Category Archives: International

Inside Higher Ed: Israel Releases Detained Akron Scholar

A University of Akron geographer who had been informally accused of spying for Hezbollah in Israel was released Sunday without any charges being filed.

Ghazi Falah, an associate professor in the department of geography and planning at Akron, holds joint Israeli and Canadian citizenship but works in the United States on a permanent visa. He had been visiting his ailing mother in Israel, and on July 8, he was taking photographs at a resort near the Lebanese border when Israeli authorities detained him. He was held for more than two weeks before Israeli officials gave any indication of why he had been held.

Last week, they told his lawyers that they believed he had been taking pictures of Israeli installations along the border for intelligence purposes, a spokeswoman for the Israeli Consulate General in Philadelphia told the Associated Press. No formal charges were ever filed, and he was never brought before a judge. His lawyers insisted that he had been taking the photographs for academic purposes, an argument also made by a group of scholars who have campaigned and petitioned for his release.

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The Chronicle: Proposed Rule Change Would End Canadian Students’ Exemption From Finger Scanning at the Border

Canadians have long felt they had a special relationship with Americans, though heightened border security since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is straining that relationship. Now the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is proposing to end one way in which Canadian students enjoyed a special status.

Under a rule change proposed on Wednesday in the Federal Register and likely to be adopted next year, Canadians coming to the United States to study or work would be required to be digitally fingerprinted and photographed. The requirement has already applied to all other foreign students since 2003, under the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology Program. The program, known as US-Visit, maintains a huge and growing database of biometric data on all foreigners who enter the United States.

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Akron Beacon Journal: Israel accuses Ohio college professor accused of spying

An Ohio college professor has been accused by Israel of spying for Hezbollah and Iran, his lawyer and Israeli government officials in the United States told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Ghazi Falah, a geography professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, has not been charged with a crime but remains in an Israeli jail. He was arrested July 8 in northern Israel, but Israeli officials and Falah’s lawyer, Husein abu-Husein, were prohibited by an Israeli court from saying why.

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Inside Higher Ed: Scholar of Peace in the Line of Fire

Saoud El Mawla was a year late in accepting a position as professor at Earlham College. He was supposed to start in the 2003-4 academic year. But the tightening of visa rules post-9/11 meant that Lebanese citizens like El Mawla were unable to get the necessary documents to come to the United States. It didn’t matter that El Mawla has been hired to teach peace studies, and was an outspoken advocate for non-violent solutions to the problems of the Middle East. It took nearly a year of negotiations, in which Earlham’s president and other top officials lobbied the State Department, for El Mawla to gain the visa he needed to get to Indiana.

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BBC News: SNP makes ‘free education’ pledge

The SNP will pledge a return to free university education as part of its election campaign drive next year.
The party will say a £100m package for students will mean an end to the graduate endowment fee.

Student loans would also be abolished and there would be a return to the system of grants, the SNP will say.

Deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon will deliver a keynote speech this week on the policies a Nationalist government would deliver if elected next May.

‘Backdoor tuition fee’

She claims that current education policies are holding back the country’s younger generation.

Ms Sturgeon said: “This package will get rid of the graduate endowment, the backdoor tuition fee, to make university education free again.

“It will also abolish student loans and replace them with grants and it will allow for the write-off of the existing graduate debt from student loans that holds so many young people back from taking entrepreneurial risks and getting on the housing ladder.

“The SNP is determined to create a generation that is independent of mind, confident and forward-looking.”

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The Chronicle: Colombian Academics and Students Receive Death Threats, Forcing Some Into Hiding

Death threats against professors, students, and employees at two universities in Colombia have driven one professor out of the country and several students into hiding. Academics have long been targets in the country’s 41-year-old civil war, and some are worried that violence against them may be on the rise.

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The Chronicle: Iraq’s Intellectuals Are Marked for Death, Human-Rights Groups Say

Iraqi academics are targets for attacks in a concerted campaign to rid Iraq of its intellectual class, according to several international human-rights groups. The leader of one organization said the killings no longer could be considered political assassinations, but were “simply anti-intellectual and anti-education.”

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