Stephanie Ebbert

1 week ago | bostonglobe.com | Stephanie Ebbert

EVERETT -- City Councilors beseeched Massachusetts’ top prosecutor on Tuesday night to launch legal action against their mayor over his refusal to refund city bonuses that a state investigator determined were excessive and improperly paid. Councilors voted 10-0 to ask Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell to intervene and to recover $180,000 from Mayor Carlo DeMaria.

2 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Stephanie Ebbert

“There will be no adjudicatory agency looking at this,” DeMaria told city councilors. “That’s it. It is over. No one took any monies inappropriately.” DeMaria has refused to return $180,000 in city funds that the Office of Inspector General Jeffrey S. Shapiro urged city council to recover from him. The council has no power to force DeMaria to return the money, but councilors did vote to request that DeMaria do so.

2 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Stephanie Ebbert

EVERETT — Back in 2016, the proposal sounded simple enough. John Hanlon, then president of the City Council, suggested that an incumbent mayor’s pay be automatically bumped after each reelection. “For every full term, he will get a $10,000 salary adjustment. But he has to complete the full term,” Hanlon said during a meeting of the council‘s Ways and Means Committee.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Stephanie Ebbert |Deirdre Fernandes

Seven people targeted in recent weeks were flagged on a list compiled by Betar, including two from New England — Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was seized in late March, and Columbia University activist Mohsen Mahdawi, who was detained in Vermont on Monday. It is unclear to what extent — if at all — the administration relies on the lists from Betar or Canary Mission, another pro-Israel group, which has been collecting names of such protesters for about a decade.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Stephanie Ebbert |Deirdre Fernandes

When a shooting broke out at a pro-Israel rally in suburban Newton in September, a Zionist group rushed to fan the flames and called for a boycott of the city. Two months later, Betar US took aim at Memphis, demanding that the murder of an Israeli-born locksmith be investigated as a hate crime. Now, the US chapter of the century-old Zionist group is engaged in its most audacious gambit — attempting to steer government deportations of foreign students who have advocated on behalf of Palestinians.