Free Republic

BOSTON — Authorities are searching for the person, or people, responsible for spray-painting "Trump 2020" on the street at three different locations in Boston. The Massachusetts State Police said it was contacted by the Department of Conservation and Recreation Saturday morning with a request to block traffic while DCR crews painted over the graffiti.

BOSTON (WHDH) -- Boston police released a picture hoping it will help them find the suspect in the death of a South Boston woman who was kidnapped and killed. Police said Amy Lord, 24, was kidnapped, carjacked, robbed and murdered on Tuesday. For 47 minutes, investigators say Lord was forced to withdraw money from her bank account at five different Boston-area ATMs, each one taking her further from her South Boston apartment. Police said Tuesday around 6 a.m. at least one man forced her into her car. Investigators found her car burned just after 8 a.m. She was reported missing...

BOSTON — A new WBUR poll (PDFs – topline, crosstabs) of the special Massachusetts U.S. Senate election finds it wide open on both the Democratic and the Republican sides. U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, of Malden, leads his Democratic rival, U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, of South Boston, by 11 percentage points. On the Republican side, former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan, of Abington, has the lead over both Norfolk state Rep. Dan Winslow and Cohasset private equity manager Gabriel Gomez.

Hub drivers’ nightmares will last for “months,” Gov. Mitt Romney said yesterday, announcing tests of epoxy-anchored bolts in the Interstate 90 network have revealed a “systemic failure” of the ceiling suspension system that will require millions of dollars in time-consuming repairs. As the tally of defects continues to mount, Romney said problems in the three-year-old tunnel system are far worse than first imagined, with ceiling supports pulling away in hundreds of locations and engineers contemplating a complete replacement of all 696 epoxy-bolted fixtures. State and federal investigators have conducted 18 “pull tests” on epoxy-fastened bolts in locations throughout the I-90...

Boston cracks down on winter tradition of reserving dug-out parking spaces Thu Dec 30, 5:21 PM ET BOSTON (AP) - There's an unwritten code of urban etiquette on Boston's narrow and often-snowy neighbourhood streets: You shovel a parking space and it's yours. But this year, the city is cracking down on this age-old rule and warning residents that it will no longer tolerate the garbage cans, the chairs, the boxes and the Christmas trees that people put out along the curb to reserve the parking spaces they sweated to clear. Mayor Tom Menino is giving residents 48 hours after a...

When one of New York's top political leaders, Herman D. Farrell Jr., questioned having a party in South Boston during the Democratic National Convention this summer, saying that neighborhood had a "history of racial turmoil and tension," a Boston official called him a "racial agitator" and insisted that the busing fight of the 1970's had little to do with racism. Mr. Farrell, the longtime assemblyman from Manhattan who also is chairman of the state party, immediately tried to reduce the chance of a racial flare-up, saying yesterday that he was satisfied that Boston had changed since 1974, when some white...