All bus service in and out of South Station has been suspended while authorities continue their hunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect. Amtrak train service has also been canceled. Logan International Airport remained calm on Friday afternoon, despite the massive manhunt going on for a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, but about a third of the flights going in and out of the airport were experiencing delays, according to Massport’s website. Security has been heightened at the airport since Monday, when two explosives killed three people and injured nearly 200, but security lines were short in Terminals B and C, and Transportation Security Administration passengers checks did not appear to be out of the normal. Taxis continued to pick up and drop off passengers throughout the morning, despite the now-lifted ban on taxi service in Boston. In fact, cabs outnumbered waiting customers at several taxi stands at the airport. Local businesses were scrambling Friday morning after state authorities asked people in several communities to stay home and MBTA service was suspended. Athenahealth Inc., a company specializing in electronic health records, is based in Watertown, the focus of an intensive manhunt for a suspect in the Boston Marathon explosions. The company sent out a company wide e-mail notifying employees that its Watertown office is closed, and sent an automated phone alert as well, athenahealth spokeswoman Amanda Guisbond said. “Our headquarters are in Watertown so you can imagine how important it is to get that news to employees fast,” Guisbond said in an e-mail. Stocks were down slightly in the first hour of trading Friday, as Wall Street saw Boston in lockdown and most of the financial hub here closed, with employees working from home and skeletal staffs at the office. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down about 52 points, to 14,485.45 by 10:30 a.m. Major money management firms like Fidelity Investments and State Street Corp. told thousands of employees to stay home, as buildings across the city and in Cambridge were closed and public transportation was shut down. Financial headlines for news-hungry traders in New York and around the world led with the manhunt in Boston for the marathon bombers. Shawn Kravetz, a Boston hedge fund manager, said he had received a flood of e-mails by early morning. Business ground to a halt across the metropolitan Boston Friday, after an all-night manhunt for the marathon bombers that continued into the morning hours and led to a shutdown of all public transportation. From Kendall Square in Cambridge to the financial district in Boston to commercial districts of Watertown and Newton, companies shut down operations, sending out emails and automated calls en masse to workers telling them to stay home. In Watertown, the scene of a shoot-out overnight, Athenahealth Inc., an electronic health records company, sent out a company wide e-mail notifying employees that its office is closed. It sent out an automated phone alert as well, Athenahealth spokeswoman Amanda Guisbond said. The new One Fund Boston foundation launched to help victims of the marathon bombings has secured more large corporate donors, according to people briefed on the fund-raising. The city is expected to announce a list of new donors Friday. Fund-raising could exceed $10 million just this week, according to the people briefed on the matter. Large corporate donors include Bain Capital, State Street Corp. and TJX Cos. Bain Capital has pledged $1 million, according to the sources, joining John Hancock Financial, the marathon sponsor which seeded the nonprofit with a $1 million gift, along with AT&T Inc. Shares of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. soared more than 55.5 percent in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq exchange Thursday after the Cambridge biotechnology company released positive clinical data on an experimental treatment for cystic fibrosis. Vertex said a mid-stage study of its VX-661 drug candidate in combination with its approved cystic fibrosis drug Kalydeco “showed statistically significant improvements in lung function” among adult patients with two copies of a common cystic fibrosis regulator gene mutation. “These new results provide further validation of our strategy” of combining therapies to develop a portfolio of treatments for patients with different forms of cystic fibrosis, Vertex chief executive Jeffrey Leiden said in a conference call with investors. The life-threatening disease,causes mucus to build up in the lungs and digestive tract. | | |
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