GBH Daily: ‘I want her to say sorry’

☀️Sweater weather: sunny with highs in the 50s. Sunset is at 6:16 p.m.

When Edna Wallace was 10 years old, her mother was dying of cancer and she was sent to live in an orphanage in Worcester. A nun there sexually assaulted her, she told GBH’s Chris Burrell. Wallace is now 67, and the orphanage has since shut down. But the nun who assaulted her, Wallace said, still lives in Massachusetts.

“I get into these little tear jerks a lot of times thinking about her because she’s running around free while I’m walking around in pain,” Wallace told Burrell. “I want her to say sorry. We need an apology from her. I know I’m probably not going to get it.”

Wallace is one of 216 people who say they survived sexual abuse by a member of the clergy in the Diocese of Worcester. While other Catholic dioceses in the area have released lists of credibly accused clergy, Worcester has not. “Lists should not be published of cases which have not been found guilty of a canonical crime,” Worcester Diocese spokesman Raymond Delisle told Burrell. Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell’s office found that 90 clergy members from the Worcester diocese had been accused of sexual assault.

“They need to come out [of] the closet and let all the people know what they have done,” Wallace told Burrell. You can read Burrell’s full story here.

Four Things to Know

1. Heating help: With oil and gas prices up sharply because of the U.S. war on Iran, Gov. Maura Healey yesterday announced that her administration will temporarily cut one fee the state usually adds to utility bills by 50% and eliminate another fee entirely for the next three months. State officials will use $80 million from the budget to cover the revenue those fees usually bring in.

Even with extra help, heating bills will be higher this winter. “There’s been so much damage to the worldwide infrastructure of petroleum products, how we get them,” said Michael Ferrante of the Massachusetts Energy Marketers Association. “Refineries have been damaged, pipelines have been damaged, so you’re going to see high prices, I think, through the winter.”

2. Baker endorses all-party primaries: Former Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, is endorsing a yes vote on Ballot Question 3 supporting all-party primaries. Former Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick is already on board — though the leadership of both of their parties oppose the measure. “All-party primaries will give voters more choice and our elected officials will have to reach across the aisle to voters from other parties if they want to be successful,” Baker said.

Right now, Massachusetts has a single-party primary system, with Democrats running against Democrats and Republicans against Republicans in primary elections. The top candidate from each race then competes in the general election. This ballot question would allow qualifying candidates from every political affiliation onto the same primary ballot, and the top two vote-getters would face off in the general election.

3. Does Downtown Boston feel safe? Reports of serious crimes such as homicides, rapes, assaults and robberies are down by 7% in the district that covers Downtown Boston and its surrounding neighborhoods, according to the city’s police department. But there has been violence in the area: three people shot in the Theatre District in June, a worker assaulted near Downtown Crossing in July and a man killed near Boylston and Tremont Streets.

People who live downtown don’t necessarily feel safer: 56% of residents who responded to a Downtown Boston Neighborhood Alliance survey said they feel less safe now than they did at the start of the year. “Perception is reality,” said Babak Bina, who owns Somaek and Willie’s restaurants in Downtown Crossing. “What we need to do is work on both fronts to continue to reduce any incidents, but also make sure that we can change the perception.”

4. Hindsight is batting 1.000: Red Sox leadership is looking back on a season in which the team staged a huge comeback, won 87 games, but still couldn’t get past the wild-card series.

“Are we proud that we got there based on where we were? 100%,” Manager Chad Tracy said. “Was that the goal? No. The goal was to win the World Series. That’s the goal of every single team going into every year. And only one of them is going to accomplish it. And if you don’t, you dust yourself off and start working on doing it again next year.”

A long-term trade war with Canada could hurt Massachusetts’ economy

What’s it like for local manufacturers caught in the middle of the trade war between the U.S. and Canada? GBH’s Marilyn Schairer talked to Jim Knott, the CEO of Riverdale Mills in Northbridge. His company takes steel rods, 70% of which are imported from Canada, and turns them into wire mesh for fences and lobster traps. They also export about 40% of their final products. “We’re living both sides of the picture,” he said.

“We’ve lost a tremendous amount of export business because of this,” he said. But: “We’ve picked up a lot of domestic business which had gone to China and other areas of the world.”

He estimated that the amount of money his company pays in tariffs increased from about $1 million in 2018 to close to $1.5 million in 2025.

“You have to adapt. And we adapted during the first administration, and I think we’re adapting well during this administration too,” he said.

Schairer talked to other business experts to explain how tariffs shape the economy around us here. 

Dig deeper: 

-How U.S.-Canada trade dispute is impacting both economies

-Soaring diesel prices squeeze Mass. farmers

-Will tariff war push Canada closer to China? A former U.S. ambassador to Canada explains