The Columbia University Senate in New York City voted in favor of a resolution calling for an investigation into the school’s leadership amid anti-Israel protests that have taken place on the campus for over a week.

A source within the school’s leadership confirmed the details of the resolution, saying it was adopted by a vote of 62-14, with three senate members abstaining.

The resolution alleges Columbia President Minouche Shafik violated established protocols when she authorized the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to enter the campus and arrest protesters last week.

Specifically, Shafik is accused of violating the due process rights of students and faculty when she authorized officers to enter the campus.

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The university senate does not have the authority to remove Shafik, as it is the university’s policy-making body, which is made up of students, faculty and administrators.

"The administration and Senate share the same goal of restoring calm to campus, so everyone can pursue their educational activities," the university said. "We are committed to an ongoing dialogue and appreciate the Senate’s constructive engagement in finding a pathway forward."

Shafik has increasingly faced calls to step down amid the spread of antisemitism on campus as well as ongoing protests against Israel that have disrupted classes. 

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On Monday, Shafik said in a statement she was "deeply saddened" by certain actions of agitators, who have formed an "encampment" on the campus and riled up students and faculty with anti-Jewish slogans and chants. 

The protest encampment sprung up on the campus lawn area at Columbia April 17, the same day Shafik faced bruising criticism at a congressional hearing from Republicans who said she hadn't done enough to fight antisemitism. Two other Ivy League presidents resigned months ago following widely criticized testimony they gave to the same committee. 

U.S. House Republicans from New York have urged Shafik to resign, saying in a letter Monday she had failed to provide a safe learning environment in recent days as "anarchy has engulfed the campus."

Fox News' CB Cotton and Bradford Betz contributed to this report.

Some Missouri residents and lawmakers are calling for faster cleanup at several toxic sites in the St. Louis area.

"We always felt like we're being gaslit by these federal agencies, like the way they would answer questions, the way they were just very nonchalant," Just Moms STL co-founder Dawn Chapman told Fox News. "They really should have gone in there before any of this was built and cleaned the creek. They had a chance to really prevent all the harm that we're seeing now. And for whatever reason, they chose not to."

Chapman’s group, which she founded with her neighbor Karen Nickel, advocates for the cleanup of contaminated sites in St. Louis.

"We've talked to a lot of people that live just less than a half a mile from West Lake Landfill," Nickel said. "Since those homes were built there back in the late '50s, they had no idea that a landfill was even there."

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Nickel and Chapman said when they bought their homes, they were unaware the landfill was located nearby and that it was designated as a superfund site.

"It was like, what the heck is that? I didn't know to even look for that when I purchased my house," Chapman said.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been providing updates on the cleanups using social media, making information accessible online.

"There are some of the activists that are in the area and the community members that are very strong, that are always willing to provide information. We really tried to beef up our relationship with the key community members, and I think that's paying off," EPA Region 7 Superfund and Emergency Management Division Director Bob Jurgens said.

The EPA added the West Lake Landfill to its national priorities list in 1990. The list is part of its Superfund sites program documenting hazardous waste sites in the country. Those locations are eligible for federal funding to pay for extensive, long-term cleanup actions. 

"The Superfund process can be very lengthy. We understand their concerns with that," Jurgens said.

The EPA proposed a plan for remediation in 2006. After a public comment period, the agency adjusted its plan and released a new Record of Decision in 2008.

"Based on feedback from the community, there was an amendment to that which was completed in 2018," Jurgens said. "It's been pretty much nonstop work with the responsible parties to do the assessment, the remedial design, and then eventually get to the implementation."

Nearly 35 years after its designation as a Superfund site, residents have argued the process should be further along.

"We're told we're close to getting it there. But, you know, we're running up against a clock," Chapman said.

The EPA admitted it did not have a firm schedule for when the West Lake Landfill will be fully cleaned up.

"We don't have a timeline. It's difficult to guess how long this is going to take. We've made really good progress with the responsible parties on doing the full assessment," Jurgens said.

Adding to the complex work, a fire has been burning at the site for nearly a decade. The EPA reported it did not know how the fire started.

"It's not uncommon for there to be landfill fires," Jurgens said. "Once that fire is underground, it's really difficult to put that out. But they've done some really good actions at that site to address that."

Jurgens said there was significant space between the fire and the radioactive waste. Crews have installed a barrier to contain the fire and officials said there's currently no risk to residents in the area.

"That subsurface smoldering event is definitely in better shape than it was several years ago," Jurgens said.

Chapman and other people living in the area said issues in the past have contributed to the lengthy cleanup happening today.

"The truth is, that both federal agencies in charge of this radioactivity across the region, have made huge errors and mistakes in characterizing it," Chapman said.

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The two sites where toxic waste was stored after the Manhattan Project were added to the national priorities list in 1989. The list has not included Coldwater Creek, which extends from those sites, but locations along the creek where radioactivity has been found have fallen under the storage sites’ listing.

"This creek goes 14 miles throughout the county that I serve. And so I just believe that the whole entire creek should be tested," Missouri State Rep. Chantelle Nickson-Clark said.

Nickson-Clark, a Democrat, is a two-time cancer survivor who grew up near Coldwater Creek. She's representing the area and recently hosted a town hall to hear the stories of others living there.

"A lot of the constituents shared how they too have lost loved ones and are dealing with the aftermath," Nickson-Clark said. "It is very sad to see my community hurting and dealing with such effects of Coldwater Creek. We know that there are a lot more stories out there."

The Army Corps of Engineers, the lead federal agency working to clean up the waterway, has estimated that the effort could take until 2038.

"If you do the math, we're already 80 years into it," Nickson-Clark said. "Some of us may not even experience the cleanup in our lifetime."

Like the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers admitted the process has been lengthy.

"There’s an extensive amount of coordination, investigation, documentation, remediation that we have to do just to get one area. So the overall process definitely does take some time," U.S. Army Corps of Engineers St. Louis District Program Manager Phil Moser said.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the timeline for cleanup at both sites was unacceptable.

"This is outrageous. Let's remember, this creek has had contamination in it since the ‘50s, since the ’60s and now 2038? I mean, we will be getting close to the century mark," Hawley said. "They should quit kicking the can down the road. This ought to be an all-hands-on-deck effort." 

The Army Corps of Engineers has been taking samples along the 14-mile stretch of Coldwater Creek. The area included some 756 properties such as homes, commercial locations and recreational sites. They've been testing for uranium, radium and thorium, among other contaminates.

"When the Army Corps took over in 1998, the extent was not 100% known," Moser said. "We got to 2012 and realized that there was more extensive sampling needed in Coldwater Creek."

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New maps from the agency showed locations with contaminated soil. They also showed parts where crews were taking samples and areas they had tested and determined safe.

"There is more waste than they're saying there is," Nickel said. "The Army Corps, I don't know whether it's that they're not coming forth, being truthful, not being transparent. It's hard to tell because it's not been a very trusting relationship with that agency over the years."

Coldwater Creek flows behind Jana Elementary School. It closed in 2022 after thorium, which has been linked to cancers, was detected on the property.

"Jana Elementary School was truly a nightmare come true for us because we knew where it's at along the creek," Chapman said.

Ashley Bernaugh is also a member of the Just Moms STL group. She was PTA president at Jana Elementary, which her son attended. She said she had been requesting testing and documents from the Army Corps of Engineers for several years.

"Since 2018, the Army Corps of Engineers has really done its due diligence, and the Department of Energy along with them, to not answer my questions," Bernaugh said.

Moser said the agency tested both inside and outside the school and determined the contamination was background radiation.

"We verified and concluded that the school was safe from a radiological standpoint, and we stand by that, as well as the federal agencies that reviewed our documentation," Moser said.

Bernaugh and other advocates said it wasn’t enough. They eventually had an outside company take samples from the school grounds.

"The Boston Chemical Company were able to take dust samples and analyze them and found thorium 230, which is a metallic kind of thorium used in the radioactive bomb waste that is from early weapons development in St. Louis," Bernaugh said.

The Army Corps of Engineers reported it found dangerous levels of thorium, but only in locations close to the creek.

"The banks of the creek are being remediated by the Army Corps of Engineers because it meets their magical threshold. Of what? What they're willing to clean up of radioactive waste?," Bernaugh said.

The Army Corps also has been taking soil samples from homes near Coldwater Creek after finding contamination on the properties.

"They're finding radioactive contamination under people's basements next to the creek," Hawley said. "They've never made it right. They've never compensated Missourians for what they did and they haven't cleaned it up. They need to clean up the creek. They need to clean up the landfills, and they need to compensate people who've gotten sick."

Kansas will remain among the handful of states that haven't legalized the medical use of marijuana or expanded their Medicaid programs for at least another year.

Republican state senators on Friday blocked efforts to force debates on both issues before the GOP-controlled Legislature's scheduled adjournment for the year Tuesday. Supporters of each measure fell short of the 24 of 40 votes required to pull a bill on each subject out of committee.

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Backers of both proposals argue that they have popular support yet have been thwarted going on a decade in each case. Kansas doesn't allow voters to put proposed laws on the ballot statewide, a path that has led to approval for each measure in other states.

All but 12 states have legalized medical marijuana, and all but 10 have expanded Medicaid in line with the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act and its promise to cover almost all of the cost. Besides Kansas, only Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming have done neither, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"We're behind the times," state Sen. John Doll, a western Kansas Republican who voted for both measures, said after Friday's votes.

Republican leaders had expected both efforts to fail, given the GOP's 29-11 Senate majority, and viewed them largely as political grandstanding.

The medical marijuana vote was 12-25, with three senators absent. Law enforcement officials oppose the idea, seeing medical marijuana as likely to be close to legalizing recreational use.

During committee testimony earlier this year, opponents also pointed to Oklahoma officials' frustration with the legalization of medical marijuana by ballot initiative there in 2018. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, has said the explosive growth of the marijuana industry under a lax law has attracted an influx of criminals and foreign nationals for illegal black-market operations.

"We had no idea we were going to have 10,000 growers, way more than they have in California and all these other states, and anybody with a hangnail could get a medical card," Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said.

But Oklahoma also received nearly $52 million in revenue from its excise tax on marijuana and an additional $67 million in state and local sales taxes in 2023.

Cheryl Kumberg, a registered western Kansas nurse and president of the Kansas Cannabis Coalition, said Oklahoma's problems stem from its lax law. She said Kansas residents who can get cannabis from other states are using it, risking legal issues to address their medical problems.

"It’s ridiculous," she said. "I can go 45 minutes one way, a couple hours in the other direction, and you can just you can just use it however you want."

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly even linked medical marijuana to Medicaid expansion in 2021, unsuccessfully pitching marijuana taxes to cover the state's relatively small share of the cost of expanding Medicaid health coverage to another 150,000 people.

The Medicaid expansion vote Friday was 18-17 despite months of aggressive public campaigning by Kelly and other expansion advocates. In early January, she said she was taking a "more political approach" and suggested plans to hit anti-expansion Republicans hard during the fall campaign.

She backed off that idea this month, telling reporters after one pro-expansion event, "Whether it's an election year or not — that's irrelevant."

But last year, Kelly formed the Middle of the Road political action committee, and it raised nearly $1 million by the end December for elections this year for all legislative seats.

Also last year, two former Kelly campaign aides helped form a nonprofit advocacy group, the Kansas Coalition for Common Sense, to back the governor's goals. That group put out a post-vote statement suggesting that a no vote was a vote against lowering health care costs and helping rural hospitals.

But Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita-area Republican, said before the vote that he wasn't expecting Medicaid expansion to become a major campaign issue. He dismissed surveys and polling that expansion supporters released showing its popularity as "just based on how the question is asked."

"If you ask them, 'Do you want able-bodied people to get free health care?" people will vote no," Masterson said, repeating a common GOP argument.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills on Friday signed into law a suite of gun safety legislation approved by lawmakers after the deadliest mass shooting in state history, expanding background checks for private sales of weapons, bolstering the state's "yellow flag" law, criminalizing the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanding mental health crisis care.

The governor told lawmakers during her State of the State address that doing nothing was not an option after an Army reservist with an assault rifle killed 18 people and injured 13 others in Lewiston on Oct. 25.

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The bills drew opposition from Republicans who accused Democrats, who control both legislative chambers, of using the tragedy to advance proposals, some of which had been previously defeated. Mills said Friday the proposals would improve public safety while respecting the state's long traditions of gun ownership and outdoor heritage.

"This law represents important, meaningful progress, without trampling on anybody’s rights, and it will better protect public safety by implementing reasonable reforms and by significantly expanding mental health resources," Mills said.

The new law signed by the governor doesn't require universal background checks but it does require background checks for people who advertise a gun for sale on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace or elsewhere. Sellers would be required to conduct a background check utilizing commercially licensed businesses like L.L. Bean or Cabela's.

The legislation includes changes to the state's yellow flag law that allows police to assess an individual, take the person into protective custody for a mental health evaluation and hold a hearing before a judge to remove guns from someone in a psychiatric crisis.

The new law allows police to go directly to a judge for a warrant, streamlining the process. It eliminates a hurdle when a deputy was stymied by the Lewiston gunman’s refusal to answer the door for a required face-to-face meeting that’s necessary under current law. Law enforcement members have said in testimony about the shootings that the state's existing yellow flag law was cumbersome and hard to apply.

Republicans in the state remain opposed to the bill, specifically because of the expanded background check proposal, said the Maine House of Representatives Republican leader, Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham, on Friday.

"House Republicans have voiced ongoing support for strengthening Maine’s so-called yellow flag law and mental health services, but oppose the governor’s bill," Faulkingham said. "The unenforceable background check provision will only create confusion among law-abiding Mainers."

Supporters of expanded gun control laws, who have advocated for the passage of the new standards for months, described the approval of the rules as a victory. Twenty-two states now have a background check law, said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety.

Advocates also said they're hopeful other new gun measures approved by lawmakers in Maine will soon become law.

"Today is a victory for the gun violence prevention movement and a demonstration of what Mainers can accomplish to keep our communities safe when we work together," said Vicki Farsaci, a volunteer with the Maine chapter of Moms Demand Action.

The bill signed by the governor also strengthens legal standards for prosecution and penalties to deter other people from selling weapons to prohibited buyers, making it a felony crime. The governor's office said in a statement that the new approach "will mean that transfers of firearms to family members or trusted friends, as is common in Maine, will remain unchanged, but it will incentivize checks against the (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) for private, unadvertised sales to unknown individuals through the threat of increased risk of prosecution and prison time."

Mills' approvals of the gun proposals came a day after a special commission she convened interviewed fellow reservists of Card who raised warnings about Card's increasingly erratic behavior. Card was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the aftermath of the mass shooting after an extensive search.

One of the fellow reservists interviewed on Thursday, Sean Hodgson, told superiors in September: "I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting."

Mills also proposed the creation of a new violence and injury prevention program requiring the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention to serve as a clearinghouse for data from law enforcement, hospitals, schools and other sources to inform public policy decisions.

Her proposal for a network of crisis centers, meanwhile, would build upon the first such facility already in operation in Portland and a second one that’s being created in central Maine.

Tennessee teachers and staff will be allowed to carry concealed handguns on public school grounds under legislation signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee on Friday.

Lee, a Republican, had announced his support for the proposal just the day before while flanked by top Republican legislative leaders who had helped shepherd the bill through the GOP-dominant General Assembly.

"What’s important is that we give districts tools and the option to use a tool that will keep their children safe," Lee told reporters.

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As the idea of arming teachers began to gain support inside the General Assembly, gun control advocates and families began swarming to the Capitol to show their opposition. During the final vote, protesters chanted "Blood on your hands" and many members of the public who oppose the bill harangued Republican lawmakers after the vote, leading House Speaker Cameron Sexton to order the galleries cleared.

According to the statute, which becomes effective immediately, parents and other teachers will be barred from knowing who is armed at their schools.

A principal, school district and law enforcement agency would have to agree to let staff carry guns, and then workers who want to carry a handgun would need to have a handgun carry permit and written authorization from the school’s principal and local law enforcement. They would also need to clear a background check and undergo 40 hours of handgun training. They couldn’t carry guns at school events at stadiums, gymnasiums or auditoriums.

The legislation is the biggest expansion of gun access in the state since last year’s deadly shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville where shooter indiscriminately opened fire and killed three children and three adults before being killed by police.

Lee initially asked lawmakers to keep guns away from people deemed a danger to themselves or others in response to the shooting, the Republican supermajority ignored that request.

Many of the Covenant families had met with Lee and lawmakers hoping to persuade them to drop the idea of arming teachers. In the final days of the legislative session, Covenant families said they had collected nearly 4,300 signatures from Tennesseans against having public school staffers carry weapons on school grounds.

"There are folks across the state who disagree on the way forward, but we all agree that we should keep our kids safe," Lee said Thursday.

It’s unclear if any school districts would take advantage if the bill becomes law. For example, a Metro Nashville Public Schools spokesperson, Sean Braisted, said the district believes "it is best and safest for only approved active-duty law enforcement to carry weapons on campus."