Under pressure, overseer of Boston’s Big Dig resigns
Boston – The chief of the agency overseeing Boston’s Big Dig resigned Thursday under pressure from the governor, two weeks after falling concrete crushed a woman to death in her car.
The departure of Matthew Amorello, chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, was announced just 90 minutes before a hearing was supposed to begin on Gov. Mitt Romney’s effort to remove him from the $14.6 billion highway project.
“I didn’t think it would fix anything or magically make all the issues associated with the Big Dig go away,” Amorello said. “I still don’t believe it will. But to go into a hearing with a foregone conclusion doesn’t make sense for me, my family, any of those who have taken part in this process, or the public.”
Romney, a Republican who is considering a run for president in 2008, said Amorello’s departure averted a costly and drawn-out legal battle and “also allows the citizens and toll-payers to have confidence again in the Turnpike Authority.”
Romney had been pressing for years to remove Amorello from the Big Dig, a highway project dogged by delays, cost overruns, leaks, falling debris and allegations of shoddy workmanship and inferior materials. He turned up the pressure after 39-year-old Milena Del Valle was killed July 10 in one of the Big Dig tunnels when 12 tons of concrete ceiling panels broke loose and fell on her car.
MEXICO CITY
Candidate has no faith in electoral agency
Mexico’s leftist presidential loser said Thursday he has lost faith in Mexico’s main electoral agency, and doesn’t want them overseeing the national recount he is demanding.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Mexico’s widely respected Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, had abandoned its autonomous role and become a tool of the ruling party.
“You can’t take IFE people seriously,” he said. “They don’t act according to the law.”
An official IFE count gave conservative Felipe Calderon a less than 1 percent advantage in the July 2 elections.
Lopez Obrador is disputing that result in Mexico’s top electoral court, in a nearly 900-page complaint demanding that the Federal Electoral Court order a ballot-by-ballot recount.
LONDON
Heat-caused blackouts hit 3,000 businesses
Blackouts caused by sweltering temperatures struck more than 3,000 businesses in London’s major shopping district and part of its transit network on Thursday, officials said.
High energy demand led to outages starting in the city’s central Soho district, said James Barber, a spokesman for energy company EDF in southeast Eng land.
Barber said the outages were due to a “highly unusual sequence of faults” at substations and in underground cables.
Temperatures reached 86 degrees in central London.
SHANGHAI, China
Toy-factory workers detained after protest
Dozens of workers were detained after a two-day protest over pay and working conditions at a toy factory, a labor monitoring group reported Thursday.
The protest at the Merton Co. plant in the southern city of Dongguan began in the company dormitory Saturday, according to China Labor Watch, a group run by Chinese exiles based in New York.
Merton’s website says the Dongguan factory makes toys and gifts for multinational corporations including McDonald’s, Disney, Mattel, Warner and DC Comics. Salaries start at $72 a month for the factory’s approximately 11,000 workers, China Labor Watch said.
But about half that amount is deducted for meals and lodging, and workers face pay cuts if they refuse to work up to 70 hours of overtime a month.
CRAWFORD, Texas
War protester buys land near Bush ranch
War protesters will have a new and bigger gathering place when they return in August to President Bush’s adopted hometown: a 5-acre lot bought with insurance money Cindy Sheehan received after her son was killed in Iraq.
Gerry Fonseca, a fellow war protester who acted as Sheehan’s agent, said he recently bought the vacant lot about a mile from downtown Crawford – and about 7 miles from Bush’s ranch – for $52,500.
About half the land is pasture and the other half is woods, he said.
“If Cindy Sheehan came to town, I don’t think anybody would have sold her any property,” Fonseca, of Eagle Rock, Mo., said Thursday.
Sheehan, of Berkeley, Calif., reinvigorated the anti-war movement last summer with her peace vigil, which started in ditches off the road to Bush’s ranch.
WASHINGTON
Battle looms over Bolton for U.N. envoy
The Bush administration and GOP leaders on Thursday renewed their push for Senate approval of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador. Democrats maintained he is too brash and ineffective to be confirmed.
The sharp division all but guaranteed that lawmakers were headed toward another partisan showdown in the full Senate, although Democrats would not say whether their opposition would amount to a filibuster, as it did last year.
A Senate vote on Bolton could come as early as September, just as election season heats up with Bush’s foreign policy a major issue for voters.
The United Nations has been at the forefront of international discussions on North Korea’s missile tests, Iran’s nuclear program and the crisis in the Middle East.
After repeated failed attempts by GOP leaders to grant Bolton Senate approval, Bush last Aug. 1 used his executive power to sidestep Congress and temporarily assign Bolton to the job.
