Chris Serres

4 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Chris Serres

Massachusetts would impose strict new limits on online sports betting and ban sports gambling operators from running advertisements during televised events, under an expansive bill introduced by three state Democratic lawmakers. The legislation, called the Sports Bettor Health Act, is designed to rein in the runaway growth of sports betting in Massachusetts and ban industry practices that some public health advocates have described as highly addictive.

4 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Chris Serres

At 5:30 pm last Friday afternoon, Brittany Charlton felt a surge of dread as she stared at two emails from the . Just six months earlier, Charlton founded a research center at Harvard to improve the health of LGBTQ people through science, and to cultivate future generations of leaders in the field. It was a crowning achievement of her 20-year academic career. In an instant, the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research had eviscerated her budget.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Chris Serres

Steven Aoki has almost no memory of how he ended up in a Mass General Brigham emergency department bed, with IV tubes attached to his body, on a September morning in 2023. What he does remember is the excruciating abdominal pain, the nausea, and the fear that he would have to confess to doctors that his symptoms were brought on by a decade of excessive alcohol consumption — a bottle-a-day habit that was destroying his liver.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Katie Johnston |Chris Serres

When 16 employees were fired from the Department of Agriculture’s Boston office last month, it happened so quickly that crucial meetings were missed and half-finished projects had to be restarted — a result of downsizing by the Department of Government Efficiency. But despite heavier workloads and the threat of more layoffs on the horizon, the employees who remained — and others around the federal workforce facing similar reductions — say they’re still dedicated to their jobs.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Chris Serres |Katie Johnston

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience, knowing that I am giving back to my fellow veterans,” said Bruno, 69, of Arlington, who served in the U.S. Army and Massachusetts Air National Guard in the 1980s. Now, both veterans have watched with alarm as the Trump administration has taken an axe to the VA, imperiling the agency’s status as a national powerhouse of scientific innovation.