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☔Still rainy with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 6:30 p.m.
It’s a rainy Monday to follow our soggy, windy nor’easter weekend, bad news for anyone who can’t stand the rain. On the bright side: most people in Massachusetts have power this morning, with 1,872 reported outages. And the rain should let up tomorrow, with highs in the 70s expected Wednesday and Thursday.

“One thing that’s meteorologically interesting about this particular storm is that it did take on some tropical characteristics,” GBH Meteorologist Dave Epstein wrote. “This is because as the storm went over the warmer waters of the Gulf, it was able to gather some energy and become most likely a subtropical storm. Some meteorologists believe that it even should have had a name, but the bottom line is that the strongest part of the storm ended up over New York and New Jersey, where flooding was more significant. For us it’s mostly been a nuisance wet weekend.” You can read Epstein’s full storm recap and forecast for the start of this week here. 

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Four Things to Know

1. ICE sweep on South Coast: Among the people detained by federal immigration agents on the South Coast last week were three brothers living in New Bedford, arrested at a Market Basket parking lot. Their sister-in-law said the brothers are from Honduras and work in construction. The family said none of them have a criminal record.

“The one who’s most worried is my mother-in-law — their mother. She’s an elderly woman, so this has really affected her,” their sister-in-law said. An attorney representing two of the brothers said she had a hard time finding basic information about their detention, like where they were arrested and where they were being held.

2. Brockton mayor pleads not guilty: Brockton Mayor Moises Rodrigues appeared in court Friday and pleaded not guilty to a charge of assault and battery. He is accused of grabbing a high schooler by the shoulder at a parade in May and pulling her closer by the waist when she tried to get away.

A judge ordered Rodrigues to stay away from his accuser and any witnesses; to stay away from Brockton High School; and not to have unsupervised contact with minors who aren’t his family members. “I’m being charged for participating in a parade with 1,500 people or so, for a case that I don’t even remember what exactly took place,” Rodrigues said. “But as an American I’m going to abide by whatever the courts decide.”

3. Carpe cars: The district attorney’s office in Hampden County took 13 cars that police officers seized in criminal investigations and donated them to an automotive program at Dean Technical High School in Holyoke. Now, high school students learning how to repair cars have more vehicles to work with.

But civil liberties advocates say police officers in Massachusetts can seize people’s property, including cars, without having to prove much in court, a process called civil asset forfeiture. Katy Naples-Mitchell, justice policy counsel for the ACLU of Massachusetts, said donating the cars can help local students, but she’d also like to see a system with more checks on the power to seize private property.

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4. The rats do run this city: Boston played host to the 2026 National Urban Rat Summit last week. Human attendees from around the world talked about garbage disposal, how rodenticides impact birds and other parts of the ecosystem and rat-transmitted illnesses such as leptospirosis.

“We showed up in our Rat Ranger uniforms,” said Rat City Arts Festival Director Ricky Meinke, who closed out the festival with Grace Evans. “We had the nets, we had the rats. So visually, I don’t want to say stunning, but we drew some eyes.”

Art meets science in Kinetic Sculpture Race in Lowell

Did this weekend’s rain and wind make your neighborhood difficult to navigate? Here’s a bit of transportation whimsy for you: Curiosity Desk Host Edgar B. Herwick III was one of the judges at the Kinetic Sculpture Race last weekend in Lowell, where contestants traversed city streets, a mud pit and the Merrimack River in sculptural, engineered masterpieces they built themselves.

There was a machine inspired by cows and one inspired by manatees, one that bore a bust of Bender from the cartoon “Futurama” and one that paid homage to Laika the space dog.

You can see Herwick’s guide to the race here. 

Dig deeper: 

-Could twisting materials at the “magic angle” create energy-efficient tech of the future?

-Is Boston ready for driverless cars?

-The difference between ‘Black horror’ and ‘Black in horror’ with Robin R. Means Coleman