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Shrewsbury High School Robotics Team mentor faces child pornography charges

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

A mentor for Shrewsbury High School was charged Monday in connection to child pornography charges, federal prosecutors announced.Brian Lingard, 60, of Shrewsbury, allegedly possessed and transported child pornography when earlier this month, he flew from Paris to Boston. Investigators found child sexual abuse material on his phone, including 23 images depicting children under the age of 10, prosecutors allege. Investigators also said they found videos of girls as young as 3 years old.His phone also contained multiple pictures taken surreptitiously of fully clothed girls’ buttocks in what appears to be a school setting, allegedly in Shrewsbury High School according to GPS data. Lingard was the mentor for the Shrewsbury High School Robotics Team as a volunteer since 2013, the superintendent of Shrewsbury Public Schools said in a statement. Superintendent Joe Sawyer also noted that Lingard passed all background checks and never accessed the school’s technology system. “While the U...

Victim identified in deadly Worcester State University shooting

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

Officials on Monday publicly identified the 19-year-old killed in a shooting on the campus of Worcester State University over the weekend.The shooting happened at 2:30 a.m. Saturday and initially prompted a shelter-in-place order. Officials said Worcester State University Police soon responded to the shooting scene where they found two men with gunshot wounds.Officials said a fight led to the shooting. A 19-year-old now identified Randy Armando Melendez Jr. of Southbridge later died of his injuries at a local hospital. A 21-year-old man wounded in the shooting appeared to have non-life-threatening injuries as of Sunday afternoon, according to the Worcester County District Attorney’s office.Melendez Jr.’s stepmother Sashira Belfort shared a statement on Monday, saying “Our son was a great kid – hardworking – who loved being around friends and family.”“He loved spending his spare time at home and with his family,” Belfort continued. “We are going through the hardest time o...

Not So Spooky Halloween

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

Mother Nature had a case of the Mondays today with cloudy skies, rain, and cooler temperatures to kick off the week. While the sun may come back tomorrow, temperatures will head the other direction! The rain we had today was all thanks to a cold front and man, it’s a potent one! While we’ll break into almost clear blue skies tomorrow, temperatures will struggle to make it to 50°!The good news for the kiddos trick-or-treating tomorrow is you won’t have to worry about any rain gear! That said it will be chilly, so you’ll probably want a layer or two underneath the costumes. With clear skies and light wind, temperatures will fall pretty quickly. The light wind will be nice so there’s not a wind chill, but clear skies and light wind are what we need for temperatures to drop like a rock. And when you only start in the 40s, it’ll be a quick drop to the 30s tomorrow evening.Whether it’s the cold rain today, or the the chilly temperatures tomorrow, ...

Boston braces for ‘new reality’ of more serious flooding

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

Following a summer of flood events that rocked the East Coast, Boston needs to take concrete steps towards flood prevention and mitigation, advocates say.New approaches could include: requiring that landlords inform potential renters of a property’s flooding history, piloting a program to insure low-income families, capturing federal money to retrofit buildings to reduce risk and re-imagining the Interstate 90 redevelopment through Allston/Brighton.“The reality is that climate change is here now, we don’t have any doubt about that,” said Boston City Councilor Liz Breadon, who co-sponsored a public hearing Monday on stormwater management and flood hazard mitigation. “This is our new reality — increased frequency of intense rainstorms. In Allston/Brighton, heavy rainfall flooded Commonwealth Ave., it shut down the T and we had cases of below-grade apartments flooding.”The state’s most recent Statewide Hazard Mitigation and Climate Adapta...

MIAA Statewide Volleyball Tournament Pairings

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

MIAA STATEWIDE VOLLEYBALL PAIRINGSDIVISION 1SEEDS: 1. Newton North (20-1); 2. Haverhill (17-1); 3. Barnstable (17-3); 4. Shrewsbury (16-4); 5. Needham (14-3); 6. Andover (17-3); 7. Newton South (15-3); 8. Bishop Feehan (17-3); 9. Belmont (17-2); 10. Franklin (16-2); 11. Natick (10-6); 12. Brookline (13-7); 13. Attleboro (13-6); 14. Acton-Boxboro (11-6); 15. Boston Latin (13-5); 16. Wellesley (11-7); 17. Peabody Veterans (18-2); 18. King Philip Regional (12-8); 19. Methuen (13-7); 20. Winchester (11-9); 21. Chelmsford (13-7); 22. Lexington (12-8); 23. Wachusett Regional (10-10); 24. Lincoln-Sudbury (7-13); 25. Concord-Carlisle (9-11); 26. North Andover (8-11); 27. Plymouth North (13-7); 28. Central Catholic (7-13); 29. Westford Academy (5-13); 30. Quincy (9-13); 31. Springfield Central (6-13); 32. Arlington (6-14); 33. Diman RVT (17-1); 34. Brockton (11-8); 35. Malden (11-9); 36. Everett (10-8)PRELIMINARY ROUND – TBAGAME 1 – Diman at ArlingtonGAME 2 – Everett at Westford AcademyGAME ...

Raises drive deals to end strikes at automakers

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

DETROIT — Facing the loss of another $200 million this week to a lengthy strike, General Motors CEO Mary Barra wrapped up her weekend by going to the United Auto Workers’ Detroit headquarters intent on getting a new contract.Joined by manufacturing chief Gerald Johnson at the meeting that started late Sunday, they were able to close a deal with UAW President Shawn Fain and other bargainers early Monday that should end a contentious six-week work stoppage, three people briefed on the matter said Monday.The tentative deal capped a furious few days of agreements that still need to be ratified by 146,000 UAW members at GM, Ford and Jeep-maker Stellantis. Ford agreed to a new contract last week and was followed by Stellantis on Saturday, which raised the pressure on GM to settle for essentially the same terms.All three companies agreed to raise general wages by 25% for top assembly plant workers and add cost of living adjustments that would bring their pay increases to over 30% by ...

2 weeks, 11 national parks, 3,350 miles: Savor the Southwest on the Grand Circle road trip

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

Julia Carmel | Los Angeles Times (TNS)LOS ANGELES — There are 63 national parks in the United States, but at the start of 2023, I’d made it to only one.So when my partner, Reanna, bought us tickets to see Big Thief and Lucinda Williams at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, we had an exciting (though surely unoriginal) idea: What if we made it a road trip?As I began researching the best routes from Los Angeles to Denver, I found variations of what’s been called the Grand Circle road trip, a loop of national parks that typically spans Utah, Colorado and Arizona. It’s popular for its efficiency: If you plan well, you can hit the Southwest marvels of Zion, Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon in about two weeks. Because we’d be driving through California regardless, our own Grand Circle route expanded into an oblong shape — not quite an oval, but perhaps a seal balancing a ball on its nose.Arizona’s majestic Grand Canyon. (Josemaria Toscano/Dreamstime/TNS)Over the course of 12 days, we...

Gen Z is turned off by onscreen sex, wants no-mance over romance, a new study finds

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

Emily St. Martin | Los Angeles Times (TNS)LOS ANGLES — The youth of America have spoken, and when it comes to sex onscreen, they say “ewwwww.”The new UCLA “Teens and Screens” study, conducted by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, found that across 1,500 members of Gen Z, ages 10 to 24, young people wanted to see platonic relationships between onscreen characters, and many felt sex wasn’t necessary for story plot. (Only the respondents ages 13 to 24 were asked about sexual content.)“While it’s true that teens want less sex on TV and in movies, what the survey is really saying is that teens want more and different kinds of relationships reflected in the media they watch,” said Yalda T. Uhls, founder and director of CSS, co-author of the study and adjunct professor in UCLA’s Department of Psychology.The survey found that adolescents want to see “lives like (their) own” depicted onscreen and crave “authenticity.” Teens...

Demons, killer sloths, analog terror: The 13 best new horror movies to stream this Halloween

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

Jen Yamato | (TNS) Los Angeles TimesFire up the Ghoul Log and get ready to scare yourself silly: Spooky season has arrived.This year has seen no shortage of horror as Hollywood dug deeper into the fright business, reanimating the “Saw,” “Scream” “Evil Dead” and “The Exorcist” franchises while indie chillers like “Talk to Me” and the microbudget “Skinamarink” helped fuel the fear. (Wanna feel old? “M3GAN” came out nine months ago.)Now, in time for Halloween, there’s a candy cornucopia of new horror fare at your fingertips.Hungry for shows to binge? Mike Flanagan’s gothic “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Netflix), R.L. Stine adaptation “Goosebumps” (Disney+ and Hulu) and “Living for the Dead” (Hulu), in which queer ghost hunters visit haunted places for narrator-producer Kristen Stewart, are among a new crop of horror and thriller series.But if you’...

Kansas can’t enforce new law on abortion pills or make patients wait 24 hours, judge rules

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:12:51 GMT

By JOHN HANNA (AP Political Writer)TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas judge on Monday put a new state law on medication abortions on hold and blocked older restrictions that for years have spelled out what providers must tell patients and forced patients to wait 24 hours to end their pregnancies.The ruling was another big victory for abortion rights advocates in Kansas, where a statewide vote in August 2022 decisively confirmed protections for abortion access under the state constitution. District Judge K. Christopher Jayaram’s order suspends some restrictions that have been in effect for years. The waiting period had been in place since 1997.“The Court has great respect for the deeply held beliefs on either side of this contentious issue,” Jayaram wrote in his 92-page order. “Nevertheless, the State’s capacity to legislate pursuant to its own moral scruples is necessarily curbed by the Kansas Constitution and its Bill of Rights.”Jayaram’s o...