Many residents in metro Detroit — home to the nation’s largest Lebanese community — are mourning as the war between Israel and Hezbollah brings devastation to Lebanon.

Since March, relentless fighting has left southern towns and villages in ruins. By May, at least 62,000 buildings were destroyed, more than 1 million people were displaced, and over 4,000 have been killed.

In Israel, four civilians have died and 32 soldiers have been killed in the conflict.

There’s a shaky ceasefire now, but it’s only days old, and Israeli forces still occupy parts of southern Lebanon.

For many in metro Detroit, the pain is personal.

What does it look like to be forced from home, only to return to rubble? How does all the violence and instability ricochet among friends and loved ones here in metro Detroit, where many have family and community ties to Lebanon?

Mirvet Makki is the owner of Divine Dine Detroit, a catering business in Dearborn. She immigrated to Michigan from Lebanon in 1990, and she’s been using earnings from her business to make donations to folks in Lebanon. She says she’s constantly reflecting on the devastation in the country where she was born. 

“Seeing the rubble on the side of the road, I was thinking to myself, ‘whose son was lost here, whose father was here, whose child died on this road?’” she says. 

Makki joined host Robyn Vincent on The Metro to reflect on the heartbreak unfolding in Lebanon and how it reverberates through metro Detroit’s Lebanese community.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro

Keweenaw County will become home to Michigan’s first public forest authority. 

The Nature Conservancy purchased 32,000 acres of forest land in Keweenaw County in 2022. Recently, county commissioners voted to create a local board to manage 20,000 acres of land in partnership with the conservancy. 

Robin Meneguzzo is the CEO of the Keweenaw Community Foundation. She says residents have four goals for forest management. “One is to protect the cultural and historical features of the land. One is to keep it a working, healthy, and intact forest, the third was to maintain government revenues, and the fourth was to maintain public access.” 

Newly expanded legislation opened the door for the forest authority by allowing small rural communities in Michigan to manage their own forest resources.

Meneguzzo says the project is uniting members of the community. “This is a really amazing example of a community coming together that has very different views on how land should be used or managed.” She says 29 different groups worked together for around 4 years to complete the project.

Meneguzzo says the forest covers around 15% of Keweenaw County’s footprint and is used for hunting, fishing, foraging, and hiking. 

Voters can choose forest authority board members in the November general election.

This story is a part of WDET’s ongoing series, the Detroit Tree Canopy Project.

Transportation Riders United (TRU) is forming a statewide coalition to advocate for better transit options throughout Michigan called Move MI.

The Detroit-based group toured the state on their Around the Mitten Transit Tour, visiting and riding public transit in 16 cities.

TRU Executive Director Megan Owens spoke with WDET’s Bre’Anna Tinsley about the tour and the issues other transit systems face.

The following interview was edited for time and clarity.

Executive Director Megan Owens: TRU has worked for 25 years now in the metro Detroit area. And we know a lot about the benefits and the challenges of public transportation in metro Detroit. But we know that there’s another 70+ transit agencies around the state of Michigan, and that there are millions of people who depend on transit. So, we wanted to get a better understanding of the strengths and challenges of public transit all across the state of Michigan.

We traveled for 14 days over 1,800 miles, went all the way up to Port Huron, Alpena, Marquette, Traverse City, Benton Harbor—all over the state, 16 different cities, all to learn how public transit works, and where there are gaps, and where it needs improvement. And to think about how the state, the next governor, and other state leaders can be better supporting opportunities for Michiganders who don’t drive or don’t want to drive to still be able to get around and visit friends, family, and all of Michigan’s beautiful locations.

Bre’Anna Tinsley, WDET: So, after seeing all of those different transportation organizations, is there some trend, maybe, that you’ve discovered across the state that’s happening among our transit systems?

MO: There were a couple of things we learned. One that I don’t think a lot of people realize is that you can, in fact, take public transportation across the state of Michigan. It’s not always as convenient or easy as it should be, but we were able to visit 16 different cities using Amtrak, using regional busses, using inner city busses, and could visit all sorts of great places. So one, it was exciting to know that you can do all of these things, but we also learned that the service is way too limited, whether you’re talking about traveling between cities or traveling within any different metropolitan area. There are options to get around, but they’re not nearly as frequent, as reliable, they don’t go as many places as many people want to go.  

So while there are transit agencies that are working extremely hard to provide the very best service that they can, they’re all limited by funding and are really torn to try to provide the very best they can with extremely limited resources.

BT: The reason for the limited resources, did you discover if that was something that’s happening at the state level, or do all of these communities have their own individual limitations?

MO: One of the reasons we did want to explore all of these different areas is that the state does fund an important component of transit in every single community. There’s something called the “local bus operating budget item” (LBO) that we’ve been fighting for years to get the state to increase to make sure that Smart and DDOT have the resources they need. But it funds every one of the 77 transit agencies across the state. At one point in time, the LBO, as it’s called, covered half the costs of running local transit service, so the state covered half the costs, and the local communities came up with half the costs.

But, as costs have gone up and the state budget allocation has not. It’s cover and the state funds are covering barely a third of the of what it costs to run local transit services across the state. And right now it’s one of those things that’s debated in the state budget every year. How much is going to go into this local bus type operating? So, we did make sure one of our last stops was at the state capitol to make sure legislators knew just how important this local bus operating budget is.

Just about every legislator and most of the people they deal with every day are people who drive, and a lot of us are used to driving everywhere. But we wanted to remind legislators that every community has thousands of people who don’t drive, whether that’s seniors, whether that’s students, whether that’s somebody who is saving up for their first car, whether that’s a person with a disability, whether they’re in a wheelchair or have epilepsy or have a developmental disability. There are thousands of people all around us who don’t drive, who deserve to have just as full and robust lives as everyone else. They should be able to see the Great Lakes, they should be able to visit, so many of these wonderful places that we have in our state, even if they don’t drive.

BT: So, are there any takeaways from this trip that you think maybe we can implement here that might help improve the systems?

MO: We learned some great things about the different transit agencies around the state and what they are doing. Flint has been working with a lot of alternative fuels. DDOT and  Smart have tested out electric buses that have had mixed success. But Flint is working with compressed national natural gas and with hydrogen, and so even as diesel prices shoot up, several of the systems, like Flint and Port Huron, have not had to deal with those skyrocketing costs. So, exploring different types of fuels for the buses.

There are a number of the systems around the around the state, you can just use any old credit card and tap as you enter the bus, and use that as a way to pay. So that’s something I know that our local agencies are looking into, but it was neat to see just how quick and easy it was. You didn’t need any special app, you didn’t need any official pass…if you got a credit card, you tap it, and you enter. So, I think that’s something that could make it again even easier to ride transit in our areas as well.

President Trump is visiting Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week. Michigan lawmakers are warning him against agreeing to any deals that would allow Chinese electric vehicles into the U.S.

While they are not currently available in the states, President Trump suggested he may be open to allowing them during a visit to the Detroit Economic Club earlier this year. The EVs have become popular, low-cost sellers in Europe and are now available in Canada and Mexico.

Legislation has been introduced in Washington to ban sale of the vehicles. That includes a bill co-sponsored by Democratic Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin and Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno.

Slotkin argues that having those models on U.S. roads driving near military bases and civilian infrastructure could be a security risk.

“Taking all that data, all that video, all that mapping and sending that back,” says Slotkin. “As someone who’s from the Pentagon, that is the exact detailed information an adversarial nation loves to have in their war planning.”

While Slotkin acknowledges that major tech companies, such as Google, are already collecting people’s data, she argues those companies must follow U.S. laws when handling that information.

Another concern is the impact it could have on American manufacturers, who would stand to lose out on sales.

Republican John Moolenaar represents Michigan’s 2nd Congressional District. He warns that one of the factors keeping Chinese vehicle prices down are unethical labor practices in the country.

“Chinese companies use slave labor to undercut the fair wages of hard-working Americans,” says Moolenaar.

Lawmakers say the U.S. can’t compete with the way the Chinese government subsidizes their auto industry. They argue that creates artificially low pricing for Chinese products that  American companies can’t compete with.

University of Michigan Professor Derek Peterson wanted to highlight the work of school activists – both past and present – in his commencement speech over the weekend.

What he got was controversy.

Peterson discussed the work of suffragette Sarah Burger Stearns, the woman who worked for years to get the University of Michigan to admit women to the school. He talked about the Black Action Movement of the 1970s and ’80s that sought to make campus life better for people of color. Peterson championed Moritz Levi, the first Jewish professor at U of M.

However, it was a short clip of Peterson praising the work of campus pro-Palestinian protesters that drew the ire of conservatives, pro-Israel activists, and school leadership.

Elyssa Schmier of the Michigan Anti-Defamation League called it “inappropriate, divisive, and deeply unfair” to Jewish students.

Interim U of M President Domenico Grasso apologized for the speech, calling it “hurtful and insensitive.”

In response, the University removed the YouTube video of the entire commencement.

For his part, Peterson is unfazed.

He’s a tenured history and African studies professor and has been with the university since 2009. He’s a former MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and the outgoing chair of the Faculty Senate.

He tells WDET’s Russ McNamara that he’s surprised by the controversy – especially after his remarks were approved by the U of M leadership.

Derek Peterson: I thought I was giving a speech that was meant to congratulate all these students on the success of their time at Michigan. And I wanted to honor student activists. We had these two consequential athletes on the rostrum sitting beside me, Michael Phelps and Jalen Rose, both of whom I greatly admire. And I wanted to give equal time to student activists who I think have done more than most to push our university along the path toward social justice. So the goal of the address was not to provoke or cause controversy. It was to expand the kinds of things that we honored at our commencement ceremony and to bring into view how much I myself have learned and benefited from the work that generations of activists have done here in Ann Arbor.

Russ McNamara: It seems like – recently – there’s been a measure of work done by some to minimize activism at the University of Michigan.

DP: Faculty Senate leaders don’t often get an audience with the regents and with opinion leaders across the state as much as one does at commencement. And we’ve been trying for the past year, and past two years, in fact, to make an argument about how Michigan’s acquiescence to federal authorities around student protests has damaged our collective culture.

The space for protest on campus this past couple years has been dramatically constrained. The administration has instrumentalized the Student Conduct Code and made it much more difficult to organize protests.

Meanwhile, federal authorities have gone after international students and made the cost of protesting, regardless of what kind of person you are, much higher, specifically, if you speak on behalf of Palestinians.

So I’m a tenured professor. I’ve got all these titles after my name, and I felt it was a good occasion to honor the work that activists have done, and to bring it into view in a place in which it was increasingly difficult to see how much activists have contributed to our collective life.

RM: Is it surprising to you that when someone like Regent Sarah Hubbard says commencement is not the time or place for political messages? Because I read that and I’m kind of surprised that someone who graduated from the University of Michigan would not feel that at any point, there couldn’t be a political message attached to the university or in that city.

DP: Yeah, I don’t know if she’s ever really spent time with Michigan students. The idea that graduation ceremonies should be apolitical, nostalgic, that sort of thing, is just bunk.

The University of Michigan is not a finishing school for polite men and women, and our students are not freaking wilting flowers. They’ve just finished their degrees at the foremost public university in the United States. They can freaking well-handle controversy. They don’t need to have sentiment and nostalgia slathered upon them.

What they need is a spine stiffening. They need encouragement to face injustice and inequity with the tools that we’ve given them here at the U of M. It’s take what you’ve learned at this public institution and go and serve the public to which we are beholden as the world’s leading public university. So I fundamentally disagree with the idea that graduations should be, you know, romantic and uncontroversial. That’s a betrayal of the purposes of public education.

RM: You wrote a book that came out last year, A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda. In this moment, are there lessons that can be learned about the United States, about world politics from Idi Amin’s Uganda?

DP: The book, which I wrote over the course of something like 20 years, is grounded on a lot of research that I did with archives that had been deliberately suppressed or lost or forgotten over the course of generations after Amin fell from power in 1979.

As a scholar, much of my work is about how through industrious historical research, we can uncover lessons and materials and ideas that have been either forgotten or suppressed by people in power. So as a scholar of African history looking at events in 2026 in Ann Arbor and around the United States, where it’s increasingly difficult to say anything at all about what happened in Gaza, I can’t play along with that deliberate silencing of an act of great violence.

And let me say I’m full of sympathy for Jewish people who suffered, including students at U of M who suffered as a result of the awful actions of Hamas on the seventh of October 2023.

I don’t have any sympathy for Hamas sympathizers, but as the leader of the Faculty Senate and as a faculty member who studies colonial and post-colonial African history it’s really important that we don’t invisibilize Palestinian suffering, particularly in a state in which many of our students come from the Middle East and have relations who have died in the course of Israel’s war in Gaza.

So honoring their experience at commencement seemed to me to be as vital as it was, also as I did to honor the experience of Jewish students who have found a safe haven in Ann Arbor over the course of generations.

I’m troubled by the fact that this speech has been portrayed as being antisemitic. It’s not. It was not. And I don’t feel the need to apologize for the speech, as I’ve been asked to do by people in administration here at U of M.

I do regret that Jewish attendees might have found themselves on the back foot, troubled by the remarks. I didn’t have the purpose going into it of provoking unhappiness on a happy day. And if I did it over again, I probably would add a sentence to the end of my speech. I would have phrased it something like ‘sing for Jewish students at the university who, over the past two years, have kept the memory of their loved ones who died on the seventh of October alive and have brought their suffering into view here at the university as well.’

I can honor the violence and trauma and be appalled by the awfulness of the seventh of October 2023 and also be vigorously pro-Palestinian and appalled also at the violence of Israel’s war in Gaza. I think both things are possible.

There’s no doubt the Detroit Lions have scarred many of their fans, being the first team to ever go 0-16.

Heartbreaking losses that seemed to defy the rule book, like Calvin Johnson’s non-catch in Chicago. Or the picked up penalty in the playoffs vs the Cowboys.

Losing affects the players too, like Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders faxing his retirement to his hometown newspaper.

It’s not easy for anyone around that franchise, apparently. The same goes for Dearborn-raised, Brooklyn-based comedian Joel Walkowski.

In his book “Honolulu Blues: How Loving a Losing Team Created a Winning Man” Walkowski recounts the story of his family’s personal trauma, alongside the failings of his favorite team, the Detroit Lions. It’s incredibly funny and deeply personal in a way that many can relate to.

Walkowski has been on stages across the country. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, on Comedy Central and a bunch of other places. He tells WDET’s Russ McNamara why he decided to write the book.

Joel Walkowski: It was during the [Lions coach Matt] Patricia era, and you knew that fourth quarter collapse was always coming, and knowing that the hard thing was coming kind of made it easier. And that made me think, like, ‘oh, being a Lions fan impacted me in a profound way’.

And then as part of my, like, sobriety journey, I was tasked to do goals for myself. Like, what do I really want out of life? What do I think maximizes who I am? And it was like, “Oh, if I don’t write this book, I will always regret it.” So it became my purpose, my number one goal, and like I revolved my life around writing this book.

Russ McNamara: It says a lot about the depth of a book when a historically bad franchise with its own share of tragedy isn’t the darkest stuff in it.

JW: I’ll say that there is maybe every bit of darkness that could exist is in this book, but it’s handled with lightness. And I do think the overlap is there because I started to get very serious about my sobriety, September 2021 exactly.

And I don’t know how familiar you guys are with Lions history, but things started to be done very different. So it’s Campbell-Holmes era. It’s Sheila Ford. I’m bouncing back from, like, my darkest points. So like looking at Jared [Goff] and Dan [Campbell] and Brad [Holmes], as I’m like, you know, white knuckling 90 days of sobriety and thinking, like, “Oh, is there a different way to do this?” It was so helpful.

RM: In the book, you’re very open about your experience growing up, and you specifically mentioned essentially getting addicted to speed as a child—as many people of our age did. At what point did you, even as a child, kind of realize something’s not right?

JW: I was seven years old when I was put on very high doses of Adderall. Then I get to high school and there was a high school video program. I started to want to make different videos. I wanted to have more ambitions, but I would just start taking pill after pill after pill, pulling all-nighters and really string myself out.

But along those same lines, every time I’d produce something, I got validation. I was seen for the first time. So this finding of my identity was happening while I was abusing a substance.

I didn’t become an addict because I was letting loose or partying. I became an addict alone in my room, fostering some ambition, because putting something out there was the only way I had any value, any worth, right?

RM: How much of that value and worth did you sort of get tied into with following the ins and outs of the Detroit Lions?

JW: My life revolves around Sundays, but I try and make them only value added. Regardless of a win or loss, I play basketball from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. If we win, I show my girlfriends the highlights. If we lose, I turn off my phone and don’t check any football news until Tuesday.

If you get to the very ending of this book, which dovetails with, you know, a certain 17-point halftime lead, [Lions vs 49ers in 2023 NFC Championship Game] that lesson was given to me is “the win is the friends and relationships we make along the way.” And that it took me nearly 40 years to learn that.

Joel Walkowski’s book “Honolulu Blues: How Loving a Losing Team Created a Winning Man” is out July 14, 2026 just in time for the start of Detroit Lions training camp. It is available for pre-order now.

The progressive wing of the Michigan Democratic Party made its voice heard over the weekend during the party’s endorsement convention.

Democrats gathered in Huntington Place in Detroit Sunday to endorse party candidates for some statewide offices, like attorney general and secretary of state. Party leadership said the convention hit record numbers, and nearly every candidate backed by the party’s progressive wing won their endorsement races.

Campaigns brought drums, photo backdrops, and people in orange jumpsuits and sunglasses to carry billboards, all to stand out from the field.

But the delegates seemed to care most about substance and the issues. Often, those issues involved progressive themes like limiting corporate and outside political spending, providing universal healthcare, and ending U.S. involvement in foreign wars.

Many delegates, like Dearborn Public Schools Board member Adel Mozip, wanted candidates who inspire them.

“We’re looking forward to electing people who are going to be working for the people and not paid for by corporations and interests groups,” Mozip said outside a meeting of the Michigan Democratic Party’s Yemeni Caucus Sunday.

Campaign spending

Around the convention, canvassers gathered petition signatures for a ban on some corporate political spending. Candidates bragged about not taking money from corporate political action committees while speaking to the main crowd and in smaller meetings.

Still, attendees worried party leadership hadn’t gotten the message.

Jessie Hishon and Susan Sylvester, first-time delegates from metro Detroit who attended the party’s Progressive Caucus meeting — which spilled out of a crowded room — said they felt the party didn’t trust progressive candidates enough to win against Republicans.

“I think there are too many people who don’t believe that it can happen,” Hishon said.

Sylvester said her top issue was the influence of outside spending on Michigan campaigns.

“All of the issues are important to me but we have to take the money out of politics so we can have representation in our so-called democracy,” Sylvester said.

Who takes the blame?

Democrats lost in 2024 because of splits within their traditional coalition of moderates, progressives, and racial and ethnic minorities. With Michigan possibly deciding control of Congress this November, party leaders want to change that story.

A few 2028 presidential maybes spoke at a pre-convention event on Saturday, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and New Jersey Senator Corey Booker. He warned Democrats that not voting is what let President Donald Trump retake the White House.

“You let somebody get in office who is locking up our children. You let somebody in office who is taking away our healthcare. You let somebody in office who’s taking away workers’ rights. You let somebody in office who got rid of the Department of Education,” Booker said to a cheering crowd at the Women’s Caucus luncheon.

At the convention, some delegates echoed calls for unity and engagement, even though that often requires listening to dissenters.

Detroiter Michelle Broughton said she’s been coming to Democratic Party conventions for over four decades.

“Our message needs to come across to all of us, whether we’re a young Dem or an old Dem,” Broughton said. “They need to talk about tabletop issues: food, gas, education, affordability, housing.”

But old battle lines remained visible on the convention floor.

Tensions over Palestine-Israel conflict

Progressive U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed received massive applause during his speech that criticized outside spending in Michigan races from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-MI 11), who is running against El-Sayed on a more traditional Democratic platform of affordability and re-shoring American manufacturing, followed and received boos.

In the University of Michigan regents race, incumbent Jordan Acker lost his reelection bid. Acker had faced criticism for his handling of pro-Palestine student protests — a fault line that’s grown increasingly fraught for Democrats in recent years. Amir Makled, a lawyer who represented one of those protestors, beat him.

During parts of the program, some attendees said they noticed some fellow delegates causing a disruption when a proposed resolution in support of Palestinians wasn’t taken up. Videos of the crowd appear to show a handful of convention members yelling at presenters.

Kalamazoo delegates Michelle Zukowski-Serlin and her husband Troy said they felt the jeering and booing of candidates crossed a line.

Both attended the party’s Jewish Caucus meeting. They said delegates at that meeting showed more respect to candidates that opposed support for Israel than supporters of those opponents showed pro-Israel candidates on stage.

“This is a bigger issue and that is mutual respect and acting with diplomacy, I would never boo one of their candidates,” Michelle Zukowski-Serlin said.

Could a primary fix the problems?

While many agreed the Democrats should learn from 2024, not everyone agreed on the lesson. Some want a wholesale change to how the party chooses nominees for statewide office, calling for a switch from party conventions to primary elections.

Oakland University political science professor David Dulio said Michigan is a rarity: most other states do use primaries for those down-ballot races — but there is no cure-all for messy nomination fights.

“I think there’s a temptation to think the grass is always greener and that isn’t always the case,” Dulio said.

States started moving toward primaries in the early 20th century to take power away from party insiders and test candidates’ ability to win elections, Dulio said.

“That has become the dominant form of candidate selection from within a political party, but that doesn’t mean the other options aren’t legitimate or that they can’t work,” said Dulio.

Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel said he believes a primary would be better because it would be open to all voters who choose a Democratic Party ballot.

Making that change would require voters to approve a constitutional amendment.

Michigan Republican Party Chair Jim Runestad said there’s little interest in the idea on his side of the aisle, arguing that convention nominations are less susceptible than primaries to big-money spending by outside interest groups.

Progressive surge

For some convention attendees, the lesson was to work within the current framework: support the Democratic nominees that they mostly agree with, even if the nominee is not their top choice. For others, it was that party leadership needs to get behind candidates who inspire, so voters want to support their nominee.

University of Michigan graduate student Nathan Kim said it’s not enough for the party to choose a “status quo” candidate.

“I think the Michigan Democratic Party and the party in general needs to face consequences. They need to know that they can’t get away with failing over, and over, and over again,” Kim said.

Likewise, Katarina Keating, another Michigan graduate student, said some candidates just aren’t worth supporting, even against Republicans.

“You need to draw the line somewhere. Right? If you’re going to vote for anybody if they’re in the right party, no matter what they’ve done or what they’ve said, what are you doing, what are you really voting for, what are you really trying to change?” Keating said.

At the end of the day, nearly every progressive-backed candidate won a party endorsement.

Both the upcoming August primary election, in which the U.S. Senate race remains close, and the November general election could show whether that support extends broadly outside of the convention walls — or if it’s a sign of progressive strength, just within the party’s base.

Originally posted by Michigan Public Radio.

WDET is starting a new series of Crossing the Lines reports Monday centering Highland Park.  The small city of about 8,500 residents has made a good deal of U.S. history through the decades.  It’s also seen hard financial times in recent years.  

WDET journalists have been out in the community for weeks—and will be out there for several more—talking to residents about what they want the rest of metro Detroit to know about their city.

WDET news director Jerome Vaughn is leading Crossing The Lines – Highland Park.  He says he decided to examine the city more deeply because of its central location.

“It’s a place a lot of people in metro Detroit travel through each and every day, but the majority don’t stop in Highland Park to shop or to get a bite to eat.”

Vaughn started researching the city, looking at census records, Highland Park history, and businesses, before heading out to tour the city over a number of weeks.

WDET will air stories on Highland Park through mid-May.  If there’s something about the city you think we should know, drop us a line at news@wdet.org.