■A Homecoming Parade last night in Amherst served as a warmup for today’s football contest between the University of Massachusetts and University of Connecticut. Mild temperatures last night carried over to today’s game.
■The Rev. Michael J. Doyle, a recent graduate of the School of Social Work at the Catholic University of America and a Northampton native, has been named by Bishop Christopher J. Weldon to the post of diocesan director of the U.S. Bishops’ Campaign for Human Development.
■The two-day “Vintage Vinyl” fundraising event encamped on the Amherst Common over the weekend, raising approximately $45,000 for WFCR radio. Despite Saturday’s torrents, which turned the site into “chocolate pudding,” the bins were “enormously crowded with wet people,” reports Laurie Alexander Neely.
■The number of restaurants participating this year in the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts’ “Piece of the Pie” has jumped by a third, from 72 to 96. Tomorrow’s event asks participating restaurants to donate 10 percent of their receipts for the day towards the Hatfield-based food bank.
■If a neighborhood group can prove that installing a small hydropower plant at the Upper Roberts Meadow Dam is revenue-neutral, the Northampton City Council said Thursday that it would endorse its efforts to save the historic Leeds structure.
■With the promise of $65 million from the state, the University of Massachusetts will move ahead with a long-planned project — a new $85 million academic classroom building that will provide the campus with 1,800 state-of-the-art classroom seats and space for academic programs including communications, journalism and linguistics.