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Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Sport
- Boston Globe
James Hagens, Václav Nestrašil, Sascha Boumedienne carry flag for Hockey East in first round of NHL Draft
The NHL Draft will resume Saturday at noon, with more than a dozen New England natives and local college players expected to be selected in Rounds 2-7. Aside from Hagens, here is a closer look at the two prospects with local ties selected Friday: Advertisement Václav Nestrašil, forward, Blackhawks, first round (No. 25 overall) Nestrašil is the second-highest draft pick in UMass history, behind only Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Nestrašil, a 6-foot-5-inch, 190-pound forward from Czechia, was projected as a second-round pick for most of the year, but his stock shot up with a strong close to his USHL season. Though still a raw prospect and growing into his lanky frame, the NHL upside is easy to see: Nestrašil is a fluid skater with slick puck skills and playmaking ability, with potential to develop into a two-way power forward as he fills out. Nestrašil played this past season with the Muskegon Lumberjacks of the USHL, registering 19 goals and 42 points during the regular season. His production spiked in the Clark Cup Playoffs, tallying seven goals and six assists in 13 games. Advertisement Nestrašil committed to UMass in January 2024 and will suit up for the Minutemen next season. He will immediately be among the largest forwards in Hockey East, along with Boston College forward (and Bruins 2024 first-rounder) Dean Letourneau. Boston University's Sacha Boumedienne, taken in the first round of the NHL Draft by Winnipeg on Friday, was youngest player in college hockey last season. Gregory Payan/Associated Press Sascha Boumedienne, defenseman, Jets, first round (No. 28 overall) Boumedienne, a 6-2, 183-pound defenseman from Stockholm, was the youngest player in college hockey last season. He acclimated well against veteran competition, tallying three goals and 10 assists while logging 18 minutes per game on a BU squad that reached the national title game. Boumedienne's selection marks the third straight year a BU player has gone in the first round, following Though Boumedienne does not project as a major offensive contributor, he is a well-rounded and skilled defenseman who has already displayed NHL-caliber skating ability. Though it took him a couple months to settle in, Boumedienne secured a top-four role on BU's blue line in the second semester. On top of that, just weeks after wrapping up the college season, Boumedienne represented Sweden in the Under-18 World Championships and set the tournament record for points by a defenseman, with 14 in seven games. Boumedienne is expected to be a key piece on the BU blue line next season and should take a leap as one of the league's most complete defensemen. Matty Wasserman can be reached at
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Biden to attend funeral for former Minnesota House Speaker Hortman, who was killed in shooting
The couple's private funeral, at the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis, is set for 10:30 a.m. Saturday. It will be livestreamed on the Department of Public Safety's YouTube channel. Advertisement Neither Biden nor Harris is expected to speak. Harris expressed her condolences earlier this week to Hortman's adult children, and spoke with Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate on the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket, who extended an invitation on behalf of the Hortman family, her office said. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The scene at the Capitol Hortman, a Democrat, was the first woman and one of fewer than 20 Minnesotans to lay in state at the Capitol. It was the first time a couple has been accorded the honor, and the first for a dog. Gilbert was seriously wounded in the attack and had to be euthanized. The Hortmans' caskets and the dog's urn were arranged in the center of the rotunda, under the Capitol dome, with law enforcement officers keeping watch as thousands of people filed by. Many fought back tears as they left. Advertisement Among the first to pay their respects were Walz, who has called Hortman his closest political ally, and his wife, Gwen. Biden, a Catholic, visited later in the afternoon, walking up to the velvet rope in front of the caskets, making the sign of the cross and spending a few moments by himself in silence. He then took a knee briefly, got up, made the sign of the cross again and walked off to greet people waiting in the wings of the rotunda. Lisa Greene, who lives in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park like Hortman did, but in a different House district, said she came to the Capitol because she had so much respect for the former speaker. 'She was just amazing. Amazing woman. And I was just so proud that she represented the city that I lived in,' Greene said in a voice choked with emotion. 'She was such a leader. She could bring people together. She was so accessible. I mean, she was friendly, you could talk to her.' But, she went on to say admiringly, Hortman was also 'a boss.' 'She just knew what she was doing and she could just make things happen,' she said. A hearing takes a twist The man accused of killing the Hortmans at their home and wounding Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, at their home in nearby Champlin, made a short court appearance Friday for what the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Joseph Thompson, has called 'a political assassination.' Vance Boelter, 57, of Green Isle, surrendered near his home the night of June 15 after what authorities called the largest search in Minnesota history. Advertisement An unshaven Boelter was brought in wearing just a green padded suicide prevention suit and orange slippers. Federal defender Manny Atwal asked Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko to continue the hearing until Thursday. He agreed. She said Boelter has been sleep deprived while on suicide watch in the Sherburne County Jail, and that it has been difficult to communicate with him as a result. 'Your honor, I haven't really slept in about 12 to 14 days,' Boelter told the judge. And he denied being suicidal. 'I've never been suicidal and I am not suicidal now.' Atwal told the court that Boelter had been in what's known as a 'Gumby suit,' without undergarments, ever since his transfer to the jail after his first court appearance on June 16. She said the lights are on in his area 24 hours a day, doors slam frequently, the inmate in the next cell spreads feces on the walls and the smell drifts to Boelter's cell. The attorney said transferring him to segregation instead, and giving him a normal jail uniform, would let him get some sleep, restore some dignity and let him communicate better. The case continues Boelter did not enter a plea. Prosecutors need to secure a grand jury indictment first. According to the federal complaint, police video shows Boelter outside the Hortmans' home and captures the sound of gunfire. And it says security video shows Boelter approaching the front doors of two other lawmakers' homes. His lawyers have declined to comment on the charges, which could carry the federal death penalty. Thompson said last week that no decision has been made. Minnesota abolished its death penalty in 1911. Boelter also faces separate murder and attempted murder charges in state court that could carry life without parole. Advertisement Friends have described Boelter as an evangelical Christian with politically conservative views. But prosecutors have declined so far to speculate on a motive.
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Fans criticize Beyoncé for shirt calling Native Americans ‘the enemies of peace'
As she prepares to return to the U.S. for performances in her hometown this weekend, fans and Indigenous influencers took to social media to criticize Beyoncé for framing Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries as anything but the victims of American imperialism and promoting anti-Indigenous language. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up A publicist for Beyoncé did not respond to requests for comment. Advertisement Who were the Buffalo Soldiers? The Buffalo Soldiers served in six military units created after the Civil War in 1866. They were comprised formerly enslaved men, freemen, and Black Civil War soldiers and fought in hundreds of conflicts — including in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II — until they were disbanded in 1951. As the quote on Beyoncé's shirt notes, they also fought numerous battles against Indigenous peoples as part of the U.S. Army's campaign of violence and land theft during the country's westward expansion. Some historians say the moniker 'Buffalo Soldiers' was bestowed by the tribes who admired the bravery and tenacity of the fighters, but that might be more legend than fact. 'At the end of the day, we really don't have that kind of information,' said Cale Carter, director of exhibitions at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston. Advertisement Carter and other museum staff said that, only in the past few years, the museum made broader efforts to include more of the complexities of the battles the Buffalo Soldiers fought against Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries and the role they played in the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. They, much like many other museums across the country, are hoping to add more nuance to the framing of American history and be more respectful of the ways they have 'We romanticize the Western frontier,' he said. 'The early stories that talked about the Buffalo Soldiers were impacted by a lot of those factors. So you really didn't see a changing in that narrative until recently.' There has often been a lack of diverse voices discussing the way Buffalo Soldiers history is framed, said Michelle Tovar, the museum's director of education. The current political climate has put enormous pressure on schools, including those in Texas, to avoid honest discussions about American history, she said. 'Right now, in this area, we are getting push back from a lot of school districts in which we can't go and teach this history,' Tovar said. 'We are a museum where we can at least be a hub, where we can invite the community regardless of what districts say, invite them to learn it and do what we can do the outreach to continue to teach honest history.' Advertisement Historians scrutinize reclamation motive Beyoncé's recent album 'Act II: Cowboy Carter' has played on a kind of American iconography, which many see as her way of subverting the country music genre's adjacency to whiteness and 'The Buffalo Soldiers play this major role in the Black ownership of the American West,' said Tad Stoermer, a historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University. 'In my view, (Beyoncé is) well aware of the role that these images play. This is the 'Cowboy Carter' tour for crying out loud. The entire tour, the entire album, the entire piece is situated in this layered narrative.' But Stoermer also points out that the Buffalo Soldier have been framed in the American story in a way that also plays into the myths of American nationalism. As Beyoncé's use of Buffalo Soldiers imagery implies, Black Americans also use their story to claim agency over their role in the creation of the country, said Alaina E. Roberts, a historian, author and professor at Pittsburgh University who studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to present day. 'That's the category in which she thought maybe she was coming into this conversation, but the Buffalo Soldiers are even a step above that because they were literally involved in not just the settlement of the West but of genocide in a sense,' she said. Online backlash builds ahead of Houston shows Several Native influencers, performers, and academics took to social media this week to criticize Beyoncé or call the language on her shirt anti-Indigenous. 'Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or acknowledge) the shirt,' an Indigenous news and culture Instagram account with more than 130,000, asked in a post Thursday. Advertisement Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt. 'The Buffalo Soldiers are an interesting historical moment to look at. But we have to be honest about what they did, especially in their operations against Indigenous Americans and Mexicans,' said Chisom Okorafor, who posts on TikTok under the handle @confirmedsomaya. Okorafor said there is no 'progressive' way to reclaim America's history of empire building in the West, and that Beyoncé's use of Western symbolism sends a problematic message. 'Which is that Black people too can engage in American nationalism,' she said. 'Black people too can profit from the atrocities of American empire. It is a message that tells you to abandon immigrants, Indigenous people, and people who live outside of the United States. It is a message that tells you not only is it a virtue to have been born in this country but the longer your line extends in this country the more virtuous you are.'
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In ‘Kill the Lax Bro,' Charlotte Lillie Balogh asks whodunit — and who let it happen
The aftershock of this betrayal was one of several personal heartbreaks that fueled Balogh's debut YA novel, is actor Chris Evans — Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Almost everything in this book really happened in some way,' Balogh tells the Globe. 'There were quite a few Easter eggs of my exes sprinkled throughout.' Advertisement The murder, she assures, is strictly fictional. The mystery is set in the fictional Massachusetts town of Hancock during the 1990s, where star lacrosse player Troy Richards is the target of four students' attempts to ruin his reputation. But when Troy winds up dead during Hancock High's Lock-In Night, Andrew, his former teammate/best friend; Stassi, his straight A ex-girlfriend; Naomi, the shy but observant freshman; and Tatum, the burnout with a secret grudge, must unravel the whodunit before the crime is pinned on them. Advertisement With and commentary on toxic sports culture, status quos, and self-discovery. While Troy is the doomed, titular 'lax bro,' the sometimes-negative impact of student athlete culture and toxic masculinity are Balogh's real targets. She had been a member of her high school's rowing team and later rowed for Syracuse University as an undergrad. As a student athlete, Balogh observed the different coaching approaches for girls vs. boys team sports firsthand. 'I know a coach who told me it's easier to coach boys because they're very competitive,' says Balogh, who coaches a youth team in Los Angeles, where she now resides. '[While], girls are not encouraged to be as ferocious so quickly in life.' She was especially inspired by 'New England life'; in particular, her high school alma mater's boy's lacrosse team — Troy and Andrew are amalgamations of the memories of her classmates and her own. While Balogh describes Andrew as 'the boy next door,' his increasingly volatile actions reveal his more vengeful underbelly. Troy, though (dead and) the antagonist, becomes more sympathetic as his backstory is uncovered. The intention was to 'flip archetypes. 'They both have their own ways in which they're perfect and idolized by their classmates. And it's like, which of them is better?' she says. 'Are either of them better?' Balogh also drew from 'cinematic perfection' that is 'John Tucker Must Die,' the early-2000s teen dramedy about a group of girls who, upon finding out they're dating the same guy, team up for revenge. Advertisement Spoiler: John Tucker does not die — it's more social sabotage than murder — but Balogh, a TV writer by trade, had wondered: But what if they actually killed him? 'Kill the Lax Bro' started as a 50-page TV pilot script in 2020, but eventually caught the eye of Balogh's literary agent, with whom she had previously worked on another manuscript. (That story — about a Boston high school rowing team, ahead of the Head of the Charles Regatta — will be the basis for her second novel, slated for fall 2026.) When the manuscript was put out on submission, an editor at Penguin found a video of a table read of 'She watched this video and was like, 'I want to buy that as a book instead,'" says Balogh. Charlotte Lillie Balogh will celebrate the release of 'Kill the Lax Bro' at the Natick Barnes & Noble, July 12, 6 p.m. 1324 Worcester St., Natick. Marianna Orozco can be reached at
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Science
- Boston Globe
Honey, We Shrunk the Cod
But a new study suggests that intense fishing was driving the evolution of the fish. Small, slow-growing cod gained a significant survival advantage, shifting the population toward fish that were genetically predisposed to remaining small. Today's cod are small not because the big individuals are fished out but because the fish no longer grow big. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The data, which were published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, add to a growing body of evidence that human activities like hunting and fishing are driving the evolution of wild animals -- sometimes at lightning speed. Advertisement 'Human harvesting elicits the strongest selection pressures in nature,' said Thorsten Reusch, a marine ecologist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany and an author of the new paper. 'It can be really fast that you see evolutionary change.' The imprint that humans are leaving on other species is not always quite so visible. In a second study published this week, researchers at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, reported that over the past century, increasing human development may have driven changes in the skulls of local rodents. But some of these changes were subtle, and they were not the same across species. Advertisement 'We are comparing two species in the same area that were supposedly exposed to the same pressure,' said Anderson Feijó, the assistant curator of mammals at the Field Museum and an author of the rodent study, which was published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology on Thursday. 'But the way they dealt is totally different, because their biology is different.' Go Fish In the new cod study, researchers studied a set of unusual biological specimens: a collection of otoliths, the tiny, bonelike structures located in the inner ear of most fish. Otoliths grow in size over the course of a fish's life, adding rings much as a tree trunk does. By examining these rings, scientists can estimate the age and growth rate of individual fish. The researchers used a newly developed chemical technique to analyze otoliths collected from Eastern Baltic cod harvested between 1996 and 2019, when the collapse of the population prompted a fishing ban. They found that fish harvested in more recent years were significantly smaller, with slower growth rates, than those from the beginning of the period. From 1996 and 2019, the average length of the cod declined by 48%. Then, the researchers sequenced and analyzed the DNA of each individual fish. For the older specimens, this was a tricky task, requiring the researchers to recover degraded DNA from otoliths that had been stored in paper bags, at room temperature, for decades. 'We had to work with a little dirt, a little slime, some blood traces that were sticking to the otoliths,' Reusch said. Advertisement Ultimately, the team identified a variety of genomic regions and variants associated with growth rate. A statistical analysis revealed that over time, these variants were changing in correlated, nonrandom ways -- suggesting that there was some external selective force acting on the genome and the population. That is a 'signal of selection,' said Kwi Young Han, a postdoctoral researcher at GEOMAR and an author of the paper. The results didn't prove that fishing is what drove this selection; warming temperatures would also be expected to favor smaller cod. But the size changes that the scientists documented far exceed what would be expected from temperature alone. The genetic changes could have long-term consequences for the population and help explain why it hasn't bounced back since the 2019 fishing ban. 'It's 2025 right now, and we don't see any big fish still,' Han said. Rodent Roundup In the second study, researchers examined hundreds of rodent specimens contained in the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History. The specimens had originally been collected from around the Chicago metropolitan area between 1898 and 2023. The scientists focused on the skulls of two species: eastern chipmunks and eastern meadow voles. Each skull was analyzed for specific characteristics, including its particular collection site and how highly developed the area was. The researchers found that over time, as Chicago grew more urban, the chipmunks' skulls became larger -- but their rows of teeth grew shorter. These seemingly opposing trends may have been driven by a change in diet, the scientists said. Urbanization, with its abundance of human food and trash, could have made it easier for chipmunks to pack on weight year round, leading to larger body sizes. At the same time, the robust teeth that helped chipmunks extract calories from nuts and seeds may have become less essential. Advertisement Voles, in contrast, did not show significant changes in skull size over time, perhaps because their more restrictive diets -- mostly grasses and other plants -- and reclusive natures made them less likely to dine on human food, Stephanie Smith, a research scientist at the Field Museum and an author of the study, said. 'Voles are kind of much more secretive,' she said. 'They're not as out-and-about and stealing people's french fries.' But their skulls showed signs of other changes. Vole skulls collected from more urban areas were flatter than those found at less developed sites. The bony structure that houses parts of the middle and inner ear -- known as the auditory bulla -- also tended to be smaller in vole skulls from urbanized areas. There is some evidence from other species that larger auditory bullae may be associated with enhanced hearing. Perhaps urban voles evolved smaller auditory bullae to help dampen the urban din, Smith said. Voles live 'down in the ground, near all of the train noises, all of the vibrations from people walking around, cars, buses, everything,' Smith said. 'So our thought here is that, potentially, this change in the auditory bulla could be related to filtering out excess sound.' It's just a hypothesis, Smith stressed, and one that requires much more study. But the findings help illustrate the enormous diversity of ways in which humans are inadvertently reshaping other species, whether out in the open ocean or in our backyards. Advertisement 'There is evolution happening everywhere, all the time,' Smith said. 'You just have to know where to look for it.' This article originally appeared in
