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☂️Gray and rainy with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 8:24 p.m.
A judge will not extend a temporary harassment prevention order that a teenager from Brockton obtained against Mayor Moises Rodrigues two weeks ago. The teenager, who GBH News is not naming, testified in court that the mayor pulled her by the waist as she was playing music in a parade and, when she tried to pull away, he pulled her back toward him.
“He was very close to me and made me quite uncomfortable,” the student said. She said it “triggered past feelings of a past situation where I felt my space was violated.”
Judge Scott D. Peterson said he found Rodrigues’ conduct “unwelcome, offensive, and certainly unprofessional,” and told Rodrigues not to have future contact with the teenager. But Peterson did not extend the order because, he said, it did not meet the legal standard for assault and battery or for three instances of willful and malicious conduct. GBH’s Adam Reilly has more from the hearing here. A second teenager has also accused Rodrigues of inappropriately touching her.
Four things to know:
1. Embrace Boston, the organization behind the memorial to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King on the Boston Common, is planning to open a new civic center near Downtown Crossing named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
“There’s going to be a black box theater. There’s going to be a gallery there,” said Imari Paris Jeffries, Embrace Boston’s executive director. “Art and culture is how we communicate, is how we sense-make. We’re in negotiation with a couple of companies that I know that you know and you go to them, we all go to them, which will call the new place their home.” Jeffries said he’d like to open the center by 2030, 400 years after Boston’s founding. We have a rendering of the center here.
2. The average price of a gallon of regular gas is down to $4.057, according to AAA. Prices rose to an average of about $4.50 a gallon because of U.S. attacks on Iran, and have been falling for about three weeks, said Mark Schieldrop, a spokesperson for AAA Northeast.
Prices are unlikely to fall back to where they were last summer, when a gallon averaged about $3.05, he said. But there might be some price variation, so check out what different gas stations in your area are charging. “Right now in Massachusetts, some of the wholesale clubs are selling at $3.60 a gallon or so. So we’re talking 30, almost 40 cents below what the statewide average is,” Schieldrop said.
3. The highest court in Massachusetts is allowing a ballot question that would replace partisan preliminary elections with an all-party primary to move forward. Right now, Democrats and Republicans each compete in their own primaries for statewide office; under this initiative, every candidate would appear on one ballot, and the top two vote-getters would advance to the general election.
Two officials in the Massachusetts Democratic Party — last year’s platform chair Martina Jackson and Democratic State Committee member Ann Roosevelt — sued over the ballot question, arguing that it should be excluded for interfering with the right to vote and to seek office. Members of the Supreme Judicial Court found that it did not.
4. After Holyoke’s city council voted to ban all data centers last week, a Boston-based company that was hoping to build one there said it is looking for another location. Councilors voted 9 to 4, with those in favor of the ban saying they worry about how much power and water data centers use.
“Usually [data centers] are in the areas of the country that really need help with their tax base,” said Benjamin Marshall, co-managing director of Chestnut River Power and Infrastructure. “Then we try to go to those locations and pull all the pieces together to make the right-sized data center for the community.”
Parents push for newborn screening bill to ‘change the course of children’s lives’
Vanessa and Peter Colleran weren’t thinking about cytomegalovirus (CMV) until just before their son Logan’s birth in 2017.
“The first time I even heard it mentioned was about a week before I had him,” Vanessa Colleran told GBH’s Katie Lannan. “I was having an ultrasound and I was told by the doctor that something was very wrong.”
In most people, the virus causes no symptoms. But for infants and fetuses infected before birth, it can be more serious. One in five babies diagnosed with CMV will have long-term health problems or hearing loss. Logan, born at 27 weeks gestation, was diagnosed five days after birth and died at the age of four months.
The Collerans joined a group of doctors and other parents pushing for more routine screening for CMV in newborns. The virus affects about one in every 200 babies, and treatment is available. Last month, Peter Colleran FaceTimed his wife with good news: the Massachusetts House passed a bill that would require doctors to screen every baby born in the state.
“It not only matters because it’s important for families to know why their child has hearing loss, but it matters because CMV can be prevented,” said Dr. Michael Cohen, who works at the Multidisciplinary Pediatric Hearing Loss Clinic at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. “It can be treated with medication if given early enough, and it has to be treated early and diagnosed early to even know that CMV is the cause.”
Read more about the new guidelines here.
Dig deeper:
-‘Very validating’: Local doctors, patients react to PCOS name change
-‘Toy Story 5’ gets at something very real: It’s hard to keep kids off screens in summer
-Want to improve your agility? Try these exercises that combine speed and strength
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