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.
❄️A bit of snow in the forecast, with 1-2 inches expected tonight. Sunset is at 5:20 p.m.
Part of the deal to fund the government last month was an agreement to fund the Department of Homeland Security for two weeks and no longer, as members of Congress debate how to deal with the agency that oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection in the wake of cases in which agents have shot and killed people, as well as the mass detentions and deportations the agencies have been responsible for.
The Big, Beautiful Bill Congress passed last summer means ICE and CBP agents will likely continue getting paid, said Mike Gayzagian, president of the union representing TSA officers in New England. But TSA workers at Logan Airport and across the country are expecting to receive half their regular check in the next pay period, and no pay if Congress doesn’t reach a longer-term funding agreement. So far, MassPort has reported no significant delays, but Gayzagian said his members are worried.
“We really don’t see this as having much merit. ICE is going to be paid and Customs is going to be paid. They’re going to be fully funded,” Gayzagian told GBH’s Esteban Bustillos. “And so what is the point of defunding agencies that have nothing to do with the controversy that brought this about?” You can read the full story here.
Four Things to Know
1. Labor attorney and former Senate candidate Shannon Liss-Riordan has offered to represent State Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s office for free in the lawsuit over DiZoglio’s effort to audit the legislature. It’s been 15 months since 72% of Massachusetts voters said the auditor’s office should have the power to investigate how the legislature functions, but lawmakers there have since maintained that they think having the executive branch look into their work would violate the state’s separation of powers. Liss-Riordan also ran against Andrea Campbell for the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office in 2022, an election Campbell won.
DiZoglio filed a lawsuit last week, and had previously said Michael Minogue, a Republican candidate for governor, had offered to pay for an attorney for the case. “Even though they cleared that with the ethics commission, we just feel as though the attorney general has tried to turn that into a distraction from the underlying issue, which is that we need representation in court,” DiZoglio said. DiZoglio also announced yesterday that she is running for a second term this year.
2. Planned Parenthood is now offering vasectomies in its Worcester clinic. The procedure has become more common since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which revoked the federal legalization of abortion nationwide, according to a BU researcher’s study. But not many places in central and western Massachusetts offer vasectomies.
“We have pills, we have rings, patches, we have IUDs — but at the end of the day, women or pregnancy-capable people still bear the burden of pregnancy prevention,” said Dr. Luu Ireland, chief medical officer for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. “Vasectomy gives couples an option to share the responsibility of creating the kind of family that works for them.”
3. The number of single-family homes sold in Massachusetts last month was 2,305, 12.7% lower than it was last January, according to data from The Warren Group. The median price was $612,500, about 4.7% higher than it was last January.
Those numbers reflect offers buyers made in November and December, typically a slower time in the real estate market. But one thing remained consistent, said Cassidy Norton, associate publisher of The Warren Group: low supply. “The lack of inventory also contributed to a drop in sales and increase in price,” she said.
4. It’s the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which means some local restaurants are staying open late to serve people breaking their daily fasts. MOTW Coffee & Pastries in Quincy will be open until midnight during the week and 2 a.m. on weekends.
“After you break your fast, everyone just wants to do something,” said Ali Javid, who runs the coffee shop with his family. “You work throughout the day, you’re tired, you’re exhausted, you finally get to eat and you go for prayer, right? After prayer, people just want to hang out for a little while.”
Catching the Codfather: The not-so-secret sauce
By Ian Coss, host of The Big Dig and Catching the Codfather
If you’ve listened to any season of “The Big Dig” podcast, you know that the style and feel of our show lean heavily on one thing: archival sound. For me, nothing is more effective at drawing the mind to another time and place than the actual media of that moment — the voices, the music, the crackle and hum. So as episode two of our new series “Catching The Codfather” hits the podcast feed today, I want to offer a peek into how that not-so-secret sauce comes together.
It all starts with this guy.
Peter Higgins is the Archives Manager at GBH. I still remember when we started work on our first season, my co-producer Isabel Hibbard and I met with Peter at the front desk of the station. He signed us in and led us up to the Archives, where there were boxes of tape reels with post-it notes, old posters on the walls and piles of documents. We could tell right away we were in the right place. Peter set each of us up on a desktop computer from which we could access the entire media archives, and then turned us loose. We were hooked.
WGBH first went on the air in 1951, well before PBS or NPR were founded, and today the station’s archive includes 727,780 physical items in its processed collection, as well as approximately 5.5 petabytes of digital files (a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and each terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.) Obviously a lot of that is local material, from shows like the 10 O’Clock News and Greater Boston, but you’ve also got national programs like FRONTLINE, NOVA and AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, each with archives going back decades. So for our show, which tells local stories with national significance, it’s absolutely perfect.
Part of the challenge and thrill of this process is that for most of the material in the archives you can’t watch or listen to it right away. All we can do is read the descriptions and metadata, which is often pretty sparse (I doubt the GBH News staff in the 1980s were thinking about posterity when they raced to get a nightly show on the air). So we find the material that seems the most promising — potentially hundreds of items — and give all the catalogue numbers to Peter. Then we wait.
A few weeks later, we get a folder of material, hours and hours of it. Some of this stuff has probably never been viewed by human eyes in the decades since it first aired, while some of it is instantly recognizable, even iconic. Isabel then takes on the heroic task of reviewing and organizing all the material, which is then woven into the texture of the series.
This week’s episode is especially rich with archival sound, and Peter has kindly put together a special “Open Vault” collection where you can view some of that raw material yourself.
The episode also features material from the archives of the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, where Connor Gaudet and Laura Orleans were incredibly generous with their time and expertise. If you are curious to explore the Heritage Center archive yourself, you can search it here.
Truly, archives are some of my favorite places, and archivists some of my favorite people. Support them and cherish them.
Check out the latest episode of “Catching the Codfather” here. Want to dig into the GBH archives yourself? You can do so here.
Dig deeper:
-”Catching the Codfather”: A foreign invasion
-”Catching the Codfather”: a new podcast from GBH’s The Big Dig
