The tugboat Liberty suffered an engine fire off Georges Island shortly after 8 a.m. today - just as a man was falling off a fishing boat.
The Boston Fire Department promptly summoned its dive team, which promptly got stuck in traffic because it's not based on the water. However, the Coast Guard reports the fire was declared out before the BFD marine unit got out to the tugboat and that a passing boater picked up the person in the water.
The folks at the Boston City Archives ask: When and where was this photo taken? See it larger.
Associated Press catches up with Michael Richard Smith, the Maine man who's been living in a canoe and tent on Boston Harbor. He prefers to be called a "fellow citizen," rather than homeless.
Firefighters check out the Kenmore wounded. Photo copyright Brian D'Amico.
A concert by 2 Chainz at the House of Blues was quickly followed by a station-closing brawl on the Green Line platform at Kenmore station.
Mike Moura reports at least three people were injured before MBTA Transit Police gained control of the platform, EMTs removed the wounded and the station was reopened around 10:45. The T reports the three were taken to Mass. General with minor injuries.
Riptor reports:
The Globe reports Boston is unveiling a new Web site and iPhone app (sorry, Android and Blackberry users) that let you get a sort of dashboard look at how the city's performing in a variety of areas - based on a $650,000 overhaul of the city's back-end data systems.
On the Web site, each of the main tiles lets you open up even more statistics related to the department it's from.
All kinda cool, but statistics are kind of meaningless without some context and may actually prove misleading depending on how they're used - especially in a large-ish city like ours.
Gah! Kidlet had to provide cover on the porch tonight when we came back from the supermarket - she had to fight the little buggers off as I opened the front door.
Dirty Old Boston is a Facebook page where you can see tons of photos of the "Boston/Cambridge area as it appeared before the Gentrification of the 80's began."
John Carroll, who still gets ink on his fingers, reports on a new classified-ad-like thing in the Globe's G section: "Blog" posts from advertisers, complete with underlined blue hyperlinks (sadly, the Globe has yet to perfect that print-to-Web interface or figured out QR codes, so you'll have to type the URLs in yourself).
News folks at other stations in town are fuming over the way WCVB's Susan Wornick got first dibs on video from an interview with Tom Menino at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.
A task force looking at ways of revamping how Boston kids get assigned to elementary and middle schools says it needs more time to let experts from Harvard and MIT run simulations and analyses of various options, from no assignment zones at all to 23.
The External Advisory Committee on School Choice had originally hoped to have a proposal to city official by year's end, but the mayor's office announced yesterday the committee would continue its work through at least January:
Seth Simonds reports hearing the following announcement on the Orange Line this morning:
Please step on the train. Teamwork makes the dream work. Thanks for riding the Orange Line.
Hmm, you think maybe the Orange Line got him in a trade for Angry Screaming Driver?
Anybody who gets a parking ticket in Boston today, tomorrow or Saturday can pay for it with a toy, specifically, "a non-violent, unwrapped toy of equal or greater value than the ticket fine."
Sorry, hydrant parkers and handicap-space violators, the city's annual Toys for Tickets program excludes you, as well as people caught double-parking or in crosswalks or fire lanes.
Only remaining wall of the Ames Building on Lincoln Street.
Some 17 years after much of downtown burned down during the Great Fire of 1872, and exactly 53 years before the deadly Cocoanut Grove fire, the Thanksgiving Day Fire on Nov. 28, 1889 destroyed several buildings in what is now the Financial District - and killed four active firefighters and one retired firefighter when the walls of the Ames Building collapsed on them.
MuckRock gets copies of FBI documents related to a decade-long federal look into possible corruption during White's term as mayor, most notably revolving around contributions from waste haulers in 1971. White, however, was never formally charged with anything.
No, not this one, alas. Open Media Boston has a couple of openings for stringers with some journalism experience.
We know $50 [per article] isn't much money. So we're looking for people that can crank out news content fast. People that don't mind having their work edited, but whose work doesn't need much editing. Because they know what they're doing. Which is, like, a virtuous circle. We want people who can take an assignment - or offer one of their own - go out in the field, cover something, go home, do follow-up work, write up a story, and submit it.
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