Our earlier investigation revealed widespread police misconduct around confidential informants in New Bedford. Now we're looking across Massachusetts. What we found: Instead of safeguarding against informant abuse, prosecutors enable it.

Volunteers with charities and church outreach ministries report being followed, yelled at, and sometimes ordered by police to leave Mass. and Cass, long the epicenter of the intersecting problems of homelessness and substance abuse in the city. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/30/m...

Civil process money faces little to no state oversight, and while a portion of the fees sheriff’s offices collect is supposed to go to the state’s general fund, some sheriffs have a history of not making all their transfers.

For those who recall the impunity of the Pinochet years, José Antonio Kast’s election signifies an end to a 35-year period in which most Chileans repudiated the dictator’s legacy. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

It’s “easier to criminalize somebody than to get them help,” said a mother who for more than a decade has been trying to get her son the care he needs. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/criminally-ill-state-mental-psychiatric-hospitals-prisons-waitlists-ohio/

How did Harvard find itself under attack by President Trump? There is no simple answer, but in a Globe report, a theme stands out: In the past decade of political and cultural upheaval, Harvard became the university that plenty of Americans loved to hate.

After more than a century of advocacy, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina secured federal recognition through passage of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. The decision marks a historic milestone for one of the largest tribal nations in the country.

Content which re-imagines the EU as a pan-European empire has flooded social media platforms over the past two years, garnering billions of views collectively on X, TikTok and Instagram. 

A doctor's negligence led to a woman's amputation. When discipline came, it was light — and a decade late. @globespotlight.bsky.social found this is often how the state's medical board runs. Its process is secretive. And its actions increasingly protect doctors.

Maria, a Mississippi resident from Honduras, said she and her two children have missed routine doctors’ appointments because they are “terrified” to leave the house. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/immigration-deportation-risk-immigrants-avoid-health-care-new-orleans-mississippi/

Trump is cutting up to 67,000 positions at the VA, stretching overworked doctors and nurses even further. Experts warn it’s “a perfect patient safety storm.” From Suzanne Gordon and Russel Lemle: trib.al/9y9y7TF

A state task force focused on Massachusetts’ primary care access problems has a bold proposition — demand providers and insurers double what they spend on primary care.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu condemned federal immigration authorities for turning people away as they were prepared to take citizenship oaths earlier this month.

I spoke with workers at the NLRB about the impacts of a year long lack of quorum, at least 100 staff leaving an already underfunded agency, and corporations like SpaceX trying to gut labor law www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Russia's advance in Ukraine is slower than virtually every major campaign of the past century, reports WSJ. After nearly 4 years of full-scale war, Moscow still hasn't taken Donetsk province—a target since 2014. euromaidanpress.com/2025/12/12/w...

Video of Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest on a Somerville street would be viewed millions of times. Overnight, it transformed a student who co-authored a mild pro-Palestinian op-ed into the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign scholars. trib.al/xFDIz0e

New details on how Larry Summers’s wife — a powerful Harvard professor — tapped Jeffrey Epstein and Woody Allen to boost her poetry project, while hiding or downplaying Epstein's involvement to staff. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/10/m... @bostonglobe.com

The richest 10 percent of the world's population owns three-quarters of all personal wealth.

‘I’d defend our nation’: Poles prepare for growing threat of war

For the @bostonglobe.com I wrote about Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ wonderful revised translation (“Mushroominess” FTW!) of Olga Tokarczuk‘s HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, an insightful early novel that shows her playing with the complex narrative form that would reach its height, for me, in “Flights.”

With many hospitals struggling financially, the job they have the hardest time filling is a thankless, often unnoticed, but critical one: sitters, who protect people at risk of harming themselves or others. Nearly half the sitter jobs in the state are vacant. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/05/b...

Defending schools is a growing challenge for rattled educators in cities where heavily armed men in tactical vests are snatching people from the arms of loved ones and from the streets that lead to school. Our organizer Barbara Madeloni reports: labornotes.org/2025/12/ice-...

At a time when many Massachusetts hospitals are already struggling, the impending loss of federal money could be existential for some of the state’s poorest facilities.

A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The US Navy knew of potentially dangerous levels of airborne plutonium in San Francisco for almost a year before it alerted city officials after it carried out testing that detected radioactive material in November last year, public health advocates allege. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Narcan appears to work almost miraculously, reversing an opioid overdose in minutes. But exactly how it does this was a mystery since the FDA approved it in 1971. Until now. Biology researchers have captured the mechanism at the molecular level. buff.ly/5VnUILA

Top court rules EU nations must mutually recognize same-sex marriages

“We would be lying to ourselves if [Arthur Sackler’s] methods were not used exactly for the purpose for which they were developed — to make a profit,” said Swathi Srinivasan, cofounder of HCOPES and a Harvard doctoral student in population health sciences. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/21/m...

Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” about the war in Gaza won the nonfiction award at the National Book Awards.

Poland just deployed 10,000 troops after Russia blew up a rail line carrying aid to Ukraine. The response marks a shift: Poland calls it "state terrorism," closes Russia's last consulate, and promises actions "more than just diplomatic" euromaidanpress.com/2025/11/20/p...

Many Massachusetts families who lost relatives wanted a much larger payout from Purdue Pharma to individual victims and are concerned that burdensome paperwork requirements will impede efforts to hold Purdue responsible for peddling highly addictive painkillers. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/18/m...

NEW: Governor Maura Healey’s administration is refusing to release public records that could detail when former aide LaMar D. Cook came and went from the Springfield state office building where police say eight kilograms of cocaine were delivered last month. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/18/m...

Catholic bishops nationwide recently announced “You Are Not Alone,” a program that lays out ways for Catholics across the country to provide direct aid and solidarity to immigrants in the U.S.

Since the ceasefire took effect one month ago, Israeli attacks have killed at least 242 Palestinians and injured 622.

Maine described its HIV outbreak as a significant health concern, but the government shutdown has kept a CDC team from coming to the state's aid.

A video is going viral of a man in Fitchburg who appeared to suffer a seizure while holding a baby as immigration authorities tried to detain him.

“There aren’t words to describe … the sense of hope, that I have for the future of my children, that someone has finally been able to break that barrier.” My latest for @bostonglobe.com is about what @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social’s election in New York means for Muslims in New England.

The sixth and most recent fatality occurred Sunday at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, where the prisoner died of an apparent suicide, the agency said in a statement. The death occurred five days another apparent suicide at the facility last Tuesday. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/06/m...

Hurricane Melissa has devastated the Caribbean, and it’s also taking a toll on migratory songbird species that overwinter there. The impact could be felt in New Hampshire and the Northeast, where the birds return to breed during the summer months.

In US first, New Mexico launches free child care for all reut.rs/47yNiQJ

The federal agency SAMHSA funds programs focused on suicide prevention, teen alcohol use, opioid addiction treatment, and school-based mental health, among others. Amid a continued addiction and mental health crisis, it's being stripped of power: www.statnews.com/2025/10/30/s...?

New proposal would allow sewage and rainwater to be released into the Charles in perpetuity. It's "like it’s the 1700s and we don’t understand modern sanitary management," @emnorton.bsky.social told me. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/30/s...

A US Drug Enforcement Administration agent said the DEA made “high-level arrests” of 171 Sinaloa Cartel members across New England in August. A Globe investigation found that many of the DEA’s targets were addicts, low-level dealers, shoplifters, and homeless people.

Will Massachusetts’ new pay transparency law, which takes full effect today, succeed in reducing gender and racial wage gaps? Today’s @bostonglobe.com Starting Point explores: www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/29/n...

“We Survived the Night”: Julian Brave NoiseCat on Residential Schools & Recovering Native History l Democracy Now www.democracynow.org/2025/1...

In Massachusetts, 665,000 households rely on SNAP benefits, at an average of $323 a month, and more than one in three households have reported not having enough to eat, according to a recent study by the Greater Boston Food Bank. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/26/m...

Americans brace for food stamps to run out: ‘the greatest hunger catastrophe since the Great Depression’

Russia tested new nuclear-powered cruise missile, top general says reut.rs/4qruziv

Despite Indian Country bearing some of the highest fatality rates of the #overdose crisis, there is a woefully insufficient number of programs that provide clean needles in Indian Country to reduce death and the spread of disease. Read More below ⬇️ nativenewsonline.net/health/needl...

The New York Times publishes a handy guide to which federal forces are terrorizing us at any moment. This is America, 2025.