■Cold weather lovers may be able to lace up their ice skates for a glide over ice on city skating rinks this Sunday if planned flooding operations are successful. Patrick Goggins, recreation director, said Recreation Division crew members of the Northampton Department of Public Works will be flooding the six rinks tonight, tomorrow and Sunday.
■“Heads of house” at Smith College dormitories, or “house mothers” as they are more commonly called, are being phased out gradually. Officials at the college said today that the positions are being replaced in title and duties by house residents.
■Thousands more Massachusetts children have computers in their homes, a state survey has found. The survey found a sharp jump in the number of fourth graders who reported that they had a computer in the house, from 52% in 1994 to 64% in the spring of 1996.
■The international brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch will open an office in downtown Northampton sometime this winter. The new Northampton Merrill Lynch office, at 34 Bridge St., will be a satellite of the Springfield office.
■The Vatican has rejected a plea by former parishioners of St. Mary of the Assumption Church to reopen the church closed by the Springfield Diocese in 2009. A group of St. Mary’s parishioners had sought to reverse the decision by Springfield Bishop Timothy A. McDonnell to merge the parish, along with other Northampton Roman Catholic churches, into the new St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish.
■Two vacated Catholic churches were hit for the first time with property tax bills this week after city assessors determined they no longer qualified for tax-exempt status. In doing so, assessors significantly lowered the previous assessed values of St. Mary of the Assumption Church and St. John Cantius, to better reflect their market value, according to Principal Assessor Joan C. Sarafin.