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      Martha’s Vineyard Will Have Enough Pot This Summer

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      For the island’s cannabis dispensaries, a sudden change in regulations came just in time.Until recently, Geoff Rose, the proprietor of a cannabis business on Martha’s Vineyard, believed he was in for a bleak summer.That was because his marijuana dispensary, Island Time, had run out of product — and it seemed as if he would be unable to replace it during the busy tourist season on the 96-square-mile Massachusetts island that has long been a haven for vacationers.But on Thursday, state regulators issued an order that would allow cannabis products to be transported across the ocean to licensed businesses.Mr. Rose closed his shop — temporarily, as it turns out — on May 14. At the time, the display cases were empty. No gummies. No tinctures. No pre-rolls. The only item of interest to some of his customers was the chocolate.“I believe there were 14 chocolate bars left,” Mr. Rose said in a phone interview. “They were the last to be sold. More than 14 people came in. Some were disappointed: ‘I don’t want chocolates.’ But some said, ‘OK, I’ll take it.’”The shortage, first reported by The Associated Press, had to do with conflicting laws surrounding the sale and transport of marijuana.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On a Day of Graduations, Berkeley’s Protests Stand Out

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      At the University of California, Berkeley, hundreds of soon-to-be graduates rose from their seats in protest, chanting and disrupting their commencement. At Virginia Commonwealth University, about 60 graduates in caps and gowns walked out during Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s speech. At the University of Wisconsin, a handful of graduates stood with their backs to their chancellor as she spoke.After weeks of tumult on college campuses over pro-Palestinian protests, many administrators prepared themselves for disruptions at graduations on Saturday. And while there were demonstrations — most noisily, perhaps, at U.C. Berkeley — ceremonies at several universities unfolded without major incident. Many students who protested did so silently.Anticipating possible disruptions, university administrators had increased their security or taken various measures, including dismantling encampments, setting aside free speech zones, canceling student speeches and issuing admission tickets.Some administrators also tried to reach agreements with encampment organizers. The University of Wisconsin said it had reached a deal with protesters to clear the encampment in return for a meeting to discuss the university’s investments.Some students, too, were on edge about their big day — many missed their high school graduations four years ago because of the pandemic and did not want to repeat the experience.In 2020, David Emuze and his mother had watched his high school graduation “ceremony,” a parade of senior photos set to music on Zoom, from their living room in Springfield, Ill. This time, he and his classmates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign heard that other schools, like the University of Southern California and Columbia University, had canceled their main-stage commencements altogether because of campus unrest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Police Arrest M.I.T. Protesters After Suspensions Ramp Up Tension

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      Several protesters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were arrested on Thursday after blocking access to a parking garage on campus, a day after some students involved in the pro-Palestinian encampment there received notices of suspension from the university.University police arrested “fewer than 10” people, according to a statement posted Thursday night on M.I.T.’s emergency management website. It was unclear what charges they would face, and a university spokesperson declined to comment further.The university had set a Monday deadline for protesters to vacate the encampment on the Cambridge campus or face suspension. Since then, the M.I.T. administration has begun sending notices of suspension to students who it says defied the deadline. Administrators would not say how many students had been suspended.“This means you will be prohibited from participating in any academic activities — including classes, exams or research — for the remainder of the semester,” said a letter received by one student and viewed by a reporter. “You will also be prohibited from participating in commencement activities or any cocurricular or extracurricular activities.”The university had detailed the consequences of suspension in a letter to student protesters before the Monday deadline, making clear that those who had previously been disciplined “related to events since Oct. 7” would also be barred from university housing and dining halls.As an additional condition of suspension, some students also lost their eligibility to be employed by the university, a penalty that cut off the income of graduate student employees who were suspended.“I don’t know what comes next,” said Prahlad Iyengar, a first-year graduate student who said he had lost his income and housing as a result of his suspension. “I have friends and a community, and I can find a place, but there are people affected who are housing- and food-insecure, some with children.”M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, was one of three university leaders who were harshly criticized last year for their testimony in a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism. The other two, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned in the fallout.Although Ms. Kornbluth did not face the same level of criticism, hundreds of M.I.T. alumni signed a letter calling for the university to take stronger actions to combat campus antisemitism.In a letter to the campus on Monday, she wrote: “This prolonged use of M.I.T. property as a venue for protest, without permission, especially on an issue with such sharp disagreement, is no longer safely sustainable.” More

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      More Than 170 Protesters Arrested at Northeastern and Arizona State University

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      The police made arrests at Northeastern University, Arizona State and Indiana University on Saturday, as more schools move in on encampments protesting the war in Gaza.Nearly 200 protesters were arrested on Saturday at Northeastern University, Arizona State University and Indiana University, according to officials, as colleges across the country struggle to quell growing pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments on campus.More than 700 protesters have been arrested on U.S. campuses since April 18, when Columbia University had the New York Police Department clear a protest encampment there. In several cases, most of those who were arrested have been released. More

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      William Delahunt, former congressman of Massachusetts, dies aged 82

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      Longtime Democratic congressman William D Delahunt, who postponed his own retirement from Washington to help pass the Barack Obama presidency’s legislative agenda, has died after a long-term illness, his family announced.Delahunt died Saturday at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the age of 82, news reports said.Delahunt served 14 years in the US House, from 1997 to 2011, representing Massachusetts’s 10th congressional district. He also was the Norfolk county district attorney from 1975 to 1996 after serving in the Massachusetts state House from 1973 to 1975.The Delahunt family issued a statement Saturday saying he passed away “peacefully” but did not disclose his specific cause of death, news reports said.“While we mourn the loss of such a tremendous person, we also celebrate his remarkable life and his legacy of dedication, service, and inspiration,” the statement said. “We could always turn to him for wisdom, solace and a laugh, and his absence leaves a gaping hole in our family and our hearts.”Democratic US senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts lauded Delahunt’s long public service as a legislator in the nation’s capital and a prosecutor in a county south of Boston.“I met with Bill in Quincy in February, and he was clear and as committed as ever to working on behalf of the … people of Massachusetts,” Markey said in a statement. “It is a fitting honor that the door of the William D Delahunt Norfolk county courthouse opens every day so that the people inside can do the hard work of making lives better, as Bill Delahunt did.”President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela posted a statement on Twitter/X mourning Delahunt’s passing. As a member of Congress, Delahunt brokered a 2005 deal with then Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to obtain heating oil for low-income Massachusetts residents, according to news reports. Delahunt also attended Chavez’s state funeral in Caracas in March 2013.Delahunt stepped down from the US House in January 2011. He told the Boston Globe he had previously considered retirement, but the late Massachusetts US senator Ted Kennedy convinced him he was needed to help pass Obama’s legislative initiatives at the time.Delahunt was an early Obama backer. He became the first member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation to endorse the Illinois senator’s presidential bid, according to reporting by the Patriot Ledger, the newspaper in Delahunt’s home town, Quincy.Announcing his retirement in March 2010, Delahunt said Kennedy’s death the previous year turned his thoughts to finding time for priorities beyond Washington.“It became clear that I wanted to spend my time, the time that I have left, with my family, with my friends and with my loved ones,” Delahunt said. More

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      2 Ex-Officials at Veterans Home Where 76 Died in Covid Outbreak Avoid Jail Time

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      The former superintendent and medical director of the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Massachusetts were indicted in 2020 on charges of neglect after many residents became sick and died.Two former officials at a Massachusetts veterans’ home where at least 76 people died during a coronavirus outbreak in 2020 won’t have to serve any jail time under a court order imposed by a state judge on Tuesday, according to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.The two — Bennett Walsh, the former superintendent at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, Mass., and Dr. David Clinton, the former medical director there — were each indicted in September 2020 on five criminal counts of neglect, the attorney general’s office said.The charges were centered on a decision by the facility in March 2020 to consolidate two dementia units into one, which led to the “mingling” of residents who had contracted the coronavirus with others, the attorney general’s office said when the indictment was announced.The move to consolidate the units happened in the early days of the pandemic as many were just beginning to learn how the coronavirus spread. What followed was an outbreak that led to the deaths of at least 76 people at the facility.At a hearing on Tuesday afternoon at the Hampshire County Superior Court in Northampton, Mass., the attorney general’s office asked that Mr. Walsh and Dr. Clinton be sentenced to one year of home confinement, with three years of probation.Mr. Walsh and Dr. Clinton asked the court for a continuance without a finding, meaning that they would admit that there was enough evidence to find them guilty, according to the attorney general’s office.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Haitian Migrant in Massachusetts Is Charged With Raping a Teenager

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      The suspect and the 15-year-old were both living in a hotel that currently serves as a migrants shelter. The charge comes amid heightened scrutiny over America’s immigration policy. A Haitian migrant has been charged with raping a 15-year-old girl at a hotel serving as a migrant shelter in Massachusetts, authorities said Thursday.Cory B. Alvarez, 26, was arrested on Thursday and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment that day in Hingham District Court on one count of aggravated rape of a child. He entered the United States lawfully in June 2023 through New York, according to James Covington, a spokesman for the Enforcement and Removal Operations unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Boston. But it was unclear through which specific immigration program Mr. Alvarez entered the country. The charge comes as Boston and other cities grapple with questions over migrant housing and amid intense debate across the country over America’s immigration policy. The killing of a 22-year-old woman at the University of Georgia campus in February became a political flashpoint when a Venezuelan migrant was charged with the crime, with Republicans including former President Donald J. Trump blaming the death on President Biden’s policies. Such statements have struck many liberals as inflammatory rhetoric.National data has suggested that there is not a causal connection between immigration and crime in the country, and that growth in illegal immigration does not lead to higher local crime rates. Many studies have found that immigrants are less likely than people born in the United States to commit crimes.In the Massachusetts case, both Mr. Alvarez and the teenager, who is disabled, were living at the Comfort Inn in Rockland, a Boston suburb, according to the Rockland Police. It was not clear whether the girl was also a migrant.The Comfort Inn is part of a state and federal program to house migrant families, the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. There are about 7,500 families enrolled in the emergency shelter system across Massachusetts, with just under 3,900 of them in hotels or motels, according to government figures from Friday. In December, the state reported that just over 3,500 families receiving emergency assistance housing were migrants, refugees or asylum seekers. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Man who sent bomb threat to Arizona election officials jailed for 42 months

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      A Massachusetts man who threatened to blow up the secretary of state of Arizona in 2021 has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison, one of the most severe federal punishments yet handed down for the wave of violent threats against election officials unleashed by Donald Trump’s stolen election lie.James Clark, 38, was sentenced in federal district court in Phoenix on Tuesday to 42 months of imprisonment, to be followed by three years on probation. Judge Michael Liburdi said that his online bomb threat had inflicted “emotional and psychological trauma” on government employees and required a deterrent sentence to protect democracy.Liburdi remarked that there had been so many recent threats in Arizona against election officials that people were quitting their jobs. “If we do not have good people to fill these positions who are committed to the delivery of fair elections, we lose our ability to govern ourselves,” the judge said.The prosecution was handled under the auspices of the election threats task force, a specialist unit within the justice department. The task force was set up in 2021 in response to the plague of intimidation of election officials that has erupted since the former president made his baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.Tuesday’s sentence of three and a half years in prison is on a par with the previous harshest sentence secured by the task force. In August, Francis Goetz from Texas was given a similar punishment for posting several threats against Arizona election officials on far-right social media platforms.Clark made his bomb threat a week after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. In his plea agreement he admitted to logging into the website of the then secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, who is now Arizona’s governor.He demanded that she resign within two days or an “explosive device impacted in her personal space will be detonated”. Within minutes of sending the threat, Clark searched online for Hobbs’s home address and put her name against the search term “how to kill”.Four days after the bomb threat, he searched for details of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing.After Clark’s bomb threat was discovered, two floors of the Arizona government building were evacuated and the then Republican governor Doug Ducey was forced to shelter in place. Security sweeps were conducted of Hobbs’s home and car.Before the sentence was handed down, a statement from the current Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, was read out to court. He said that the bomb threat had made employees in his office suffer fear and anxiety.“It makes each of us feel vulnerable, and that trauma does not abate over time. This type of threat is anti-American and a threat to democracy,” Fontes said.Tanya Senanayake, a trial attorney with the public integrity section of the justice department who prosecuted the case, had pressed for an even longer prison sentence of almost five years. She said that a deterrent punishment was needed to protect public officials from “a growing trend of threats to their lives and to the safety of their families”.Defense attorney Jeanette Alvarado emphasized that Clark was in the throes of alcohol and drug abuse at the time he committed the offense. He was now in recovery and has been clean and sober for three years, she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClark himself addressed the judge and said that when he made the bomb threat “I was not the person I wanted to be … I am deeply, deeply ashamed.”Since Trump became the first president in US history to refuse to cede power, election administrators and their families have come under a barrage of verbal and online attacks. A study by the Brennan Center last year found that almost one in three election officials had been threatened or abused, and almost half were concerned about the safety of their colleagues and staff.Arizona has borne the brunt of much of the wave of harassment. In two separate incidents last month, the FBI arrested individuals in Alabama and California alleged to have made violent threats against election officials in Maricopa county, the largest constituency in Arizona that covers Phoenix.On 25 March, a further federal sentencing hearing will be held in Phoenix in the case of Joshua Russell, 44, of Bucyrus, Ohio. Russell pled guilty to having left three threatening voicemails in August 2022 targeting an unnamed election official in the Arizona secretary of state’s office.The messages accused the victim of perpetrating election fraud and said: “America’s coming for you, and you will pay with your life, you communist fucking traitor bitch.”The US attorney general Merrick Garland has made combating threats against election officials a priority for the justice department. In a speech in January he said: “These threats of violence are unacceptable. They threaten the fabric of our democracy.” More