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.
🌂Scattered showers, then a cool, sunny day, with highs in the 50s. Sunset is at 8:14 p.m.
☄️That boom you heard Saturday was a “fireball traveling at 75,000 miles per hour,” GBH’s Dave Epstein explains.
Stevie Wheels lives on the sixth floor of the Ruth Lillian Barkley public housing complex in the South End. He’s a double amputee and uses a wheelchair to get around. Last Wednesday, the elevator in his building broke, as it has before. Wheels said he felt like he was stuck in a “death trap.”
Instead of staying in his apartment, he got himself down the stairs with his manual wheelchair and slept outside South Station. “It was raining, it was cold, it was wet, raw,’’ he told GBH’s Meghan Smith. “But it was OK.” Someone who knew him saw him at the station and called Suzanne Fareri-Early, who runs Community Offering People Encouragement. She got in touch with City Councilor Ed Flynn, who got disability advocate Dawn Oates involved. Oates found Wheels at South Station without his medication.
Boston does have rules in place to prevent this kind of situation: if an elevator in a public housing building is expected to be broken for more than two days, the Boston Housing Authority is supposed to pay for residents’ hotel rooms. But there were miscommunications last week, and Wheels never got one.
“This could have been prevented, but the chain of command — the hierarchy — doesn’t appear to have been used,” Oates told Smith. “This is a breakdown, again, in communication. ... It’s not malicious, it’s just poor training and accountability and oversight.” Smith visited Wheels in his apartment on Friday. The elevator was still broken.
Four Things to Know
1. The number of people in Massachusetts enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the biggest federal program to help people pay for food, fell by 155,000 from March 2025 to March 2026. That’s not because people don’t need the help, advocates said, but because new requirements Congress passed under the One Big Beautiful Bill make it harder to stay in the program — and because the state’s Department of Transitional Assistance is too short-staffed to keep up with demand.
Antionette Hughes, a DTA supervisor and president of the department’s union, estimated that they need about 200 more employees to handle their caseloads. In the meantime, people like Meredith Lively are losing their SNAP funds while navigating the bureaucracy. “It was difficult to find a human staff [member] to help me,” Lively said. “It was just apparent to me that everybody’s caseload must be just, like, so much. I can tell when the staff are really working hard at their job. And they’re just not able to handle the amount of what’s happening.”
2. Attorney General Andrea Campbell is suing the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, saying it defrauded MassHealth of $100 million through a Senior Care Options plan over the last 10 years. In the lawsuit, Campbell accused UnitedHealthcare of telling the state that members had depression and anxiety they were not actually diagnosed with or treated for, and claiming members needed skilled nursing care they didn’t actually get.
“These were not isolated mistakes,” Campbell said. “These were knowing failures that our investigation found and, frankly, supported United’s strategy, which was to grow at all costs.” The insurance company called the lawsuit “meritless.”
3. Gov. Maura Healey’s office released a guide for what hospitals, houses of worship, schools and day cares should do if immigration agents arrive. In brief: have one high-ranking person in charge of communicating with agents, decide on a place for agents to wait for that person, and train the point of contact on telling the difference between judicial warrants (like the ones judges will sign in criminal cases) and administrative warrants used in civil immigration enforcement.
The guidelines also encourage people to document arrests without getting in the way and to send photos and videos to the state’s hotline: by phone at 617-988-2474, by email to EO650-reports@mass.gov or online at https://www.mass.gov/fedmisconduct. You can read more about the guidelines here.
4. What can you expect now that the Massachusetts Senate has voted to give Auditor Diana DiZoglio financial information, a vote that came after the Supreme Judicial Court stepped in to say they should submit budgets, audits, settlements and transactions? “We’re not leaving anything out. We’re not being cute,” Sen. Paul Feeney said. “We’re not moving stuff around. She requested certain documents. The scope was clarified. I’m thrilled that now the Senate will be moving forward to respond to that.”
The state House, in the meantime, is taking a different path. Speaker Ron Mariano said in an email to lawmakers that the chamber’s leaders are working on transparency legislation “that will provide long-term solutions to the concerns that we continue to hear from our constituents.” He did not say when that legislation would be up for a vote.
Colleges, looking to build back trust, embrace cost transparency
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who just got into college this year. How can you figure out how much it will cost to finish your degree? You can see the sticker price for tuition, fees, room and board, but the university you pick could raise those costs next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Financial aid can fluctuate. The landscape of scholarships, loans and grants can be hard to navigate.
A survey from the Strada Education Foundation found 68% of both college students and parents said the financial aid process was either confusing or mixed, not straightforward. So some universities, looking to attract more students, are trying to shed more light on the cost of college.
“This has been a nagging problem,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told GBH’s Kirk Carapezza. The council runs the College Cost Transparency Initiative, which more than 700 schools have signed on to with a promise to make financial aid clearer.
Brandeis University is testing a new tool to help students estimate their final bill. “What we’re trying to do is help families understand what their actual cost will be,” said Jen Walker, vice president for enrollment management.
Dig deeper:
-As small Mass. colleges struggle with finances, students grapple with cost-cuts
-Massachusetts makes $25 million bet on quantum research lab at MIT
-How many college grads actually use their degrees? It’s complicated
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