Massachusetts

USA: Florida, Texas escalate flights, buses to move migrants

EDGARTOWN, Mass. (AP) — Republican governors are escalating their partisan tactic of sending migrants to Democratic strongholds without advance warning, including a wealthy summer enclave in Massachusetts and the home of Vice President Kamala Harris, to taunt leaders of immigrant-friendly “sanctuary” cities and stoke opposition to Biden administration border policies.

USA: 3 charged with killing Boston gangster Whitey Bulger in 2018

BOSTON (AP) — Three men, including a Mafia hitman, have been charged in the 2018 prison killing of notorious Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Bulger’s death raised questions about why the known “snitch” was placed in the West Virginia prison’s general population instead of more protective housing.

A new leader in the Philippines, and a family’s old wounds

BOSTON (AP) — He was the uncle I never met. But in my family’s origin story, Emmanuel “Manny” Yap always loomed large.

The life of great potential cut short. The cautionary tale. But also the reminder of doing what was right, no matter the cost.

A rising leader in the youth-led opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Manny Yap joined his parents and siblings for lunch at his mother’s favorite Chinese restaurant in their hometown of Quezon City.

USA: Harvard University student newspaper endorses BDS movement

01 May 2022; MEMO: Harvard University's student-run daily newspaper has announced its support for and endorsement of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Israeli occupation, making it one of the most significant steps by an American university against the occupation.

Son of famed American artist charged in Jan. 6 Capitol riot

BOSTON (AP) — For years, Vincent Gillespie waged a legal battle to try to gain control of hundreds of paintings by his father — renowned postwar American artist Gregory Gillespie.

On Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutors say, Gillespie engaged in a very different kind of battle, joining rioters as they tried to wrest control of the U.S. Capitol from the federal government in one of the most violent confrontations of the riot.

Ukraine says potent Russian hack against power grid thwarted

BOSTON (AP) — Russian military hackers attempted to knock out power to millions of Ukrainians last week in a long-planned attack but were foiled, Ukrainian government officials said Tuesday.

At one power station, the hackers succeeded in penetrating and disrupting part of the industrial control system, but people defending the station were able to prevent electrical outages, the Ukrainians said.

USA: S&P downgrade indicates Russia headed for historic default

BOSTON (AP) — The credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has downgraded its assessment of Russia’s ability to repay foreign debt, signaling rising prospects that Moscow will soon default on external loans for the first time in more than a century.

S&P Global Ratings issued the downgrade to “selective default” late Friday after Russia arranged to make foreign bond payments in rubles on Monday when they were due in dollars. It said it didn’t expect Russia to be able to convert the rubles into dollars within the 30-day grace period allowed.

USA: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu hopes to transform her adopted city

BOSTON (AP) — When she was elected mayor of Boston in November, Michelle Wu transformed the image of the city’s chief executive — up until then the sole domain of white men, many of Irish descent.

Now in office, the Chicago-born daughter of Taiwanese immigrants is facing a raft of challenges, including making good on key campaign promises like creating a fare-free public transit system and blunting the city’s skyrocketing housing costs.

Wu, 37 and the mother of two, has also grappled with early morning protests outside her home and racist online taunts.

USA: War censorship exposes Putin’s leaky internet controls

BOSTON (AP) — Long before waging war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin was working to make Russia’s internet a powerful tool of surveillance and social control akin to China’s so-called Great Firewall.

So when Western tech companies began cutting ties with Russia following its invasion, Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov was alarmed. He’d spent years exposing Russian censorship and feared that well-intentioned efforts to aid Ukraine would instead help Putin isolate Russians from the free flow of information, aiding the Kremlin’s propaganda war.

Ukraine digital army brews cyberattacks, intel and infowar

BOSTON (AP) — Formed in a fury to counter Russia’s blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine’s hundreds-strong volunteer “hacker” corps is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence .

“We are really a swarm. A self-organizing swarm,” said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT executive at the center of Ukraine’s bootstrap digital army.

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