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State Police responded to the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Facility in Shirley after dozens of inmates refused to be locked in their cells Monday evening. The Department of Corrections says 51 inmates in the P-1 Housing Unit at the maximum security prison were involved in the incident. All corrections officers were safely evacuated from the unit and the prison’s Special Operations team regained control of the inmates at approximately 7:00 pm. Souza Baranowski prison cell (WBZ-TV) Souza Baranowski prison cell (WBZ-TV) The situation is still being assessed, but there were no injuries to any officers. A source tells WBZ the unit was...

Good Afternoon!

AS HE PREPARES to move out of the White House, Barack Obama is understandably focused on his legacy and reputation. The president will deliver a farewell address in Chicago on Tuesday; he told his supporters in an e-mail that the speech would “celebrate the ways you’ve changed this country for the better these past eight years,” and previewed his closing argument in a series of tweets hailing “the remarkable progress” for which he hopes to be remembered. In 2010, two years after electing him president, voters trounced Obama’s party, handing Democrats the biggest midterm losses in 72 years. Obama was...

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts says Besty DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to run the Department of Education, has a "radical political philosophy" and a thin resume for the job. "There is no precedent for an Education Department Secretary nominee with your lack of experience in public education," Warren wrote in a lengthy letter sent to DeVos on Monday morning. DeVos hasn't held top policy-making positions in the past, unlike other picks for the position by past presidents. Warren said that DeVos has "virtually no experience" in handling student debt, developing standards for school accountability, or improving schools - the...

Like Chipotle, the Cleveland Browns and the Democratic Party, the bust-out Boston Globe is trying to “reinvent” itself. In a memo...this week, editor Brian McGrory says the Globe will no longer be the “paper of record” (as if it ever was). Instead, he said, the Globe will be an “organization of interest.” McGrory’s memo reads like it was composed by a recent graduate of an ESL program, or perhaps translated from another language, most likely consultantese. Everything is to be interesting, “relentlessly interesting.” After all these years of printing dreary left wing agitprop, how will the Globe become interesting? “We’ll...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Saturday called for the Senate to not hold confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet picks until after the completion of an ethics screening. "Cabinet officials must put our country's interests before their own. No [confirmation] hearings should be held until we’re certain that’s the case," the Massachusetts Democrat tweeted. [Snip] "This is ridiculous," Warren tweeted, "[Trump's nominees] can’t drag their feet on ethics paperwork while their Senate friends try to run out the clock."

Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Friday she will run for a second term in 2018, signaling again that she plans to be one of her party’s fiercest critics of Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress. Warren made the announcement — which had been expected — in a message to supporters. […] Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, won the Senate seat in 2012 by beating incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown in her first political contest. Potential GOP opponents in 2018 include former Boston Red Sox pitching star Curt Schilling, a strong Trump backer. …

Rising housing costs in Colorado are making it hard for teachers to stay in the area, so officials are moving in to help. As Colorado’s housing costs skyrocket, a growing number of school districts, local leaders, and lawmakers are taking steps to make housing more affordable for teachers and staff. For years, resort communities like Aspen, Colorado, and a rural district in the state’s Eastern Plains have leased housing to employees at below-market rates. More recently, subsidized housing for educators has cropped up in pricey urban areas such as San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore. But lately, Colorado districts big and...

Earlier this week, 47 Republican senators published an open letter informing the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal with the United States that failed to be approved by the Senate would likely expire in 2017, once President Barack Obama’s term ended. The letter enraged progressives, who immediately began accusing the senators of treason for having the audacity to publish basic constitutional facts about how treaties work. If these progressives want to know what actual treason looks like, they should consult liberal lion Ted Kennedy, who not only allegedly sent secret messages to the Soviets in the midst of the...

Good Afternoon And Happy New Year!

In an otherwise observant Politico article, “The Death of Clintonism,” Todd Purdum unwittingly reminded conservative readers why they distrust the major media. For the article, Purdum interviewed Elaine Kamarck, a senior domestic policy adviser under Bill Clinton whose White House Purdum covered as a reporter. Having been around long enough to remember George W. H. Bush’s 1988 campaign against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, Purdum and Kamarck have no excuse for misrepresenting the campaign’s most decisive ad. The subject of the ad was Dukakis’s support of his state’s insane furlough program for convicted killers as a form of criminal rehabilitation. The...

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has added New York’s top federal public defender to his legal team as he appeals his death sentence, filings show. A judge approved David Patton, the head of New York’s influential federal public defenders office, to represent Tsarnaev, 23, on Friday.

Eighteen years ago, on New Year's Eve, David Fisher visited an old farm in western Massachusetts, near the small town of Conway. No one was farming there at the time, and that's what had drawn Fisher to the place. He was scouting for farmland. "I remember walking out [to the fallow fields] at some point," Fisher recalls. "And in the moonlight – it was all snowy – it was like a blank canvas." On that blank canvas, Fisher's mind painted a picture of what could be there alongside the South River. He could see horses tilling the land – no...

A Moroccan security official says that his country's intelligence service warned Germany twice about the risk posed by Anis Amri, the radical Muslim who slaughtered 12 people at a Christmas market in Berlin earlier this month. The official, who spoke to Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah, says that the Germans received two written warnings, one on September 19 and the other on October 1, about Amri's radical Islamic beliefs. He explains: Correspondence from the Moroccan security agencies had a clear warning about the Tunisian man's desire to carry out a terrorist act. Earlier this month, Dutch populist Geert Wilders was criticized...

Harvard Law School has announced the launch of a series of paid fellowships for research on issues of Islamic law during the 2017-2018 academic year, aimed at influencing public discourse and U.S. policy on Sharia. According to a recent email sent by the director of Harvard’s Islamic Legal Studies Program, Intisar Rabb, the launch of the new program comes “just in time” for the beginning of the Trump administration and has the goal of “building a community of Islamic law scholars in the academy” as well as informing “policy and media discourse about Islamic law.”

Months after being sued, a small Massachusetts town has agreed to let a local Islamic group build a cemetery that some neighbors opposed. Under a deal approved this week, the town of Dudley will permit the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester to buy a long-idle dairy farm and build a 6-acre cemetery at the site. In exchange, the group won’t seek to expand the burial ground for at least a decade and will drop a lawsuit it filed against the town in July. The society sued Dudley after a town zoning board denied plans for the cemetery in June, saying...

Continuing years of long-shot efforts to reform the American electoral system, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said Tuesday that at least 20 Republican members of the Electoral College may not cast their votes for President-elect Donald Trump. Since Donald Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 presidential election, Lessig, who briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, and his anti-Trump group, "Electors Trust," have been working to offer legal advice to members of the Electoral College who are considering voting for a candidate that did not win the popular vote in their state. The group also promises to inform interested...

Ever since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in last month’s presidential election, liberals have been whining about how “unfair” this result is. Now, the Democrat lawmakers in Congress have launched a sick plan against Trump before he’s even inaugurated that may result in his impeachment. Right Wing News reported that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is working on a bill that would force President-elect Donald Trump, future FLOTUS Melania Trump, their youngest son Barron, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence to put their assets into a blind trust. This would prevent any conflict of interest during Trump’s presidency while...

A group of protesters chained themselves across the doors of a TD bank in Massachusetts in solidarity with Dakota Access Pipeline protesters in North Dakota. From Masslive.com: The pipeline opponents began their action just after 8 a.m. by chaining themselves to the doors, shutting the bank branch down.Police initially gave them 30 minutes to leave, but more than three hours have passed with no movement on either side.Protestors said they will remain until they are arrested. Marc Osten, a Smith College student, Aly-Johnson-Kurts and University of Massachusetts student Giovano Castro are chained in the front, while Harrison Greene and...

Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy had “selfish political and ideological motives” when he made secret overtures to the Soviet Union’s spy agency during the Cold War to thwart then-President Ronald Reagan’s re-election, a Reagan biographer said in an interview with The Daily Signal. When they came to light years later, Kennedy’s secret contacts with the Russians through their KGB spy agency in the early 1980s didn’t cause nearly the tizzy that Russia’s alleged interference with this year’s election has for President-elect Donald Trump among liberal activists and reporters. Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump has said he hopes to “get...