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LOS ANGELES, United States: President Donald Trump demanded a massive $1 billion fine from the prestigious University of California system on Friday as the administration pushed its claims of antisemitism in UCLA’s response to 2024 student protests related to Gaza.

The figure, which is five times the sum Columbia University agreed to pay to settle similar federal accusations of antisemitism, would “completely devastate” the UC public university system, a senior official said.

President James Milliken, who oversees the 10 campuses that make up the University of California system, including Los Angeles-based UCLA, said managers had received the $1 billion demand on Friday and were reviewing it.

“As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” he said.

“Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the US economy, and protect our national security.”

Asked about Trump’s fine during a press conference on Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom – who sits on the UC’s board – said “we’ll sue” and accused the president of trying to silence academic freedom.

“He has threatened us through extortion with a billion dollar fine unless we do his bidding,” Newsom said, crediting the UC system as “one of the reasons California is the tentpole of the US economy, one of the reasons we have more scientists, engineers, more Nobel laureates, than any other state in this nation.”

Media reports suggest the government wants the money in installments and is demanding the university also pay $172 million to a claims fund to compensate Jewish students and others affected by alleged discrimination.

The UC system, with schools that are consistently ranked among the best public universities in the United States, is already grappling with the Trump administration’s more-than half-billion dollar freeze on medical and science grants at UCLA alone.

The move appears to follow a similar playbook the White House used to extract concessions from Columbia University, and is also trying to use to get Harvard University to bend.

Columbia’s agreement includes a pledge to obey rules barring it from taking race into consideration in admissions or hiring, among other concessions, drawing criticism from Newsom.

“We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom, or on this extraordinary public institution. We are not like some of those other institutions that have followed a different path,” Newsom said.

Pro-Palestinian protests rocked dozens of US campuses in 2024, with police crackdowns and mob violence erupting over student encampments, from Columbia to UCLA, with then-president Joe Biden saying “order must prevail.”

Universities have been in Trump’s sights since he returned to the White House in January.

His Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement views academia as elite, overly liberal and hostile to the kind of ethno-nationalism popular among Trump supporters.

NAGASAKI, Japan: Twin cathedral bells rang in unison Saturday in Japan’s Nagasaki for the first time since the atomic bombing of the city 80 years ago, commemorating the moment the atrocity took place.

On Aug. 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m., three days after a nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

After heavy downpours Saturday morning, the rain stopped shortly before a moment of silence and ceremony in which Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki urged the world to “stop armed conflicts immediately.”

“Eighty years have passed, and who could have imagined that the world would become like this?

“A crisis that could threaten the survival of humanity, such as a nuclear war, is looming over each and every one of us living on this planet.”

About 74,000 people were killed in the southwestern port city, on top of the 140,000 killed in Hiroshima.

Days later, on Aug. 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, marking the end of World War II.

Historians have debated whether the bombings ultimately saved lives by bringing an end to the conflict and averting a ground invasion.

But those calculations meant little to survivors, many of whom battled decades of physical and psychological trauma, as well as the stigma that often came with being a hibakusha.

Ninety-three-year-old survivor Hiroshi Nishioka, who was just three kilometers from the spot where the bomb exploded, told ceremony attendees of the horror he witnessed as a young teenager.

“Even the lucky ones (who were not severely injured) gradually began to bleed from their gums and lose their hair, and one after another they died,” he recalled.

“Even though the war was over, the atomic bomb brought invisible terror.”

Nagasaki resident Atsuko Higuchi said it “made her happy” that everyone would remember the city’s victims.

“Instead of thinking that these events belong to the past, we must remember that these are real events that took place,” the 50-year-old said.

On Saturday, the two bells of Nagasaki’s Immaculate Conception Cathedral rang together for the first time since 1945.

The imposing red-brick cathedral, with its twin bell towers atop a hill, was rebuilt in 1959 after it was almost completely destroyed in the monstrous explosion just a few hundred meters away.

Only one of its two bells was recovered from the rubble, leaving the northern tower silent.

With funds from US churchgoers, a new bell was constructed and restored to the tower, and chimed Saturday at the exact moment the bomb was dropped.

The cathedral’s chief priest, Kenichi Yamamura, said the bell’s restoration “shows the greatness of humanity.”

“It’s not about forgetting the wounds of the past but recognizing them and taking action to repair and rebuild, and in doing so, working together for peace,” Yamamura said.

He also sees the chimes as a message to the world, shaken by multiple conflicts and caught in a frantic new arms race.

“We should not respond to violence with violence, but rather demonstrate through our way of living, praying, how senseless it is to take another’s life,” he said.

Nearly 100 countries were set to participate in this year’s commemorations, including Russia, which has not been invited since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Israel, whose ambassador was not invited last year over the war in Gaza, was in attendance.

An American university professor, whose grandfather participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons, spearheaded the bell project.

During his research in Nagasaki, a Japanese Christian told him he would like to hear the two bells of the cathedral ring together in his lifetime.

Inspired by the idea, James Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, embarked on a year-long series of lectures about the atomic bomb across the United States, primarily in churches.

He managed to raise $125,000 from American Catholics to fund the new bell.

When it was unveiled in Nagasaki in the spring, “the reactions were magnificent. There were people literally in tears,” said Nolan.

Many American Catholics he met were also unaware of the painful history of Nagasaki’s Christians, who, converted in the 16th century by the first European missionaries and then persecuted by Japanese shoguns, kept their faith alive clandestinely for over 250 years.

This story was told in the novel “Silence” by Shusaku Endo, and adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016.

He explains that American Catholics also showed “compassion and sadness” upon hearing about the perseverance of Nagasaki’s Christians after the atomic bomb, which killed 8,500 of the parish’s 12,000 faithful.

They were inspired by the “willingness to forgive and rebuild.”