Boston Biker reports a new city effort to keep bicyclists from dying that will feature BPD officers going after Masshole motorists and encouraging bicyclists to wear helmets:

Officers will more proactively seek out and fine for safety violations committed by those on a bicycle and those operating a motor vehicle. This effort will include the strict enforcement of Massachusetts laws dedicated to bicycle and pedestrian safety.

The city will hold a bicycle anti-death summit on Wednesday, April 21 at 5:30 p.m. at BU's Morse Auditorium to let bicyclists and "high-ranking" officials discuss ways to curb bicycle collisions. Also, the city will be setting up some sort of database to actually track bike/car collisions.

Red Mass. Group is reporting somebody's hired a polling company to canvass Republican state convention-goers about a mystery candidate willing to take on Richard Tisei for the lieutenant-governor nomination. Conservatives really, really don't like him, apparently.

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Patch, AOL's attempt at a national network of community sites, recently went live in Needham, giving that town's online news consumers three different places to read about Peter Smulowitz and the guy charged with trying to kill his young child - whom Wicked Local says is a girl, Boston.com's Your Town says is a boy and Patch says is a child.

All three sites are very similar in what they seem to be doing: News, sports, calendar listings, information about the town (Patch helpfully notes which officials are "important officials"). In other words: Recreating a traditional weekly community newspaper, from back in the day when stuff like that was called "local" insteady of "hyperlocal." Wicked Local and Your Town have more depth at this point, having been around longer, and their writing is a lot more polished. Wicked Local is bloggier, Patch makes its employees volunteer in the town and is encouraging local folks to generate some user content (i.e., write for free), Your Town links to stuff on other sites (and has what appears to be dead forums - the most recent post was from almost two months ago).

Ultimately, of course, the question is whether even a well off town like Needham can support three full-time Web sites - are there enough advertisers who want to reach those 30,000 people?

If you live in Needham, how do you get your local news these days?

Jeffrey Smith faces 20 years in federal prison on charges that also include sending letters to residents of a particular street in Somerville that his supervisor, who lived there, was a Level 3 sex offender who should be deported to England, the US Attorney's office in Boston charged today.

Between Sept. 22, 2009 and March 10 of this year, Smith allegedly sent 29 threatening letters to organizations in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and North Carolina, starting with St. Paul AME Church in Cambridge and the NAACP office in Roxbury, which he threatened to burn down because he did "not like African American or minorities in charge as supervisors of my security department at Novartis, nor I like them as president of the United States."

Smith worked for Securitas Security Services, which provided security to Novartis in its Cambridge offices.

In total, Smith sent 29 threatening letters to organizations, the US Attorney's office says, adding that the letters to the Somerville residents were signed "Heyward Dublomi," a variant on a bad journalism prank.

Innocent, etc.