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 still hot, with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 8:22 p.m.
Local World Cup rundown: Scotland beat Haiti 1-0 Saturday. It’s good news for Moira Brown, a 93-year-old Scotland fan who came to the U.S. to watch her team. “At my age, am I not lucky?” she told NPR. “I waited almost 30 years to see another World Cup. Now I’m the luckiest person in this world.”
GBH’s Jeremy Siegel got a ride to the game with Scotland fans who rented school buses to get to Foxborough. As other fans paid $80 for Commuter Rail round-trips or $95 for official Boston World Cup bus rides (“They tried to rob us blind,” Scotland supporter Brian Roy said), the Providence Tartan Army charged $38 a ride and used the money for buses, drinks, and $16,000 for donations to local organizations. You can see and hear more from the bus ride here.
And it’s not the end of the road for Haiti. The team plays Brazil on Friday, continuing their first men’s World Cup appearance since 1974. “It’s absolutely amazing, it feels amazing, it’s a great moment for Haitian pride and the Haitian community here in Boston,” fan Kitzner Vassor said.
Next up: Iraq plays Norway in Foxborough tomorrow at 6 p.m. In the meantime, if you see visitors killing time between matches, share this list of things to do in our fair city with them.
Four Things to Know
1. The Massachusetts House passed a bill to try and deal with growing national efforts to ban books from schools and public libraries. The bill would create one process people would have to go through to try and get a book pulled from shelves. Supporters like Maureen Amyot, director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, said that would help librarians who worry about harassment if they decline to ban a book.
“No librarian will have to worry that they’ll be fired or disciplined for selecting books that they know are appropriate for the students in their school or the people in their communities,” Amyot said. “They’ll be able to do their work with that confidence, and that is huge.”
2. Alvin Campbell faces up to life in prison after a jury convicted him of aggravated rape and kidnapping. Prosecutors said he posed as a rideshare driver and targeted women outside of bars. Campbell’s sentencing is scheduled for June 29.
He is the brother of Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who in the past has said she talks about her family’s story “because I think there are so many who carry their story with a sense of shame and don’t want to talk about it, including the criminal aspects of my family. … But there is no shame in one sharing their story. There is power in it.”
3. Boston, Cambridge and Worcester will allow bars to stay open to 3 a.m. until July 31. Somerville is also letting bars stay open until 3 a.m. through July 19, though they can only serve alcohol until 2 a.m. Additionally, Cambridge will allow people to drink alcohol outdoors in a few designated spots: Central Square, Kendall Square, Harvard Square, Inman Square, lower Massachusetts Avenue and Porter Square/North Massachusetts Avenue.
Officials in other cities and towns are mulling the issue of later last calls: similar measures are on tap in Brookline, Everett, Dedham and Needham. New Bedford officials said they’re considering outdoor drinking zones of their own, but probably won’t let bars extend their hours.
4. Scientists are injecting a collection of American elm trees in Vermont with Dutch Elm disease to try and figure out which ones are more resistant to the fungus. Leila Wilson, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, has cared for these elms since she hand-fertilized flowers and harvested their seeds. Once she and other scientists can figure out which trees can survive the fungus, they’ll create a seed bank they hope will help local elm populations grow.
“American elm is a foundation tree species in floodplain forests,” Wilson said. “These are systems which are facing severe threats from non-native pests and pathogens, but we also know from other impacts, right? Land use change, conversion to agriculture, now climate change, and changing precipitation and temperature patterns. So these are systems that are in peril.” You can see the syringe she uses to inject trees here.
Mass. wheelchair users wait months for simple repairs. Critics say private equity is to blame
Destiny Maxam’s wheelchair steering mechanism broke in 2023. That meant she couldn’t use it until she could get it fixed. She had to wait for the repair company to get the necessary parts and do the repair.
That took five months, she told GBH News reporter Meghan Smith.
In that time, Maxam had to spend the bulk of her days in her bed, which didn’t allow her to sit up like she would in her chair. Spending more time laying down meant she developed pneumonia and had to go on a ventilator in an emergency room.
“That’s the big confusion that people have — they think it’s the exception, and it’s not,’’ Maxam told Smith. “It is the norm. Every single time you call, you’re going to experience this wait.”
Smith spoke with disabled advocates, lawmakers and researchers. They told her getting a wheelchair fixed is so hard because of a combination of factors: not enough technicians, having to go through health insurance or medical companies and private equity firms who buy companies doing this work and then cut costs. Most of the American wheelchair market is owned by just two companies: Numotion and National Seating & Mobility. About 5.5 million people in the U.S. use wheelchairs.
Smith talked to people trying to solve this issue here.
Dig deeper:
-A long journey home: Hundreds of disabled people have new homes thanks to court settlement
-His public housing building’s elevator was broken, so a disabled veteran slept outside
-Is Boston’s use of concurrent signals putting pedestrians at risk?
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