commutation

Since transport workers seem to strike very regularly in Italy, skeptical commuters doubted their inconvenience had anything to do with standing up for women's rights.

Among the 25 people who perished on Friday when a commuter train crashed head-on with a freight train in Los Angeles was lesbian police officer Spree Desha. The 35-year-old officer's body was carried out of the train draped by an American flag as fellow police officers and rescue personnel saluted her.

The engineer of the Los Angeles-area commuter train that crashed into a freight train Friday -- killing 25 people and injuring 135 others -- was a gay man with a bit of a troubled past. Robert M. Sanchez, who had been working for Metrolink since 2005, is believed to have failed to stop at a signal near the San Fernando Valley district of Chatsworth, causing his train to collide with a Union Pacific freight train.

Socialist prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero won reelection Sunday in a clear endorsement of a record of social change including the legalization of gay marriage and on-demand divorce, reforms once unthinkable in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Spain. Zapatero also shifted Spanish foreign policy by pulling troops from Iraq in his first term, which he won three days after Islamic militants killed 191 people in a string of bombings against commuter trains. Voters handed Zapatero his second term despite worries about a slumping economy, immigration, and resurgent Basque separatists, blamed for gunning down a member of the prime minister's party on Friday -- timing that recalled the March 11, 2004, Madrid attacks.