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Hector Figarella lives in Northampton, but has been visiting his family in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela. Since the U.S. attacked the country’s capital last weekend and detained President Nicolás Maduro, Figarella says that the mood of people around him has gone from hectic and frantic to a calmer sense of unease.
“People are going about their days,” Figarella, who supports Maduro’s party, told GBH’s Tori Bedford. “When you go out, things seem pretty normal, but there’s this uneasy feeling that nobody knows what’s going to happen next, especially since people are following the situation closely and United States President Trump is threatening with a second attack.” He noted the death toll from the attack, confirmed to be 32 but rumored to be as high as 80.
Julio Henríquez, a Venezuelan-born lawyer who lives in Boston, told GBH’s Sarah Betancourt that he believes “military aid from a foreign power was the only way out” of Maduro’s regime, but also that the U.S. was not justified in attacking.
“I feel tremendously uncomfortable with the idea that this is right. I don’t think it is,” Henríquez said. And while Maduro is facing trial in the U.S., his administration is still in power: “For daily life in Venezuela, for going back to democracy, for respect for human rights and for honoring the victims of human rights and finding justice for the victims of human right violations over all these years, I don’t think we’re even a single step closer to that,” Henríquez said. You can read the full story and other local reactions to the conflict here.
Four Things to Know
1. The U.S. Department of Justice say the man who they believe killed two students and injured nine more at Brown University last month, then killed an MIT professor at his home in Brookline, left video recordings confessing to the killings before he died by suicide — but did not talk about a motive.
The man, who attended Brown University in 2000 and 2001 and studied in the same program as MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in their native Portugal, also said he had been planning the attack for at least six semesters, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. It appears that he did not know the two Brown students killed: Ella Cook, 19, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, 18.
2. Four children and 29 adults have died from flu-related complications in Massachusetts so far this year, according to data from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Boston Public Health Commission. Two of the children lived in Boston, and both were under the age of 2. Boston hasn’t seen a pediatric flu death since 2013.
“There has been a lot of misinformation related to delaying vaccination in children. It is safe to vaccinate children as soon as they are eligible, the flu vaccine is safe, effective, and it saves lives,” said Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, Boston’s commissioner of public health. She said parents can start vaccinating their children against the flu at 6 months old. If a child has the flu and is having trouble breathing, urinating less frequently, has a persistent high fever, or is extremely lethargic and hard to wake, Ojikutu said parents should “seek immediate medical attention.” The Boston Public Health Commission suggests anyone with questions about the flu or flu shots should contact their health care provider, local health center or a pharmacy.
3. Your winter heating bill forecast: the costs of heating oil, propane and natural gas are down slightly compared to last winter, and the state’s Department of Energy Resources expects “slightly milder” weather. That means most households relying on those fuels to heat their homes can expect bills 4% to 9% lower than last year. However, electricity prices are up, so homes using electric baseboard heaters will likely pay about 6% more.
A colder-than-expected winter could lead to higher heating bills still. “Although heating oil, propane and natural gas prices are expected to be lower compared to last year, many households will still spend more overall because extended periods of cold weather lead to more heating use,” Department of Energy Resources officials said in their annual forecast. “For example, last winter was colder than initially forecasted, which contributed to higher heating bills.”
4. The number of primary care doctors who left their practices to join a concierge or direct primary care model — in which patients pay an annual membership fee in exchange for more direct access to their physician — has almost doubled in five years, Harvard researchers say.
Doctors who make the switch, and patients who can afford it, tend to report greater satisfaction, said Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital researcher Zirui Song. “For everyone else left in traditional primary care practices,” Song said, “there are more patients needing new primary care physicians, and, in the short term, fewer physicians to actually take on those patients.”
Goodbye, dirty water: Boston Harbor welcomes back shellfish harvesting
Good news for those who have an itch for local shellfish: for the first time in a century, clams, oysters and mussels from the waters off Hull, Hingham and Winthrop are considered safer to eat. State officials said local shellfishers — professionals and hobbyists — will likely be able to start harvesting in late summer or early fall this year.
“Water quality has improved enough to reopen some shellfish beds, particularly the outer harbor, to direct harvests of shell fishing,” Wayne Castonguay of the State Division of Marine Fisheries told GBH’s Marilyn Schairer.
A bit of history: shellfishing was banned in the Boston Harbor back in 1925 because of a national typhoid outbreak from contaminated oysters. Only harvesters with special licenses could access some shellfish beds, and even then they had to bring their shellfish through a cleaning process called depuration to make sure they were safe to eat.
And Boston Harbor remained polluted for years because humans were “dumping toxic sludge and untreated wastewater” into it, said Priscilla Brooks, vice president and director of the Ocean Conservation Program at the Conservation Law Foundation. The foundation sued Boston and the state of Massachusetts in 1983. Cleaning the harbor was a decades-long, multibillion-dollar effort that’s paying off, Brooks said.
“The opening of Outer Boston Harbor to shellfishing is yet another example of how far Boston Harbor has come — from one of the dirtiest in the country to a national jewel that belongs to everyone,” Brooks told Schairer.
Now the towns of Hull, Hingham and Winthrop can develop a management plan for permits and decide which shellfish beds will be harvested.
“It’ll be interesting to see how many residents actually want to go out in the flats and dig shellfish,” Kurt Bornheim, Hull’s harbormaster and shellfish constable, told Schairer. “A lot of people want to do it, but then ... they find out how hard it is.”
You can read the full story here.
Dig deeper:
-In conversation: Can scientists succeed where politicians fail?
-Healthy Oysters for Healthy Coasts, Oceans and Climate
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