■Sloshing is no joshing matter. That was the thought of mailman John Sector of Florence as he sloshed his way through the Armory St. parking lot on his rounds this morning through Spring’s third snowstorm.
■Calling for a new political era in which “human needs will be as important as physical needs,” Boston Mayor Kevin H. White told a standing-room-only crowd at the University of Massachusetts’ Student Union Ballroom last evening that “there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of what a city is and what a campus is supposed to be.”
■Northampton’s principal planner, Wayne Feiden, has returned from a three-month sabbatical in Hungary, and began work in City Hall last Monday. Feiden spent the winter in Budapest, talking to and learning from planners in that country.
■Local police, saying uniforms worn by members of a youth organization are too similar to the ones they themselves wear, want the group to change its wardrobe. Though members of the Police Law Enforcement Explorers agree that their group’s uniform in nearly identical to the summer garb worn by town police officers, they contend it is also the same outfit worn in most other chapters of the nation-wide organization.
■Easthampton police officers are at the center of a wage dispute after a contractor began paying them $7 less per hour for road details on a state highway job. The abrupt pay cut late last year spawned a class-action grievance and talk of litigation and left Easthampton $9,000 in the hole.
■Interim Amherst Superintendent Maria Geryk can choose between a veteran teacher and a new face as next principal of the Regional Middle School. The finalists are Karsten Schlenter, 47, a middle school principal in Michigan for nine years, and Michael Hayes, 35, a math teacher and administrator at the middle school for more than 12 years.