Los Angeles: Bus drivers’ strike affects 18,000 students

About 800 bus drivers went on strike in the nation’s second-largest school district Tuesday, causing delays for some 18,000 children and canceling field trips and sporting events.

Laidlaw Transit Inc., the largest of five transportation companies working for the Los Angeles school system, said its Teamster drivers did not show up for work in the morning.

Nearly 10 percent of the school district’s 700,000 students including many severely handicapped youngsters ride buses.

Laidlaw serves 18,000 students, but the strike could affect all bused students because other companies were redirected to pick up children stranded by Laidlaw buses.

Philadelphia: Air conditioner leak damages City Hall

City Hall rocked by scandal and tarnished by corruption during its 101-year existence has now been severely damaged by a water leak from an air conditioner in the richly ornate building.

A burst pipe sent water cascading through the world’s largest solid masonry edifice, damaging the City Council chambers’ 19th-century wooden desks, gold-leaf ceiling, antique light fixtures and balcony. Water also soaked carpets in the building and streaked dozens of portraits of past mayors.

There was no immediate cost estimate.

“We don’t know the extent of the damage, but it’s pretty bad,” Luz Cardenas, spokeswoman for Mayor John F. Street, said Tuesday.

The paintings are insured, but the rest will probably have to be covered by the taxpayers, officials said.

Maine: Imposing state prison demolished for park

Demolition began Tuesday at the 178-year-old Maine State Prison, a fortress-like red brick and limestone compound in Thomaston that was a forbidding landmark along the coast.

Crews breached the 22-foot-high outer wall and began tearing down the gymnasium, the first of 25 buildings to be demolished in the coming weeks.

The debris will be deposited at the limestone quarry that supplied material for the original prison, built in 1824, and the site will be seeded with grass and turned into a park.

The prison inspired a Stephen King story that was later made into the 1994 movie “The Shawshank Redemption.” But the movie was actually made at a prison in Ohio.

The imposing structure had been a landmark for vacationers traveling along U.S. Highway 1. Its prison store, which sells furniture and other items made by inmates, will continue to operate at its longtime location outside the prison walls.

Los Angeles: Rape, murder evidence presumed destroyed

Evidence gathered in as many as 6,000 unsolved rape and murder cases in Los Angeles County is missing and presumably destroyed, according to a county forensic specialist.

“Every one of these cases we can’t solve now means a violent perpetrator remains on the street,” said Lisa Kahn, the deputy district attorney in charge of the forensic science section.

The missing evidence involves cases investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

She said that the evidence was apparently destroyed but that she is still trying to find out exactly who did it and why.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday that any destroyed evidence was most likely disposed of with the permission of investigators and was not simply lost.

But Detective Rick Jackson told KCBS-TV that evidence sometimes is destroyed because of limited storage space.