Hey, the Big Dig worked!...Trial by Media...Harvard prints cartoons

Well, it's been 18 years since construction began on Boston's "Big Dig". After putting up with all the corruption, delays, cost overruns, leaky tunnels, and wholesale disruption of downtown Boston for nearly two decades...it turns out that it may have been worth it after all.

The project has reduced by 62 percent the number of daily vehicle hours traveled on both the central artery, the airport tunnels, and Storrow Drive eastbound.

Speeds on Storrow Drive east to I-93 north have improved from 4 to 21 miles per hour.

Afternoon peak travel times along the length of the I-93 northbound through downtown have dropped from 16 to 3.1 minutes.

''This is the first report done since the opening of the project, and it demonstrates that those commitments and promises made back in the 1980s were true," the authority chairman, Matthew J. Amorello, said yesterday.

The report says that one of the most far-reaching impacts the project has had involves giving more people faster access to Logan.

When the turnpike extension connecting Interstate 90 with Logan Airport, opened fully in 2003 and allowed drivers from the South Shore to avoid snaking through downtown Boston to the Callahan tunnel, the number of people who found themselves within 40 minutes of drive time of the airport grew by 800,000, to a total of about 2.5 million.

That extension, coupled with the opening of the Ted Williams Tunnel, resulted in less traffic on the Callahan and Sumner tunnels, where average weekday speeds increased from 13 miles per hour to 36 miles per hour.

The report projects that the highway improvements will attract $7 billion in private investment, adding more than 43,000 jobs along the I-93 corridor and in the South Boston Seaport District.

''Looking toward the future, the pattern of new development in the Back Bay that originally derived from the Turnpike extension project is being repeated in South Boston and along the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway as a result of the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project," the report says. The turnpike extension from Newton to Boston was completed in 1965.

The report estimates that property tax revenues from Big Dig development on the South Boston Waterfront, where large parcels remain undeveloped, will equal 9 to 11 percent of the city's 2005 tax base of $1.13 billion when the waterfront is fully developed as planned, in about 20 years.

(More...)

Staying local, I now turn to a story that I have avoided covering, especially since it appeared on the front page of "People" Magazine. Accused murderer Neil Entwistle is scheduled to return to the Commonwealth today...and there's worry that he won't be able to get a fair trial due to all the publicity. I suppose keeping the story out of the 'tabloids' might have helped, hmm? How many sheeple have already tried, convicted, and hung him in absentia all due to speculation fueled by the media?

...With the publicity surrounding the case, several legal specialists said yesterday that it will be difficult for Entwistle to get a fair trial, particularly after a judge unsealed police affidavits this week that detail much of prosecutors' evidence said to support allegations that he shot Rachel and 9-month-old Lillian in their Hopkinton home last month.

The lawyers said they were appalled that Framingham District Judge Robert V. Greco made public 151 pages of affidavits that allege, among other things, that during the week of the killings Neil Entwistle surfed the Internet for websites that describe how to kill people.

''I think it's shocking, absolutely shocking," said Charles Rankin, a well-known criminal defense lawyer and one of the overseers of the state public defender agency. ''It just feeds more stories in the media and makes it harder to eventually find a jury that hasn't heard in excruciating detail the Commonwealth's version of events that hasn't been tested by any adversary process."

Jeffrey B. Abramson, a specialist on juries and a former Middlesex County prosecutor who teaches legal studies at Brandeis University, said that relentless news coverage of the killings and Neil Entwistle's flight to his native England already made it hard to find a fair and impartial jury. With the release of the affidavits, which also described alleged Internet searches by Neil Entwistle for paid escorts, Abramson said he could not fathom how that can ever be done.

Greco unsealed the affidavits Monday, over prosecutors' objections, after news organizations, including the Globe, sought their release because of intense public interest in the case. The judge said he had to balance the rights of all the parties in the case, privacy concerns, and the ''extent of community interest." Based on those factors, he unsealed the documents after ordering a few details blacked out...

Lastly this morning, there's word that a conservative student newspaper at Harvard University has reprinted the inflammatory Dutch cartoons showing the prophet Muhammed. I haven't seen these cartoons, so I don't have an opinion regarding their content....but I make note of the fact that the University hasn't been overrun by rioting extremists, either.

A conservative student newspaper at Harvard University has become one of the few media outlets in the country to show inflammatory Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, angering students on campus and prompting a forum to discuss the controversy.

The four cartoons appeared in the Feb. 8 issues of The Harvard Salient, a conservative, biweekly newspaper, under the headline, ''A pox (err, jihad) on free expression." The student editors called the cartoons, including a sketch of Mohammed carrying a bomb in his turban, ''relatively innocuous."

''Publishing materials that criticize the ways Islam has been usurped worldwide for purposes of violence and oppression is a risky, but honest and necessary, business," the editors wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Muslim students and others were angered when copies of the paper arrived on campus Thursday, calling the decision to reprint the cartoons a show of disrespect to Muslims. ''What really bothers them are that these are schoolmates who are out to offend them," said Khalid M. Yasin, a junior and president of the Harvard Islamic Society. ''They're people their age that are really attacking things that are very integral to their lives."

Travis R. Kavulla, a junior and the editor of the paper, said the student journalists meant no disrespect to Muslims, and had hoped instead to provoke a debate on campus. ''Now that [the cartoons] have provoked such a firestorm around the world, it's a shame that the mainstream media isn't publishing them because many people don't understand what they look like," he said.

On the same page, the paper also reprinted two anti-Semitic cartoons that ran in newspapers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, including one that superimposed a swastika over the Star of David.

After the paper was published, some students called for Kavulla to resign. Tomorrow night, the Harvard College Interfaith Council is hosting a forum to discuss the cartoons.

And so, the world turns on, whether us Americans choose to pay attention or not....given our current leadership, I'd say "not".