A construction worker was knocked in a trench and killed today in the first fatality in the city's massive highway reconstruction project known as "The Big Dig."

Tom Lyons, spokesman for Boston Emergency Medical Services, called it a "terrible accident" and said the unidentified man was pronounced dead at the scene at Leverett Circle.

The worker was apparently hit by a large metal beam that was being lowered into the ground by a crane, said Kate mahogany, a spokeswoman for the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project. The man was knocked into a 20-foot deep construction trench at about 10 a.m.

The man worked for a utility relocation company, said Mahogany. It was the first fatality in the history of the $10.8 billion project that will eventually re-route Interstate 93 beneath Boston.

A half-dozen firefighters hoisted the body out of the trench in a body bag on a stretcher.

Police are making investigations into the "suspicious circumstances" surrounding the event.

Egypt plans to encase the smallest of the three Great Pyramids with 2,000 red granite slabs that covered part of the structure in ancient times, a government archaeology official said Sunday.

Workers soon will begin making detailed plans of King Mycerinos' pyramid to determine where the slabs should be placed, said Zahi Hawass, chief archaeologist for the Giza plateau where the Sphinx and Great Pyramids are located.

The 10-year project began last year with the measuring and registering of stones some weighing 15 tons found scattered on the plateau just outside Cairo. Cranes will be used to lift them into place. The project's cost is estimated to be $5 million.

Mycerinos' pyramid was reopened March 3 after a yearlong restoration effort to reinforce walls, erase graffiti and install a new ventilation system.

The king, who ruled in 2490-2427 B.C., died before the whole pyramid could be encased. His son Shepseskaf abandoned the project apparently because of the cost, Hawass said.

He said that only one-third of the pyramid's bottom was covered with granite and 70 percent of those stones fell off. The current project entails replacing the stones that dropped away.

Hawass said that restoring the granite stones will protect the pyramid's limestone structure. The stones were brought on boats up the Nile River from Aswan, 435 miles south of Cairo, in ancient times. The project also involves excavating to find tombs of the king's Courtiers thought to have been buried near him. Archaeologists also will look for wooden solar boats which ancient Egyptians believed took the soul of the dead to the nether world.

Welcome to the 7 Muses, the place Boston has been flocking to since its opening three weeks ago. Boston socialites have discovered this opulent club, enjoying live music by the best local and imported bands. The high vaulted ceiling, classy mahogany wood and original art add elegance and charm to the youthful, with-the-times atmosphere, which the club maintains. Fashionable patrons must get on a guest list three days in advance to guarantee entrance to 7 Muses, but believe me, it's worth the wait.

A 20-year-old Harvard University junior was found dead early yesterday morning, his body slumped against a sea wall near the Revere Beach pavilion.

A man walking his dog along the stretch of barren beach discovered David Okrent bleeding from knife wounds on the head and body, said James Borghesani, spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney. Okrent was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Police are investigating the death as a possible homicide, questioning Okrent's roommates for details and combing the dorm where he lived for clues.

Yesterday, as State Police began piecing together the events that led the accomplished mathematics major from the Harvard campus to the cold shore of a lonely beach, Okrent's father, Lawrence, was finishing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle 1,000 miles away at his family's home in Evanston, Ill.

As he put the finished puzzle on the kitchen table, he got a telephone call from an organ-donor center requesting permission to use his son's organs.

"If you're doing a donor authorization program," he told the person at the other end of the line, "why don't you ask my son himself?"

"Haven't you been called?" the man said.

"What are you talking about?" he answered back as the man hung up.

Lawrence Okrent took the request as a joke, went upstairs and took a shower.

Then he thought, it might be a mistake: His son had lost his Harvard ID three weeks earlier; someone else must have picked it up and was found carrying it.

He called his son at Eliot Hall in Cabot House, the dorm where his son had lived since his sophomore year. When he got the answering machine, he called the senior resident adviser, whose wife told what had happened.

"It was like being kicked in the gut with a heavy boot," Lawrence Okrent said in a telephone interview from his home, where he, his wife, Inez, and their two daughters - Arika, 27, and Sarah, 25 - mourned the loss of an only son and a younger brother. None had any idea what would have led the student, who had no car, 10 miles to Revere Beach so early in the morning.

"It's very mysterious, and we're all just in complete shock," Lawrence Okrent said. "And I don't think we'll be able to release it until his Body is brought back here."

For David Okrent's parents, the shock was amplified by the recent and Vivid memory of their son - vibrant and enthusiastic - when the two visited him in Cambridge for junior parents' weekend.

Harvard was a "pressure-packed place" that put a heavy burden on his son at times, Okrent said. But that was not the frame of mind his son was in days ago, when he and his parents took in a Hasty Pudding show, dinner at a North End restaurant with his friends, and a movie at the Brattle Theatre. He was even excited about a new course he was taking in quantum mechanics.

In order not to mar that memory, Lawrence Okrent said, the family has decided not to return to Massachusetts to get their son, but to have him brought to them. A funeral director said the body could be returned home as early as tomorrow.

If you purchased a gun in Massachusetts in 1996, it might have taken the Executive Office of Public Safety years to file a record of the sale in a way that could be easily retrieved.

Today, the trace can be made in less than 30 seconds. Glaciers could have moved faster than a sales receipt used to go through the Public Safety offices, where more than 720,000 records were stowed in shoe boxes.

"Law enforcement officers here are flying blind," state Representative Paul Caron (D-Springfield) told The Globe in a May 10, 1996 story. In 1996, police had no timely way of knowing if someone had purchased a gun who shouldn't have - someone with a felony record, a history of domestic violence, or serving probation, to name three.

Nor could police determine if someone with a gun permit was buying weapons in bulk from any of the state's 1,300 licensed firearms dealers, only to sell the guns on the street.

Enter the computer age - and Kathleen O'Toole, secretary of the Executive Office of Public Safety. State officials credit O'Toole for finding two years ago the $700,000 needed to develop a computer program that allows a document filled out at the time of a gun purchase to be entered directly into state files. She also moved the gun record operation to the Criminal Histories Systems Board.

Today, the backlog not only has been eliminated, but officers can perform gun traces 24 hours a day. If officers are dispatched on a domestic violence call, they can instantly find out if guns are registered at the home in question before rapping on the door.

Police are working on a system that may be operating by the end of the year that would allow an officer making a traffic stop to trace a motorist's gun ownership before approaching the car.

Had the system been in place four years ago, state officials speculate that Trooper Mark S. Charbonnier might have been forewarned, while still in his cruiser, that he was pulling over someone on probation. David Clark is serving a life sentence for fatally shooting Charbonnier during a Route 3traffic stop in Kingston.

"The impact this filing system has had on public safety is phenomenal," said Worcester police Captain Paul Campbell. He estimates Worcester police have revoked hundreds of gun licenses in the past several months because of the new fingertip access that law-enforcement officials now have to gun purchase records.

Secretary O'Toole put it another way.

"At least we don't have pigeons roosting on boxes of gun sale records anymore," she said

The racketeering indictment and immediate disappearance of Boston Mob Boss "Whitey" Bulger has had many wondering 'where's Whitey?' But that curiosity has turned toward the Boston office of the FBI which is being charged with "serious government misconduct". Whitey's unfettered reign at the top of the criminal world, may have been helped by the FBI -- who wanted to keep their top informant talking.

Boston officials today formalized a proposal for curfew laws for minors. Sparked by the rash of violence against young people, the laws impose a heavy fine on children under 16 out after dark with out supervision.

"It is unfortunate we have to take such drastic measures, " Boston Mayor, Thomas M. Menino, said in a press conference earlier today. "Unfortunate but necessary. The safety of the inhabitants of Boston has to be our top priority."

During the past month, parents and concerned citizens have been looking to city hall for a reaction to the grizzly murders that have plagued Back Bay and Cambridge.

This law follows the confirmation of the most recent victim as Daniel Webster, of Cambridge. The identification process took an appalling three days and finally had to resort to dental records because of the extent of damage to the body. The coroner's report listed cause of death as "massive damage and loss of blood. Prior to time of death, the victim had suffered partial dismemberment, loosing both arms and left leg."

Yesterday Daniel's second grade class took flowers and pictures to the site, but even this gesture was destroyed as an evening downpour washed the offerings into a nearby sewer grate.

And still some would consider the second grader lucky. He is the nineteenth victim of what appears to be a rash of serial murders that have the police stumped. Why is he lucky? Other victims have suffered more brutal damage; in one case, not a single internal organ escaped the attack. All that remains whole of "victim 16" is the calf and foot of her right leg. Victim 16 was found early last week on the streets in the Back Bay area and still has not been identified. Police investigators spent yesterday searching inside a flood drain for fragments of her shattered skull. They have declined to comment on whether their search was successful and whether any information that could lead to her identification has been found.

There are fifty-six missing person cases that could fit the characteristics of victim 16, but none coincide with the night of her murder. It is the police's best guess that victim 16 was a homeless person taking shelter in a nearby doorway.

A Boston police spokesman said that "this new law will go a long way to keeping our children safe" and he encourages parents to enforce it. He also stressed that the police are focusing their full attention on solving these crimes so that life could return to normal.

Depending on where you live in Boston, the new law may go into effect as early as Monday, March 23, and Cambridge residents can expect a similar resolution within the week.