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Family advocates are outraged by a prom held at Boston City Hall that was open to children apparently as young as 12 featuring crossdressers, homosexual heavy petting, suspected drug use and a leather-clad doorman who teaches sexual bondage classes. Children from middle schools and high schools across Massachusetts on May 9 attended a Youth Pride Day event ending with a prom inside of Boston City Hall sponsored by the Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Youth, or BAGLY, a group seated on the Massachusetts Commission for GLBT Youth. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino issued a proclamation welcoming homosexual and transgender...

The detective son of Mayor Thomas M. Menino moonlights as a “safety engineer” for a politically wired construction powerhouse that has landed millions in city contracts and regularly turns to the mayor’s team for necessary permits, the Herald has learned. Detective Thomas M. Menino Jr., a 13-year Hub cop, landed the plum, 20-hour-a-week post with Suffolk Construction in January 2008, even as he pulls down a taxpayer-funded $86,000 annual base salary in the department’s intelligence unit. In 2007, he made $137,000 as a police officer with overtime and detail pay, records show.

The bizarre story behind the construction of Boston's most controversial building

Howie live thread starting with his Sunday Herald column

Howie thread beginning with his Sunday Herald column

Mayor Thomas M. Menino yesterday declared war on pharmacy chain plans to open mini health clinics in stores, diagnosing them as “unsafe” and “ill-equipped to monitor community health needs.” “Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong,” said Menino, as he called on city health commissioners to help him block the so-called mini-clinics from coming to Boston. Menino’s fighting words came one day after the state’s Public Health Council approved a controversial plan to allow retailers such as CVS to run no-appointment-necessary, limited services medical clinics inside their stores. At the clinics, nurse practitioners would diagnose minor...

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino says the Boston police lieutenant who is serving 18 months court-ordered probation for punching his girlfriend off a Baltimore barstool is a “coward.” “(Police Commissioner Edward) Davis has assured the mayor that he will do everything in his power to hold this coward accountable for his actions,” said Menino’s spokeswoman, Dot Joyce. “Domestic violence is a huge problem in our society. No one should be able to get away with raising a hand to anyone, especially a defenseless woman.” Lt. David Murphy was suspended for 30 days on Dec. 19 but will only serve five...

Abdel Majid left behind family and friends in Morocco four years ago to study and work in the United States. Yesterday, as he heard the traditional Muslim call to prayer at the new Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury, he truly felt at home. “The population here - most of them are immigrants far from where they grew up,” said the 29-year-old Revere man. “To hear the call of prayer makes you feel this is really your country.” Yesterday, Muslims from across the region watched the capping of the mosque’s minaret, the tower from which the call to...

BOSTON Boston Mayor Tom Menino pledges to combat global warming by committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city 80 percent by the year 2050. Menino's short-term goal is to reduce Boston's emissions by seven percent over the next five years. The mayor hopes to meet those goals by installing energy efficient heating systems in buildings throughout the city and by encouraging increased use of wind power as well as other measures. Menino says Boston already is the region's largest municipal purchaser of renewable energy and biodiesel fuel made from vegetable material.

Mumbles Menino is so desperate to grab some of that new meals tax money, he’s starting to sound like Popeye’s old friend Wimpy. The mayor of Boston goes out Friday talking about hamburgers, and how this proposed tax increase would only cost you 18 cents on a $9 bacon double cheese with fries, which will work out great down the road because your property taxes will go down by thousands of dollars because of that extra 18 cents. In short, Mumbles will gladly give you a tax cut Tuesday for an 18-cent hamburger tax today. It’s a scam of course....

The Boston Redevelopment Authority went to court yesterday to prevent four of its key officials from having to answer questions under oath about a deal in which a city-owned parcel of land was transferred to an Islamic group for construction of a mosque. Lawyers for the city's most powerful agency argued in Suffolk Superior Court that critics of the mosque project at Roxbury Crossing had no right to depose the BRA officials about the project or obtain more documents than those already provided to the David Project, a nonprofit Jewish advocacy group. Leaders of the David Project have questioned the...

The Islamic Society of Boston's effort to build the region's largest mosque has received at least $1 million in financing from a Saudi Arabia-based bank dominated by governments that critics of the mosque project say support Islamic extremism. The Islamic society acknowledged yesterday receiving a $1 million loan from the Islamic Development Bank in late 2005 -- principal owners of which are Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran, and Egypt -- after opponents of the mosque project provided the Globe with documents showing that the bank paid about $500,000 in mosque construction bills late in 2005. Work on the mosque, which is...

Mayor Thomas M. Menino is chastising shock jocks Opie & Anthony and WBCN for broadcasting a live "Homeless Shopping Spree" yesterday where homeless people were given money and were taken to a New Jersey mall... "This so-called "shopping spree" is a sick and twisted exercise that degrades the most vulnerable members of our society," Menino. "This is wrong, and we need the public . . . who care about the homeless and about basic human decency to stand up and tell them so." According to a live broadcast of the program yesterday, more than 2,000 people showed up at the...

Hey youse, yeah I’m talkin’ to youse out there, youse think it’s easy bein’ Mumbles Menino? All these years as mayor, and you gets no respect. The city looks lousy, companies are movin’ out, half the drugs in the police evidence room are missing, you backed Tom Reilly for governor, they keep puttin’ “holiday tree” up the Web site - things get any worse and James Baker and Lee Hamilton will be writing a report about you, which as everyone knows is the singular of “youse.” But still, the Mayor toils on, moving through the city, accompanied only by a...

The Herring family is all too familiar with the ruthless, unimaginably violent actions of a girl gang that has taken to terrorizing Dorchester in recent months. In March, 8-year-old Daryus Herring - that’s right, a little 8-year old boy - was surrounded and stomped by the girls that call themselves the Crown Path gang. The attack left the child unconscious with four broken ribs. Days later, the same girls tried to beat up the boy’s big sister - 13-year-old Shaquice Herring - after she asked them, “Which one of you jumped my brother?” The wannabe girl gangsters responded by throwing...

A crime-fighting theory that says stopping major crimes begins with stopping small ones has influenced policing strategies in Boston and elsewhere since the 1980s. But scholars are starting to question whether fixing broken windows really fixes much at all. ON THURSDAY, Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced a new initiative. The Boston Police Department, he said, will be cracking down on misdemeanor offenses, including loud parties, unleashed dogs, public drinking, and even littering. ''Today we are addressing what may sometimes appear to be smaller issues," the mayor said at a press conference, ''but for those of us familiar with the 'broken...

I am proud to live in a country where religious freedom is a fundamental belief, and where our elected officials are judged by their performance in office, without religious tests. Though the beliefs they hold in their hearts surely inform every decision they make, elected officials are properly judged by the policies they pursue, not by the religion they practice or by their adherence to the tenets of our own religious beliefs. So, I was troubled to read that picketers protested Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s address to the Catholic Charities of Greater Boston Christmas dinner earlier this month, criticizing the...

CARICATURES OF CATHOLIC belief have been a staple of American life since the Colonial period. Once upon a time, the cartoons were drawn and the caricatures were promoted by Protestant bigots. That's rarely the case anymore, except on the fringes of the religious fever swamps (and, to be sure, among certain devout secularists). In an odd historical twist, cartoon Catholicism and the crudest caricatures of Catholic belief are often promoted today by Catholic political leaders. Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino is a case in point. In the course of his recent remarks to the Catholic Charities Greater Boston Christmas dinner,...

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has raised the level of rhetoric and insulted religious Catholics across the state by telling a homosexual newspaper this week that those who want to enforce the Church's teachings and instructions are, in his words, "hateful." Catholic Charities, an arm of the Archdiocese of Boston but run by a separate (and unfortunately, left-wing) board of directors, had announced that it was honoring Mayor Menino at its annual fund-raising dinner to be held next Friday, Dec. 9, at the Boston Harbor Hotel. Many religious Catholics were outraged and communicated with Archbishop Sean O'Malley that he should not...

Mayor Thomas M. Menino said yesterday that critics campaigning to have him ousted as keynote speaker at a Catholic Charities fund-raiser next week are blinded by anger and risk weakening the Catholic Church by making it more exclusive. 'Faith, hope, and charity, that's what the church is about," the mayor said in his first public remarks on the issue since Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley announced last week he would not attend the event. ''If these people are Catholic and charitable, where does this animosity come from? They are not charitable at all. As a Catholic, I am trying to help...