Police were conducting an investigation in a residential area of Easton, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, authorities said.
Officers were seen in the yard of a house on Summer Street near Black Brook Road, but it wasn’t immediately clear what bro…
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Driver high on meth led police on chase through multiple Mass. towns, authorities say
A driver accused of leading police on a chase through several towns and sending his truck flying through the air in an attempt to escape was high on methamphetamine, Massachusetts State Police said Wednesday.
The situation started around 3:30 p.m….
Employee charged with embezzling $650K from Brookline medical practice, using funds for luxury purchases
A Massachusetts woman is charged with embezzling over $650,000 from a Brookline medical practice and using the funds to pay off her personal purchases at Louis Vuitton, Bloomingdales, Best Buy, Target and travel-related websites, according to the U.S….
One T subway line now has no slow zones
There are now no slow zones on the entire length of the MBTA Blue Line, the transit agency announced Wednesday.
It’s the only T line with no speed restrictions, according to the MBTA’s slow zone dashboard.
Two weeks ago, there were 16 restrictions on the Blue Line, limiting trains’ speed on 38% of the line. But the agency closed down one stretch of the line for track work over a few weeks and used a full shutdown this weekend to finish it up.
The T says the work has sped up travel on the Blue Line by three minutes.
MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng and MBTA Chief Operating Officer Ryan Coholan were set to hold a news conference Wednesday afternoon to discuss the update.
There are 95 speed restrictions across the rest of the T as of Wednesday: 54 on the Red Line (18% of the track), 31 on the Orange Line (17% of the track) and 10 on the Green Line (2% of the track). The MBTA says that it’s the first time in over a year that there are fewer than 100 speed restrictions across the system.
Slow zones are put in place for sections of track where it’s not considered safe to run trains at full speed because of wear and tear on the track. The MBTA has targeted those areas for repairs.
Eng has released a plan aimed at removing all MBTA slow zones by the end of the year.
More on MBTA slow zones
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Art Institute debt relief affects 3,500 in Mass.
The Biden administration approved over $80 million in debt relief on Wednesday to more than 3,500 Massachusetts borrowers who attended the Art Institutes, including the New England Institute of Art in Brookline.
The federal debt relief for Bay Staters is part of a $6.1 billion student loan relief package to 317,000 borrowers who attended Art Institute campuses around the country.
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the relief is targeted to borrowers who were “cheated by their college.”
“Schools that use flashy marketing materials and high-pressure recruiting tactics to sell higher education is equivalent to snake oil,” he said on a press call. “Art Institute engaged in widespread and sustained practices that misled borrowers about the value of their degree, their ability to find jobs.”
Cardona said Art Institute advertised that over 80% of graduates got jobs in their field, though they “knew that wasn’t true.”
“They also lied about the salaries that graduates earned. School staff admitted to making up salary information,” he said. “They used the earnings of celebrities whose millions had nothing to do with Art Institute to their averages, including the income of tennis great Serena Williams.”
Students and parents of students who enrolled in Art Institutes on or after Jan. 1, 2004 through Oct. 16, 2017 are eligible for debt relief.
The announcement follows a 2018 lawsuit filed by Massachusetts’ attorney general’s office, which alleged, among other things, that New England Institute of Art and owner Education Management Corporation violated the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act by misrepresenting the likelihood of job placement to prospective students in order to induce enrollment.
In 2019, Suffolk Superior Court entered final judgment against NEIA and EDMC, ordering them to pay restitution of approximately $60 million plus interest based on the amount of tuition paid by NEIA students. They were also ordered to pay $11,765,000 in penalties. EDMC and NEIA filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
The relief represents one of the largest group discharges of student loans across the country to date, adding to the nearly $29 billion in debt relief the Biden administration has granted so far over the last three years.
“In Massachusetts alone, 930,000 borrowers owe nearly $32.5 billion in federal student loan debt; approximately 40 percent of these borrowers are 35 or older,” Attorney General Andrea Campbell said. “Even more alarming is the fact that many borrowers owe more today than they did when they originally borrowed, for instance of borrowers who first entered college in the 2003-2004 academic year, more than one third had a higher balance in 2015 than what they did when they originally borrowed.”
The group discharge will provide debt relief automatically to borrowers starting Wednesday. Borrowers do not need to take any action.
Historic sites in Concord are among most endangered in US, preservation group says
Minute Man National Historical Park, Walden Pond and other historic places near Concord, Massachusetts, are threatened by the planned expansion of a private airfield, according to a major preservation group.
The National Trust for Historic Preserva…
