Hiawatha Bray

4 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Hiawatha Bray

Howard owns 617 Defense, a company that offers firearms training throughout Greater Boston. He’s also president of the Massachusetts chapter of the National African American Gun Association, an organization that boasts 45,000 members nationwide, nearly half of them women. And he’s one of several local Black entrepreneurs serving a growing market niche: Black people who feel the need to arm themselves. A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Hiawatha Bray

Let’s see... a falling stock market, waning consumer confidence, a raging trade war between the US and Canada. Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like recession. Maybe it isn’t the ideal moment for Apple to kill off its least expensive smartphone, the $429 iPhone SE, and replace it with the new $600 iPhone 16e. But with iPhone sales slumping lately, the product line needed something more than a facelift.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Hiawatha Bray

President Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canada are once again on hold, but that’s cold comfort for local beer makers. Trump could change his mind at any time, and impose import duties on a host of products essential to craft brewers, from malted barley to aluminum cans. And the constant sense of uncertainty only adds to the stress. “There’s still some knives to drop and to catch,” said Matthew Malloy, chief executive of Boston’s Dorchester Brewery.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Hiawatha Bray

A thumb-sized $100 robot from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is hitching a ride to the south pole of the moon. But the machine, called AstroAnt, isn’t going to explore the lunar surface. It’s going to find out whether robots could someday repair spaceships like the one it’s riding on. The idea for AstroAnt came from “Seveneves,” a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson which features swarms of tiny robots that help build giant habitats in space.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Catherine Carlock |Hiawatha Bray

There are two main ingredients in cost of building housing: labor and materials. Here in New England especially — where builders have long wrestled with the cost of construction — the 25 percent tariff on Canadian imports instituted this week by President Donald Trump will make the latter even more expensive. Much of the softwood lumber and mass timber that goes into apartment buildings in Massachusetts comes from Canada, as does fabricated steel and aluminum.