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.
❄️ Snow showers tonight and tomorrow, with accumulations up to an inch. Highs in the 20s today. Sunset is at 5:04 p.m.
When you close your eyes tonight, you’ll be just a day and a half away from the Patriots’ first Super Bowl appearance since 2019. The last time the Pats were in the big game was under head coach Bill Belichick, who led the team to six Super Bowl victories. This year Mike Vrabel is in the coach’s seat, and Belichick has missed his first chance at entering the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The post-Belichick years have been spotty for the Pats, GBH’s Esteban Bustillos noted. He put it bluntly: “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Usually, teams that are coming back from those kinds of campaigns are looking to rebuild, maybe get a playoff win or two and call it a day. … But the Patriots under Mike Vrabel were apparently in no mood for a prolonged renovation. They didn’t even wait for the cement to set before putting in a new foundation that this franchise can build on for years.” You can hear more of his analysis here and read his reporting from San Francisco here.
The Pats are playing the Seattle Seahawks, with kickoff on Sunday at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time. If you’re only watching for the halftime show, know that Bad Bunny will take the stage when the second quarter ends, likely between 8 and 8:30 p.m. And if you want anything but sports this weekend, GBH’s Jared Bowen has recommendations for art, film, and 100-year-old books.
Four Things to Know
1. Boston could spend about 4.5% more on its schools budget next year, but may cut between 300 and 400 jobs, Superintendent Mary Skipper said this week. The proposed layoffs and cuts would include more than 200 teachers and 100 paraprofessionals, about 160 of whom now work in three school buildings that will close at the end of this school year.
The cost increases come from health insurance, transportation, out-of-district special education and labor contracts, Skipper said. Enrollment is down by about 3,000 students since the start of the 2024 school year. “The reality is that our costs are increasing at a faster rate than our revenues,” Skipper said.
2. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed an executive order stating that federal immigration agents are not allowed to go into schools, libraries and community centers without a judicial warrant, and that agents are not allowed to use public spaces in the city (like parks) for operations without first obtaining permission. It also says local police have to protect Boston’s residents, and that the city will not provide local resources to federal immigration operations.
Worcester, too, is banning federal immigration agents from using its public spaces — like parks, garages and parking lots — for their operations. City Manager Eric Batista’s office said there’s no evidence that ICE agents have ever used public spaces in the city to gather for operations, and that city officials want to keep it that way. Gov. Maura Healey signed a similar executive order last week banning federal immigration agents from using state-owned property for staging.
3. Brian Shortsleeve, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, put out a campaign ad on social media last month using fake, AI-generated audio of Gov. Maura Healey. The post does not disclose that the audio was created with AI.
“While this ad is a parody, there is nothing funny or fake about its substance, which highlights Maura Healey’s failed record of killing jobs and making Massachusetts the most expensive state in the nation,” a Shortsleeve campaign spokesperson said. Twenty-six states in the U.S. have laws either banning AI deepfakes in political campaigns or, more commonly, requiring that campaigns disclose their use of AI, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Massachusetts has no such regulations.
4. Expect some snow showers today and a coating to about an inch of accumulation tonight, GBH’s meteorologist Dave Epstein said. It’s not much, but that’s cold comfort for people who are still digging out from the snowstorm from almost two weeks ago.
“There are paths that are literally no more than 14 to 18 inches wide. I’m trying to walk along them with my guide dog in front of me and thinking, ‘I didn’t realize they made shovels this narrow!’” said Nora Nagle, who lives in South Boston and is legally blind. “It’s very hard to get around.” As of Tuesday, the most recent data available, Boston had fined 1,800 property owners more than $190,000 and received almost 13,000 snow-related complaints on 311. Ben Bruno of Walk Up Roslindale, a pedestrian advocacy group, had some advice to make the streets more passable: “Grab a shovel,” Bruno said. “If you’re an able-bodied person and you have the time, I would say just do what you can for your community.”
Welcome to the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. The opening ceremony is at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. NBC has the broadcasting license for the Games this year, and our colleagues at NPR put together a guide for how to watch the different events and highlights. There are eight new competitions, from ski mountaineering to new events in the established sports of skeleton, luge, ski jumping and moguls. We also have a video from the Curiosity Desk’s Edgar B. Herwick III about how figure skating judging works.
Here are three local stories to watch:
🛷There are two local athletes on the luge team: Ansel Haugsjaa of Framingham and Zack DiGregorio of Medway. They gave GBH’s Craig LeMoult an explanation of how their sport works: in doubles luge, the person on top is responsible for steering and the one on the bottom is essentially a shock absorber. “It looks effortless, but it feels like so much work in your head, and it feels like so much work before the run,” Haugsjaa said.
🏒Players from the Boston Fleet, the city’s Professional Women’s Hockey League, will represent the USA, Finland, Switzerland, Germany and Czechia. “You know I was saying, like, iron sharpens iron,” Boston Fleet captain Megan Keller told GBH’s Esteban Bustillos. “And now to have everybody that’s going to be going to the Olympics for the most part, outside of some college players, playing in the PWHL, it’s just gonna grow the game and elevate it even more at the Olympics.”
⛸️In figure skating, three athletes with the Skating Club of Boston (which is in Norwood) are skating for Team USA. They are pairs team Emily Chan and Spencer Howe and Max Naumov, the son of figure skating coaches Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, who died in a plane crash in Washington, D.C. last year. “I can’t describe how difficult it was in the very beginning and through month after month of just really, really trying my hardest to keep a positive mindset, keep all of the personal issues at home and stay focused on skating when I was here,” Naumov told LeMoult. “But thankfully, skating became a tool that actually helped me overcome all of that.”
Dig deeper:
-The Winter Olympics in Italy were meant to be sustainable. Are they?
-What adaptive ice skating looks like in Massachusetts
-Where to learn Olympic Sports in Greater Boston
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