The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a Cambridge clerk-magistrate can hold public hearings on whether to bring charges against a couple dozen alleged clients of a ring that flew in prostitutes from Los Angeles and Las Vegas to render sexual services in high-end Cambridge and Watertown apartments turned into brothels. Read more.
Cambridge today rolled out the first of four battery-operated trash trucks it's buying to reduce carbon emissions from city vehicles. Read more.
Bluesky, a social platform that feels like Twitter circa 2014 (so, yay), seems to have really taken off the past week. Of course, the hardest thing about signing up on a new platform is finding people to follow. Folks on Bluesky have assembled a series of "starter packs" - collections of accounts to follow on specific topics - and there are several of possible interest to people in Boston and the Boston area: Read more.
The Crimson reports the prolonged drought has been drying up Cambridge's reservoirs, leading to officials urging residents to conserve water - like by taking shorter showers. Worst case, Cambridge could buy water from the MWRA, which has larger, still relatively plentiful water sources out west, but that water would cost more.
The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a Cambridge man's first-degree murder sentence for strangling and then dismembering somebody in his apartment in 2015. Read more.
Myron Freeman captured the sunset from Vassar Street at MIT this evening.
Boston College's Burns Library posted this photo of US Rep. Tip O'Neill voting in Cambridge in 1955.
Mark Garfinkel captures the scene on Memorial Drive, where a trucker hauling portable toilets this morning slammed into the Mass. Ave. overpass, sending two of the plastic outhouses right onto the asphalt.
Roving UHub photographer John McMahon managed to survive a trip down Appleton Street in Cambridge. Read more.
Where's the Tobin? Morning haze over Boston Harbor. Photo by Josh Bittker.
On both sides of the Charles, people called 911 to report the smell of smoke this morning, as bone-dry brush in greater Boston started flaming overnight. Read more.
MIT News reports researchers have figured out how to 3D print "semiconductor-free logic gates" that can be assembled into something that could do computations - work they began in the pandemic days, when semiconductors suddenly became scarce. Current polymer-based 3D printers will never be able to reproduce state-of-the-art chips (with circuits close enough to spark concern about quantum effects), but then, not everything needs that kind of CPU, they say.
MIT News reports two MIT economists and a University of Chicago colleague have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in economics.
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson and James Robinson in Chicago shared the award for showing that "democracies, which hold to the rule of law and provide individual rights, have spurred greater economic activity over the last 500 years."
So there's this annual event called New York Bagelfest and they always pick a "best of the fest" bagel and this year, the award went to Bagelsaurus, which New Yorkers will have to take Acela and then the Red Line to try in the wild.
Harvard acted to bar outsiders from the Yard after somebody, apparently not affiliated with the university, vandalized the statue and the building with red paint as a protest against Israeli actions in Gaza, the Crimson reports.
Sean Hennessey shows us the human chain moving books through Porter Square today from Porter Books' old location to its new one.
Cambridge Day reports work that includes widening the pedestrian/bicycle path and reducing the speed limit on Memorial Drive outbound from the BU Bridge starts Monday.
Streetsblog Mass reports the driver who hit and killed John Corcoran on a pedestrian/bicyclist path next to Memorial Drive has had his license suspended during an investigation but has yet to be charged with anything: Read more.
A San Francisco man was arrested yesterday on charges he sent several voice-mail messages to two companies, one in Somerville, one in Cambridge, that he was furious at them and was planning to head over with an AK-47 and a handgun with a silencer and mow down everybody he can. Read more.
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