Regional News

There’s been another delay in having an independent official oversee coronavirus mitigation efforts in state prisons.

Seth Peters, the first person appointed to the new position of ombudsman for the Department of Correction, was suddenly placed on paid administrative leave Tuesday after WBUR inquired about whether he is the same Seth Peters who was involved in a wrongful death lawsuit that UMass Memorial settled nine years ago.

On a stone bench, between Salem Harbor and The House of the Seven Gables, two friends settled in to smoke a little weed.

“We do like this spot,” said Jeremiah MacKinnon, 26.

“Yes,” added his companion, Frank Shaw, who is 68.

The two make an unlikely pair. Shaw wears a baseball cap with a graphic of a cannabis leaf with EKG monitor waves. MacKinnon sports an old school newsboy cap. Shaw, with gray wispy hair, has the air of a jokester. MacKinnon, a younger millennial, carries the aura of someone generations older.

Third-generation lobsterman Nick Prior was in eighth grade when he started working as a sternman on Aquarius, the lobster boat his grandfather built. They still fish together out of Bremen in midcoast Maine. But now, Nick, who is in his last year of high school, is at the helm while Verge Prior, age 77, stuffs the bait bags and bands the claws of their catch. Between hauling traps, Verge quips that he plans to catch lobster until the end of his life. "Some days I feel it's going to be tomorrow, other days it seems longer."

Connecticut is likely to have digital credentials for COVID-19 vaccines available by the end of the month. Officials said it would make it easy to scan and verify vaccination status.

Greenhouse gas emissions from heating and cooling buildings continue to rise in Connecticut despite the state’s efforts to improve energy efficiency.

An annual greenhouse gas inventory released last week for 2018 — the latest available data — showed vehicle exhaust remains the state’s largest problem, but the sharpest year-over-year increase came in the residential sector. Commercial building emissions were also higher.

In the big scheme of things, the Bobryk forest is pretty small potatoes. It’s about 300 acres of birch, hemlock and other hardwood trees, sandwiched between two larger state forests in western Massachusetts.

“It feels weird to say this forest isn’t special because that’s not what I mean,” says Laura Marx, a forest ecologist at The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts. Rather, says Marx, Bobryk forest is “a really cool example” of things gone right, and an illustration of exactly how preserving forests might help slow climate change.

National Guard troops are used to being activated during times of natural disaster or civil unrest — but in Massachusetts, they're being called out to drive students to school.

The office of Gov. Charlie Baker said Monday that as many as 250 Guard members would be made available "to address staffing shortages in certain districts," according to a news release. It said that 90 would be training immediately for service in Chelsea, Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn.

At 9:30 in the morning on one of the hottest days in August, it was still cool at Maple Hill Cemetery in the town of Dorset. That is the time of day when Caitlin Abrams likes to come here. She wore rubber boots in the dewy grass that soon, a man would start to mow. She walked over to a marble stone, whiter than the rest.

It reads, “Joseph Porter Baldwin, son of Silas and Sarah Baldwin, who died April 26 1811, in the sixth year of his age. His death was occasioned by accidentally falling under the pitman of a sawmill, which instantly terminated his existence.”

Connecticut expects to welcome hundreds of Afghan refugees in the next couple of months as resettlement agencies and groups across the state are assigned families already on military bases.

But as advocates ramp up efforts to receive as many families as possible, they’re also calling on the U.S. State Department to focus on those who haven’t been able to leave the Taliban-controlled country despite their ties to the U.S.

Advocates say dozens of Afghan Americans from Connecticut are still stuck in Kabul with no way out.

Health leaders across Connecticut are warning state legislators about the dangers of dirty air. But the head of the state Senate said Monday the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) will not be on the agenda during a special session expected to occur within the next two weeks.

They shook hands with business owners in Roxbury, danced with a neighborhood group in Dorchester, and held get-out-the-vote rallies from Grove Hall to Chinatown.

It’s down to the final hours of campaigning for the five major candidates running for mayor of Boston, and over the weekend, acting Mayor Kim Janey, city councilors Michelle Wu, Andrea Campbell and Annissa Essaibi George, as well as the city’s former economic development chief John Barros, criss-crossed the city to try to win over undecided voters.