In Other News

Witch Way to Salem? The T, of Course..

The MBTA and Keolis Commuter Services (Keolis), the T’s operations and maintenance partner for Commuter Rail, will operate extra Commuter Rail service to and from Salem on all weekends in October. Several extra trains will run on Saturdays and Sundays during peak times on the Newburyport/Rockport Commuter Rail Line. The increase in service will help accommodate visitors to Salem for Haunted Happenings events, and the schedule will be available soon at mbta.com/cr. Passengers can utilize the unlimited $10 Weekend Commuter Rail Pass for their journey to and from Salem. Riders can also take advantage of a special $5 round trip ticket between Beverly and Salem every weekend in October.

Frankin Harvest Festival Still On?

Despite a forecast of high winds and a potential for up to eight inches of rain, as of  posting time, there is still no word of cancellation for the Franklin Downtown Partnership's Harvest Festival....

Holy Smoke!

A cautionary tale for neighbors of electric energy storage facilities. A fire at a solar farm in western P.E.I. is finally out as of Tuesday after some battery cells burned, smouldered and flared up for two weeks.

Mass. Health Connector members Spared Impact of Fed Cuts.
None of the Massachusetts Health Connector's around 350,000 enrollees will be impacted by the federal government's announcement that it's canceling hundreds of thousand of people from Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces, agency Executive Director Audrey Morse Gasteier said Wednesday.

Sales approach $140 mil in first month of online Lottery games

In the first full month they were available, bettors spent nearly $140 million on online lottery games through the Massachusetts Lottery platform that launched in late July.

Franklin United Methodist Church Joins Cooperative Parish

According to a FUMC post,  every local church in the New England Annual Conference has been placed into a cooperative parish.  The Franklin UMC has been placed in the “South-West Cooperative Parish” with Centenary UMC (Attleboro, MA), Chartley UMC (Norton, MA), Plainville UMC (Plainville, MA), and South Walpole UMC (South Walpole, MA). Rev. Dr. Jacob Juncker, pastor of the Franklin UMC, has been named the Parish Coordinator. Cooperative parishes are not mergers; they are partnerships designed to help congregations deepen discipleship, strengthen mission, and respond more effectively to the needs of their wider region. The South-West Cooperative Parish covers 24 towns and more than half a million people, offering a tremendous opportunity to imagine ministry beyond what any one church could do alone. To learn more about cooperative parishes, go to https://www.neumc.org/parishes.