Boston Harbor

Two commuter ferries collided in the fog of Boston Harbor, but there were no reports of serious injuries and both boats remained afloat, a Coast Guard spokesman said. The ferry Massachusetts, inbound from Hingham with 151 passengers and three crew members, collided with the ferry Laura, which had only four crew members on board, Petty Officer Zach Zubricki said.

With midterm elections looming, President Obama is raising campaign money at a ferocious pace, tapping into an energized corps of Democratic donors. Obama trailed his predecessor, George W. Bush, in the amount of money raised 13 months into their tenures ($32 million to $53 million), but had more than twice the number of fundraising appearances (33 to 13) compared with Bush, who curtailed such travel after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Obama's next fundraising trip is Monday, when he flies to Los Angeles to help the Democratic National Committee and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.

The badly decomposed corpse of a 30-foot-long finback whale washed into Boston Harbor on Monday, possibly dragged in unintentionally by a ship, officials said. The whale, which weighs perhaps 25 tons, had been dead for quite a while, said Susan Gedutis, a spokeswoman for the New England Aquarium. Experts could not determine the cause of its death, she said.

On Tuesday, millions in Washington, D.C., and billions around the world will watch as Barack Obama takes the oath of office as president of the United States. In 1961 on the same date -- Jan. 20 -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy took the same oath. The comparisons with JFK began long before the first ballot was cast and the two leaders' similarities become even more apparent during a walk through the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston.

Boston Harbor, the 2-year-old thoroughbred champion of 1996, was injured during a workout Monday morning at Santa Anita and will be sidelined four months, according to trainer Wayne Lukas. After working six furlongs in 1:12, the son of Capote, who completed last year with a victory in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile, suffered a fracture of the cannon bone in his left front leg. "The exercise girl said he was pulling up on the [backstretch] and he took a bad step," Lukas said.

President Bush is an "environmental hypocrite" who has abandoned a commitment to help with the $6.5-billion cleanup of polluted Boston Harbor, environmentalists charged Tuesday. Bush used the harbor for a national television spot in his presidential campaign against Gov. Michael S. Dukakis during the summer of 1988. The 30-second ad labeled the harbor as the most polluted in the nation and ridiculed Dukakis for failing to clean it up.

Massachusetts on Wednesday settled a federal lawsuit over the pollution of Boston Harbor by agreeing to pay a $425,000 fine and to establish a $2-million trust fund to benefit the port and adjacent Massachusetts Bay. The settlement ended three years of litigation between the state and federal environmental officials, a case that could have dragged on for years longer, officials said.

Boston Harbor, winning the Breeders' Cup Juvenile at Woodbine on Saturday, broke the record for most purses in a year by a 2-year-old. Boston Harbor's win was worth $520,000, increasing his total for seven races to $1,928,605. Boston Harbor is trained by Wayne Lukas, who also trained Mountain Cat, the old record-holder with $1.4 million in 1992. Boston Harbor's earnings were boosted by a $1-million bonus that came from sweeping a four-race series in Kentucky.

Boston Harbor is getting cleaner, but state officials say that's despite of foot-dragging by the man who made its filth famous: George Bush. Bush sailed in during the presidential campaign last September and accused Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of neglecting an important environmental issue in his own state. Now, the governor and his top environmental aides are wondering when President Bush will put his money where his mouth was. They want the $59 million recommended for the harbor cleanup by Congress but which was deleted in Bush's budget.

A tugboat guiding a tanker from its dock struck and punctured the vessel, causing some 50,000 gallons of heating oil to pour into Boston Harbor, U.S. Coast Guard officials said Thursday. The Alex C, owned and operated by Bay State Towing, was helping the Panamanian-registered tanker Posa Vina leave the dock at Tosco Marine Terminal in East Boston when the tug struck and ruptured the tanker's port side 2 feet above the waterline at 8:30 a.m. EDT, the Coast Guard said.

I was polishing off a turkey sandwich at an outdoor patio table last week when a man pacing nearby caught my ear as he talked into his cellphone. If they want the $400, they're going to have to take it forcibly. Then later: If that's true, then maybe it's time to leave the country. Even in vacation mode, I smelled a story and asked him if had one to tell. He said he sure did.

Two commuter ferries collided in the fog of Boston Harbor, but there were no reports of serious injuries and both boats remained afloat, a Coast Guard spokesman said. The ferry Massachusetts, inbound from Hingham with 151 passengers and three crew members, collided with the ferry Laura, which had only four crew members on board, Petty Officer Zach Zubricki said.

The shipping lanes in and out of Boston Harbor will be narrowed and shifted north today in a bid to lower the risk of ships killing rare right whales. The entire North Atlantic right whale population is estimated at just 350. It's the first time in U.S. history that shipping lanes have been changed to protect wildlife.

The commander of the Constitution warship was relieved of duty because of a "loss of trust and confidence in his ability to command," a Navy spokesman said Thursday. The Navy declined to provide specifics about why Cmdr. Thomas C. Graves was removed as senior officer of the historic warship, known as Old Ironsides. Graves' removal, however, was not the result of disciplinary action, said a Navy spokesman, Cmdr. Jeff A. Davis.

Over the last decade, a couple of surging trends have begun to reshape American cities. Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and other theoretical designers started picking up commissions for public buildings, shedding their reputations as so-called paper architects. And cities, particularly on the East Coast, have been rediscovering their waterfronts, moving to replace sagging infrastructure with new cultural facilities.

Democrats began assembling Saturday beneath a gray sky in this soggy convention city, determined to put a sunny face on their gathering and boost Sen. John F. Kerry's prospects against President Bush in November. As the nominee-in-waiting slowly wended his way eastward to Massachusetts, his hometown of Boston tightened security and primped for a four-day turn in the national spotlight, starting Monday.

Since the days when Bay State revolutionaries flung crates of tea into Boston Harbor, this historic body of water has been awash both in controversy and in waste. For more than a century, Boston and its surrounding communities have been spewing their sewage into Boston Harbor, making it one of the nation's most polluted bodies of water and an object of derision. But now, several years into a $4.

Dank wastes. Squishy sludge. Unspeakable funk and poison. These are the horrors that brought a broad smile to the face of George Bush. Here on the waters of Boston Harbor, in the heart of the home state of his Democratic presidental rival, Bush Thursday pointed an accusing finger at pollution and Michael S. Dukakis' reputation as an environmental champion. "My opponent talks a pretty good game on the environment.

Re "Kerry Keeps Recruiting, McCain Keeps Resisting," June 12: I was heartened to hear that John McCain is not considering joining John Kerry's ticket, because if he did, I'd have to vote Peace and Freedom this year. In the same way I won't give Ralph Nader my vote, I would never vote for a ticket with McCain on it, regardless of any attempt at bipartisanship by my own party. To think that Kerry would sell us out so easily (I cannot forget that McCain is pro-life, a war hawk, a great supporter of NAFTA and the ills it brings us)

It is the most expensive highway construction project in the nation's history -- and possibly the most miserable marriage of residents and redevelopment. Replacing an antiquated, elevated highway with a 10-lane interstate running below Boston was so ambitious that some likened it to building the Panama Canal. But while that fabled engineering effort took place in a sparsely populated jungle, the Big Dig -- as the $14.