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.
🌥️Cloudier and warmer, with highs in the 50s. Sunset is at 6:56 p.m.
A Boston Police officer was arrested yesterday, accused of manslaughter after he shot and killed a man in Roxbury last week. Officer Nicholas O’Malley pleaded not guilty in the March 11 death of Stephenson King. O’Malley and other officers were trying to arrest King, who was in a stolen car and suspected in a nearby carjacking. After the shooting, O’Malley said King was trying to run officers over. But investigators who watched footage from body-worn cameras and interviewed other officers at the scene wrote that “regardless of their perception, that statement was not factually true.” GBH’s Craig LeMoult reports that this is likely the first time in decades that a Boston police officer is facing manslaughter charges for an on-the-job shooting. You can read the full police report here.
Four Things to Know
1. State Attorney General Andrea Campbell is joining 23 other states in suing the Trump administration over its elimination of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gases should be regulated because they pose a risk to people’s health. That rescinded protocol, first put in place in 2009, is called the Endangerment Finding.
“EPA has rushed a rulemaking process to rescind the Endangerment Finding and repeal all motor-vehicle greenhouse-gas standards, blatantly disregarding the law and science,” Campbell said in a statement. “EPA’s rescission is based on flawed interpretations of the law — previously rejected by the Supreme Court — that the agency lacks authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.”
2. Abortion providers in Massachusetts treated more people from outside state lines than Massachusetts residents in 2024. And state data suggests most of them got their appointments through telehealth and received abortion pills by mail, according to a new report from the Department of Public Health. That means people in other states can see an abortion provider from Massachusetts and get their medication without traveling to the Bay State. (GBH’s Hannah Reale has charts showing the data here.)
That’s likely at least in part because, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Massachusetts passed a law protecting health-care providers here from criminal charges under other states’ restrictive abortion laws. “Patients who need abortion care in Mississippi can get medication abortion pills through the mail for $5 from our service,” said Dr. Angel Foster of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project. “There is a deep irony that, I think, in some areas of the country, affordable abortion care is more accessible today than it was prior.”
3. The number of small claims court cases in the state involving a company taking a person to court over consumer debt jumped 60% in two years, according to data from the state’s court system. And 77% of those cases came from just nine companies — debt buyers, credit companies and banks consistently pursue the majority of cases. In 2025 the top three (LVNV Funding LLC, Midland Credit Management Inc. and Portfolio Recovery Associates LLC) filed more than half the cases. You can find a map of data of small-claims court debt cases by ZIP code here.
The data does not specify what kinds of expenses the debt came from. April Kuehnhoff, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said that in her experience it’s mostly what she called “survival expenses,” including medical debt. “We also see all sorts of basic necessities that are being charged to credit cards, and those can include things like groceries or getting your car fixed so that you can get to work,” Kuehnhoff said.
4. Lawmakers in the Massachusetts House said they’re getting closer to voting on a bill that would ban federal immigration officers from detaining people in the state’s courthouses. Rep. Dan Cahill, a Democrat from Lynn, said he expects the vote to come “between now and sometime in April.” GBH News has found that federal immigration agents arrested 614 people in Massachusetts courthouses last year, and state officials have heard from an immigrant mother afraid to pursue criminal charges after her daughter was raped, for fear of being targeted when the family goes to court.
“What we don’t want is for people to have a false sense of security or a false sense of hope,” Cahill said. “We try to be very practical — some would say brutally honest — where we don’t know if those protections can be afforded to them outside of our courthouses. But we know that within the building itself, we can protect all of our residents.”
Boston Legacy players don’t just kick around soccer balls. They kick around nine languages too.
A bright moment to close out the week: if you go to a Boston Legacy FC game, know that you can cheer on the players of Boston’s National Women’s Soccer League team in any one of nine languages and dialects. Players speak English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Danish, Japanese, Catalan and languages from Uganda and Mali.
“Oh my gosh, we sing 'Happy Birthday’ in six languages. We have six Happy Birthday songs for everybody’s birthday, and it’s in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Danish and Japanese,” goalkeeper Laurel Ivory said this week. “There’s probably another in there somewhere. But that’s what we sing Happy Birthday in.”
The team doesn’t have on-staff translators, GBH’s Esteban Bustillos reports. But there’s a cross-section of players and coaches who speak a mix of English, Spanish, French or Portuguese. And they all try to honor each other’s languages and cultures, said head coach Filipa Patão, who is from Portugal and also speaks English and Spanish.
“Because we have different people here, we have different cultures,” Patão said. “This is a way to approach everybody, to connect everybody and say, ‘Hey, your language, your culture matters here for us.’”
Read Esteban Bustillos’ full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Boston Fleet celebrate Olympic medalists as PWHL seasons get back underway
-3,000 miles from Boston, Patriots fans flock to this San Francisco bar
-No matter where you’re from, this Concord, Mass., resident has a song for you
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