■Students from the Jackson Street School were given the opportunity to study bullet holes made during target practice at the Northampton police station. The demonstration was part of a tour given to the students recently.
■Environmental Protection Administrator William D. Ruckelshaus ordered today an almost complete ban on use of the pesticide DDT in the United States. Ruckelshaus made the ban effective Dec. 31, 1972, to allow a transition to substitute pesticides.
■Howard W. Atkins, 84, died today in the Cooley Dickinson Hospital. He was remembered today as a successful farmer and businessman who helped to build Atkins Farms into a local landmark. In the mid-1930s, Mr. Atkins joined his father in operating the family apple farm started by his grandfather in 1887 with an orchard of 100 trees.
■Good Friday, long a city-sanctioned religious holiday, will be like just any other Friday to city employees next spring — they’ll have to work. That marks a change in a 20-year city policy in which employees had been able to take off the entire or a portion of the day to attend church.
■Earth-shaking explosions heard Thursday afternoon in parts of the city were caused by a state police bomb squad disposing of dangerous materials at a gravel pit off Ryan Road, emergency officials said. The materials were chemicals and other possible explosives that were removed from a vacant house in Springfield this week.
■After 14 years teaching second-graders, an award-winning William E. Norris School teacher is taking on a new challenge: teaching teachers. Michael Flynn, a math and science teacher at the Southampton elementary school, will leave his job at the end of the month to become associate director of the SummerMath for Teachers program at Mount Holyoke College.