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.
🌤️Mostly sunny and cool, with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 8:05 p.m.
We hope you can mark Memorial Day in a way that’s meaningful to you. You can visit the flag garden on the Boston Common, where volunteers have planted an American flag for every member of the U.S. military who died in a war or conflict since the American Revolution. You can also spend some time with loved ones outdoors — our GBH colleagues have put together a list of picnic spots in Boston and beyond.
We’ll be back in your inbox Tuesday morning.
Four Things to Know
1. A man and his 15-year-old son are still in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after members of the U.S. Coast Guard arrested them off Martha’s Vineyard Monday. The Coast Guard first approached Rogerio da Silva Lima and his son, Nycolas de Al Varenga Lima, for a safety check, then came back to ask them for documentation.
“The Coast Guard’s primary mission is to protect people on the waters. It really appears that this is straying from that core mission, and it’s just yet another example of the capricious and racially charged immigration practices that we’re seeing this federal administration carry out,” said State Sen. Julian Cyr, who represents Martha’s Vineyard.
2. The Center for Human Development, a health nonprofit in Springfield, is laying off about 70 people who work in community outreach because of Medicare cuts. Their program, which will end June 30, helps about 3,500 vulnerable patients get the medical services they need.
“The idea that really we could get ahead of people’s health circumstances, and particularly in the instances of chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, asthma... before they got to the emergency room and they had hospital visits,” Center for Human Development spokesperson Ben Craft said. “Which are not only stressful for individuals and families, but also for the health care system are pretty costly.”
3. Next week, workers will remove the final internal components from the defunct Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth. The parts will go into concrete vaults until the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves plans to move them for burial at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews, Texas.
Getting approval and moving the parts to Texas will likely take two years, said David Noyes, site vice president for Holtec Decommissioning International. What’s left is an outer shell — which crews will begin removing next year — and about 794,015 gallons of water. Workers are running the water through a treatment process to remove most contaminants, though some radioactive material will still be present.
4. Lee Pelton announced yesterday that he’ll leave his job as president and CEO of The Boston Foundation at the end of August. Pelton led the foundation for five years, during which he focused its work on economic inequalities in and around the city. He is also the former president of Emerson College and a current member of GBH’s Board of Trustees.
“I’ve often said that I’ve been in training for this job my entire life because it represents values, ideas and problem solving that are fundamental to who I am and what I hope to be,” he told GBH’s Boston Public Radio.
Pushing a ‘sacred rebellion,’ American colonists justified revolt with religion
How do you use religion to justify war? GBH’s Trajan Warren has a look at how supporters of American independence from Britain used religious iconography. Using images like Moses freeing American colonists from British rule helped make the battle about virtue.
Kate Carté, a professor of history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas told Warren that treason “was an illegal act. And it was important to the revolutionaries to appear thoughtful and steady and moral in the way that they were going about this violent, revolutionary thing.”
Religious imagery was also used among people who supported the British crown, who saw going against the king as also going against the Church of England, said Karin Wulf, a professor of history at Brown University.
“There are all these ways in which people see this so differently,” Wulf said.
More Revolutionary stories:
-These places west of Boston might have a better claim as the birthplace of the Revolution
-Before the American Revolution, these Massachusetts publishers rebelled in print
