Sabotage

Developments today pointed to sabotage as the cause of the explosion and crash of Pan Am Flight 103, killing all 259 people aboard: A U.S. government source in Washington today said the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, received a telephone warning about two weeks ago from a person claiming to represent the Abu Nidal radical Palestinian group. The caller said a bomb would be placed aboard a Pan Am plane. In Moscow, the U.S. Embassy last week warned American diplomats that a bomb threat had been made against a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt, West Germany, to the United States.

Boston and Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority police are investigating reports that sabotage of electrical equipment might have caused Tuesday night's blackout of Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final series at Boston Garden, the Boston Globe reported. MBTA officers saw an electrician who had worked for Boston & Maine Railroad acting suspiciously near a transformer storage room where the electrical troubles began, sources said. While Garden officials originally assumed the transformer accidentally overheated and shut down, investigators now say the electrician might have had a key to the storage room, which the railroad used to own, and might have manually shut off the transformer.

The Kurdish National Liberation Front today claimed it placed a bomb aboard a West German jetliner that crashed near the Aegean coast and killed 16 people, the Anatolia news agency reported. The dispatch said an unidentified caller told the agency's London bureau that "we killed the West German diplomat in Paris and we downed the plane that crashed in Izmir. " Anatolia said the caller appeared to refer to the shooting death today of a consular employee near the West German Embassy in Paris.

"Sabotage," said Joe Merlino. "Absolutely not true," said James DiMeyo. Wonder what the debate is about? Here's a clue: Merlino is vice chairman of the Delaware County Democratic Committee. DiMeyo works for John McNichol, director of the county data- processing office, chairman of the Upper Darby Republican Party and perhaps the most influential Republican in the county. Indeed, the charge and denial are about politics - and computers. Specifically, a computer to process voter registration data - name, party affiliations and addresses - of Delaware County's approximately 300,000 registered voters.

Interim University of Florida coach Don DeVoe, who announced Tuesday he wouldn't seek the job on a permanent basis when his contract expires in April, claims his chances for success were sabotaged by some members of deposed coach Norm Sloan's staff, assistant Monte Towe in particular. "Things could have been so much better, but outside influences made it impossible," DeVoe said yesterday. "It's crazy how young men can be influenced by people who shouldn't be anything to them. " DeVoe said Towe was with Dwayne Schintzius on the night the star center quit the team.

The Bucks County Water and Sewer Authority believes sabotage may have led to a malfunction that sent wastewater and chemicals from the Green Street sewer treatment plant into a nearby stream Monday night. The stream is a tributary of Neshaminy Creek. In a statement released yesterday afternoon, authority officials said they believed someone used a key to enter the plant's control building and flip a circuit breaker to the off position. As a result, power to pumps and to an alarm designed to alert operators to the problem was cut, officials said.

A Nicaraguan intelligence official was quoted yesterday as saying that U.S. and Central American military forces have conducted sabotage and intelligence missions on Nicaraguan territory since 1984. Maj. Ricardo Wheelock, the chief of army intelligence, was quoted by Barricada, the newspaper of the ruling Sandinista movement, as saying that U.S. forces sabotaged Nicaraguan military and fuel installations and conducted spy missions. "North American forces have been involved in acts of terrorism against civilians and the military" in the last several years, Wheelock said.

It would have been understandable if Matt Emmons had a bad first Olympic experience. Earlier this year, Emmons discovered someone sabotaged his rifles. Then, while preparing for the men's 50-meter prone rifle event, he caught a cold. Before yesterday's final, his heart beat so much, he didn't know whether he could calm himself. He remained composed and focused. His reward was an Olympic gold medal. "How's it supposed to feel? I don't know. I probably won't realize it until I get home," said Emmons, a Brown's Mills, N.J., native who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.

A leaking natural gas line in a Washington Township school was the result of negligence by the contractor, not sabotage, township police concluded yesterday after a five-day investigation. The leak occurred the morning of Dec. 6 in the new Chestnut Ridge Middle School on Hurffville-Cross Keys Road. A teacher inadvertently turned on the gas to a 3/4-inch uninspected line. Nearly 1,000 students and 70 faculty members had to be evacuated from the school. The gas did not ignite, and no one was hurt.

Two striking Philadelphia Gas Works employees were charged yesterday with sabotaging two underground natural gas pipes, causing potentially explosive leaks similar to one that forced the evacuation of a South Philadelphia neighborhood on Sunday. Patrick Vogelei, 39, of Annebella Street, Havertown, Delaware County, and William Williamson, 41, of Chelwynde Avenue near 69th Street, were each charged with two counts of risking a catastrophe, resklessly endangering another person, criminal mischief and interfering with public utilities in connection with the two separate gas leaks, police said.

JERUSALEM - Mishaps at Iranian nuclear facilities and weapons sites may be part of a covert organized attack on Iran's nuclear weapons program, according to Western intelligence officials. An explosion last week outside Iran's third largest city, Isfahan, is thought to be the most recent strike, though details on the intended target are still unclear. A sprawling military base and nuclear facilities are outside Isfahan, and intelligence officials across the Middle East said there was strong evidence that the explosion had done "significant structural damage.

Throngs of screaming young girls appeared to be giving the Philadelphia Orchestra a teenyboppers' farewell as the Japanese leg of the 2010 Tour of Asia came to a close. The minute the orchestra's buses pulled up at Tokyo Haneda International Airport for the flight to Seoul, the screaming began - and then abruptly stopped. The orchestra, as it turned out, was not the object of the crowd's Thursday-morning vigil. Some hot Korean movie star was due to alight there, and his fans were too preoccupied with his arrival to utter his name intelligibly.

Calling it the "catastrophe that wasn't," SEPTA officials said the fire that engulfed a R5 Paoli train car packed with passengers this morning was in no way suspicious or criminal. "All the potentials and the numbers were there for a really horrific instance," said Richard Maloney, SEPTA spokesman. "We ended up with a bad fire and a lot of people that were very badly shaken. " The smokey fire broke out about 7 a.m. on the train's first car as it train left the Overbrook station in West Philadelphia.

I'M OUTRAGED at the White House's apparent coziness with Big Pharma. Our medical industry is driven by drug profits and over the last two decades, the pharmaceutical industry has been driving health care costs to unsustainable levels. Some chronically ill patients and many of the elderly say they can't afford their medication if they don't carry gold-plated insurance to pay for it. So I'm not impressed that Big Pharma will spend $150 million on TV ads, or its pledge to cut drug costs by $80 billion, without first learning the specifics of the deal that the industry cut with the White House, since we can blame the drug companies' hefty prices as one of several causes of unaffordable health care for millions.

IT'S everything many of us wished for: W. is whacking brush at his ranch in Texas, and Barack Obama is president of the United States. Millions massed on the Mall in Washington and hundreds of millions more watched on TV around the world as Obama was sworn in and Bush helicoptered out of any responsibility for the mess he left for the new president to clean up. Is it really just four weeks since then? Only Hollywood marriages have shorter honeymoons than many people, including the press, have given President Obama.

David Rabe, best known for Hurlyburly, was long considered the playwright of the Vietnam War. A vet whose company once traded him to another company for a Jeep, he understood the deep damage the war did to the American psyche. In an essay written long after he wrote the plays, Rabe saw the war as a "swamp where history paused and could have shown us who we were and who we were becoming . . . an X-ray knifing open the darkness with an obscene illumination. " But, he wrote, "we closed our eyes.

A horse from the Delaware Park barn of Eight Belles trainer Larry Jones, owned by Jim Squires, an outspoken critic of drugs in horse racing, has failed a drug test, Jones said yesterday. Stones River tested positive for illegal levels of clenbuterol after winning a race on June 8, Jones said. Talking outside the paddock at Delaware Park, Jones said there is an "outside shot" Stones River legitimately tested positive. But he said he and Squires believe the horse was a victim of sabotage.

'I didn't sabotage the power plant, the power plant sabotaged me," Jack Black insists in the sweet, goofy Be Kind Rewind - and he's right. Black is Jerry, a deadbeat doofus who hangs out at a rundown Passaic, N.J., video store, and who gets electrocuted one night while trying to blow up a transformer. Instead, weird stuff happens, mega volts course through his flabby bod, and he gets magnetized. When Jerry returns to the video store, he unwittingly demagnetizes its entire stock, rendering the VHS tapes blank and snowy.

As Orpheus leads Eurydice out of the underworld, she's the one who messes up her own resurrection in the new Sarah Ruhl retelling of the famous Greek legend, titled Eurydice. During the hopeful trudge when Orpheus is given a second chance at happiness by retrieving his snake-bitten wife from the Lord of the Underworld's clutches, he violates the rules of the game by looking back at her. This time, he does so only after she calls his name. OK, I've given away the ending, but it's justified here, because the play, which closes Aug. 26 at New York City's Second Stage, doesn't arrive at Philadelphia's Wilma Theater until April 2008.

A rash of problems with Philadelphia's five-year-old electronic voting machines had officials scrambling yesterday, while suburban communities reported few problems. After the polls closed, however, it was a different story in the suburbs. Montgomery and Chester Counties were unusually slow tabulating the day's vote. Few vote totals were posted on county Web sites late yesterday. Montgomery County was faced with a delay because it did not use its normal tabulation software.