Demonstrations, Protests and Riots

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      London Police Arrest Gaza Protest Planners at Quaker House

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      Quakers in Britain said the raid, in which six youth activists unaffiliated with the religious group were arrested, “clearly shows what happens when a society criminalizes protest.”Quakers in Britain are reeling from what they say is an unheard-of violation of one of their places of worship by police officers who forced their way into a meeting house in London and arrested activists gathered there to plan Gaza war protests.“No one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory,” Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said in a statement issued after the raid.But on Thursday evening, the pacifist group said, more than 20 uniformed police officers, some armed with tasers, forced their way into the meeting house in Westminster, breaking open the front door “without warning or ringing the bell.”The officers searched the building and arrested six women at a gathering of Youth Demand, an unaffiliated activist group that was renting a room to meet in, the Quakers in Britain said.The Metropolitan Police said the arrests followed Youth Demand’s plans to “shut down” London with protests next month, according to British media. The police said that while they recognized the right to protest, “we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent activity that crosses the line from protest into serious disruption and other criminality,” British media reported.The arrests raised alarms in England, and came amid a crackdown on Gaza War protesters in the United States, especially on college campuses, where some students have denounced Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Specter of Auto Tariffs Spurs Some Car Buyers to Rush Purchases

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      “Prices are going to shoot up now,” one shopper said. But some dealers said that economic concerns might be keeping people away.Ziggy Duchnowski spent Saturday morning car shopping along Northern Boulevard in Queens with two goals in mind.He wanted to find a new small car for his wife, and he hoped to strike a deal before the new tariffs that President Trump is imposing on imported cars and trucks affect prices.“The word on the street is prices are going to shoot up now,” said Mr. Duchnowski, 45, a union carpenter who voted for Mr. Trump, holding the hands of his two small children.The tariffs — 25 percent on vehicles and parts produced outside the United States — will have a broad impact on the North American auto industry. They are supposed to go into effect on April 3 and are sure to raise the prices of new cars and trucks.They will also force automakers to adjust their North American manufacturing operations and scramble to find ways to cut costs to offset the tariffs. And for now at least, they are spurring some consumers to buy vehicles before sticker prices jump.Analysts estimate that the tariffs will significantly increase the prices of new vehicles, adding a few thousand dollars for entry-level models to $10,000 or more for high-end cars and trucks. Higher prices for new vehicles are also likely to nudge used-car prices higher.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What We Know About the Detentions of Student Protesters

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      The Trump administration is looking to deport pro-Palestinian students who are legally in the United States, citing national security. Critics say that violates free speech protections.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily.Pool photo by Nathan HowardThe Trump administration is trying to deport pro-Palestinian students and academics who are legally in the United States, a new front in its clash with elite schools over what it says is their failure to combat antisemitism.The White House asserts that these moves — many of which involve immigrants with visas and green cards — are necessary because those taken into custody threaten national security. But some legal experts say that the administration is trampling on free speech rights and using lower-level laws to crack down on activism.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily. He did not specify how many of those people had taken part in campus protests or acted to support Palestinians.Mr. Rubio gave that number at a news conference, after noting that the department had revoked the visa of a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University. He did not give details on the other revocations.Immigration officials are known to have pursued at least nine people in apparent connection to this effort since the start of March.The detentions and efforts to deport people who are in the country legally reflect an escalation of the administration’s efforts to restrict immigration, as it also seeks to deport undocumented immigrants en masse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Turkey Deports BBC Reporter Who Covered Mass Protests

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      Mark Lowen was detained in Istanbul after reporting on unrest prompted by the arrest of a rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the broadcaster said.The BBC said on Thursday that Turkey had deported a correspondent who was covering the antigovernment protests in the country, after he was detained and labeled “a threat to public order.”The broadcaster said in a statement that Mark Lowen, who had been in the country for several days, was taken from his hotel on Wednesday and held for 17 hours. He arrived in London on Thursday morning.“No journalist should face this kind of treatment simply for doing their job,” said Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, who described the detention and deportation as “an extremely troubling incident.”“We will continue to report impartially and fairly on events in Turkey,” she added, and said that the BBC would reach out to the Turkish authorities.Mr. Lowen was in Turkey reporting on the political crisis sparked by the arrest last week of Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s top rival, on accusations of corruption and supporting terrorism. Hundreds of thousands of Turks have protested in cities across the country since his arrest. About 170 people have been jailed pending trial, the country’s interior ministry said as of Wednesday.Mr. Imamoglu, who was subsequently removed from his post as mayor and jailed pending trial on the corruption charges, said his arrest was politically motivated. Critics of Mr. Erdogan said the moves were the latest example of his increasingly authoritarian tactics after two decades in power.Mr. Lowen, a well-known correspondent who had previously lived in Turkey for five years, was not the only journalist to be caught up in the crackdown. Of the more than 1,300 people that the interior ministry has said have been arrested in connection with the protests, 11 were journalists. Seven of the detained reporters, including a photographer for the French news agency Agence France-Presse, were released without charge on Thursday.“To be detained and deported from the country where I previously lived for five years and for which I have such affection has been extremely distressing,” Mr. Lowen said in a statement. “Press freedom and impartial reporting are fundamental to any democracy.”Turkey did not announce the deportation and Turkish officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ben Hubbard More

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      Assessment Warns Against Conflating Legal Musk Protests With Tesla Vandalism

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      President Trump has suggested attacks against Tesla are a coordinated effort to intimidate the billionaire Elon Musk, but an internal intelligence assessment did not support that claim and warned against conflating legal protests against Mr. Musk with vandalism to his property.The attacks on Tesla vehicles and facilities “appear to have been conducted by lone offenders, and all known incidents occurred at night, making identification and arrest of the actors difficult,” officials with the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security wrote in an intelligence bulletin dated March 21 and obtained by The New York Times.The initial assessment, shared with law enforcement agencies across the country and subject to change as investigations proceed, was based on an analysis of vandalism investigations in nine states over the past two months. It concluded that the attacks, which included firing gunshots, spraying graffiti, smashing windows and setting vehicles on fire, were “rudimentary” and not intended to injure people.The people taking these actions “may perceive these attacks as victimless property crimes,” but their “tactics can cause accidental or intentional bodily harm” to bystanders and first responders, the officials wrote in the report.While law enforcement agencies should aggressively pursue people committing those acts, they should not investigate “constitutionally protected activity” directed at Mr. Musk, who has overseen a far-reaching effort to reduce the size and function of the federal government, they added.Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi described the Tesla attacks as “domestic terrorism.” The director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel, reiterated that assessment on Monday, saying it was investigating what he described as an increase in violent activity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pam Bondi Calls Tesla Vandalism ‘Domestic Terrorism,’ Promising Consequences

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      Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday labeled a recent spate of attacks on Tesla dealerships across the country as acts of “domestic terrorism” directed at Elon Musk, as Trump allies have pressured the Justice Department to take aggressive action.In recent weeks, vandals in apparent protest of Mr. Musk’s polarizing efforts to drastically shrink the federal government and fire government workers have defaced or destroyed Tesla vehicles and damaged buildings in several cities. No serious injuries have been reported.Five more vehicles at a Tesla facility in Las Vegas were damaged on Tuesday in what the local authorities said was a targeted attack.“The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism,” Ms. Bondi wrote in a statement. “We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”There is no federal domestic terrorism law, so those charged in the attacks would be charged under other federal statutes; Ms. Bondi did not specify what charges could be brought, but she said that if convicted, some of those accused could face sentences of at least five years in prison.Ms. Bondi’s remarks echoed President Trump’s labeling of the vandalism as terrorism. On Tuesday, he baselessly suggested in a Fox interview that the vandalism was paid for “by people very highly political on the left.”Congressional Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have pressured Ms. Bondi to call such attacks domestic terrorism — after successfully resisting efforts by Democrats in 2022 to pass legislation to counter the rise in activity by white supremacists and other far-right groups.Ms. Bondi supported Mr. Trump’s mass clemency for hundreds of his supporters who violently ransacked the U.S. Capitol, including some who assaulted police officers. The F.B.I. described those involved in the planning and perpetration of that attack as “domestic violent extremists,” whom they had previously identified in threat assessments.Several Tesla facilities have been targeted in the past several days.On Monday, police arrested a 26-year-old woman with spraypainting anti-Musk messages on the front windows of a Tesla facility in Buffalo Grove, Ill., on Friday. That same day vandals broke windows and defaced a dealership in the San Diego area with swastikas and slogans.The F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, working with the local police, are investigating vandalism of Cybertrucks at a Tesla dealership in Kansas City, Mo., the F.B.I.’s Kansas City field office said in a statement posted to Facebook. An unknown attacker fired more than a dozen shots at a Tesla dealership in Tigard, Ore., last week, damaging some of the vehicles and store windows. More

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      Protest Against Serbian Leader Draws Over 100,000 in Biggest Crowd Yet

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      The rally on Saturday in the capital, Belgrade, came as protests have spread to towns around the country and have drawn increasingly insistent calls that President Aleksandar Vucic step aside.A student-led protest movement in Serbia rallied more than 100,000 people for a huge peaceful street demonstration on Saturday in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, defying warnings from the country’s embattled strongman leader that months of unrest were careening out of control into violence.Saturday’s rally, the biggest outpouring of public discontent in Serbia in decades, was preceded by a drumbeat of warnings from President Aleksandar Vucic and his expansive media apparatus that protesters were planning violent attacks to provoke “civil war” and seize power.Opposition politicians added to a foreboding mood by claiming that they had received information from inside Serbia’s security service of secret plans to arrest Mr. Vucic’s political rivals.But Saturday’s rally, which began outside the Parliament building in Belgrade and soon engulfed the city center, passed without major incident. Supporters of President Vucic gathered in a park near Parliament and threw stones at students. But fears that the government would deploy war veterans and soccer hooligans linked to organized crime gangs to beat protesters — as it has in the past — did not materialize.Farmers on tractors, students and anti-government demonstrators taking part in a protest, in front of the parliament building, in Belgrade on Saturday.Mitar Mitrovic/ReutersThe Belgrade police said the protesters numbered 107,000 while students at Belgrade University’s faculty of dramatic arts, which helped organize the rally, put the turnout at 800,000.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Yorkers Protest as White House Defends Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia

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      Hundreds of demonstrators marched downtown while a spokeswoman for President Trump said the president had the authority to detain Mahmoud Khalil.As hundreds of demonstrators made their way through Lower Manhattan on Tuesday to protest the detention of a prominent pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University, the White House defended the arrest and rebuked the school for what it called lack of cooperation.The activist, Mahmoud Khalil, was a leader of student protests on Columbia’s campus and often served as a negotiator and spokesman. Mr. Khalil, 30, who is Palestinian and was born and raised in Syria, is a legal permanent resident of the United States and is married to an American citizen.He was arrested on Saturday and transferred to detention in Louisiana.A spokeswoman for President Trump, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Tuesday that the government had the authority to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card under the Immigration and Nationality Act.“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers with the logo of Hamas,” she said.Her remarks came a day after Mr. Trump vowed that the apprehension of Mr. Khalil was “the first arrest of many to come.”Some free speech groups and civil rights activists have questioned the legality of Mr. Khalil’s detention, which his lawyers have challenged in court. On Tuesday, some New York Democrats expressed concern about the arrest. But Mayor Eric Adams shrugged off questions about it at a City Hall news conference, saying that the federal government, not the city, had authority over the matter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More