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 warm, with highs around 80. Sunset is at 8:23 p.m.
Your World Cup wrap-up: Norway won its game against Iraq 4-1 last night, with Erling Haaland scoring twice and Leo Ostigard once. Iraq’s Aymen Hussein scored the team’s sole point and had an own-goal near the end of the game.
But a lot of the fun, as always, was in the stands and on the way to Foxborough. GBH’s Jeremy Siegel got video of Norway fans pretending to row a Viking boat up a South Station escalator and of Iraq fans playing music from the windows of a school bus they took to the game. Inside the stadium, Esteban Bustillos (who got denied FIFA credentials but bought the cheapest remaining ticket and attended anyway) captured what the game meant to fans in the stands.
“We come from many, many different religions here in Iraq,” Anthony Abdulnoor, a fan who came from Michigan, told Bustillos. “There’s Catholics, there’s Muslims. There’s all types of different religions. And we all come together to support one team.” Read more about how we got to the game here.
Next up in Foxborough: Scotland plays Morocco on Friday. Stay tuned.
Four Things to Know
1. About half of Massachusetts residents surveyed in a Suffolk University Political Research Center poll said they’ve thought about moving away from Massachusetts in the last year, and about 40% of them said it’s because of the cost of living.
“That’s the single biggest driving factor right now in terms of what people are concerned about: Just going to the grocery store and buying enough groceries to eat,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. “You can see how, when you have a lower income, food and grocery prices have such a bigger piece of the pie for those households and that impact is affecting the decisions that they have to make going forward.”
2. Bridgewater State Hospital is different from the state’s prisons: people usually get there because they were ordered to get mental health treatment through a civil process — not through criminal court — or because they were charged with a crime and sent there for a mental health evaluation. But the state’s Department of Corrections, which also runs the state’s prisons, is in charge of the hospital. Now lawmakers are looking to change that, with a plan to switch oversight to the state’s Department of Mental Health by 2028.
“We know individuals at Bridgewater have histories of complex trauma, mental health conditions, substance use disorders, experiences of abuse, neglect, violence, homelessness or repeated psychiatric crises,” said Jacqueline Hubbard of NAMI Massachusetts. “Effective treatment recognizes the impact of that trauma and focuses on healing and recovery, dignity and individualized care. Families want to know that their loved ones are being treated as patients first and foremost.”
3. Sergio Ayala Mejia, a man from Guatemala who was deported from the U.S. without a court hearing last year — on the same day a judge rescinded his deportation order from 2007 — is back in Massachusetts with his partner and three children. His claim for asylum is pending.
“I’m scared to drive,” he said. “Especially because sometimes I carry my son with me. I don’t want him to see me get detained again.” But he said he thinks the U.S. is the “best country to live in.” “The only thing that is bad is the system right now, but I think we can make it a good country again,” he said.
4. Rescuers from the Center for Coastal Studies said they hope a young humpback whale that got tangled in fishing gear north of Provincetown will be able to fully recover. You can see a few photos of the rescue here.
“In this case the whale survived because somebody reported it. We were able to disentangle it. But a lot of whales don’t have that kind of luck,” said Scott Landry, a member of the center’s Marine Animal Entanglement Response team. “It does seem like there is so much rope that the majority of whales, of all species that we study, have not avoided it in their lifetimes.” The Marine Animal Entanglement Response hotline is 800-900-3622.
Behind the bill: A long time coming
By Katie Lannan, State House reporter, GBH News
A bill Gov. Maura Healey signed last week took more than a decade to pass. It updates more than 300 sections of Massachusetts law, removing outdated or offensive language referring to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In some cases, that means updating terms like “the aged and disabled,” replacing them with language such as “a person with a disability.”
On its face this might seem like a simple change — a find-and-replace you could almost do with a keyboard shortcut.
But across the breadth of state law, that’s a big bureaucratic challenge. West Springfield Rep. Michael Finn said last November that he remembers asking House staff at one point why the bill had never gone anywhere.
“It seemed like a no-brainer to me that this is something we should be doing for dignity for all individuals across the Commonwealth,” Finn said. “And it was told to me that the work still needed to be done, and I was unclear what that meant, but what it meant was we needed to go through the entire statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and find every instance that any word that we were talking about was mentioned.”
And once they identified all those places, lawmakers needed to make sure changing the words wouldn’t have downstream effects, like changing who’s eligible for a state service. Another hurdle is that even though the House and Senate have both been interested in doing this, in recent years the two chambers have not prioritized it simultaneously. And so it’s gotten lost in the shuffle during the end-of-session rush, when lawmakers are trying to finish many things at once.
That end-of-session frenzy is approaching again as Beacon Hill nears a traditional July 31 deadline. The Legislature meets in two-year terms, so the last two times this date came around — July 2024 and 2022 — lawmakers pulled all-nighters and still had to keep working later in the year to wrap up big bills, a process that becomes more politically complicated. A lot of smaller bills fall by the wayside when that happens.
In 2025, when the current term started, lawmakers were thinking of both the chaos of the previous July and the ballot question calling for an audit of the Legislature. They passed a series of internal reforms aimed at making their operations more efficient and transparent. Part of that is softening the July 31 deadline — they do not have to have bills totally finished by then; they just have to be in the final negotiation stage between the House and Senate to stay alive.
We are seeing a burst of activity now to pass bills through the House and the Senate so they can at least get the dealmaking formally started in the next six weeks.
So what takes so long to get bills to these final steps? Part of it is that the Legislature moves slowly by design. Top lawmakers will tell you it’s a deliberative body, and it’s their job to make policy that reflects time spent considering outcomes and hearing from all sides.
On top of that, there are bandwidth questions. Most of the year, the House and Senate each choose to meet in formal session one day a week, which limits the number of bills they can debate. And we heard some Democrats in the House make the case recently that the fight over the legislative audit is taking up all the oxygen and keeping lawmakers from diving into the issues. But there’s always something big that crowds out many of the thousands of bills filed each session, whether it’s that, a shelter capacity crisis, or responding to federal funding cuts.
And even though Democrats control both the House and Senate, they usually do not agree on what rises to the top. Each side has its own policy priorities and may not feel as strongly about taking up a particular bill — until time gets short and they start thinking about trades.
