<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2KVtvH_1GwLJDkb00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2KVtvH_1GwLJDkb00" width="1920" height="1084" ><figcaption>Gov. Maura Healey reaches to grab a pen to sign an abortion-related bill on Aug. 10, 2026 in her ceremonial State House office.</figcaption></figure>This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.Sign up here!🌤️Mostly sunny and cool, with highs in the 50s. Sunset is at 4:26 p.m.Gov. Maura Healey signed an emergency order Friday enacting a law saying doctors can perform abortions based on their professional judgement and without other legal limitations, like a cutoff that makes abortion illegal in the last few months of pregnancy. The law passed the Legislature this summer and was supposed to take effect over the weekend.So why the emergency order? Opponents of the law have collected more than 100,000 signatures to challenge it, and once those are certified, the law would have been put on hold. Those signatures would also trigger a referendum on our 2028 ballots, where voters will decide whether they want to keep the law on the books or get rid of it. If that sounds familiar, Question 9 on this year’s ballot was similarly a referendum on a 2024 gun law, which Healey also signed an emergency order to implement. About two-thirds of voters ultimately decided to keep that law. GBH’s Hannah Reale has a much deeper look at the abortion law here.<h2>Four Things to Know</h2>1. Question 1 blues: A push to change the state’s public records law so that it covers the governor’s office and Legislature was the least controversial question on last week’s ballot: 86% of voters supported it. But after the election, Senate President Karen Spilka said “there are details to be worked out” before deciding whether the Legislature will pass the law as written or change it. “So many of us in local government already have been operating under this law, for decades in some cases,” said John Griffin, executive director of Partners in Democracy, which supported Question 1. “I think that the Legislature should just move forward and honor the voice of the people of Massachusetts and accept that it should now be under the jurisdiction of that same law.”2. Science on the ballot: When Democrats take control of the House and Senate in January, some local scientists said they want to see them restore funding to scientific research that the Trump administration cut in its first two years. The federal government ended up paying up on some revoked grants after legal battles, but Scott Delaney, a former Harvard epidemiologist who lost his grant funding and now runs an organization called Grant Witness tracking the money, said about 200 grants, totaling $500 million, were lost in Massachusetts.“The energy, I think, to fight back is real. It’s palpable, and it’s incredibly important, and will be so for at least the next two years,” he said. “I think as a result of the election, we’ll see a couple of tangible opportunities that really may have the capacity to bring some funding back to science that has been lost.”3. Missing students in Springfield: Springfield Public Schools have enrolled about 800 fewer students this year than they expected. School officials are still trying to figure out why. It could be some combination of falling birth rates, students and their families fleeing or getting caught up in immigration enforcement, families moving to another city or families experiencing housing instability and unable to regularly send their children to school.Whatever the reasons, fewer students mean Springfield will get about $20 million less from the state starting in the fall of 2027. “We are not the only district experiencing a decrease, but we are feeling it very much,” Superintendent Sonia Dinnall said.4. Falmouth to the UN climate conference: Eighteen people from the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth are attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Türkiye this week. It’s also called the 31st Conference of the Parties, or COP31 for short.“The main objective really is this very difficult debate: how can we align the global climate effort and national actions with the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals?” said Matti Goldberg, director of international policy for Woodwell. “And right now, it looks like we’re about to miss the 1.5 degrees limit anyway. So, the second part of that question is: what do we do in what’s called an overshoot scenario of 1.5? How do we minimize that overshoot and how do we come back?”Social equity businesses still left behind a decade after Mass. cannabis legalizationTen years ago Massachusetts voters decided to make recreational cannabis legal and heard some big promises. The state started a Social Equity Program, a way for people who had been arrested when cannabis was illegal, or who came from communities targeted during the war on drugs, to get into the legal cannabis industry as entrepreneurs with a little extra help.GBH’s Meghan Smith looked into what happened to those promises a decade later. She found that about a third of Social Equity Program licenses went to delivery businesses, which are among the industry’s most difficult sectors in which to turn a profit.“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I thank God for the opportunity to participate in the legal cannabis industry through social equity,” said Duane Harden, owner of the cannabis delivery business BlazeXpress in Springfield. “But on the flip side, the regulations made it almost impossible. It’s like they set us up for failure, you know?”You can check out the full investigation here. And as we report on the decade since Massachusetts voters decided to make recreational cannabis legal, we want to hear from you: How do you see the legal cannabis industry shaping your city, town or neighborhood? Are there any questions you want us to try to answer? Reply to this email or send a message to daily@wgbh.org.Dig deeper: -Join us forTen Years Later: Marijuana Legalization in Massachusetts-10 years later: How Mass. went from marijuana battleground to fertile weed country</div></body>

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This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed. 🌤️Mostly sunny and cool, with highs in the 50s. Sunset is at 4:26 p.m. Gov. Maura Healey signed an emergency order Friday...

GBH Daily: Healey’s emergency abortion order

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This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed. 🌤️

GBH Daily: Healey’s emergency abortion order

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