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NEW BEDFORD -- The storm over a Fall River high-stakes bingo hall dumped an immeasurable amount of ill will across the SouthCoast yesterday.
In the latest gust, a city official accused the chairwoman of the Chamber of Commerce of conflict of interest for the business group's support of the project.
The week-old controversy, erupted when Mayor Rosemary S. Tierney urged Gov. A. Paul Cellucci to block the Fall River proposal saying it does not guarantee any regional benefits.
By John Estrella, Standard-Times staff writer
Southeastern Massachusetts, the land of hurricanes, saw weather with a twist of the Kansas plains yesterday.
A collision of two opposing air masses kicked off a spate of funnel clouds forcing the closure of several town beaches, but causing no damage.
Two tornadoes set down in Plymouth during the afternoon drew the attention of residents across the region.
FALL RIVER -- The Legislature is expected to appropriate $4 million today for the purchase, cleanup and development of the Kerr Mill site.
The long-awaited measure would pave the way for the new home of UMass Dartmouth's Advanced Technology Center and become an inducement for other industry to locate at the site.
State Rep. Michael Rodrigues, D-Westport, said the Kerr Mill project has been one of his top priorities since taking office 16 months ago.
ACUSHNET -- Luis da Rosa, who swept into School Committee service four years ago on the wings of a controversial but total recall of the board, resigned Monday night.
Mr. da Rosa, citing personal reasons and "circumstances beyond my control," said he was pleased with his service, which helped protect the "financial interests of the town" through completion of long overdue maintenance projects at the elementary and Ford Middle schools.
During Mr. Da Rosa's tenure, the board hired two superintendents and guided public education reform.
Along the way, he expressed his disenchantment with the community's willingness to avoid funding an appropriate salary that would retain a superintendent in Acushnet.
LAKEVILLE -- A committee of representatives from all of the boards in town is being organized to decide how the town should prepare itself for the population explosion expected when the new commuter rail station opens next month.
The Growth Task Force established in an interdepartmental meeting last night will include a member from each town board and at least one at-large member from the public. It will meet starting Sept. 3 in order to examine the town's options for controlling growth.
The idea came out of Selectman Chawner Hurd's suggestion last night that discussion of Lakeville's growth issues be separated from the town's new interdepartmental meetings, which are intended to discuss myriad issues but had been bogged down by growth issues.
ROCHESTER-- In the upcoming special town meeting, residents might find one of the articles particularly familiar.
That's because they voted on it at a special election two weeks ago.
The only Proposition 2½ override question to pass the ballot box Aug. 6 -- $100,000 to purchase open space-- tops the warrant for Monday's special town meeting.
FALL RIVER -- Heitor Souza once wanted to be a priest. It was all his family prepared him for while growing up in the village of Rabo Peixe, Azores.
The man who united Fall River's celebration of the Holy Ghost feast and watched it become a huge event for all of New England knew as a seminary student he would never take on a priest's robes.
Although he did not become a priest, that didn't stop him from being spiritual.
By Ric Oliveira, Standard-Times staff writer
FALL RIVER -- Clemente Anastacio was a child in the Azores, barely able to walk, when he began celebrating the Holy Ghost Feast.
"Since I have been conscious I have always celebrated it," said the former president of the Great Holy Ghost Feast of New England.
Now retired, Mr. Anastacio still celebrates the feast -- but now in his new country, where this ancient custom has bloomed, drawing more than 150,000 people from all over North America and Portugal to Fall River.
Dick White
Join us now on Martha's Vineyard in sweet early morning as Bill and Hillary Clinton leisurely wade through a pile of invitations at their breakfast table inside the secluded Oyster Pond estate of developer Dick Friedman ...
"Oh look, Bill! Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson have invited us to a clambake and champagne bash."
"Pass the bagels, Hillary-honey. Who else is going to attend?"
WESTPORT -- A state factfinder has been called into contract negotiations between the Westport Federation of Teachers and the School Committee. Teachers have been without a contract since August 1996.
Negotiations between the teachers union, the School Committee and a mediator broke down two weeks ago, said School Superintendent Margot desJardins. "We went into that meeting thinking it would be resolved. It wasn't."
The impasse came just a month shy of the start of school.
BRUNSWICK, Vt. -- Federal and state officers were cautiously approaching the stolen police cruiser abandoned by a man suspected of killing four, including two of their colleagues, when one of their dogs suddenly sensed something in the trees on the ridge.
In a split second, the officers knew it was Carl Drega and the hillside immediately erupted in gunfire. But the tiny margin they had gained from the alert German shepherd just may have saved their lives.
The descriptions of the ensuing scene, amid the tall, thick pines near Dennis Pond in Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom, are chilling.
SPRINGFIELD -- While this state is injecting more free-market competition into its power industry, its chief regulatory agency is growing quickly.
But the chairman of a key legislative committee said yesterday he wants to rein in the regulators while lifting controls on the industry.
It was part of a broadened debate over the future of state energy regulation as a new era of deregulation take hold.
PARIS -- Police massed around the Eiffel Tower and spread throughout Paris yesterday, brought in by the busload to prepare for the arrival of Pope John Paul II.
The security deployment for the pope's four-day visit, which starts today, will be the largest in France since the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1989.
"It is a huge security operation and the police department has been working on it for more than a year," Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement said.
NEW YORK -- Twenty people were accused by a federal grand jury yesterday of conspiring to smuggle deaf Mexicans into the United States and force them to peddle trinkets on streets and subways -- a scheme that earned up to $1 million a year, officials said.
The wholesale indictment, announced in Brooklyn, outlined a bicoastal operation in which bosses in New York and Chicago allegedly used threats and violence to keep their victims in servitude. The victims sometimes were "traded" between cities like baseball teams swapping outfielders.
WASHINGTON -- As a challenger for a House seat in Massachusetts, James P. McGovern raised only 7 percent of his political action committee money from the transportation industry.
McGovern won, and the Democrat landed a seat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Now, preparing to run as an incumbent, he finds transportation interests eager to help.
Between Jan. 1 and June 30, McGovern raised 37 percent of his PAC money from the transportation industry.
MOSCOW -- Mir's crew members inspected their space suits yesterday for a desperately important repair mission into an airless compartment -- while their bosses on the ground insisted they were not putting lives in danger by skimping on spare parts.
A computer breakdown this week that shut down most systems aboard the banged-up space Mir was caused by an aging part that Russia had chosen not to spend the money to replace, Deputy Mission Control chief Viktor Blagov acknowledged.
But Blagov insisted that Mission Control was not saving money at the expense of the safety of the Russian-American crew.
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- NATO-led troops took over police headquarters and barracks and seized truckloads of weapons yesterday from police loyal to indicted wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, moving deeper into a growing dispute among Bosnian Serbs.
Western powers are intent on weakening Karadzic and eventually sending him to an international tribunal to face genocide charges. As long as Karadzic is at large and pulling the levers of power, there is little chance that the Bosnian peace agreement signed in 1995 can work.
NATO's intervention comes at the request of Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, and could push the Serb republic -- which accounts for 49 percent of Bosnia -- closer to a break-up.
JIYE, Lebanon -- Stepping up hostilities in a week of escalating violence, Israeli jets struck deep inside Lebanon yesterday, bombing a guerrilla base and a power plant in retaliation for rocket attacks on northern Israel.
The only known casualties in the raids were two children, injured when the roof of their house collapsed under Israeli bombardment in eastern Lebanon.
The attack was the latest in a series of violent exchanges that have killed at least nine Lebanese civilians and wounded dozens of people in southern Lebanon and northern Israel since Monday. It marked the first time this week that Israeli forces have retaliated directly, rather than their allies in southern Lebanon.
Compiled from wire reports
MENEMSHA -- It may be the first time the Kennedys have had smooth sailing in months.
With President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton aboard Senator Edward M. Kennedy's schooner, The Mya, the sea quelled, the sun shined and everything was rosy for the Kennedy clan yesterday.
Of course, the centers of the latest controversy -- Congressman Joe Kennedy, Michael Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. -- weren't aboard. J.F.K. Jr. recently called his cousins "poster boys for bad behavior" in his magazine, George.
BOSTON -- Sometimes praise comes in the form of a gold star. And sometimes it comes in the form of dollars. The latter is the case for the state Department of Transitional Assistance.
Yesterday morning, the Massachusetts DTA was awarded a $5.8 million bonus from the federal government for their efficient administration of the Food Stamp Program. Only five other states received bonuses.
Such bonuses are given to states across the nation for getting the right amount of food stamps to the right people without overpayment or underpayment.
BOSTON -- Cigarette manufacturers vowed yesterday to continue their legal attack on a state law that requires them to disclose the special ingredients in their products.
They also said they would focus on a new argument -- that the state law would likely destroy the industry's "valuable ingredient trade secrets."
"The companies intend to pursue that avenue vigorously," tobacco attorney Henry Dinger said in a statement.
The companies reacted after losing an appeal in federal court in Boston. The companies, in that appeal, had argued that a federal law on cigarette "advertising and promotion" overruled the state law.
BOSTON -- The state attorney general's office promised yesterday to fight a request for a 6.8 percent increase in auto insurance rates.
The industry said last week it needed a rate increase of 9.6 percent, but it then knocked off 2.8 percent from that because it is being required to return millions that it mistakenly overcharged from 1991 through 1996.
The attorney general's office said it wanted to take a close look at the industry's costs.
"We'll make them prove to us that their rates and their cost went up 9.6 percent from last year to this year," said Assistant Attorney General Joanna Connolly.
BOSTON -- Federal officials are going after a Falmouth chemical company to reimburse the government for cleaning up a hazardous waste site in New Bedford where the firm stored its materials.
The U.S. Department of Justice has asked a federal judge in Boston to force Cape Chem Corp., which does business as Erie Chemical Sales in Falmouth, to pay $233,000.
"The basic premise is the polluter pays," said Bill Brooks, spokesman for the Justice Department. "The (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) had to oversee or supervise the cleanup and this represents money that they spent -- taxpayer money. We're trying to make sure that the company here pays their fair share."
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. trade deficit narrowed as exports hit an all-time high and imports shrank for the first time in eight months. But the deficits with Japan and China rose sharply, drawing a rebuke yesterday from the Clinton administration.
The Commerce Department said the nation's overall trade deficit narrowed 14.5 percent in June to $8.16 billion, compared to a $9.4 billion trade gap in May.
But even with June's improvement, the deficit for this year is still on track to be the worst showing in a decade as trade continues to be the major weak spot for the U.S. economy.
WASHINGTON -- The key to success for the nation's savings and loans, federal regulators have discovered, appears to be simple: mortgages, done the old-fashioned way.
The Office of Thrift Supervision, known mostly for dealing with troubled S&Ls, set out six months ago to determine what makes a thrift highly profitable. The results of its study, which identified the 102 most consistently profitable institutions out of the nation's 1,300, were released yesterday at a news conference.
NEW YORK -- The Dow Jones industrial average pushed back above 8000 yesterday, rolling to a 100-point gain for an unprecedented third straight day, as the stock market extended a lightning quick rebound from this month's slide.
The Dow, which rose 108 points on Monday and nearly 115 on Tuesday, rose an additional 103.13 to 8021.23, easily wiping out the remnants of Friday's 247-point tumble.
Broad market indexes also advanced for the third straight day, led again by the technology-rich Nasdaq composite index, which nearly shot back into record territory.
By Richard Pacheco
Standard-Times correspondent
"Brigadoon" isn't the world's best known musical. It's only been done in the area about two times in 20 years, unlike a show such as "Oklahoma," which seems to crop up in some incarnation nearly every season, until critics can recite the book or hum the music by heart.
But "Brigadoon," the musical UMass Dartmouth Theatre Company Director Angus Bailey chose for the outdoor production that is scheduled to begin tonight, was a hit in 1947, receiving the New York Drama Critics' Circle nod as best musical that year.
By Eric Gongola, Standard-Times staff writer
The joys experienced by the players and coaching staff of New Bedford Post 1 over the past few weeks are dulled only by thoughts of what might have been.
The Mass. state champions walked away from the American Legion Baseball Northeast Regional Tournament Tuesday afternoon on the short end of a 7-2 decision against Spring City, Pa.
OAKLAND, Calif. -- There wasn't a lot of time to savor it.
In fact, there was only about 30 minutes, the amount of time between games of yesterday's doubleheader with the Oakland Athletics.
But finally, thanks to a seven-run, fifth-inning explosion, the Boston Red Sox made it to .500, pulling even at 63-63 by virtue of a 7-5 victory in Game One before a sparse crowd at Oakland Coliseum.
It marked the first time since May 4, when they were 14-14, that the Sox were at .500.
These days you'll find Jack Hamilton in his restaurant, serving up the best prime rib in Branson, Mo. The place is called "Pzazz," and you can find it right next to the Tony Orlando Theater.
The food is good. The business is good. And life is good for Hamilton, 59, a retired major-league pitcher.
Every now and then, a tour bus will pull in from New England. Hamilton has baseball memorabilia hanging on the walls, and he's a friendly proprietor, quick to introduce himself with a smile and a handshake.
By Ed Duckworth, New England Sports Service
PHILADELPHIA -- A week ago today, Pete Carroll was pointing out how much more important the Patriots' third preseason game would be than their fourth.
Sunday's matchup with Denver, he said, would be the real acid test, the "culmination of everything" the Pats had been working on during their 4½-week training camp at Bryant College.
By comparison, the matchup with the Eagles at Veterans' Stadium four days later would be simply something the Pats would try to survive without injuries.
Nearly one week after she appealed in a letter to Acting Gov. Paul Cellucci, New Bedford Mayor Rosemary Tierney is still trying to explain why she thinks it is a good idea for her and the governor to interfere with the Wampanoag tribe's plans to build a high-stakes bingo hall in Fall River. The problem is that the explanations aren't helping; rather, they're serving to demonstrate how badly the administration is reaching to salvage something out of the casino debacle she presided over in New Bedford.
If the American people knew what was good for them (yeah, right), they would take the opportunity to educate themselves geographically each time the president of the United States takes a vacation. This way we wouldn't have high school students wondering what state Illinois is in and asking why they can't find Chicago in western Kansas. Geographic illiteracy is a major disgrace in the United States. And part of the reason is that the standard reaction when the president goes on vacation is not to get out atlases and encyclopedias but, rather, to say, "So?" and continue watching more bad TV. Enough! I say.
Business owners frequently declare they want to get government "off their backs" so they can compete in a free market. "Government" has become a cuss word when spat from the lips of many executives.
Pity poor Cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev.
There was a picture of him being carried in a chair from his Soyuz capsule after last week's landing in Kazakhstan. And you could tell he was glad to be back. More or less glad, anyway.
The expression on his face -- a brave attempt at a smile -- was the same one worn by millions of teen-agers every year. It's no easy thing, coming home to face the music after you've wrecked the family car.
FALL RIVER -- Susan Sandler's "Crossing Delancey" is a perky romantic comedy, at once amiable and airy. The Little Theatre of Fall River's production of it is given charm and sass by a winning cast.
Set in New York City in the present, "Crossing Delancey" presents a classic clash of tradition with the contemporary. It showcases terrific characters who enchant and amuse with their quirks and notions.
Tonight's only original network programming comes from "48 Hours" (10 p.m., CBS) with a report on a possible new treatment for children with Down syndrome. A mother has launched a one-woman crusade to publicize a combination therapy of the unapproved drug piracetam with nutritional supplements. Parents who oppose the treatment are also featured. Actor Chris Burke ("Life Goes On"), who was born with Down syndrome, also appears.
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