’99 memo warned Big Dig’s tunnel bolts wouldn’t hold
Boston – Seven years before falling concrete crushed a motorist to death inside one of Boston’s Big Dig tunnels, a safety officer warned that the bolts could not possibly hold the heavy ceiling panels, according to a memo that came to light Wednesday.
John Keaveney wrote the memo in 1999 to one of his superiors at contractor Modern Continental Construction Co., saying he could not “comprehend how this structure can withhold the test of time.”
“Should any innocent State Worker or member of the Public be seriously injured or even worse killed as a result, I feel that this would be something that would reflect Mentally and Emotionally upon me, and all who are trying to construct a quality Project,” he wrote, according to The Boston Globe.
The July 10 accident that killed Milena Del Valle, 39, has revealed problems throughout the $14.6 billion project.
Keaveney told the Globe that it was a skeptical third-grader on a tour of the project who caused him to doubt the tunnel’s safety. She raised her hand and asked, “Will those things hold up the concrete?”
“It was like (she) had pointed out the emperor has no clothes,” he said. “I said, ‘Yes, it would hold,’ but then I thought about it.”
Woman testifies in cellphone-in-throat case
Independence, Mo. – Prosecutors say a man shoved a cellphone down his girlfriend’s throat because he was angry and jealous. But defense attorneys insisted as a trial got underway that the woman swallowed the phone intentionally to keep the defendant from seeing whom she had been calling.
Marlon Brando Gill, 24, is charged with first-degree assault in the December incident involving 25-year-old Melinda Abell.
Abell has given inconsistent accounts of what happened before she was taken to a hospital, where an emergency-room doctor removed the phone.
She testified Tuesday on the first day of Gill’s trial that she couldn’t remember how the phone got in her throat, saying she had too much to drink that night.
She said in court that she could not recall writing a statement to police after the incident, in which she said: “I think he thought I’d been talking to other guys. … He took my phone to see who I had been calling.”
The statement added: “If I didn’t want him to see my phone, I would have just thrown it out the window and busted it.”
Much of her testimony centered on her relationship with Gill, of Kansas City, Mo., which started in 2004.
“It was good at first, then it got rocky,” Abell said.
CHICAGO
City law requires paying “living wage”
Brushing aside warnings from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the City Council approved an ordinance Wednesday that makes Chicago the biggest city in the nation to require big-box retailers to pay a “living wage.”
“It’s trying to get the largest companies in America to pay decent wages,” Alderman Toni Preck winkle said.
The ordinance passed 35-14 after three hours of impassioned debate.
The measure requires mega-retailers with more than $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet to pay workers at least $10 an hour in wages plus $3 in fringe benefits by mid-2010. The current minimum wage in Illinois is $6.50 an hour and the federal minimum is $5.15.
Mayor Richard M. Daley and others warned the living wage proposal would drive jobs and desperately needed development from some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and lead giants like Wal-Mart to abandon the city.
KABUL, Afghanistan
22 Taliban fighters killed in clashes
Fighting in southern Afghanistan killed 22 suspected Taliban militants, officials said Wednesday, as NATO nations approved expanding the alliance’s peacekeeping force into the region.
Taliban fighters have stepped up attacks this year, triggering the worst violence since the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001 for hosting Osama bin Laden. The bloodshed has raised new fears for Afghanistan’s fragile democracy.
The latest clashes, involving Afghan and U.S.-led coalition troops and air power, occurred Tuesday and Wednesday in two districts of Helmand province, also the hub of Afghanistan’s huge trade in opium and heroin.
MOGADISHU, Somalia
Cargo plane sparks round of allegations
A mysterious Russian-built cargo plane believed to be loaded with weapons landed in this capital Wednesday, setting off a fresh round of allegations that Somalia has become a proxy battle ground for its neighbors Eritrea and Ethiopia.
The United States and other Western powers have cautioned outsiders against meddling in Somalia, which has no single ruling authority and can be manipulated by anyone with money and guns. But there’s little sign the warning has been heeded.
Somalia’s virtually powerless government charged on Wednesday that the Ilyushin-76, only the second flight to land at Mogadishu International Airport in a decade, was packed with land mines, bombs and guns. It said the shipment had come from Eritrea, which supports the Islamic militia that has seized the capital along with most of southern Somalia.
WASHINGTON
Adjustments designed to boost tutoring
The Bush administration says it again will bend the rules of the No Child Left Behind law, intending to get thousands more poor children into tutoring.
The Education Department said Wednesday it would expand two experiments that early signs indicate have helped more children get into tutoring. The step is an attempt to address a major snag under the 2002 law.
Only 10 percent to 20 percent of the more than 1 million poor children eligible for tutoring have signed up.
The policy changes are part of a pattern of enforcement by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. She wants to show she can adapt – waiving rules to get more kids in tutoring – and yet be tough on states that do not comply, by threatening to pull federal money.
