Scooty Nickerson

2 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Scooty Nickerson

Teresa Rogg stood by the kitchen counter in her Quincy home last summer with a phone pressed to her ear, wrapping stacks of $100 bills in tin foil. She then sealed the money in a box, walked out to her yard and waited for a courier, just as the woman on the phone had instructed. The man who appeared from the side street remained silent, save for a single word — a passcode. “Blessings,” he said. “That’s how I knew to hand over the box,” she recalled.

3 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Omar Mohammed |Scooty Nickerson

Short-term visa holders who overstay their visit to the US make up a significant part of immigrants who become undocumented, according to immigration experts, even as the overall rate of visitors who remain in the country beyond the period allowed is significantly low. Nearly 400,000 people who had these visas issued in the 2023 fiscal year have remained beyond their allowed stay, according to the most recent estimate by the federal government.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Jonathan Saltzman |Scooty Nickerson

White people account for about 68 percent of Massachusetts residents with obesity but make up 82 percent of patients taking the drugs, according to the analysis, which relied on tens of thousands of insurance claims and data on assets. Women make up 51 percent of the state’s obese residents but about 71 percent of GLP-1 users. And nearly one-third of people taking the medicines have household incomes of $200,000 or more.

2 months ago | bostonglobe.com | Danny McDonald |Scooty Nickerson |Sean Cotter

It was an immigration case with potentially wide-ranging implications: a Tufts graduate student swarmed and then taken into custody on March 25 by masked ICE agents outside her Somerville apartment. Four days earlier, the Trump administration had quietly revoked Rümeysa Öztürk’s student visa, according to court filings.

Mar 22, 2025 | bostonglobe.com | Scooty Nickerson

“Household budgets are strained by higher energy bills,” she said. “If your home isn’t well insulated, you are spending too much to keep warm.”But just how expensive are energy costs in Boston? Federal data tracking average prices across the nation show that Boston metro’s prices are much higher than the national average. The average electricity price in the Boston metro area was 31 cents per kilowatt-hour in December 2024, the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.