Protests on campus | Morning Newsletter

Friday, welcome. You might feel some lingering frost this morning, but later on, the day will be sunny with high temps around 63.

As pro-Palestinian protests cause clashes at colleges across the nation, the University of Pennsylvania and other local schools have become host to their own encampments and rallies.

And a new podcast investigates a hate-crime murder committed in Philadelphia in 1989 — and the search to find the person who was killed.

Here’s what you need to know today.

— Julie Zeglen (morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

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Tensions are escalating on college campuses around the country as students continue protesting the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

The national view: Earlier this week at schools such as Columbia, Yale, and NYU, administrators brought law enforcement to campus to break up pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments. USC just canceled its main graduation event amid ongoing protests, too.

Closer to home: At Swarthmore College, student protesters erected about 20 tents in a peaceful protest Tuesday night into Wednesday.

And at Princeton University yesterday morning, a half-dozen encampment tents were taken down voluntarily after warnings from the school’s public safety department. Two graduate students were also arrested for trespassing. Later that day, former New York Times Middle East bureau chief Chris Hodges appeared to be escorted out of a charged campus rally while reading a poem for Palestinian children.

In Philadelphia: More than 100 protesters marched from City Hall to University City on Thursday afternoon. At Penn, both faculty and students called for the university to divest from companies benefiting from the war, to protect its Palestinian students, and to reverse the suspension on the Pro-Palestinian student group Penn Against the Occupation.

By Thursday evening, students had set up about 10 tents on the campus’ College Green. The Inquirer’s Alfred Lubrano and Susan Snyder explain how we got to this moment, and here are accounts of yesterday’s protests from our reporters who were there.

P.S. Watch Inquirer.com for the latest throughout the weekend.

In 1989, a white man from Wilmington claimed that he had murdered a Black man in Philadelphia to earn a “badge of honor” from racist skinheads.

Fifteen years later, law enforcement got set on his trail and determined the story was true. Yet in a bizarre subversion of typical true-crime tales, they had a confession, but didn’t know who the victim was. Meanwhile, the family of the man who had been randomly shot down had been searching for answers.

“You have these two sides: the victim’s family and law enforcement. And they’re each grasping in the dark to put together the pieces,” said Jake Halpern, the journalist behind a new podcast on the case. “Eventually their storylines collide some 17 years after the fact.”

Ahead of a live event featuring the former FBI agents involved, The Inquirer’s Zoe Greenberg and David Gambacorta break down the wild, haunting case.

Welcome back to Curious Philly Friday. We’ll feature both new and timeless stories from our forum for readers to ask about the city’s quirks.

This week, we’re resurfacing a once-again timely explainer from 2023: Now that the primary election is over, who cleans up all those campaign signs?

Private-property owners are responsible for disposing any signs on their lawns or buildings. And in public places, it’s on the campaigns to clean up after themselves. But that doesn’t always happen. Here’s the full explanation.

Have your own burning question about Philadelphia, its local oddities, or how the region works? Submit it here and you might find the answer featured in this space.

For the fourth summer in a row, Jason Kelce will celebrity bartend for the Eagles Autism Foundation. Where is the bar based?

A) Sea Isle

B) Center City

C) Havertown

D) Ocean City

Think you know? Check your answer.

🥁 Bopping to: Philly-born, multi-hyphenate Eric Slick’s New Age Rage.

☀️ Applauding: Penn Medicine’s goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

👚 Mourning: Our biz-casual go-to, as these five Philly-area Express stores close.

This Philly-based cultural institution just named Anthony Roth Costanzo as its new president. He’s been called the “the Mariah Carey of opera” (which should give you a big hint).

ALEPPO HAIR HELIPAD

Email us if you know the answer. We’ll select a reader at random to shout out here. Cheers to Tracey Slobotkin, who solved Thursday’s anagram: Center City SIPS. Philly’s summer-long happy hour kicks off its 20th anniversary in June.

Enjoy your weekend! I’ll be back in your inbox on Monday.

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