| ⛅ Partly cloudy, with a high near 21 and wind chills a low as -6. |
The snow has finally stopped. According to the National Weather Service, Boston ended up getting a total of 23.2 inches, making this snowstorm the eighth-largest in the city's recorded history. Mayor Michelle Wu lifted the city's snow emergency and parking ban at 8 p.m. last night. (That means you can keep using space savers in the neighborhoods that allow them until 8 p.m. on Wednesday.) Now to the news: Knee deep: It's another snow day for Boston and many surrounding public school districts, as the region continues to dig out. For the adults heading back to work, state officials are warning that the commute in the near future could be tricky. - Icy roads: Massachusetts Highway Administrator Jonathan Gulliver says icy conditions will remain a risk, with temperatures expected to stay below freezing through the rest of the week. "We will have crews out periodically over the coming week to make sure that we're putting treatment down to try to reduce that black ice that you're likely to see first thing in the morning," Gulliver told reporters yesterday. "That's going to be on both local roadways, and especially around places like intersections and entrance and on-ramps to our highways."
- Piling up: Snowbanks will also be a challenge, especially on local roads (as my supposedly two-way Somerville side street can testify). "The municipalities have a hard time with this much snow," Gulliver said. "There's no place to put it." With another possible winter storm eyeing us this weekend , crews are focusing on clearing road shoulders and drainage infrastructure, he said. "Things are going to be narrow for the next few days with those big snowbanks," Gulliver said. "But we're right now pushing those back and really trying to open up those roadways again."
- On track: The MBTA expects to run normal service this morning across all bus, subway and commuter rail lines. However, there may be some Hingham/Hull ferry cancellations due to ice and slush in Hingham harbor.
In court: A federal judge in Boston will hear arguments this afternoon on whether the developer behind Vineyard Wind should be allowed to resume construction. As WBUR's Miriam Wasser reports, the Trump administration brought the nearly complete 62-turbine offshore wind farm near Martha's Vineyard to a standstill last month over purported national security risks. But three other projects affected by the same pause have gotten court rulings allowing them to get back to work. - What to expect: The developers behind the three other farms successfully argued in court that the pause was just an excuse for the administration to stop an industry it doesn't like. (Vineyard Wind went through a yearslong vetting process that included the Defense Department before starting construction.) Kate Sinding Daly, a policy expert with the Conservation Law Foundation, said she expects Vineyard Wind to employ the same legal strategy. "I think it's highly likely that the developer here is going to make a similar argument that this is all pretextual — that this is an administration that has it out for wind," Daly said.
- Zoom out: Here's a map showing all the offshore wind projects off the coast of New England and their current legal status.
On the auction block: Three paintings by the late artist and longtime public TV host Bob Ross are going up for auction today in Marlborough. As WBUR's Katie Cole reports, Ross' company is putting the works up for sale to support public television, after Republicans in Congress revoked federal funding last year. - How much will they bring in? The paintings have been appraised at between $25,000 and $60,000, each. Robin Starr, the vice president of Bonhams Skinner auction house, said they could fetch even more. "Auction people are a little like baseball people, so we don't want to jinx things by saying what we think they're going to do, but I think we can assume they're going to do quite well," Starr said.
P.S.— Think you know everything about Taylor Swift? Think again. Our friends at Cognoscenti are hosting a CitySpace event tonight that will dive deep into the world of the pop icon with three local Swift experts who have dissected her music, brand and more. The show starts at 6:30 p.m., with doors at 5:30 p.m. Get tickets here! |
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| | | Nik DeCosta-Klipa Senior Editor, Newsletters | | |
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Gov. Maura Healey called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign and for federal immigration agents to leave cities like Minneapolis, after a U.S. Border Patrol officer fatally shot a VA nurse. Bristol County Sheriff Heroux also called for Noem to resign. Read more. |
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Senate Democrats say they are unwilling to fund the Department of Homeland Security without major reforms, raising the likelihood of a partial government shutdown at the end of this week. Read more. |
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Iran's bloody crackdown on nationwide protests killed at least 6,126 people while many others still are feared dead, activists said Tuesday, as a U.S. aircraft carrier group arrived in the Mideast to lead any American military response to the crisis. Read more. |
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In an interview with Here & Now’s Robin Young, Warren acknowledged that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last summer, left ICE “rolling in the dough” for the next three years. But she said Congress does have the power to take back the money. Read more. |
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Forty years after the Challenger disaster, NPR explores the engineers' last-minute efforts to stop the launch, their decades of guilt and the vital lessons that remain critical for NASA today. Read more. |
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- Six people were killed in the private jet crash Sunday night in Bangor, Maine. Experts expect the weather and questions about ice accumulating on the wings — which has happened at least twice before on the specific Bombardier Challenger 600 plane model — will be the focus of a federal investigation into the crash.
- At an apparel manufacturer in Maine, community members have been forming a human wall to protect immigrant workers from federal immigration agents as they arrive and leave for the day.
- George Saunders' new novel "Vigil" takes place over the course of the final earthly hours of a former oil company CEO who is visited by a spirit who comes to comfort him. In her review, critic Carol Iaciofano Aucoin writes that the book exhibits Saunders' rare ability to make you laugh and blink back tears within the same paragraph.
- Cognoscenti contributor Frederick Hewett says Gov. Maura Healey's recently announced plan to give Bay Staters a winter break on their utility bills is "a band-aid on a structural problem." "As things stand now, ratepayers bear the cost of the transition to clean energy on top of the cost to prop up the aging gas system," Hewett writes in the commentary . But he argues that failing to invest in the former would be even worse for residents' future utility bills.
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Nearly all of Massachusetts got at least a foot of snow Sunday. For lots of kids, that made Monday a sledding holiday. Read more. |
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