Roving UHub photographer Gretchen snapped the new Whole Foods sign in Hyde Square this morning, adds:

I chatted with the workmen this morning and discovered I wasn't the only person who had stopped to take pictures.

WBUR posts the naked truth about the local singer and an exhibit at the MFA - and how her husband got the guards to turn off the security cameras for a bit (hey, she doesn't go by the acronym AFP for nothing).

H/t Othemts.

UPDATE: Somebody turned the flags into campus police.

The Huntington News reports two American flags with certain colors missing that were hanging in an International Village lobby have gone missing.

The flags, one missing the blue and stars, the other missing the red stripes, were intended to represent the lack of cooperation in Washington between the "red" and the "blue," according to their designer, Thomas Starr, a professor in Northeastern's Department of Art and Design. But the Northeastern College Republicans called them an un-American "atrocity" and demanded they be removed.

APB put out for tagger in Dudley Square.

Seen running from the scene with a can of spray paint was a stout 60-something Caucasian male wearing glasses, appeared to be running toward Hyde Park.

More Dudley Square photos: http://s369.photobucket.com/albums/oo139/JohnAKeit...

Remains of the tube. Photo by Lalunkee.

Lalunkee tweets:

Fluorescent tube at Comm. College Station nearly landed on my head, hit the ground and exploded.

The Herald reports. Teacher says it's OK; Obama was bringing up higher truths.

In addition to evacuating the trolley station, police also got people out of the parking lot of the office building next to the station.

UPDATE: Carl Stevens at WBZ tweets:

Riverside MBTA stop closed because of a coffee maker.

One of the country's last 5 & 10's yesterday filed a class action lawsuit against a Florida marketing firm it says keeps sending ads it doesn't want to its fax machine.

In its lawsuit, filed in US District Court, the owners of the West Concord 5 & 10 want RFB Distributors - and a series of other marketers still to be identified - to stop tying up its fax line.

Receiving Defendants' junk faxes caused the recipients to lose paper and toner consumed in the printing of Defendants' faxes. Moreover, Defendants' faxes used Plaintiff's fax machine. Defendants' faxes cost Plaintiff time, as Plaintiff and their employees wasted their time receiving, reviewing and routing Defendants' unauthorized faxes. That time otherwise would have been spent on Plaintiff's business activities. Defendants' faxes unlawfully interrupted Plaintiff's and the other class members' privacy interests in being left alone.

In addition to a ban on the faxes, the suit seeks $500 for each junk fax the store and its as yet unidentified fellow fax recipients have gotten.

Channel 4 is conflicted:

WBZ's Jim Armstrong spoke off camera with the widow of one of Bulger's alleged murder victims. She's disgusted by the idea someone would not just make such a costume, but that anyone else would dress up as a man accused of murdering 19 local people.

But it seems, if you're not personally connected to the man or his legendary wrath, you might be OK with it.

OK, so Dems get predictably outraged about Scott Brown's public desire to not see Elizabeth Warren naked, but Republicans might want to find a better way to respond than praising Brown's decision to pose nude for a sex-advice rag as an example of an agonizing decision he courageously made.

The Jamaica Plain Gazette reports a task force looking at how to replace the hulking Casey Overpass are down to two options: A bridge that would replicate the current traffic flow and ground-level intersections. State Rep. Russell Holmes, who favors a bridge, said the committee should hold hearings in Dorchester and Mattapan, in addition to JP, because of the overpass's importance as a regional route.

Outside the Apple store, of course.

The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit today upheld an earlier decision to toss an $8.5 million verdict against the FBI for its role in letting Whitey Bulger and his henchmen kill an informant and the guy who was giving him a ride home, saying the families filed their lawsuit three weeks after the expiration of the statute of limitations.

In February, a three-judge panel overturned a lower-court award to the families of Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue. In the ruling today, the entire court voted 5-2 to reject the families' request for a rehearing.

Under the Constitution, federal courts may not make decisions based on sympathy to parties and may not displace the judgments made by Congress in nonconstitutional matters. The legal issue presented by these cases is not whether the conduct of the FBI was shameful; it was. It is not whether plaintiffs are victims of that conduct; they are.

However wronged the plaintiffs, the issue is whether these plaintiffs have complied with the stringent limitation period set by Congress for claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

In the ruling, the judges said that as much as they sympathize with the families of and, their only recourse is to ask Congress and the President for legislation that would extend their time period to file suit.

In a dissent, Judge Juan R. Torruella said the FBI's role in letting Bulger murder the men was such a "monstrous injustice" that, at the very least, the entire court owed them a new hearing:

Beyond its implications for the Donahue and Halloran families, this case has thrust renewed attention on the FBI's reliance on confidential criminal informants, and the obvious ways in which this relationship can become too cozy for comfort. Public trust in our institutions requires that when these institutions stray, they be held accountable and made to absorb the costs of their conduct. They ought not be perceived as operating with de facto impunity. Although it is hoped that these agencies will learn from these dreadful examples of government gone amuck, future reform is of little consolation to those injured by official malfeasance.

Judge Kermit Lipez also dissented:

There is nothing more hollow than expressions of sympathy by judges over an injustice that the law permits them to redress. There was no compelled outcome here. Instead, there was a serious misjudgment that perpetuates a grave injustice.

• Complete ruling

James Harvey tweeted around 5:30 p.m.:

Just had the Red Line doors open in the middle of the Longfellow Bridge.

Eric Steinhardt, apparently on the same train, reports the doors stayed open only very briefly, not even long enough for him to jump out.

It's a major mess at Sedgwick and South streets in JP, where a water main burst, flooding the streets and bringing in a flotilla of tow trucks to move cars out of the way.

A Boston man in his 40s has died after coming down with the flu, the Boston Public Health Commission said today. The man was particularly vulnerable because of unspecified underlying health issues, the commission said.

The commission says everybody should get a flu shot and take other precautions to reduce the odds of contracting or spreading the virus, including frequent hand washing or sanitizing, staying home with flu symptoms and for at least one day after your fever breaks, covering your mouth when coughing and avoiding sick people.

Ethan Long snapped City Councilor Tito Jackson (Roxbury) at Occupy Boston's tent city in Dewey Square yesterday. Jackson tweeted today:

It is power and momentum in the making! Inspired! Get up stand up!

Posted under this Creative Commons license.

A Suffolk Superior Court jury today found Emmanuel Pina and Sandro Tavares guilty of first-degree murder for the shooting deaths of a man with whom they'd had a beef and an innocent cook gunned down by an errant bullet at the now closed Ka-Carlos Bar and Grill in 2009, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.

The verdict means mandatory sentences of life without possibility of parole. The two were also found guilty of shooting a third man, who survived.

According to prosecutors and police, Pina and Tavares opened fire outside the restaurant on Jovany Eason early on Aug. 2, 2009. One of the bullets came through a window and hit Manuel Monteiro, a cook at the restaurant who was working two jobs to put his daughters through college - and who tried to defuse an argument among the men earlier that night.

The restaurant never recovered from the incident.