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WAREHAM, Mass. — Massachusetts authorities say an on-duty firefighter was struck by a hit-and-run driver and seriously injured while responding to a traffic incident during the powerful nor'easter.Wareham police say the Onset Fire Department firefighter was hit by a vehicle early Friday evening while at the scene of the traffic incident on Cranberry Highway, also known as routes 6 and 28.Officials have not released the firefighter's name or condition. The firefighter was taken to a Rhode Island hospital.

The controversial case surrounding Michelle Carter has taken many twists and turns during the last few years, and now the woman’s lawyers are asking the state’s highest court to toss her conviction. Here’s how it played out:February 2012: Teenagers Conrad Roy III and Michelle Carter meet, starting a complicated relationship that plays out primarily through texts and phone calls.

WEST BROOKFIELD — A day after the bodies of a mother and three children were found in their Old Warren Road home here, Worcester County District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. urged people to “be careful, be vigilant” and report anything they saw on the road in the last few days to police.“No matter how small or insignificant you think your information may be, if you saw someone, if you saw a vehicle on that road, we’d like to talk to you,” Early said, adding that the time frame authorities are interested in is Wednesday to yesterday.

A falling tree struck and seriously injured a woman walking to pick up her child from school in Woburn during yesterday’s fierce storm, a top fire official said.The woman was taken to a local hospital with what Woburn fire Chief Stephen Adgate called a “significant leg injury” after a large oak tree apparently uprooted and fell on her amid the high winds that whipped eastern Massachusetts in yesterday’s nor’easter.

Boston police are still searching for a man they say indecently assaulted a woman after breaking into her home a week ago today.Cops released footage of a man walking in the area of Hemenway Street and Westland Avenue where the assault occurred. They say he fits the description of the suspect given to police.The suspect shown on bpdnews.com is a black man with short hair wearing a dark-colored shirt, light-colored pants and sneakers, police said.The woman assaulted said she was able to scream and scare the man away during the early morning assault.

The fierce nor’easter that clobbered the state yesterday with high winds and raging floodwaters, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, is expected to continue its onslaught today with all eyes on the noon high tide.The surge that splashed through the Seaport and downtown Boston streets was expected to return overnight and again this afternoon in the second storm in as many months to inundate the usually bustling area.

The wind-blasted sea swallowed whole swaths of the Houghs Neck neighborhood in Quincy, forcing residents to flee their homes into National Guard trucks even at low tide and prompting fears about how high today’s high tide will rise.Long stretches of Sea Street — the main way into the shoreline neighborhood — were flooded over and some escaped the rising water carried to dry land in the bucket of a front-loader.

The state trooper who fired a rifle during last weekend’s Interstate 93 melee has been suspended without pay as officials determine whether or not he wrote a string of offensive online posts in recent years.Trooper Matthew Sheehan is the focus of an Internal Affairs probe, where officials say they are determining whether Sheehan authored posts under the screen name “Big Irish” on an online forum, which disparaged minority communities and discussed the use of force on the job.

The new high-powered defense team representing Michelle Carter argues that “words alone” can’t kill in their pitch to the state’s highest court — an appeal claiming her involuntary manslaughter conviction is unconstitutional and violates both state and federal law.“(T)his appeal presents novel questions of constitutional and criminal law,” Carter’s attorneys wrote in an appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court, filed Feb. 5. “It will set precedent for who may be prosecuted for encouraging suicide with words alone.”

Aly Raisman is suing the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics, claiming they “knew or should have known” about the abusive patterns of Larry Nassar, a disgraced former national team doctor now in prison for sexually abusing young athletes.Nassar, who is named as a co-defendant in the lawsuit filed in California, is serving life in prison for molesting some of the sport’s top athletes and others as well as child pornography crimes.