Sorted by date Results 1 - 21 of 21
BOSTON (AP) — A package exploded on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston late Tuesday, and the college said a staff member suffered minor injuries. Authorities said another suspicious package was found near a prominent art museum and the FBI was assisting with the investigation. The parcel that blew up was one of two that were reported to police early in the evening. Boston's bomb squad neutralized a second package near the city's Museum of Fine Arts, which is on the outskirts of the Northeastern campus. NBC Boston reported that t...
BOSTON (AP) — It took more than three centuries, but the last Salem "witch" who wasn't has been officially pardoned. Massachusetts lawmakers on Thursday formally exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., clearing her name 329 years after she was convicted of witchcraft in 1693 and sentenced to death at the height of the Salem Witch Trials. Johnson was never executed, but neither was she officially pardoned like others wrongly accused of witchcraft. Lawmakers agreed to reconsider her case last year after a curious eighth-grade civics class at North A...
GILBERT, Ariz. (AP) — As Forrest Gump in the Oscar-winning 1994 film of the same name, lead actor Tom Hanks abruptly trots to a halt after more than three years of nonstop running and tells his followers: "I'm pretty tired — I think I'll go home now." Jacky Hunt-Broersma can relate. On Thursday, the amputee athlete achieved her goal of running 102 marathons in as many days, setting an unofficial women's world record. And she can't stop/won't stop, saying she'll run two more for good measure and wrap up her challenge on Saturday with 104. "I...
Archaeologists combing a hill near Plymouth Rock where a park will be built in tribute to the Pilgrims and their Native American predecessors have made a poignant discovery: It's not the first time the site has been used as a memorial. David Landon of the University of Massachusetts-Boston's Fiske Center for Archaeological Research says his team unearthed a cache of personal items he thinks were buried there in the late 1800s, most likely by a brokenhearted settler who had outlived all three of her children. Landon says the objects — e...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Dreading your eventual return to the office? The federal government is making available — for free — some waterfront workspaces with killer views that are sure to entice. But there's a catch. The General Services Administration says the U.S. Coast Guard has decided it no longer needs four of the nation's most picturesque lighthouses, and it's inviting certain types of organizations to take them over at no cost. The GSA, which has been getting rid of its large inventory of obsolete lighthouses, said Thursday that Beave...
BOSTON (AP) — It was a tempest in a teapot — or, more accurately, a whiskey tumbler. Presidential transitions are always at least a little tricky. Case in point: Researchers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum have found a cache of letters from Americans objecting to JFK's embrace of cocktails at White House events. The letters shed new insight into President Dwight D. Eisenhower's handoff to Kennedy early in 1961, and the strikingly different attitudes that people held about alcohol at official functions. "Liquor dulls the...
WARWICK, R.I. (AP) — There goes Rhode Island again — always finding a way to get its tiny tentacles onto the national stage. In a made-for-memes moment sandwiched between other states' calls to fight poverty and end racial injustice, a lawmaker and a restaurateur with a heaping plate of sauteed squid stood on a beach and proclaimed Rhode Island the "calamari comeback state" at the virtual Democratic National Convention. The 30-second spot, aired Tuesday night during the convention's roll call as Rhode Island's Democrats formally nominated Joe...
BOSTON (AP) — Neil Diamond posts a fireside rendition of "Sweet Caroline" with its familiar lyrics tweaked to say, "Hands ... washing hands." A news anchor asks when social distancing will end because "my husband keeps trying to get into the house." And a sign outside a neighborhood church reads: "Had not planned on giving up quite this much for Lent." Are we allowed to chuckle yet? We'd better, psychologists and humorists say. Laughter can be the best medicine, they argue, so long as it's within the bounds of good taste. And in a crisis, it c...
BOSTON (AP) — The Boston Marathon, the world's most celebrated footrace, was postponed until Sept. 14 because of the coronavirus pandemic. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh announced the decision Friday. The Boston Athletic Association, which oversees the marathon, had held off deciding the fate of the April 20 race even as other high-profile sports events were canceled or postponed around the globe. But pressure had mounted in recent weeks from officials in Boston and the seven cities and towns along the 26.2-mile (42.2-kilometer) course. Some had e...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian police said Thursday they have opened an investigation into the possibility that the U.S. ambassador came under illegal surveillance by an unknown party before she was recalled from her post in May. The announcement came two days after Democratic lawmakers in the United States released a trove of documents that showed Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, communicating about the removal of Marie Yovanovitch as the ambassador to Ukraine. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which runs t...
BOSTON (AP) — New Englanders fired up the weirdness machine again in 2019, and it cranked out oddities pretty much nonstop. There was a giant spinning ice disk in Maine, a naked firefighter in Rhode Island, and twin mysteries in Massachusetts and Vermont, where people reported that intruders had entered their homes — only to vacuum and scrub them clean. A sampling of some of the region's stranger stories from the past 12 months: ___ COSMIC CAROUSEL A slowly rotating ice disk the width of a football field formed in the Presumpscot River in Wes...
SALEM, Mass. (AP) — Most marathoners take 35,000 steps to reach the finish line. John Young needs 80,000. The high school math teacher from Canada is part of a rare and spirited breed of athlete: those who've overcome the daunting challenges of dwarfism to conquer the 26.2-mile (42.2-kilometer) distance. Many endure not just the usual rigors of training but cruel taunts from onlookers — "Hey, check out the midget" — as they put in their miles. But Young, who lightheartedly refers to himself as an LP ("little person"), has become an inspi...
BOSTON (AP) — No. 1 if by land, No. 2 if by sea? Archaeologists are excavating what they believe was the site of an outhouse next door to Paul Revere's home — and the privy, as the colonists politely called their potties, could be flush with artifacts. People typically dumped trash and household goods in their outhouses. Volunteers with the City of Boston Archaeological Program already have pulled fragments of pottery, bottles and a tobacco pipe from the bricked yard of the Pierce-Hichborn House in the heart of Boston's North End. So far, the...
BOSTON (AP) — You might want a bigger boat, but you probably don't need better odds. The confirmed return of great white sharks to Cape Cod has rattled some boaters and beachgoers. Yet the chances of an encounter involving a human are infinitesimally small, and the likelihood of an attack resulting in serious injury or death is smaller still. How small? With apologies to "The Hunger Games," may the odds be ever in your favor — because they are. In 2016, there were 53 unprovoked shark attacks in the U.S. — none fatal — according to the Florida...
BOSTON (AP) — Fifty years ago Wednesday, a factory worker who claimed he was the Boston Strangler was sentenced to prison. But questions still remain about Albert DeSalvo's confession. Many doubt his assertions that he stalked and killed nearly a dozen women in the Boston area in the early 1960s. DeSalvo later recanted the story and never was indicted in the murders. He was serving a sentence on unrelated charges when he was stabbed to death in prison in 1973. A look at the lingering questions clouding one of America's most infamous serial k...
BOSTON (AP) — It was the year of Rhode Iceland and Rattlesnake Island. Of 40-year-old Twinkies, clown wars and pizza offered as ID. And let's not forget this udder nonsense: texting cows. File 2016 in New England under "W'' for wacky. Your guide to some of the weirder stories that left us scratching our heads, laughing out loud or both: ___ CAN I SEE YOUR PIE D? A Massachusetts student became a national punchline after she tried to use a slice of pizza as a form of identification to get into a college town bar — then slapped the bouncer whe...
BOSTON (AP) — Fake news, quadricentennial edition: America's early settlers were all pious. The native people were savages. Freedom and liberty were available to all from Day One. As the U.S. gears up to mark the 400th anniversary of its roots as a nation, leading scholars from around the globe are teaming up to dispel myths and challenge long-held assumptions about how the country was settled. Their group, New England Beginnings, is using phone apps and searchable online archives to help set the record straight about the early 1600s — and fil...
BOSTON (AP) — The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 — one of Boston's most peculiar disasters — killed 21 people, injured 150 others and flattened buildings when a giant storage tank ruptured. Now Harvard University researchers think they know why the wave of sticky stuff claimed so many lives: A winter chill rapidly cooled the molasses as it streamed through the streets, complicating rescuers' frantic efforts to free victims. A team of experts who studied the disaster to gain a better understanding of fluid dynamics concluded that cold tempe...
BOSTON (AP) — Think back to America's founding fathers, and you'd be forgiven for imagining plenty of prudence and self-restraint. You'd be wrong: A lot of riotous rhetoric sprang from those stiff upper lips. Political bombast is nothing new — it's in our DNA. But so is the concept of civility in public discourse, which sprang from the colonists' initial rough-and-tumble approach to nation-building. Steven Bullock, a professor of humanities at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the author of a new book, "Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of...
BOSTON (AP) — "Fifty Shades of Grey," Puritan edition? The famously strait-laced 17th-century sectarians who helped settle America weren't nearly as priggish as you might think, a leading Puritan scholar says. Letters penned by Puritan forefathers including Colonial Gov. John Winthrop evoke more passion than prudishness, said Francis Bremer, a professor emeritus of history at Pennsylvania's Millersville University. Bremer is presenting his latest research next week at Boston's Old South Meeting House, at an event dubbed "Ravishing Affection: M...
BOSTON (AP, posted Sept. 23, 2016) — Did notorious gangster Al Capone have a soft spot? An intimate letter he penned from prison suggests the ruthless racketeer could handle tenderness almost as skillfully as his Tommy Gun. The three-page letter — which is being auctioned off next week — is addressed to Capone's son, Albert "Sonny" Capone. The mobster signed it, "Love & Kisses, Your Dear Dad Alphonse Capone #85," which was his number at the Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay. "Junior keep up the way you are doing, and don't let nothing get yo...
