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Time of India
16 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Who is Megha Vemuri? Indian-origin MIT student barred from graduation after campus speech; here's what we know
Megha Vemuri, a graduating student of Indian origin at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was prevented from attending her own commencement ceremony. The decision came after she delivered a speech supporting Palestine during a campus event, raising questions around protest boundaries and institutional response at U.S. universities. Why MIT took disciplinary action Vemuri had been assigned a formal role as a student marshal during the ceremony. However, days before the event, Chancellor Melissa Nobles informed her that she would not be allowed to take part in graduation. Her family was also restricted from entering the campus for most of the day. According to an email quoted in The Boston Globe, Nobles wrote that Vemuri had 'deliberately and repeatedly misled Commencement organizers.' Nobles clarified that while MIT acknowledges student rights to expression, leading a protest during an official event violated the institution's rules on time, place, and manner of protest. What she said in her speech During the speech, Vemuri wore a red keffiyeh, commonly associated with Palestinian solidarity, and criticized MIT for its ties to Israel's military. 'The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with,' she said. She argued that these links make the institute complicit in the ongoing conflict in Gaza. She urged graduates to take a stand, calling for support for humanitarian efforts, an end to arms transfers, and the severing of institutional ties with Israel. She also acknowledged previous campus activism, pointing out student votes calling for MIT to cut connections with the Israeli military and support a ceasefire in Gaza. Megha Vemuri. A bright neuroscience undergrad. Gets carried away. Wears Islamic Keffiyeh. Ignores Hamas Bloodshed. Bashes Israel & MIT. Misuses parent there would've wanted to listen to this BS. Activism should be kept out of Universities. Online reactions and personal background After her speech went viral online, Vemuri's LinkedIn profile was taken down. Screenshots of it were shared widely on social media platform X. The Palestinian Youth Movement later identified her as the speaker. Born and raised in Alpharetta, Georgia, Vemuri graduated from Alpharetta High School in 2021. At MIT, she majored in computer science, neuroscience, and linguistics, and also served as class president. She is affiliated with Written Revolution, a student group focused on anti-imperialist perspectives. Before MIT, she interned at the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and participated in several leadership and science programs. Larger context on campus protests Vemuri's case follows a wider trend of disciplinary measures against students involved in Palestine-related protests. At New York University, for example, a student's diploma was withheld after a commencement speech criticizing the Gaza conflict. At MIT itself, students have staged sit-ins and walkouts since April, demanding that the institution cut its academic and financial ties with Israel's defense sector. MIT has acknowledged such relationships but defended them as part of its educational and research commitments. Vemuri has not made any public comments following the university's decision, but her supporters continue to voice criticism of MIT's handling of the matter.
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Herbert P. Wilkins, former chief justice of the state Supreme Judicial Court, dies at 95
'If you ask me who was the most significant chief justice certainly Herbert Wilkins would be a standout,' she said. 'I say that not only in the Commonwealth, but nationwide. He was an extraordinary man.' Justice Wilkins, who also was committed to public service on community boards and with influential legal organizations before and after his years on the bench, was 95 when he died Tuesday at home in Concord. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In rulings and in private conversations, Justice Wilkins was known for his brevity and clarity. His humor was also often present, even on the bench. Advertisement A 'Wilkins ruling' had certain hallmarks, said 'It's brief, it's concise, it says what it means to say,' she said of his opinions, which he wrote from draft to finish. His clerks submitted memoranda for him to review. 'He was not a man of many words, but each word counted,' she said, 'and he also was very funny and had a dry wit.' Advertisement In 1996, when Justice Wilkins was scheduled to be sworn in as chief justice in the governor's office, he noted in an interview that it was the same place where he had taken the oath as an associate justice in 1972. It also was the same place where his father, Raymond S. Wilkins, was sworn in as an SJC associate justice and later as chief justice. 'So it's going to be a four-fer,' Justice Wilkins told The Boston Globe. Then he joked that he had picked Though nominated to be an SJC associate justice by 'In my view, our state Constitution tells us today that the state may not engage in the senseless killing of a murderer, even though he is by definition a person who has committed a senseless killing himself,' His more nationally lasting impact involved helping place the SJC at the cutting edge from the mid-1970s onward in issuing state Constitution rulings that more forcefully protected individual rights during an era when the US Supreme Court generally was not doing so. 'I rather regard it as an anchor to the windward to protect people's rights that we should all be in favor of,' Justice Wilkins said in a 1986 interview. Advertisement Justice Wilkins 'understood that state constitutions were terribly important,' Marshall said, and by doing so was 'was among the most highly regarded jurists among state jurists.' From the outset as chief justice, he worked amiably with the state Legislature. That close work with lawmakers helped spur appropriations to build and rehabilitate courts across the state, Marshall said. 'That was a singular achievement that nobody else had been able to do,' she said. Marshall added that Justice Wilkins also tried to ensure that legal assistance would be made more available to state residents who couldn't afford a lawyer when they found themselves caught up in complex court matters. The current Supreme Judicial Court justices 'As a jurist, he was known for his incisive rulings and meticulous attention to detail,' the statement said. 'His respectful and polite demeanor on and off the bench earned him the respect and admiration of all who worked with him. The people of the Commonwealth are fortunate that a person of his intellect, dignity, and commitment to justice was willing to devote his talents in their service.' The youngest of three siblings, Herbert Putnam Wilkins was born on Jan. 10, 1930, and grew up in Winchester. His mother, Mary Louisa Aldrich Wilkins, died in 1954, the year Justice Wilkins graduated from Harvard Law School. His father, Advertisement Before joining the SJC in 1972, the year after Raymond died, Justice Wilkins followed in his father's footsteps as a Harvard College and Harvard Law graduate. A decades-long resident of Concord, he was town counsel for Concord and Acton and chaired Concord's Board of Selectmen before becoming a judge. A Phillips Exeter Academy graduate, he formerly served on his alma mater's board of trustees and as president of the Harvard University Board of Overseers. Justice Wilkins also was a member of the council of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He also had been the 'He took his obligations seriously,' said Justice Wilkins joined the Palmer & Dodge law firm after law school and was a partner from 1960 until becoming a judge. In 1952, he married Angela Middleton, an internationally recognized expert in addressing learning disabilities and teaching those with dyslexia to read. When he met with reporters in July 1996, after Weld nominated him to lead the SJC, Justice Wilkins spoke with pride about Angela's work and said he believed he would be the first chief justice whose wife worked full time. With his four children, Justice Wilkins 'tried to instill a sense of social responsibility to do right by others, an obligation that we're all in this together,' said his son Advertisement Douglas's siblings are Stephen of Gloucester, an educator; In addition to his wife and children, Justice Wilkins leaves eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be announced. Justice Wilkins 'was a very, very kind man and I think he hired kind clerks,' said Dolberg, who added that the judge and his wife invited former clerks to gather for lunch each year around his birthday. One by one, all stood each year to discuss and update their careers, becoming an extended family through the annual gatherings, inspired by his life and work. 'We were so full of gratitude,' Dolberg said. 'We really felt he had been an amazing mentor and that he had helped guide us in our careers.' Bryan Marquard can be reached at
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Post Malone navigated a very damp night for a sold out crowd at Gillette
That might have been necessary to buy in to the scale of the production. With booming, busy drums and lurching guitar squeals, plenty of numbers leaned on sound and fury and signified not much, and the flame bursts and fireworks that punctuated songs like 'Rockstar' simply underlined his band's churning sensory-overload maximalism. With its late-'70s adult-contemporary tinkly-piano sound, 'What Don't Belong To Me' was soft rock, but loud. The rolling cut-time country of 'M-E-X-I-C-O,' meanwhile, was energetic but not particularly convincing. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up But if the singer's recent Nashville pivot may have been mercenary in nature, it also came off as dopily genuine; Malone's great gift as a pop star is his utter inability to radiate anything but sincerity. Leaning into a rasp and a twang, he pulled off the big-spectacle country of 'Wrong Ones' better than a lot of big-spectacle country stars, and the straight-up heartstring-tugger 'Yours' imagined the wedding of his three-year-old daughter, a country theme if ever there was one. Advertisement Even if he didn't slip or fall, Malone's performance didn't always have sure footing. His voice was sometimes more robust than on record, as on a more dynamic 'Better Now,' and sometimes it was even more warbly and thin. He inserted 'Boston' into the lyrics of 'M-E-X-I-C-O' and Morgan Wallen's 'I Ain't Comin' Back,' and it flew by so quickly in both cases that either nobody noticed or nobody cared. Still, Malone's affability was so strong that he could bring a fan in a Dallas Cowboys jersey onstage to perform with him and get the crowd to stop booing long enough for him to sing the almost delicate 'Feeling Whitney' accompanied only by her fingerpicking on acoustic guitar. (The booing recommenced after.) And as he returned from the rigging at the back of the stadium where he sang the encore, he stopped to sign autographs and pose for selfies along the way as his band pounded out the post-rock scope of 'Congratulations.' 'As long as you ain't hurting nobody, keep being yourself,' he concluded, advice that's worked out pretty well for Post Malone. Jelly Roll performs at Gillette Stadium. Ben Stas for The Boston Globe/The Boston Globe Malone's steel-guitar player Chandler Walters opened with amiable but personality-light country that could've come from any of the last five decades, complete with a medley of Advertisement POST MALONE With Jelly Roll and Chandler Walters At: Gillette Stadium, Saturday Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@ or on Bluesky @
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
JD Vance botches defense of the MAGA 'brain drain' Trump has caused in academia
Vice President JD Vance showed some mind-numbing ignorance in a recent attempt to downplay reports that his administration has caused a 'brain drain' — or an exodus of expertise leaving the United States' scientific fields — by suspending research grants and targeting student visa programs. Reputable voices in academia have highlighted the Trump administration-fueled crisis and its potential to inflict lasting damage on the future of American science. But in an interview Thursday with the right-wing outlet Newsmax, Vance waved off those concerns with some jingoism and what appears to be thinly veiled racial bigotry: First of all, I've heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear that we're going to have a brain drain. If you go back to the '50s and '60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens — some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent. This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject it. I just think we should invest in our own people. We can do a lot of good. Vance, who previously delivered a speech framing universities as 'the enemy' in American society, went on to suggest that U.S. colleges may not be producing 'good science' because, according to him, many schools discriminate against white and Asian people. This was an especially ironic claim given it's his administration that is currently threatening to pull student visas from thousands of Chinese students. But let's sit with his 'why can't Americans do this' question for a moment, shall we? Because it sounds patriotic — but it's fundamentally idiotic. For one: Vance's comments were surprisingly dismissive of contributions from the more than 1,500 German scientists, some of them Nazis, brought to the United States as part of an operation known as 'Project Paperclip' (the vice president isn't exactly known for giving accurate lessons on American history). But to be clear: There's an illustrious history of immigrant scientists coming to the United States and making tremendous contributions to the American way of life. But aside from that, Trump's crackdown on science is also causing American scientists and aspiring scientists — the ones Vance claims to care about — to reconsider their career path. The Boston Globe highlighted that trend in a recent report sourced from more than two dozen young scientists, who said they're considering going abroad to find jobs or, potentially, abandoning scientific research entirely due to the Trump administration's actions. Per the report: Across New England and the country, thousands of budding scientists have awoken to a stark new reality, one they never could have imagined just six months ago. Funding for laboratories that focus on everything from the genetic causes of aging to cancer is drying up. Jobs in biomedicine are vanishing. Medical schools are rescinding offers of admission and once-thriving scientific internship programs are shutting down for lack of money. In university hallways, cafes, and cafeterias, from Cambridge to Providence, students are commiserating and strategizing over their increasingly precarious futures. And other nations see opportunity in the United States pursuing an anti-science agenda under Donald Trump. As I wrote in a recent Tuesday Tech Drop, foreign science organizations are licking their chops at the chance to poach American scientists who may be looking to take their expertise elsewhere. All of this highlights the ignorance in Vance's idea that American science will chug along undeterred as Trump's administration cracks down on academic freedom. The notion that American scientists will be eager to work in an increasingly repressive environment — one in which their research can be irreparably quashed and their foreign-born colleagues can be unceremoniously booted from the country —seems utterly detached from reality. This article was originally published on
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Boston Globe
Convicted former Catholic priest exposed by Spotlight investigation dies at 87
Talbot was one of the subjects of The Boston Globe's investigation into priest sexual abuse that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and was adapted into the 2015 movie 'Spotlight.' The investigation revealed widespread sexual abuse, and coverup of that abuse, within the Catholic Church. Jesuits USA East did not offer a comment about Talbot's death. Related : Advertisement He pleaded guilty in 2018 to gross sexual assault and unlawful sexual for sexually abusing a 9-year-old boy at a Maine church in the 1990s. He was sentenced to three years in prison. Prior to the Maine conviction, Talbot spent six years in prison after pleading guilty to raping and sexually assaulting two students in Boston. He has settled lawsuits with more than a dozen victims in addition to the convictions. Talbot was a former teacher and athletic coach at Boston College High School from 1972 to 1980 before he was transferred to Maine, where he worked at Cheverus High School in Portland until 1998. Former Boston College High School student Jim Scanlan, 63, reported Talbot's abuse in Massachusetts. The Associated Press doesn't typically use the names of sexual assault victims without their consent, which Scanlan provided. His reports led to charges against Talbot. Advertisement Scanlan said he has reached out to others who were abused by Talbot. He said he holds people in positions of power within the church accountable for allowing Talbot to continue abusing children over many years. Scanlan said he has tried to deal with his anger at Talbot, but it's a long process. 'The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference,' Scanlan said. 'Maybe I just parked him away a long time ago, resolved I couldn't change what happened.' Jesuits USA East said Talbot had been residing at the Vianney Renewal Center in Dittmer, Missouri, prior to entering hospice care. The center cares for sexually abusive priests and provides other health care services. Talbot's case was emblematic of a pattern of behavior in the Catholic church about how it dealt with sexual abuse and priests. Accusations against him went back decades, and in that time he was transferred to new jurisdictions. Allegations of a cover-up went all the way up to Cardinal Bernard Law, the former archbishop of Boston. The Globe investigation revealed Law and his predecessors had transferred abusive priests from parish to parish without alerting authorities, or parents. Law died in 2017. The investigation into the Catholic church opened up wider queries into sex abuse in other religious institutions that uncovered abuse in other faiths and the Boy Scouts.
