Radio City contract OK’d

New YorkMembers of the orchestra for Radio City Music Hall’s “Christmas Spectacular” approved a contract deal Sunday that allowed them to return to work following a bitter labor dispute.

The contract was approved late Sunday afternoon, according to Shawn Sachs, a spokesman for the union representing the musicians. He declined to disclose any details of the approval.

Much of the contract dispute revolved around salary for members of the orchestra, which plays as many as six 90-minute shows a day at the height of the Christmas season.

Tickets for the “Christmas Spectacular,” which is known around the world, run as high as $250.

School violence drops 50 percent in decade

Washington One in 20 students was a victim of violence or theft at school in 2003, the government said in a report that shows school crime rates about were half what they were 10 years earlier.

Yet the school crime rate essentially has leveled off, showing no change since 2000, according to a report Sunday from the departments of Education and Justice.

“The level of precision isn’t good enough to say whether there has been a change,” said Thomas Snyder, a report author at the Education Department.

Snyder said, however, there has been no change in the crime rate in several years. The report does not attempt to explain rises and falls.

South Floridians get break from Gamma

Miami Hurricane weary, hurricane savvy and a little hurricane obsessed, South Floridians nervously – and possibly needlessly – filled fuel tanks Saturday, stocked groceries and tied down those blue tarps as they monitored a late-season torment called Tropical Storm Gamma.

This time, though, the awful hurricane season delivered sunny news:

With a little bit of luck, nearly all of Gamma’s weather will bypass South Florida, a region still recovering from Hurricane Wilma’s rampage less than four weeks ago.

The latest predictions carried the center of a relatively weak Gamma diagonally across central Cuba late today and had it missing the Florida Keys and the rest of South Florida .