuff food waste out, individuals, businesses, and policymakers alike will need to make some serious changes — and those changes will look different for each country. Global food waste is not just a consumer-level problem, but also a nasty side effect of inefficient food systems that have environmental and social implications.

The UN has the goal of slashing food waste in half by 2030. For that to happen, the authors of the Food Waste Index say there’s one crucial step all countries need to do: data collection. You can’t stop wasting food until you know how much food you’re wasting.

How do you measure food waste?

According to the report — which was spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and co-authored by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a UK-based climate organization — households contributed to 60 percent of all food waste generated globally in 2022, compared to nearly 28 percent for food service and a little under 13 percent for retailers. However, it’s important to note that there was a lot more usable data for food waste in households than there was for food service or retail — and that’s especially true for low-income and middle-income countries.

The report uses a three-level methodology with each level increasing in accuracy and utility. The first level is an estimate using preexisting food waste data from countries. For countries that haven’t yet started collecting data on food waste, UNEP took data from other nearby countries that had similar income levels and then extrapolated that information to create estimates. These figures are a helpful start to understanding the scale at which food waste may exist in a country, but the report emphasizes that most of the Level 1 estimates are not accurate enough to use beyond that.

To clarify which estimates can be used for understanding the scale of a problem and which can be used beyond that, the report also assigned a “confidence” rating to each Level 1 estimate — high, medium, low, very low, or no rating. Only 11 countries were assigned a high confidence rating for household food waste estimates. Of these, Saudi Arabia had the highest amount of household food waste per person annually, at a little over 231 pounds per person. Bhutan had the lowest, at just under 42 pounds per person.

The next two levels of the methodology lay out a framework in which countries can track their food waste generation. Level 2 is the recommended, baseline approach for countries and requires an actual measurement, rather than just an estimate, of food waste that is suitable for tracking food waste at a national level. Level 3 goes beyond that and gives guidances for how countries can include additional helpful data, like where wasted food goes, how much of food waste is edible, and food loss from manufacturing.

While some organizations and institutions define food waste as edible food mass, the report includes both the edible and inedible parts of food. That may make it seem as if the estimations are inflated, but what’s considered edible and inedible can differ from culture to culture — think peels of fruits, or certain parts of animal meat. They also acknowledge that it’s difficult to measure edible food waste without also measuring the inedible parts, and most countries haven’t done so.

Notably, the report only includes what gets thrown out at the household, retail, and food service level. That means that the Food Waste Index does not measure “food loss,” which is what gets lost in the production part of the process at farms and factories, as well as in transportation. According to the FAO, an estimated 13 percent of the world’s food is lost in the supply chain prior to hitting shelves.

Why does food get wasted?

The report also found that on average, household food waste in high-income, upper-middle income, and lower-income countries didn’t differ too much, but the reasons why waste happens will differ across these groups. Variables like access to electricity and refrigeration, dietary habits and behaviors, food distribution infrastructure, country temperature and so forth can all contribute to a country’s food waste levels.

While there didn’t seem to be a relationship between a country’s income grouping and household food waste levels, a household’s income within that country — along with other factors — could play a part in their food waste habits.

“Just as we expect the reasons for waste to vary between countries, we expect it to vary between households within the same country,” said Hamish Forbes, a senior analyst at WRAP and one of the authors of the 2024 Food Waste Index, via email. “Factors such as kitchen infrastructure, cooking skills/knowledge, cultural norms, time availability, disposable income and so on are all likely to play a role.”

In the United States, the Food Waste Index found that food waste is happening mostly at the household and food service level. If we want to get those numbers down, it’s going to take every participant in our food system — from consumers all the way to big businesses and retailers.

How can we stop wasting food?

It would be reductive to leave the burden of solving food waste and loss to everyday people, when the problem requires solutions across industries, food sectors, governance, and consumers. “The problem is everywhere and requires solutions everywhere,” the report authors write.

As of 2022, only 21 countries had made commitments to reducing food waste or food loss as a part of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the goals to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change as a part of the Paris Agreement. But out of those 21, only two countries had submitted NDCs to tackle both food waste and food loss, according to a report by WRAP. Those two countries were Jordan and Namibia, according to Forbes.

Commitments are a great first step, but what comes next? “There’s a well-known saying that ‘what gets measured gets managed’ and this is very evident in the food loss and waste space,” said Forbes. He added that measurement can show the true scale of our food wastage across different sectors, and in turn, it can also help policymakers identify solutions and where to implement them.

“Beyond just measuring the total amount of food waste, measurements in countries, cities or even businesses can identify ‘hotspots’,” Forbes told me. “For example, if I measure food waste in my restaurant and see from that data that most diners are leaving some of their potato fries, then I’m probably serving too much and I can reduce that wastage.”

One country that’s made progress is the United Kingdom. In 2005, the UK established the Courtauld Commitment, a series of voluntary agreements between the governments, organizations, and businesses within the UK to reduce food waste and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as improve water management. The food waste reduction policies from these agreements work on all parts of the food system: supporting waste management on farms, giving guidance to food service and retail sectors on food redistribution, implementing consumer campaigns, and more. As a result, the UK has reduced per capita food waste by 23 percent in total from 2007 to 2018.

Dana Gunders, the executive director of the US-based food waste reduction nonprofit ReFED, told me that in the US, there are a few ways our government can change the consumer environment so that people waste less food.

One solution is passing the Food Date Labeling Act. You’ve probably found yourself squinting at a carton of eggs that’s been in your fridge for an unknown amount of time, scouring for the “sell by,” “use by,” or “best by” date and debating how safe it is to consume. As of now, the US doesn’t have a standardized labeling process for food, which has translated into consumer confusion around food quality that leads to throwing out meals that are perfectly safe to eat. Creating a standardized label system with clearer phrasing could help consumers make better choices around food usage.

Then there’s Gunder’s big legislative wish: a ban on sending food to landfills, a policy that’s in the jurisdiction of states. According to ReFED, some states and municipalities have enacted policies around limiting, diverting, or banning organic material like food from entering landfills.

Gunders also wants to see food service sectors and retailers like grocery stores track their food waste — again, better collection of data helps craft better solutions. She also thinks grocery stores could improve their food donation system. There are some up-and-coming intermediaries, like Too Good To Go, which connects donations from grocery stores and restaurants with consumers. But having a more robust policy that isn’t opt-in can help redistribute perfectly edible food and make sure it doesn’t go to waste.

“All companies should have a solid donation policy that is across all of their locations, across all product types,” Gunders said. “Sometimes you have grocers who are great at donating bread, but they really don’t donate milk or dairy or meat or seafood. And so there are ways to do that, and some of the grocers who are best at donating are doing that.”

Of course, consumers themselves play a role. Planning meals and being more careful around purchasing food, preserving food in freezers, finding ways to take leftover ingredients and making them into a meal — all are ways individuals can personally reduce their food waste.

As for food waste and hunger, the report states that “reducing food waste can increase food availability for those who need it.” Forbes told me that how food loss and waste relates to hunger will depend on the sector we’re focusing on. It’ll take a lot more than simply slashing food waste to fix hunger — which is ultimately a symptom of poverty — but reducing food waste by diverting perfectly edible foods to those who need it can certainly help.

There are already legal challenges to the new policy, but authorities detained some migrants this week.

The UK is again preparing to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda after Parliament created a workaround to enact a policy the high court declared unlawful.

Authorities have begun detaining migrants to deport to Rwanda under the revamped plan. But the policy faces major logistical issues, humanitarian concerns, and the likelihood that a future Labour government will scrap it.

Former Home Secretary Priti Patel initially proposed the controversial law in 2022 as a way to reduce irregular migration, particularly via small boats across the English Channel, which is on the rise in the UK. Her successor, Suella Braverman, also advocated for the plan until she was fired in 2023; Prime Minister Rishi Sunak then vowed to “stop the boats” and promised that the policy would become law.

Sunak succeeded on the latter front. Following legal challenges that saw the UK Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights declare the proposal unlawful, a bill declaring Rwanda safe for migrants and that limits the courts’ ability to adjudicate the country’s safety was approved as law by King Charles in late April, despite heavy opposition from the House of Lords. The government published a video on May 1 showing law enforcement authorities detaining people to send to the East African country as soon as July.

The law has been resoundingly criticized by human rights advocates, immigration lawyers, and Labour politicians who say it violates international law and is, to quote shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, “an expensive gimmick.”

The law is part of a broader effort by Sunak and his Conservative Party to burnish their image as their government struggles to maintain support in the lead-up to a national election. Irregular migration has increased in recent years, but it’s not the driver of the problems that the UK is facing, including ongoing cost-of-living and housing crises. However, it is among voters’ top concerns, making the extreme anti-immigration law an appealing policy for a dysfunctional party struggling to maintain power.

Now, people fleeing their home countries and making the deadly journey to seek asylum in the UK are bearing the costs.

The UK’s Rwanda deportation policy, briefly explained

The Rwanda plan has been a policy priority for two years now, and it’s outlived two prime ministers and two home secretaries. The ostensible goal? To deter irregular migrations via the English Channel and other routes, ostensibly for the migrants’ own safety, and to disrupt human trafficking operations.

Though the government has declared Rwanda a safe country through its recent legislation, it is the threat of being sent there instead of potentially receiving asylum in the UK that is meant to deter people from entering the country.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame claimed that his country was simply trying to help out with “a very complicated problem all over the world” when Rwanda and the UK struck their initial agreement in 2022. But Rwanda will be well compensated by the British government for its purported generosity (more on that later). And critics say it also benefits Rwanda reputationally despite Kagame’s autocratic tendencies (which include threatening or jailing political rivals, repression of the media, and changing the constitution to extend his rule), not to mention the UK government’s own concerns that Rwanda is not a safe place for LGBTQ refugees.

But immigration has become a key policy pillar for the conservative government post-Brexit. Former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, along with Sunak, all touted their tough stance on immigration, hoping to appeal to socially conservative party members who see immigration as a key issue. Sunak and Truss backed the Rwanda plan, which was first proposed by controversial former Home Secretary Priti Patel.

The policy was deeply controversial from the start. It applies to the roughly 52,000 asylum seekers the government deems to have entered the UK illegally after January 2022. Under international law, everyone has the right to seek asylum, and countries are obligated to protect people in their territory seeking asylum under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The UK was one of the original signatories to that convention.

But under the new rule, regardless of whether their claims are valid, asylum seekers can now be detained, and forced to fly to Rwanda, where their asylum claims will ostensibly be processed and they will be resettled.

The plan “is effectively removing the UK from the asylum convention, because it removes the right to asylum which is explicitly guaranteed,” Peter William Walsh, senior researcher at the Oxford Migration Observatory, told Vox in an interview. It also could change the UK’s legal structure: the UK has threatened to withdraw from the court’s jurisdiction should it rule against the Rwanda plan.

Costs are already adding up; though no one has been sent to Rwanda and just a handful detained, the UK has already paid Rwanda 220 million pounds (about $270 million) to create infrastructure for asylum seeker processing. That number could skyrocket to more than half a billion pounds total (about $627 million) to send just 300 people to the East African country, according to a UK government watchdog.

Because of objections from advocacy groups, the UK Supreme Court, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), no migrant in the UK has ever been transferred to Rwanda under the plan. (One migrant has been sent to Rwanda voluntarily under a separate policy that pays eligible migrants 3,000 pounds if they volunteer to be sent to the country.) As seven people awaited deportation to Rwanda in June of 2022, the ECHR intervened and issued injunctions stopping the migrants’ removal and pausing the controversial policy. Though the UK left the European Union in 2020, it is still part of the Council of Europe, which the ECHR has jurisdiction over, making the court’s decision legally binding. And in November 2023, the UK’s highest court ruled the scheme unlawful.

Sunak, however, doubled down on the Rwanda policy, introducing emergency legislation to have Parliament declare Rwanda a safe country, as well as working on a new treaty with Rwanda to address the court’s concerns that asylum-seekers might be sent back to their home countries.

That legislation, the Safety of Rwanda Act, passed Parliament in late April and unilaterally declared Rwanda to be a safe place to resettle migrants, paving the way for King Charles’s approval and the Home Office’s moves to detain some migrants who arrived by irregular routes.

Conservatives have made the case that the policy is the only way to deal with both the volume and the expense of current migration patterns. There has been a marked uptick in irregular migration to the UK, not just by the “small boats” crossing the English Channel from France. According to data from Frontex, the European border authority, there were 62,047 attempts to cross into the UK via the English Channel last year, which was down 12 percent from the previous year. Overall attempts at irregular border crossings in the EU and the UK were at the highest levels since 2016, a period of significant migration from Syria in particular.

Irregular migration makes up a fraction of all immigration cases to the UK — the majority of migration cases in 2023 came on work or student visas, according to the Oxford Migration Observatory — but it is extremely expensive, as migrants claiming asylum cannot work while awaiting processing and the government must pay their costs. Some estimates put asylum seekers’ housing costs alone at as much as 8 million pounds per day.

It is also highly visible, Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank British Future, told Vox, giving some British people the sense that they have no choice about who comes to their country. And the Rwanda plan is a highly visible answer to that anxiety, which the Tories hope will have political impact, Katwala said.

The plan still faces legal challenges, and it’s not clear that it will ever be successful

Despite this week’s detentions, the plan will still face significant challenges — not the least of which is the Labour Party’s vow to overturn the policy should it gain power in the national elections, which must take place by January 2025.

In the meantime the plan is almost certain to face legal challenges, both within the UK and quite possibly in the ECHR.

The primary legal challenge will likely be to the Rwanda Safety Act. The UK government’s assertion that Rwanda is a safe country doesn’t make it a fact, and measures to safeguard migrants deported to Rwanda under the UK-Rwanda treaty, like appointing independent asylum and humanitarian law experts to assess the cases of people for whom it might not be safe to stay in Rwanda, haven’t yet fully been implemented, according to an April 25 statement from the current Home Secretary James Cleverly.

The major concern for asylum seekers potentially deported to Rwanda is refoulement, or being sent back to their home countries. In theory, asylum seekers flee their homes under fear of persecution, death, or other harms — and were they to be sent back, they’d again face dire circumstances. The UK-Rwanda treaty is supposed to protect against that through a provision that explicitly bars Rwanda from sending asylum seekers to third countries.

However, even if Rwanda doesn’t refoul asylum seekers, it’s not clear that it would be safe for everyone sent there. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office has previously expressed concerns about Rwanda’s safety, especially the risks of extrajudicial killings, as well as the risk that LGBTQ people will be denied asylum there. “We know that [the government has] done risk assessments, and they know about the fundamental flaws” in sending people to Rwanda, Walsh said.

When Israel implemented a similar scheme from 2013 to 2018, thousands of people claiming asylum there went to Rwanda and were then sent to Uganda, where many tried to make it to Europe. Based on this program, not only did Rwanda not process asylum cases, but the government either sent people on to Uganda or didn’t track them once they arrived.

Advocacy groups and labor unions are challenging the law on humanitarian bases; the UK’s civil servants union claims the scheme would require them to break international law in carrying out their roles. And the ECHR could hear challenges to the law after it goes through the UK court system, and deliver a final ruling on whether the plan violates human rights, but that is unlikely to happen before UK general elections.

In the meantime, the government is facing some logistical problems in carrying out its plan; for starters, the government may not legally be able to detain people in the UK’s seven Immigrant Removal Centers until the first flights to Rwanda take off, Walsh said. And space will be an issue, too; there are 1,700 people in the centers, which Walsh called “akin to prisons,” and only 500 free spaces. That could lead to people being held in actual prisons, though UK prisons are already overcrowded.

Migrants have reportedly also started fleeing to Ireland, an EU country. Ireland’s justice minister Helen McEntee has said she will draft emergency legislation to send asylum seekers back to the UK, but the phenomenon has already increased tensions between Ireland and the UK.

Sunak has survived a reported attempt to oust him as Tory leader before the national elections, but it’s doubtful that even this extreme legislation will carry the Tories to victory in the next national polls. What it seems likely to do, though, is further isolate the UK from the international community.

The Columbia protests and the debate over pro-Palestinian college students, explained.

Protests over the war in Gaza erupted on Columbia University’s campus in mid-April, inspiring demonstrations at other universities across the country as well as in Canada, Australia, and France.

But as those protests — many of which center on encampments and demands that universities divest from Israel — have grown, so too have intense crackdowns involving local law enforcement.

Wednesday at UCLA, masked counter-protesters attacked pro-Palestine protesters in their encampment with metal pipes, mace, and pepper spray and threw at least one firework, while police were slow to intervene, according to Al Jazeera. The encampment was later cleared by police. That outburst followed a police action at Columbia that saw officers arresting student protesters who had occupied a building, and the arrests of hundreds of other protesters across the US — now more than 2,000, according to the Washington Post.

President Joe Biden gave an address in the wake of these developments, affirming the right to protest in remarks at the White House Thursday, but “not the right to cause chaos.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs,” Biden said, adding that he would not seek to deploy the National Guard to stem the unrest. Biden, who has staunchly supported Israel’s war in Gaza after October 7, had previously denounced both “antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

His remarks are a reminder of how much political scrutiny colleges and universities are currently under, particularly when it comes to issues of Israel and Palestine, as Israel’s war on Hamas stretches into its eighth month. Previous rounds of congressional testimony made top universities the locus around which America litigates questions about the US’s support of Israel amid its deadly war in Gaza, free speech, antisemitism, and anti-Muslim discrimination — and a convenient target for political elites looking to make a point. And not just Biden: House Speaker Mike Johnson, visited Columbia’s campus, and now claims “antisemitism is a virus” spreading on college campuses. Under Johnson’s leadership, the House passed a bill Wednesday that would adopt the working definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.”

As politicians weigh in, some universities — including Columbia — have taken steps to shut down encampments, often without considering students’ central demand — that their schools divest any investments in Israel. Others, including Brown University, have entered into agreements with demonstrators, accepting some of their demands.

Overall, the controversies at Columbia and other campuses illustrate how universities have struggled to uphold their dual commitments to free speech and protecting their students during a fraught political moment when more young people sympathize with the Palestinian cause than with the Israeli government. Concerns about antisemitism at the protests (often attributed to students, but largely perpetrated by outsiders according to anecdotal reporting) also piqued national attention, as has the very public role of police.

“Calling the police on campus is such a breach of the culture of a college or university,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is representing arrested Columbia students, told Vox. “To do so in response to nonviolent student protest is beyond the pale, and it really undermines the standing of the university in the eyes of a broad swath of the population as a place of free, open, and robust dialogue and debate.”

What’s actually happening on college campuses

Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests have become a prominent feature on college campuses since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. They reached a fever pitch in December when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania gave controversial testimony before Congress about campus antisemitism, both real and hypothetical.

The demonstrations were reanimated after Columbia president Nemat Shafik gave congressional testimony that, per the Associated Press, focused on “fighting antisemitism rather than protecting free speech.” Students erected tents on Columbia’s main lawn to show solidarity with Gaza. Then Shafik took the controversial step of calling in the police to arrest those involved.

They have spread not just across the country — at campuses including at Yale University, New York University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Miami University in Ohio, and Temple University in Philadelphia and others — but also internationally.

Over the course of the protests, hundreds of people at Columbia, Yale, the University of Texas-Austin, Emerson College, the University of Southern California, and New York University have faced mass arrests as administrators seek to quell the unrest.

Police involvement in the protests has intensified in recent days: Local law enforcement removed students at Cal Poly Humboldt from a university hall they had been occupying for a week. Dozens of NYPD officers entered Columbia University Tuesday night, arresting a group of protesters who occupied a university building. Protesters at Cal Poly Humboldt, Columbia, UCLA, City College of New York, the University of New Mexico, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and others were also arrested. In Paris, France, students at Sciences Po were removed by police after occupying a school building.

At least 47 students were arrested at Yale days after its encampment sprung up, and more than 150 were arrested at New York University. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed Texas police to the UT-Austin campus, where they arrested 34 including a journalist. Boston police also arrested 108 people at a protest led by Emerson College students who linked arms tightly and raised umbrellas; four officers were injured while trying to break up the crowd.

In an echo of previous protest movements — including those at universities in the mid-20th century, as well as more recent demonstrations for civil rights — protests at some schools, including the University of Texas, appear to be growing in response to police crackdowns on protesters. There have been anecdotal reports of police violence during Tuesday night’s police raid at Columbia; those are difficult to verify, as press — including student reporters — were not allowed in the occupied building at the time. As of Friday, media is still being denied access to Columbia’s campus.

The protests are calling on universities to divest from firms that they contend profit from Israel’s war and occupation in Palestine, more than six months after the start of the war and as the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 34,000. Some groups at universities that conduct military research, like New York University, are also requesting their schools end work contributing to weapons development as well.

Following Shafik’s testimony, Columbia students pitched more than 50 tents on the lawn in what they called a “Liberated Zone” on April 17. But the tents stayed up only about a day and a half before Shafik intervened. “The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students,” she wrote in an April 18 letter to the Columbia community.

The police arrived shortly thereafter to arrest students for trespassing and removed more than 100 protesters, tying their hands with zip ties. Some have also been suspended and removed from student housing.

In the days since, negotiators from the group leading the protest at Columbia — Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) — have been in discussion with university administrators about the demonstrators’ demands. Those negotiations were cut off the morning of April 29.

A lot of the national attention has focused less on the protesters’ demands or the US-Israeli relationship — and the destruction of Gaza — and more on allegations that the protests are inherently antisemitic for criticizing Israel, or that specific antisemitic incidents have occurred. Shafik announced that classes would be hybrid through the end of the academic year to provide a “reset” on the conversation and in light of students’ safety concerns. Shafik requested on April 30 that the NYPD maintain a presence on the university campus until mid-May.

Rabbi Elie Buechler, a rabbi associated with Columbia University’s Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, had urged hundreds of Orthodox Jewish students to go home and suggested they stay there for their safety. Brandeis University, a historically Jewish institution, has extended its transfer application period to accommodate students who feel unsafe on their campuses.

The protests have been complicated by the way they’ve been characterized

Student protests on Columbia’s campus were largely nonviolent until the night of April 30, when the NYPD entered Hamilton Hall — the building protesters occupied and renamed “Hind’s Hall” for Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl allegedly killed by Israeli troops alongside her family in January. An Instagram video shared by CUAD appears to show an individual being pushed or kicked down the stairs in front of the building, and one student told Vox they saw some of the arrested protesters bloodied and with visible wounds. New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg confirmed Friday that a NYPD officer fired his gun while inside the school building. No one is believed to have been injured.

Representatives from the New York Police Department said during a press conference shortly after the Columbia encampment opened that there had been some incidents in which Israeli flags were snatched from students and unspecified hateful things said. But they said that there have not been any reports of Columbia students being physically harmed or any credible threats made against individuals or groups associated with the university community ahead of the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

However, a video surfaced in late April of what appeared to be masked pro-Palestinian protesters outside of Columbia’s gates shouting, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” at Jewish students. It’s not clear whether those shouting were affiliated with the university.

Just after the video was circulated, President Joe Biden issued a statement: “This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous — and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.”

That statement served as a “blanket condemnation of the Columbia protests,” said Matt Berkman, an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. It failed to distinguish those featured in the video who may not have been affiliated with the university from the vast majority of student protesters, who based on many different accounts, have been peaceful. And it flattened the makeup of the protests, which include a number of Jewish students. Jewish students who have been suspended from Columbia and Barnard stated that they had celebrated a Passover Seder within the encampment at a press conference.

In a video address, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also misleadingly characterized the protests, falsely claiming that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities” in a video address and compared them to rallies held in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party.

“Pro-Israel activists are clearly invested in painting everyone at Columbia, whether inside or outside the gates, with the same broad brush,” Berkman said.

There are antisemitic incidents in the United States, which represent real danger to Jewish communities and individuals — and they have increased since the Hamas attacks on October 7.

In December, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents had increased by nearly 340 percent since then. Complicating its data, however, is the fact that the ADL’s annual audit of antisemitic assaults, vandalism, and harassment also includes in the latter categories some anti-Zionist activism. Removing all Israel-related incidents from their count, America has a smaller but still big problem: Non-Israel-related antisemitic incidents still rose by 65 percent compared to 2022, per their data.

Columbia students aren’t alone in facing broad accusations of antisemitism. Students at Yale, the Ohio State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others have all been called out by the ADL for engaging in Palestine solidarity protests as well as for specific incidents of antisemitism. Nor are they alone in facing arrest; NYU students and faculty and students at Yale have also been arrested.

Police involvement in the protests — particularly on New York City campuses — has been met with backlash, particularly from university faculty and activists.

“NYPD presence in our neighborhood endangers our entire community,” the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in an April 30 letter. “Armed police entering our campus places students and everyone else on campus at risk.”

The letter claims that faculty efforts to defuse tension between the protesters and administration had been rebuffed, and that university administration had failed to consult faculty when deciding to bring the police on campus.

Veronica Salama, who as a staff attorney at NYCLU is part of the team defending these students, told Vox that Shafik called the police as part of her emergency powers — but in doing so violated university policy. Vox has reached out to Columbia for comment and will update with its response.

What’s behind the protests?

In many ways, the demands of the protesters have been overshadowed by the controversy.

At Columbia, the protesters belong to the coalition CUAD, which formed in 2016 to demand Columbia and Barnard College disclose investments in and divest — or remove from its investment portfolio — from Israeli and American companies and institutions that support Israel, citing its wars in Gaza and oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

Shafik said in a statement that the school will not divest from Israeli companies or those that contribute to the ongoing occupation and destruction of Gaza; instead she offered a process to make Columbia’s investments more transparent to students and pledged to support early childhood development in Gaza and displaced scholars from the region.

The coalition’s demands for divestment are of a piece with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement started by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. BDS cites as its inspiration the anti-apartheid activists of the 1980s who targeted South Africa’s apartheid government with boycotts.

While that movement wasn’t decisive in bringing down that government, it was successful in alienating the apartheid government from major global players like Barclays bank, the Olympics, and the International Cricket Conference, forcing countries and international institutions to confront their complicity in South Africa’s racist policies.

In addition to divestment from “companies profiting from Israeli apartheid,” CUAD has a list of five other demands, including a call for an immediate ceasefire from government officials including President Joe Biden, and, importantly, an end to the dual degree program that Columbia has with Tel Aviv University.

These demands echo those of student groups at other colleges and universities. NYU student activists are also demanding the university shut down its Tel Aviv campus and “divest from all corporations aiding in the genocide,” including weapons companies, and ban weapons tech research that benefits Israel.

Two universities, Brown and Northwestern, have reached deals with student protesters and refused to take disciplinary or legal action against them. Northwestern has pledged to disclose its investments, and Brown has promised to hold a university board vote on whether to divest. However, the administration will not hold that vote until October. Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, has agreed to explore divestment and call for a ceasefire.

Critics allege that BDS and anti-Zionism are at their core antisemitic, arguing that BDS delegitimizes Israel and “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination, or that, if implemented, would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state, are antisemitic,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The nature and tenor of the campus anti-war protests has been at the forefront of both media coverage and congressional hearings on antisemitism and campus free speech. But administrative response to them — particularly calling the police and issuing suspensions — has added a new dimension to the debate.

It’s all part of a broader fight over free speech and antisemitism on college campuses

Universities have struggled to balance their goals of protecting free speech and combatting antisemitism since the outbreak of war in Gaza, which has proved a political minefield.

In December, a trio of university presidents who testified before Congress were accused (if not fairly) of being too permissive of free speech in the face of antisemitism or being too legalistic in their explanations of their situation.

Now, some universities seem to be changing their tack.

Shafik called in the police on protesters despite Columbia’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of free speech. The University of Southern California recently canceled the commencement speech of its pro-Palestinian valedictorian over campus safety concerns. And now NYU and other institutions have also instituted police crackdowns on protesters.

Private universities, like many of those experiencing protests today, have long maintained policies that protect free speech similarly to the First Amendment: permitting anything up to genuine threats of violence and threatening behavior that would warrant punishment or even referrals to the criminal system. But the last six months have seemingly made many of them question not just when and where a threat begins, but also maybe even those commitments to students’ free speech more broadly. And complicating this all is a years-long history of pro-Palestinian activists saying they face targeted harassment.

Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that if Columbia wants to remain committed to free speech, it has an obligation to apply its speech policies in an equitable manner that is unbiased against any particular viewpoint and to ensure that students currently facing disciplinary action are offered due process.

“Columbia providing due process, while fairly and consistently applying its viewpoint-neutral speech policies, will be absolutely mandatory here if Columbia wants to start back on the right path,” Morey said.

Prohibiting students from camping out or blocking entrances or exits is “all above board” if applied uniformly, Morey added. But schools should see calling the police to enforce any such policies as a last resort, said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law.

“I understand the very strong desire to protect the safety of all the students involved,” he said. “At the end of the day, the presumption should be in favor of free speech and free expression, and there are exceptions to that, but [starting] with that presumption often brings a lot of clarity to these vital decisions.”

Correction, April 25, 4:30 pm ET: This story originally misstated the Anti-Defamation League’s methodology for tracking antisemitic incidents. It differentiates among the categories of assault, vandalism, and harassment. Among the latter categories, it includes some anti-Zionist expressions.

Update, May 3, 5 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 24 and has been updated multiple times, most recently to include the expansion of the protests.

Deescalating conflict around protests was possible, but many colleges turned to law enforcement instead.

For weeks, police have been arriving on college campuses from New York to California at the behest of university officials, sweeping pro-Palestinian protests and arresting more than 2,100 people. They’ve come in riot gear, zip-tied students and hauled them off, and in some high-profile instances, acted violently.

The aggressive crackdown started when Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, summoned New York Police Department officers to campus in mid-April to bring an end to the student encampment there, one day after she promised Congress she would quash unauthorized protests and discipline students for antisemitism.

That police intervention temporarily dismantled the encampment, and resulted in the arrest of more than 100 protesters on trespassing charges.

But it was also a strategic failure on the part of the university administration. If the university was trying to avoid disruption, it has ended up inviting it instead.

In the days since, as support for the protesters has swelled both at Columbia and at hundreds of colleges across the country, students have set up encampments, organized rallies, and in a few cases escalated their protests by occupying university buildings. Similar protests even cropped up in other countries.

In response, other universities have taken Columbia’s lead and cracked down on these protests, which seek to end colleges’ investments in firms supporting Israel’s occupation and its ongoing assault on Gaza. Nearly 50 universities have called the authorities to intervene, and students and faculty have been beaten, tear gassed, and shot at with rubber bullets by police.

This week, when Columbia escalated its police response, the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, reported that “officers threw a protester down the stairs ... and slammed protesters with barricades.” A police officer also fired a gun in a campus building, and others threatened to arrest student journalists.

This can only be described as a major overreaction to student protests. But it also didn’t happen in a vacuum. The police response falls squarely in a long pattern of colleges suppressing pro-Palestinian activism and anti-Israel speech — one that dates back many decades. Currently, universities aren’t applying their rules equally, singling out only some student advocacy as unacceptable campus speech and, in some cases, even changing rules to specifically target these protests. (The Department of Education is now reportedly investigating Columbia for anti-Palestinian discrimination.)

While schools including Columbia were quick to call in law enforcement, however, a few other schools have taken an alternative approach — with vastly different outcomes. Administrators at Brown, Northwestern, and several others negotiated with students, allowed them to continue protesting, or even reached deals to end the encampments by meeting some of the protesters’ demands. As a result, they’ve avoided the kind of disruption and chaos unfolding at universities that called the police.

These divergent outcomes among schools that relied on police and those that didn’t offer an important lesson on how universities should manage campus activism, while ensuring students’ safety and protecting speech.

A messy and misguided response to protests

It only took a day and a half after the first Columbia encampment was set up for Shafik to call the police on April 18. In her letter to the NYPD, she wrote that she had “determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” Shafik did not explain what threat the encampments actually posed. (Samantha Slater, a spokeswoman for the university, told Vox that Columbia would not offer comment beyond Shafik’s letter.)

The protest itself was not especially disruptive — even the police said protesters were peaceful. They didn’t get in the way of students going about their daily activities, including attending classes.

In many ways, the demonstration at Columbia was a standard student protest: Demonstrators were raising awareness about a problem and asking their university to do something about it. Encampments have been used as a protest tactic on college campuses for decades, including in recent years, like when students ran divestment campaigns against fossil fuels.

In the 1980s, when Columbia students protested against South African apartheid, with virtually the same divestment demands as the current protesters have, they blockaded a campus building for three weeks. In that case, the school came to an agreement with the student protesters rather than turning to the police to break up the demonstration.

While other campus protests historically have led to arrests, few have attracted such a massive national police response so swiftly. What’s taking place now looks similar to how schools responded to anti-war protests in the 1960s and ’70s, when schools, including Columbia, violently cracked down on students. And in 1970, the National Guard infamously shot at protesters at Kent State in Ohio and killed four people. Yet, as my colleague Nicole Narea wrote, the protests then were more aggressive than the encampments on campuses today.

The line between legal and illegal protest is often clear. Students have a right to protest in certain campus areas, but occupying a building constitutes trespassing. Enforcement of these rules, however, is seldom applied equally.

In many cases, universities have alleged that the protests were disruptive and pointed to the fact that some Jewish students felt that the encampments created an unsafe environment for them on campus. While harassment and intimidation can be reasons to involve law enforcement, the accusations against these protesters mostly focused on their chants and campaign slogans — and in many cases wrongly conflate anti-Israel rhetoric with antisemitism. (It’s worth noting that the arrested student protesters have largely been charged with trespassing, not harassment or violent acts.)

One of the other problems with how many universities and officials have responded to pro-Palestinian demonstrations is that they have changed their protest rules since October 7, in some instances specifically targeting Palestinian solidarity groups.

At Columbia, for example, the university issued onerous protest guidelines, including limiting the areas students are allowed to protest and requiring that demonstrations be registered weeks in advance. Northwestern University abruptly imposed a ban on erecting tents and other structures on campus, undermining ongoing protests. Indiana University preemptively changed its rules one day before its students set up an encampment by disallowing tents and changing a decades-old rule. And in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order requiring that public universities change their free speech policies and singled out pro-Palestinian groups that he said ought to be disciplined.

Such moves have only added fuel to the protests. They also put students and faculty in danger, as police have conducted violent arrests. (Why were there snipers on roofs at Indiana University, anyway?)

It can also ultimately be ineffective; after state troopers arrested students at the University of Texas, for example, the Travis County Attorney’s Office dismissed the criminal trespassing charges, saying they lacked probable cause.

Is there a better response to campus protests?

Not all universities have turned to the police in response to pro-Palestinian protests. Those that chose a different path have seen much less tension than those that did.

Evergreen State College, for example, agreed to its student demands, promising to divest from businesses profiting off human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. Students agreed to end their encampment in response.

Schools that didn’t necessarily acquiesce to protesters’ demands took other, non-escalatory steps to quell demonstrations. Brown University, which had last year called police to disband protesters, took an alternative approach this time around: The university negotiated with protesters, and organizers agreed to clear the encampment earlier this week after the school’s governing body announced that it will hold a vote on divesting from companies with ties to Israel later this year. Northwestern University similarly reached a deal with its students by reestablishing an advisory committee on its investments.

At Michigan State University, President Kevin Guskiewicz visited the student encampment himself and talked to the protesters about their concerns. He allowed students to continue the protest, so long as they applied for a permit, which the students did and the university granted. As a result, the school has avoided the kind of disruptions seen at Columbia and other universities.

There’s a simple way for universities to handle these protests: Treat them like other protests.

As the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in an open letter to college and university presidents, schools can announce content-neutral rules and enforce them — that is, set up guidelines that don’t just target certain protests, such as the ongoing pro-Palestinian ones. “The rules must not only be content neutral on their face; they must also be applied in a content-neutral manner. If a university has routinely tolerated violations of its rules, and suddenly enforces them harshly in a specific context, singling out particular views for punishment, the fact that the policy is formally neutral on its face does not make viewpoint-based enforcement permissible,” the ACLU wrote.

At Columbia, where the aggressive police response started a national pattern, it’s hard to argue that enforcement was neutral from the start of the encampment. “Just imagine these students were protesting, say, in solidarity with women’s protests in Iran,” wrote Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor at Princeton and author of the book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, in a post on X. “I don’t see how [the] NYPD would have been called in to arrest them 36 hours into their then small protest.”

Instead, Columbia called law enforcement, and now campuses across the country are environments that are unsafe for students and faculty alike. Pro-Israel counterprotesters, for example, attacked student encampments earlier this week at the University of California Los Angeles with pepper spray, wooden planks, and fireworks. (Notably, while schools acted swiftly to uproot the encampments, UCLA was an example of how slow they have been in actually protecting the protesters from violence.)

Ultimately, the moment Shafik called in the NYPD set the stage for a far more disruptive end of the semester for schools nationwide than what the original protests would have achieved on their own.

“From the very beginning, calling in the police quickly has been an escalatory dynamic,” Tufekci wrote on X. “It almost always is.”

The debate over the Anthropocene epoch, explained.

The word “Anthropocene” has gained cultural resonance in recent years, as it’s become clearer that humans have made an indelible and destructive impact on our planet. But it’s also a term with a specific technical meaning: an epoch, or geologic unit of time, named for humans.

In 2009, a group of scientists first started investigating whether the Anthropocene should be formally recognized as part of the way we record geologic time. They did this by way of a discreet process laid out by a global body of geologists called the International Commission on Stratigraphy. This video explains what happened next: how a team of scientists looked for the evidence to make their case, and what it means to consider humanity’s impact as part of the Earth’s 4.6 billion-year history.

Senior reporter Sigal Samuel has covered the Anthropocene debate for the website here and here.

We don’t mention this in the video, but Phil Gibbard and Erle Ellis co-authored a paper proposing the Anthropocene as a geological “event” rather than an epoch:

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