With the hindsight of its being trounced by hurricane Katrina — and foresight of weather experts who predict a consecutive stormy summer season this year for the Gulf Coast — a New Orleans law firm has since spent over $100,000 to purchase new hardware, implement high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) software and set up a secondary, out-of-state data center.

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Dow Jones Indexes has switched to IBM pSeries from Sun Microsystems Inc. servers to calculate its global market indexes and averages — the core port of which IBM performed for free in exchange for commitment to its platform.

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Simon & Schuster Inc. plans to save $1 million a year on hardware costs and licensing fees as a result of migrating off its old IBM mainframes.

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By Joe Spurr, Globe Correspondent | Page: B1

Like every other year, the Piers Park Sailing Center in East Boston is closed for the winter. Its frosted docks anchor three sailboats, bobbing gently with the water. Skyscrapers across the harbor sparkle in the early dusk.

Vince D’Addieco and Shannon Murphy still visit the dock, not just to sail the harbor, but to remember. To them - and hundreds of other local youngsters who bonded through its teamwork-oriented summer programs - Piers Park isn’t just where they learned to sail, or earned some extra money taking care of the boats - it is where they grew up.

But when spring returns, Massport’s $220,000 in annual funding will not, even though nearly everyone agrees the program has been a success since it began in 1995.

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Ralph Nader’s criticisms of the federal government during last year’s presidential race haven’t shrunk. They’ve grown.

Calling the US war in Afghanistan “a riverboat gamble,” Nader said President Bush is “basically in the process of burning down the haystack to find the needle.” In an interview yesterday with the Globe before speaking at a peace rally in Boston, Nader argued that a blend of “bribes, spies, and limited military action, coupled with a big humanitarian effort by the UN” would be more effective and minimize the costs to innocent civilians.

“You have to ask yourself: `What happens after you catch the backers of the attackers and you leave . . . behind an extremely devastated society bitter?’” Nader said.

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Howard Zinn, historian, author, Boston University professor emeritus, and antiwar activist, recently received the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Eugene V. Debs award for his writing and political activism. He has authored “A People’s History of the United States,” and his autobiography “You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train,” and contributed to a new book, “Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century,” as well as many others. Zinn, 79, grew up in Brooklyn. He was chair of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta and taught at BU for about 25 years. He lives with his wife, Roslyn, in Cambridge.

Q. Do you consider yourself a pacifist?

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A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that the Massachusetts law that creates a buffer zone around abortion clinics does not violate the free speech rights of protesters.

The law, passed a year ago and upheld yesterday by the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, bans protesters from coming within 6 feet of clinic workers or patients inside an 18-foot buffer around the entrance of any clinic that performs abortions.

Lawmakers pushed for the law after gunman John Salvi killed two female workers at two Brookline abortion clinics in 1994.

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The pile driver fired without relent, piercing the air like shotgun blasts echoing against the surrounding structures of West Village and the John D. O’Bryant African-American Institute.

Amid construction of the new Behrakis center, the machine’s rhythmic recoil was not unlike the tick-tock of a clock, serving its reminder to those within earshot the dwindling number of days remaining until May 10 — the deadline for an administrative decision regarding the future whereabouts of the Institute.

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