■Sixteen years is a long time to wait, but Northampton High School basketball fans will tell you it was worth it. The Blue Devils won the Valley League basketball championship over Greenfield, 61-54, in the Hamp High gym. Northampton hasn’t been Valley League champions since 1956-57.
■Mrs. Katherine Cole, 65, wife of Dr. Charles W. Cole, former president of Amherst College and U.S. Ambassador to Chile, died suddenly at her home in Pelham on Sunday. She was found by her husband when he returned to the house from shoveling snow about 10 a.m.
■Acupuncturist Dan Sachs has opened a new office at 16 Center Street in Northampton. Sachs has been in private practice in Greenfield since 1984. In Northampton, he is sharing an office with another acupuncturist, Margie Kolchin, and Steve Miller, a chiropractor.
■Some students at Amherst College are encouraging the administration to withhold information used by U.S. News and World Report to compile the magazine’s annual rankings of the nation’s colleges and universities. While Amherst had been rated the No. 1 liberal arts college in the nation five times by U.S. News and World Report, it dipped to No. 2, behind Swarthmore, in the magazine’s September survey of liberal arts colleges.
■Alan Seewald will be sworn in as Northampton’s solicitor this morning, two days after being allowed to withdraw as lawyer in a lawsuit against the city. City Clerk Wendy Mazza will swear in Seewald at 11 a.m. in Mayor David J. Narkewicz’s office at City Hall.
■After being detained in Bahrain and deported by its authorities, Northampton resident and human rights activist Paki Wieland says she remains resolute to standing with its people to welcome a new era of democracy and freedom. Wieland, along with five other American observers, was detained earlier this week at a roadblock on “trumped-up” charges, she said, then deported about 12 hours later.