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❄️Snow showers sleet, with highs in the 30s. Sunset is at 6:59 p.m.
The latest in the Trump administration’s fight with Harvard University: the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the school on Friday, saying it didn’t address antisemitism on its campus.
A spokesperson for the university told GBH’s Kirk Carrapezza that university officials have taken “substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforce anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus.” University officials also said the administration’s true motive for the lawsuit isn’t fighting antisemitism, but trying to get the school to fall in line with its ideological demands in other areas.
Four Things to Know
1. Residents and organizers across Roxbury said they want the local district attorney’s office to release video evidence in the killing of Stephenson King. Boston Police Officer Nicholas O’Malley was arrested on a manslaughter charge last week, and though investigators have footage from officers’ body-worn cameras, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden said they won’t release it. O’Malley pleaded not guilty.
“There’s a whole other aspect to this that’s not being covered in the fact that we’re talking about a Black man who was apparently assassinated by a white police officer who made the decision that he was going to take this person out,” said Sadiki Kambon, the director of the Black Community Information Center. “It looks like this Stephenson, he’s our George Floyd here in Boston, and that racial aspect of this shooting is being ignored totally.”
2. A federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit from a group of Boston Public Schools parents who claimed the city’s exam schools discriminate against white and Asian students in their admissions. To get into one of the city’s exam schools — Boston Latin Academy, Boston Latin School and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science — the district considers students’ grades and entrance exam scores. They admit students who scored in the top 20% of applicants and put the rest into tiers based on socioeconomic status, admitting the top students from each tier.
U.S. District Court Judge William Young said that system is “race-neutral,” and that the parents who filed the lawsuit “fail to demonstrate aggregate disparate impact when using the comparator of school-aged population.” Chris Kieser, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation representing the plaintiffs, said he plans to appeal.
3. Unassembled new Red Line cars, which have been in federal custody since last May as federal officials investigated whether their Chinese state-owned manufacturer used the forced labor of Uyghur people in their production, have been released and are on their way to Massachusetts. Owners of the Springfield factory where the cars are assembled plan to rehire the 160 workers they furloughed when they shut down production because of the delay.
The manufacturer, CRRC, gave federal officials documentation about its labor practices, said Phil Eng, the MBTA’s general manager and interim Massachusetts transportation secretary. Eng also noted that Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal met with President Donald Trump and his chief of staff to urge federal officials to release the parts. The parts will go to a factory in Springfield, where workers will assemble them into completed cars and send them to Boston to join the MBTA fleet.
4. Playwright Mfoniso Udofia is staging the seventh play in her Ufot Family Cycle series, but it’s still a work in progress. As actors perform “Lifted,” the story of a woman who is accused of plagiarizing the work of her deceased Nigerian father, Udofia is taking feedback from audiences and rewriting the script.
“I hope when you come see this play, you leave asking yourself how you think knowledge passes, and what you think ownership of knowledge is and how you hold community,” Udofia told GBH’s Under the Radar. You can check out more coverage of previous plays in the series here.
The world’s first modern rocket launched from a cabbage farm in Massachusetts 100 years ago
There’s a piece of rocket-science history in our own backyard: at the ninth hole of the Pakachoag Golf Course in Auburn is an obelisk that marks the site of the world’s first modern rocket launch, which used liquid fuel — gasoline and liquid oxygen.
That rocket, launched by Worcester scientist Robert Goddard, flew just 41 feet in 2.5 seconds. Charles Slatkin, who directs the nonprofit The Wonder Mission, called him “the father of modern rocketry.”
“It was humanity’s first steps toward seeking out what was in space,” Slatkin told GBH’s Sam Turken.
Still, not everyone in the 1920s believed his pursuits were worthwhile, said Kevin Schindler, a space historian at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. “People started calling him the moon man,” Schindler told Turken. “And even colleagues would say, ‘Hey, Bob, how’s the moon-rocket business going?’ And I think he was a little sensitive to that.”
Those doubters were proven wrong: Buzz Aldrin had a copy of Goddard’s autobiography in his pocket when he walked on the moon in 1969, 43 years after Goddard’s first rocket flight.
You can find Sam Turken’s full story here.
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