After much fanfare, Bechtel Parsons/Brinckerhoff has agreed to settle a lawsuit from the state and will pay $407 million. Smaller companies involved with the Big Dig will pay $51 million. $400 million seems small given the cost overruns of the Big Dig, but the state won't be turning that kind of money down. The AP report on WBZ notes that Bechtel Parsons/Brinckerhoff received $2 billion for consulting on the project, so this is a partial......

--In the middle of a card game at an old folks' home in Jamaica Plain, someone let loose pepper spray, and three residents went to the hospital. That must have been a high-stakes game of pokeno! Police questioned one 66-year-old man, Robert Kane, because he had pepper spray in the past, but he denied it. One resident referred to "troublemakers" in the home and suggested that some people in the home were beefing. Aren't they......

The Boston Police Department issued a press release today indicating that twenty-three people will be charged for crack and cocaine distribution in the Bromley-Heath housing development in Jamaica Plain. In season one of The Wire it was Avon Barksdale working for control of The Towers – its season four now and the lines are still tapped in hopes of shutting down Marlo Stanfield's operation. The fiction of HBO's drama is well developed and revolves around......

Bostonist hates taking off our shoes at the airport when going through security. We have a special pair of particularly smelly shoes we wear hoping that the TSA people will have to touch them as we go through the detectors. But we don’t carry knives, bombs, or secret documents. Back in 2003 Ahmed Mehalba was arrested and charged with possessing secret documents when he was searched at Logan International Airport. Mehalba a former Boston taxi......