BOSTON — Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration is increasing the amount of funding available to help low-income residents pay their heating bills.
The announcement comes after several lawmakers and advocates for the poor objected to the administration’s initial decision to release only $11 million of the $30 million in heating assistance authorized by the Legislature last month.
The Department of Housing and Community Development said in a Tuesday email that it had agreed to release $19 million, with the remaining $11 million to be saved for use during next year’s heating season.
The Union of Minority Neighborhoods and other advocates gathered at the Statehouse on Tuesday to urge the Republican governor to release the full amount immediately. The said the state money was needed to offset cuts in a federal heating assistance program.
NORTH ANDOVER — A former NHL star is apologizing for crossing a picket line to shop at a supermarket where workers are on strike.
Former Boston Bruins and Colorado Avalanche defenseman Ray Bourque was caught on video exiting a North Andover Stop & Shop on Monday as a worker said “Shame on you.”
Thousands of Stop & Shop workers at 240 stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island went on strike last week over what they say is an unfair contract proposal.
Bourque, a 22-year member of the NHL players’ union, apologized on Twitter.
He said he had a “medical condition that I was preparing for” and “mistakenly crossed the picket line.” He promised to walk the picket line in solidarity with Stop & Shop workers once his medical issue is resolved.
WELLFLEET — Organizers of an effort to raise $200,000 to buy a pair of shark-detecting sonar buoys to deploy off Cape Cod say they will return $36,000 already raised because it’s too late to install them this year.
Heather Doyle and Ashley Penn launched the effort and named it the Arthur Clever Buoy Pilot after Arthur Medici, the 26-year-old Revere man killed in a great white shark attack last September off Wellfleet.
Doyle tells the Cape Cod Times that because they couldn’t come through on their promise to deploy the buoys by this summer they felt the funds should be returned to the donors.
She says they also had trouble getting a town or the Cape Cod National Seashore to agree to install the system.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A Rhode Island man faces up to five years in prison after pleading guilty to illegal firearms sales.
Federal and local authorities say 21-year-old Diosvany Cabreja Renosa pleaded guilty Monday to selling two guns, one with an obliterated serial number to a local person, and another to an undercover law enforcement official who lives out-of-state.
The Providence man sold someone a 9mm pistol with an obliterated serial number last April and then in November sold an undercover ATF agent, who lives in Massachusetts, a semi-automatic rifle with a drum magazine.
According to ATF records, Reynosa is not a federally licensed firearms dealer.
MYSTIC, Conn. — Addressing the problems caused by dams is still the biggest challenge facing the recovery of the Atlantic salmon.
That’s at the core of a presentation a federal fisheries biologist is scheduled to deliver to a regulatory board on Tuesday in Connecticut. Dan Kircheis of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be speaking to the New England Fishery Management Council during its meeting in Mystic.
Atlantic salmon were once abundant in U.S. rivers, but now they only return to a handful in Maine. They’re on the endangered species list in America. Kircheis will be talking about a recovery strategy for the fish on Tuesday.
The salmon also face fishing pressure off of Greenland, a warming ocean and pollution in rivers. Governments declared 2019 the International Year of the Salmon.
From Associated Press