Massachusetts
Massachusetts State House working last minute to pass bills ahead of Wednesday deadline
BOSTON – The Massachusetts State House is typically quiet on Fridays but not this week, as state lawmakers work to push major pieces of legislation to the governor’s desk, including a possible return of Happy Hour.
“This place is going to be buzzing”
“I think for the next five days, this place is going to be buzzing,” State Sen. Barry Finegold told WBZ-TV from his Statehouse office. Buzzing with fellow legislators, lobbyists and stressed-out staffers racing to beat the Wednesday deadline. “We’re very hopeful that it’s going to get done.”
Republican State Rep. Marc Lombardo is frustrated by the procrastination, pointing to the House, Senate and corner office being dominated by Democrats. “It’s a tornado of activity that really doesn’t have to wait until the last week of July,” he said.
The House and Senate have until Wednesday to hammer out their differences on key bills. Bills that don’t get voted out of conference committee essentially “die” on Beacon Hill.
Finegold heads the Joint Economic Development Committee, working on a multi-billion-dollar package that could pave the way for a new soccer stadium in Everett for the New England Revolution.
Will Happy Hour come back to Massachusetts?
How about bringing Happy Hour back to Massachusetts?
“We’re hopeful to get that passed as well,” Finegold explained. “We do have a lot of younger people in our city and throughout Massachusetts and we want to do things that we think they’ll like.”
While Rep. Lombardo can see how this could help the economy, he’s not a fan of the last-minute rush to the finish line.
He said lawmakers are “expected to read bills very quickly as they come out of conference committee…hundreds of pages of documents and yet forced to get a vote because we’ve waited to the last moment to put things on the floor.”
Complex legislation, packed with all sorts of line items.
The CEO of Boston Pads is watching the housing bill closely as lawmakers debate whether or not to ban broker’s fees for renters.
“These agents spend a lot of timing calling all day. It’s not uncommon for them to show an apartment at eight or even nine o’clock at night,” said Demetrios Salpoglou.
It’s a vote that he said could have crippling impacts on the real estate industry in Massachusetts.
This is just a glimpse of the mad rush and closed-door negotiations at the State House.
“This is what it takes,” Finegold said. “We have to get things done.”
Massachusetts
Massachusetts arrested over sword-wielding, threats to Donald Trump | The Jerusalem Post
A Massachusetts man accused of making threats on Facebook to kill United States President Donald Trump was arrested on Wednesday after a stand-off with law enforcement in which the man began brandishing a sword.
Andrew Emerald, 45, was charged in an eight-count indictment filed in federal court in Springfield, Massachusetts, over a string of threatening posts he allegedly made last year, including one in which he vowed to travel to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida if the president was not dead by 2026.
“Either Trump is dead and in the ground by 2026, or I am hunting him down and putting him there,” Emerald wrote in another social media post in May 2025, according to the indictment.
A lawyer for Emerald did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
His Facebook posts came to the FBI’s attention as a result of a tip from a citizen who had warned Emerald that it was a crime to threaten the life of the president, according to documents prosecutors filed seeking to have him detained.
Emerald replied that he had been threatening Trump online for a decade and that, if law enforcement came after him, “I’ll kill them until they kill me,” according to an affidavit from an FBI agent.
When the FBI on Wednesday went to his residence in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to execute an arrest warrant, Emerald refused to come out before eventually stepping into view brandishing a long, metallic sword, the affidavit said.
The FBI agent said Emerald had previously referenced his sword in Facebook posts threatening Trump, including in July 2025, when he said he would stick it through the president’s throat.
Emerald told agents they would need to shoot him before locking his door, the FBI agent recounted.
Local police and an FBI crisis negotiation team were called in. He finally agreed to be arrested after a police officer reached him on his phone, the FBI agent’s affidavit said.
Massachusetts
Jewish families in western Massachusetts get ready for Passover
CHICOPEE, Mass. (WWLP) – Jewish families in western Massachusetts and across the world are preparing to observe the eight-day festival of Passover starting at sundown Wednesday. The holiday commemorates the biblical story of Exodus and the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt.
The festival is also known as Pesach and the Festival of Unleavened Bread, according to the National Day Calendar. Its date changes annually because it is set according to the first full moon in the Hebrew calendar month of Nissan.
The roots of the holiday are found in the Old Testament. While traditionally a Jewish observance, many Christians have also begun participating in Passover celebrations.
The holiday starts with the Passover Seder, which is a ritual feast. The event includes reading, singing, washing hands, drinking wine, and eating specific foods.
A traditional Seder meal includes roasted lamb, flatbread called matzah, bitter herbs like horseradish, and vegetables dipped in saltwater. These items are arranged on a Seder plate.
The food and wine are ingested in a specific order during the meal. The procedure is written in a book called the Haggadah, which also includes the consumption of four cups of wine.
All facts in this report were gathered by journalists employed by WWLP. Artificial intelligence tools were used to reformat information into a news article for our website. This report was edited and fact-checked by WWLP staff before being published.
Local News Headlines
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Massachusetts
Artemis II crew will use laser communications developed in Massachusetts on trip around the moon
The countdown is on for Artemis II and its crew’s historic liftoff Wednesday evening. The mission will mark NASA’s first piloted flight to the moon in 53 years.
Attached to the Orion spacecraft the four astronauts will take around the moon, is a key piece of technology developed over decades in Lexington, Massachusetts.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Researchers and developers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory designed and built optical communication systems, which use lasers instead of traditional radio frequencies to transmit information.
“With laser communications, we’re able to deliver a lot more data with a lot less power and with much smaller terminals,” explained Jade Wang, Assistant Group Leader of Optical and Quantum Communications at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
The technology marks a major leap from the RF systems used during the Apollo missions decades ago. Researchers say those older systems created limits on how much and how reliably data could be sent back to Earth during flight.
“The in-flight instrumentation is a huge bottleneck [on newer spacecrafts], and without laser communications, all of that data that’s critical to the safety and the health of the astronauts wouldn’t be as readily available,” said Steve Gillmer, Assistant Group Leader of Structural and Thermo-Fluids Engineering at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
4K video in space
The new system is expected to provide a faster, more seamless flow of critical data, including 4K video upload and download as well as other capabilities. In a sense those grainy videos of the moon from the 60s and 70s will truly be a thing of the past.
“The way I eventually described it to my friends was I was working to make communications in space more like, bring the internet so astronauts could view cat videos for instance, and to have the experience in space that they currently enjoy at home,” said Wang.
Beyond Artemis II, researchers say technology will play a vital role in the future of deep space exploration. NASA plans to have a moon-landing flight in 2028.
“Artemis is just the first step. Ultimately, we are hoping to send people to Mars for exploration there, and this same of technology is required to kind of provide the amount of data and services that we need for that kind of exploration,” Wang added.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory is owned and operated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology but serves as the largest federally funded R&D tasked with developing advanced technology for the DoW, U.S. government agencies and non-DoW organizations such as NASA, the FAA, and NOAA.
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