Students at the University of Michigan’s graduation protested against war and showed support for Palestine by waving their flags. This clashed with the usual celebrations of graduation.
The protest took place at the start of the event at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. About 75 people, some wearing traditional Arabic headscarves, along with their graduation hats, walked towards the stage for graduation.
They shouted “Regents, regents, you can’t hide. You are funding genocide. ” while holding signs, including one that said “No universities left in Gaza. ”
In the sky, planes flew with advertising banners. One sign says “Stop supporting Israel now. Let Palestine be free. ” The other sign says “We support Israel. ” Jewish lives are important.
No one got arrested, and the protest didn’t cause any big problems during the two-hour event. Many people came to the event, some of them were waving Israeli flags.
The police stopped the protesters from getting to the stage, and a university spokesperson said that security officers took the protesters to the back of the stadium. They stayed there until the event was over.
“Peaceful protests have been happening at U-M graduation ceremonies for many years,” she said.
US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro stopped talking a few times. He asked the audience to look at him.
Before he gave a promise to graduates in the military, Del Toro said they would keep the rights we value, like the right to protest peacefully.
The university said it’s okay for protesters to camp out on the campus. But the police helped to stop a big group of people at a graduation event on Friday night, and one person got arrested.
Michigan, Indiana University, Ohio State University, and Northeastern University in Boston were getting ready for protests at their graduation ceremonies this weekend. Many more are scheduled to happen in the next few weeks.
At Indiana University, people were telling others to wear their keffiyehs and leave while President Pamela Whitten was speaking on Saturday night. The college in Bloomington, Indiana, has picked a special area outside Memorial Stadium where people can protest during the ceremony.
Protesters are setting up tents on college campuses to ask universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies that support the war in Gaza. This is a big student movement happening on campuses all over the country. Some schools have made deals with the protesters to stop the demonstrations and lower the chance of causing problems for final exams and graduations.
Police have taken down many encampments and arrested protesters.
The Associated Press says that at least 61 times since April 18, people have been arrested at protests on college campuses in the US. In total, more than 2,400 people have been arrested at 47 different campuses. The numbers come from information given by the Associated Press and from what universities and police have said.
18 students at Princeton University in New Jersey decided not to eat in order to try to get the university to stop investing in companies connected to Israel.
David Chmielewski, a high school student, who is not eating to protest, said in an email on Saturday that the protest started on Friday morning with people only drinking water.
He said the hunger strike will keep going until university leaders talk to students about their demands. They want to be forgiven for any crimes and punishments for protesting.
Other protestors are joining in “solidarity fasts” that go on for 24 hours, he said.
Princeton students started a protest and some stayed in a building, which led to about 15 people getting arrested.
Students at Brown and Yale, and other colleges, also went on hunger strikes earlier this year before the recent wave of protest camps.
On Saturday, the police stopped a protest at the University of Virginia. The campus police said it was a “illegal gathering” on a social media site.
Video from WVAW-TV showed police in special gear taking protesters out of a camp at the Charlottesville campus. The police have not said how many people were taken into custody.
In Boston, students at Tufts University peacefully removed their protest camp without any help from the police on Friday night.
People from the school in Medford, Massachusetts, said they were happy with the progress, which didn’t happen because of any deal with the protestors. The people who organized the protest are really upset that talks with the university didn’t work out.
The protests are happening because of a fight between Israel and Hamas. It all started on October 7 when Hamas fighters attacked the south of Israel. They killed around 1,200 people, most of them were not soldiers, and also took about 250 people as hostages.
Israel started a big attack in Gaza to wipe out Hamas. This attack has killed over 34,500 Palestinians, and most of them are women and children. The information comes from the Health Ministry in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Israeli attacks have caused a lot of damage and forced many people in Gaza to leave their homes.
Tag: University of Michigan
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University of Michigan agitated by anti-war protests as graduation coincides with rallies
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Why are earthquakes so hard to predict?
Even though they have looked into possible precursor phenomena, scientists have not yet been able to identify any clear signs that an impending shaking is about to occur.
Major earthquakes, like the 7.8-magnitude quake that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday, have well-established causes. Despite this, they are still difficult to predict.
Although science and technology have advanced, it is still essentially impossible to predict exactly when and where earthquakes will occur.
“Earthquake prediction has always been kind of a holy grail,” said Wendy Bohon, an earthquake geologist who works as a communications strategist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “If we could tell people exactly when an earthquake was going to happen, we could take steps to mitigate against it. But Earth is a very complicated system.”
Part of the challenge is that the very nature of earthquakes makes them unpredictable events. When one does occur, it happens quickly.
“An earthquake is not like a slow-moving train that eventually picks up speed. It’s a sudden, accelerated event,” said Ben van der Pluijm, a professor of geology at the University of Michigan.
Earthquakes also tend to strike with little to no warning. Though scientists have investigated potential precursor events — everything from shifts in subsurface sounds to potential increases in a region’s seismic activity to changes in animal behavior — they have so far been unable to pinpoint any consistent signals that shaking is imminent.
The lack of any clear pattern makes it difficult to create reliable forecasts akin to weather reports.
Additionally, the processes that underpin earthquakes — the mashing and colliding of tectonic plates and the energy that builds up as a result — tend to play out over long periods of time. Scientists can, for instance, gauge that an earthquake will likely strike an area some time in the next 200 years, which may be specific on geologic timescales. On human time scales? Not so much.
“We have an incredibly good idea of where we expect earthquakes, and even the sizes that we can expect for large earthquakes in these areas, but that does not help us to narrow that down to a human timescale,” van der Pluijm said.
The U.S. Geological Survey is even more blunt on the topic. “Neither the USGS nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake. We do not know how, and we do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future,” the agency said on its website.
Still, there are ways to prepare. The USGS has developed an early-warning system called ShakeAlert that detects when a significant earthquake has occurred in California, Oregon and Washington and then issues radio, television and cellular alerts saying that strong shaking is imminent. In most cases, the alerts offer only a few seconds of warning, but that time can be extremely valuable, said van der Pluijm.
“Twenty seconds sounds very short, but it’s enough time for you to find a place under a desk to take cover,” he said. “It’s not a prediction, but ShakeAlert is a huge step forward because it can minimize the inevitable impact.”
One of the most important ways to prepare for an earthquake is to be aware of the risks, Bohon said. For policymakers, this means ensuring that critical infrastructure is protected in earthquake-prone areas.
“What we need to do is to make sure we understand what can happen and build to withstand that,” she said. “We have to make sure people know what to do. We have to make sure that our cities are able to be resilient in the face of those hazards so that we don’t just survive the earthquake, we can survive in the aftermath.”