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☀️Sunny, with highs in the 40s. Sunset is at 4:15 p.m.
An update on a story GBH first reported in July: construction is now underway on an affordable housing development for veterans in Winchendon — a project that almost fell through because of tariffs and uncertainty over federal funding cuts.
“The sound of bulldozers at this point is welcome,” said Stephanie Marchetti, director of the nonprofit Montachusett Veterans Outreach Center in Central Massachusetts told GBH’s Sam Turken. “The town has been well aware of this project for the five plus years we’ve been working on it. And so I think they were feeling a lot of what I was, which was will it ever come to fruition?”
The development, which will remodel an old school building, will include 44 new units and is slated to open in 2027.
“The veterans are already asking, can they get on a waitlist yet?” Marchetti said. “It’s a lot of excitement, a lot of enthusiasm around the project.”
Four Things to Know
1. U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley said she and other House Democrats are working to bring a vote on extending the tax credits that help make Affordable Care Act plans within reach for millions of Americans — despite the challenge of a Republican-controlled House.
“We do have a discharge petition at the desk,” Pressley said. “That’s what was just used to force a vote to dispatch a subpoena to the Department of Justice for the Epstein files. A discharge petition, when you hit that magic number of 218, forces a vote, and it calls for the Affordable Care Act, those subsidies, to be extended for three years.”
2. The Massachusetts Republican Party has endorsed John Deaton — a lawyer and cryptocurrency advocate — for next year’s Senate primary. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because he challenged Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2024. This time he’ll be seeking the seat currently held by Sen. Ed Markey, who also faces primary challengers.
Other candidates can still seek the Republican nomination, but the party’s endorsement of Deaton makes winning the primary a tougher climb. “If I can avoid a contested primary, it allows me to talk to the 64% unenrolled in Massachusetts. It allows me to talk to disenfranchised Democrats,” Deaton said. (Want more? GBH politics reporter Adam Reilly has a full rundown on Deaton’s candidacy.)
3. After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its website with language suggesting vaccines might cause autism — a claim widely debunked by decades of research — Robbie Goldstein, the top public health official in Massachusetts called the statement “factually incorrect and deliberately misleading.”
Goldstein, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Health also said the state’s Department of Public Health is reviewing its own website and removing links to any CDC content deemed incorrect or misleading.
4. Traveling for the holiday?: AAA expects 73 million people on the move for Thanksgiving — about 6 million by plane and most of the rest by car.
The busiest travel days will be Tuesday, Wednesday and the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
No matter where you’re from, this Concord resident has a song for you
If you walk around Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord, you might run into John Muresianu. He’ll likely be in a day-glow yellow vest, though he doesn’t work there. And he might be singing — in one of 46 languages.
“I’m like a Walmart greeter,” he told GBH’s Craig LeMoult. “I greet tourists from around the world in their native tongue with their favorite song, prayer or poem in 46 languages. eight Asian, five African, four Middle Eastern and 20 European. So if, for whatever reason, you’d like to hear the most beloved song from any country on the planet, pick a country and I’ll sing you the song.”
It all started when a doctor diagnosed Muresianu with congestive heart failure about 10 years ago and suggested he go for more walks. As Muresianu wandered around Minute Man National Historical Park, he started noticing how many people were there from across the world.
“We have half a million tourists per year come here from all over the world,” he said. “So it’s — this is total paradise.”
One day he asked a woman where she was from. She said she was from France.
“And at first I thought, ‘No, don’t, they’ll just feel harassed. Forget it. They’ll just reject me and that won’t feel very good,’” he said. “And I didn’t have a plan, but something inside me said, ‘Sing to her the Marseillaise, the French national anthem.’”
So he started: Allons, enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé. Contre nous, de la tyrannie, l’étendard sanglant est levé; l’étendard sanglant est levé.
“And I finish and she says, ‘you made my day,’” Muresianu said.
The next person was from Mexico.
“So I start singing her Cielito Lindo, which is the de facto Mexican national anthem,” he said: ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores, porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones. “And literally what does she say? The exact same words, ‘You made my day.’”
LeMoult saw him sing the poem “Quiet Night Thought” by the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai to a man from Chengdu, China, and “Lang Zal Zi Leven,” the Dutch “Happy Birthday” song, to a person from the Netherlands. Learning a new song takes him about three hours, Muresianu said.
“I believe actually that in our DNA that we are programmed to get our greatest joy from bringing joy to others,” Muresianu said. “I think that’s a biological fact.”
You can hear him sing some of his songs here.
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