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.

Sign up here!

☀️Sunny and warmer, with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 7:20 p.m.

A federal judge in Boston yesterday dismissed a lawsuit in which the Trump administration’s Department of Justice tried to compel Massachusetts to release data on registered voters in the state. Federal officials were looking for a list of every registered voter with names, birth dates, addresses, driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers, GBH’s Katie Lannan reports.

U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin wrote that the law on which federal officials relied requires them to explain why they want the voter data. “Here, the Attorney General offered no basis — none — and the demand was therefore facially inadequate,” Sorokin wrote. You can read his decision in full here. This is one of about 29 similar lawsuits federal officials have filed nationwide seeking voter data from states.

Support for GBH is provided by:

Four Things to Know

1. The father of Stephenson King Jr., the 39-year-old man shot and killed by a police officer last month, said he wants to see body-camera footage of the shooting. “I want to see his face and what really happened,” said Stephenson King Sr., standing alongside civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump. Crump also represented the families of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The police officer accused of shooting King, Nicholas O’Malley, was arrested and charged with manslaughter, based in part on evidence from body-camera footage. He has pleaded not guilty.

King had struggled with mental health issues and paranoia in his final months, King Sr. said. He is still trying to find out what happened between the last time he saw his son earlier that day and the moment O’Malley shot him three times. Police officers have said they suspected King Jr. in a carjacking. Earlier in the day, his father said he asked him to call 911. “He said, ‘Dad, you need to call the ambulance, I cannot move,’” King Sr. said. “They put him on the stretcher and took him downstairs. … I watched them leave. That’s the last time I saw my son.”

2. Former Secretary of State John Kerry called the current two-week ceasefire agreement with Iran “remarkably loosey-goosey.” “It’s shocking, honestly,” Kerry told GBH’s Boston Public Radio. “I think it proves more serious and more dangerous as we go on, because the Strait of Hormuz [is] in the control of Iran, which they were not before [the war] started.”

He also said he does not believe the U.S. and Israel should have attacked Iran. “There was not an imminent threat,” Kerry said. “And by the way, Donald Trump himself stood up and bragged and said we’ve obliterated their nuclear program [after attacks in June 2025] … There isn’t a notion possible to conjure up by which they could have made a nuclear weapon at this point in time.”

Support for GBH is provided by:

3. The MBTA sold 17,450 tickets to World Cup matches on its first day of sales. Most fans looking for tickets were on the ball: 5,000 scored their tickets to the stadium in the first 10 minutes, and 11,000 within the first hour. The most popular match was Haiti vs. Scotland on June 13, with 6,200 tickets sold. Tickets are still available on the MBTA’s mTicket app. To buy one, riders have to register with the same email address they used to purchase their World Cup game tickets.

A bit of back-of-the-envelope math: that many tickets at $80 a pop adds up to about $1.39 million. The MBTA spent $35 million to redesign and upgrade the station ahead of the games, making the platform accessible from all train cars. Agency officials hope to transport 20,000 fans to each of the seven matches.

4. Sunday marks 20 years since Massachusetts passed a law requiring all residents to have health insurance or pay a fine — a law you might know as Romneycare. The law meant about 400,000 people who previously lacked health insurance got coverage and later became a model for the national Affordable Care Act. Last year, almost every resident of the commonwealth — 97.9% — had health insurance, according to the Center for Health Information and Analysis.

But: “Having a health insurance card doesn’t actually mean you can afford the care you need when you need it,” said Amy Blackburn, interim executive director of the Massachusetts advocacy group Health Care for All. Last year, about 40% of state residents said they struggled to pay for health care.


What to do this weekend: sculpture, missing masterpieces and The Drama

Three recommendations for arts and culture this weekend from Jared Bowen, host of GBH’s The Culture Show:

First: a trip to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem for the exhibition “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone.” “She had an improbable and spectacular rise to stardom in the 1800s. As the daughter of Black and Indigenous [Mississauga] parents, she became a sculptor of international renown,” Bowen said. Lewis began her career in Boston, and later moved to Rome in 1866. The exhibition marks the first retrospective of her career. “It makes her a legend today, only now finally getting her due,” Bowen said.

Next: The book “Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist” by Geoffrey Kelly. Kelly is a retired FBI agent who oversaw the investigation into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist for 22 years. While the 13 works of art stolen from the museum more than 30 years ago have not been recovered, and no one has faced criminal charges in the theft, Kelly names people he believes committed the heist and traces where the paintings may have gone: a farmhouse in Maine and another location in Connecticut. “I have covered this story for a long time and there are so many details that I didn’t know,” Bowen said. “You’ll find this book riveting.”

Finally: “The Drama,” the movie starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. The two play a couple from Boston preparing for their wedding day who, during a night of drinking with friends, tell each other the worst thing they have ever done. “He can’t reconcile suddenly knowing this about his partner,” Bowen said of Pattinson’s character. “I think this becomes an amazing psychological portrait of people, but really of society at large.” Film critic Sarah G. Vincent also recommended the movie, if not only for the scenes shot at Andy’s Diner in Cambridge — which Vincent said she suggested to filmmakers — then for its deeper look at wedding culture and more. “I think it’s a really provocative film,” Vincent said, “but I also think it’s really funny. And I think people need to put the passion that they have, if it is against this movie, into actual real-world change instead of just critiquing a movie from the comfort of a movie theater.” Her full take on the film is worth listening to here.