A man accused of firing a gun and hitting several homes this weekend in Plymouth, Massachusetts, faced a judge Monday.
Joshua Fitzgerald, a 25-year-old Plymouth man, was arrested Saturday after authorities said a fight outside a bar led him to shoo…
Massachusetts
Many young people ready to leave Boston area, survey finds
With the region already grappling with workforce shortages, a quarter of young professionals living in Greater Boston intend to move elsewhere over the next five years as they navigate their career prospects and housing affordability, a new survey rel…
Here’s why abortion will be such a big issue for the ballot come November
One thing we’ve heard from leaders of both parties in the last few years – abortion is on the ballot this November.
The issue of abortion has been front and center since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. Since then voters in a number of states, including Vermont, Kansas and California have approved abortion rights measures.
In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion rights drove women to the polls, which resulted in surprising success for Democrats. President Joe Biden and the Democrats think it could work to their advantage come November.
Rebecca Hart Holder is with the group Reproductive Equity Now. She says the issue is galvanizing for Democrats.
“Vote. That is what we have to do, “ Hart Holder told NBC10 Boston. “We have to turn out and vote and make our voices heard.”
It’s also an issue for young voters.
A recent poll from Harvard’s Institute of Politics found that 18 to 29-year-olds were twice as likely to describe themselves as pro-choice, and 69% of women 18 to 29 and 55% of young men say access to reproductive health care is important when choosing which state to call home.
“I think it really gets to the salience of this issue in the everyday lives of people, “Hart Holder told NBC10. “People don’t want government telling them what to do in their private lives. “
But former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been doubling down.
The New York Times recently reported that he privately supports a 16-week abortion ban. And last year, Trump took credit for appointing the conservative Supreme Court justices, saying on social media “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”
Since Roe was overturned, more than a dozen states put abortion limits in place.
Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, says abortion will be a big issue this fall.
“What Dobbs did was remove, at the Supreme Court level, the issue of abortion and return it to the states,” Maloney Flynn told NBC10 Boston. “So the people in a truly Democratic process get to make their own laws.”
Maloney Flynn said the Women’s Health Protection Act, which is based by Biden, is too extreme.
“That legislation would essentially eliminate any pro-life protections that have been passed across the country since Dobbs in 2022,” she said.
Democrats and supporters of that bill say it will protect the right to access abortion care nationwide.
And the issue is even more complicated for Republicans following the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on IVF saying frozen embryoes are human beings, and those who destroy them can be held liability.
Trump has said he would support the availability of IVF.
School bus crashes into home in Dorchester
One person was taken to the hospital after a school bus crashed into a building in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood Monday, according to police.
The bus crashed into a house at the corner of Claridge Terrace and Wentworth Street around 4:40 p…
SUV crashes onto roof on sidewalk in Stoneham
An SUV crashed and landed on its roof on a sidewalk in Stoneham, Massachusetts, Monday.
It wasn’t immediately clear if anyone was hurt in the crash on Maple Street or how it happened.
NBC10 Boston has reached out to Stoneham police and fir…
Inside Copley Square’s 1st major facelift in decades: What to expect
Copley Square — one of Boston’s most beloved public spaces — is getting a major facelift, the likes of which haven’t been seen in nearly four decades.
The city is in the process of renovating Copley Square Park, a complex project seeking to make the Back Bay plaza “even more human,” according to project manager B Chatfield, with upgrades that still maintain what people have loved about Copley for decades.
Improvements to the park will include updates to the fountain, new lawn and planting areas, an elevated seating area called the Raise Grove, lighting and updated pathways and plaza space, according to the city.
The project is expected to be done by the end of the year. The project’s budget is nearly $17 million.
“It’s a square that people feel a lot of connection about,” Chatfield said. “It serves as a neighborhood park as well as a citywide destination. And so, trying to get an understanding of how the site is used by protestors and marchers and where big events are set up, versus what happens on a daily basis with people coming out of the Hancock Tower.
“I think the designers worked a longtime to try and accommodate those scales of activities,” she continued.
Chatfield said that the last time Copley Square Park got an update this significant was in the 1980s.
“It echoed a lot of those lines of trees and rectilinear layout,” Chatfield said. “It’s not exactly historic. It’s always playing nice with the historic fabric around it. And we figured we would continue to play nice but respond a little bit more — I think better — to human use and trying to make this a space where people could make their own.
“And what we’re doing now, we’re increasing the planting areas, so making it softer in that regard and I think we’re still pushing it in that direction of making it even more human,” she continued.
You can watch Chatfield discuss the Copley Square Park renovations in the video at the top of this story.
The city provides more information about the project on this webpage.
