This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
🌥️Cloudy and cold, with highs in the 40s. Sunset is at 4:24 p.m. It’s day 43 of the federal government shutdown.
Years after her husband Bill was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Susan Todino made a difficult decision: she could no longer care for him at home.
“You make these promises to each other, you know — ‘I’ll never put you anywhere, I’ll always take care of you,’” she said at a caregiver support group meeting. “But you get to a point where you can’t do it anymore. And you have to accept that fact, that somebody’s there that can do it better than I can.”
But that difficult decision was only the first step in finding Bill a place to live and receive care. GBH’s Meghan Smith reports that while memory care units — specialized facilities for people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia — are becoming more common, they haven’t kept pace with current demand or the expected surge in patients as Baby Boomers age. And when you do find a spot, the cost is often staggering.
“As we are living longer and living better lives, there is a point that more of us are going to need this type of care,” Walter Ramos, president of the nonprofit Rogerson Communities, a memory care facility in Jamaica Plain, told Smith. You can find her full reporting, along with more about Bill and Susan Todino’s story, right here.
Four Things to Know
1. Attorney John Deaton announced that he’s running for U.S. Senate in 2026, looking to defeat Senator Ed Markey. Deaton ran last year against Senator Elizabeth Warren, who won re-election against him with a 60%-40% vote.
Deaton, a Republican candidate, said he wants to be an independent voice. “The wealth gap that exists today is the greatest it’s ever been in American history,” Deaton said. “And I truly believe it’s the greatest threat to our constitutional Republic.”
2. UMass Amherst students who lived in off-campus apartments are replacing what they can after a fire this weekend destroyed their building at 57 Olympia Dr. No one was injured, but the building’s 232 residents are now trying to find new places to live.
“My apartment was on the furthest side from the fire,“ senior Owen Ball said. ”When it first started, I kind of thought that maybe the worst thing that would happen is that my room would fill with smoke.” He’s been sleeping on a friend’s couch, he said. He lost his computer, clothing, bicycle, glasses and contact lenses — and a stuffed hippo he’s had since he was a child.
3. Ken Buesseler, a scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is in Belém, Brazil for the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP30. He’ll help run the conference’s Ocean Pavilion, a section dedicated to the planet’s oceans and their importance.
“We can stand for the oceans and tell people why the oceans matter,” Buesseler said. You can read more about the Ocean Pavillion here.
4. It’s getting colder, which means any sea turtles who have not yet migrated to warmer waters are at risk for getting cold-stunned. Mass Audubon picked up its first sea turtle of the season, a juvenile green sea turtle found on a beach in Eastham. If you spot a sea turtle on a beach during the colder months, follow these steps and call the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary hotline immediately at 508-349-2615 (option 2).
“We don’t want these turtles back in the water,” Mass Audubon Cape Cod science coordinator Mark Faherty told CAI. “Get them a good ways above the high tide line and then you cover them in wrack and that stabilizes their temperature; it gets them out of the wind. And then you mark it in some obvious way – a big arrow, a buoy. You know, there’s usually some beach trash around.”
Retired judges say Boston judge’s resignation in protest of Trump is ‘extraordinary’
Mark Wolf served as a federal judge in Boston for 40 years, after President Ronald Reagan gave him a lifetime appointment in 1985. For the past 11 years he’s been a senior judge, meaning he could remain on the bench with a lighter caseload while then-President Barack Obama appointed a full-time successor. Wolf said he never saw himself fully retiring — until the second Trump administration began, he wrote in an essay published in The Atlantic this weekend.
“As I watched in dismay and disgust from my position on the bench, I came to feel deeply uncomfortable operating under the necessary ethical rules that muzzle judges’ public statements and restrict their activities,” Wolf wrote.
Judges are typically only allowed to share their views in court or in written opinions. Wolf’s essay “really is extraordinary,” said retired Judge Nancy Gertner — who served with Wolf and is now a paid contributor to GBH’s Boston Public Radio — in an interview with GBH’s Marilyn Schairer. “This is someone who loved being a judge. [Wolf] would have been the last person I would have expected to resign from the bench. So it took a lot to get to this moment.”
And retired judges can have a special role, said Christopher Muse, a retired associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court.
“[We] have a greater sense of outrage because [we] know what’s expected. You know, we regularly read and re-read the Constitution,” Muse told Schairer. “I know it’s not a hot edition for most of the citizenry, but that’s what we did for a livelihood.”
Wolf, 78, announced that he is joining The Boston law firm Todd & Weld LLP. He said he will also “speak out, support litigation and work with other individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting the rule of law and American democracy.”
Read Marilyn Schairer’s full reporting here.
From the archives:
2014: Judge Mark Wolf’s Case For An International Anti-Corruption Court
2012: Chief Judge Mark Wolf Leaves Post
Subscribe to GBH Daily
Your essential daily newsletter delivering trusted news, local insights, ways to connect, and can't miss programs from Boston and beyond.
