■Northampton police and the state fire marshal’s office today are probing the cause of an explosion in the Norma-Lee building at 90 King St. Police listed the cause as “suspicious” and said it had nothing to do with the heating system or natural gas.
■The Northampton School Committee last night voted to send a directive to all school department personnel, advising them to limit their long distance telephone calls, in view of the $13,200 budget request for the telephone account next year, compared to $11,782 spent this year.
■In a surprising move, South Hadley High School has decided to drop Northampton for its Thanksgiving Day football game. Instead, it will renew its Turkey Day rivalry with Chicopee Comprehensive High School, effective for the 2000 season. The move ends a 15-year relationship between South Hadley and Northampton.
■After 17 years on the job, Northampton Police Officer William Lynch III is handing in patrol officer badge #6 to retire as of Friday. On Tuesday, members of the Police Department turned out for a potluck lunch in the Center Street station’s “ready room” in honor of Lynch, who was sixth in seniority on the department’s roster of patrol officers.
■Breaking a decade-long tradition, the student-run Project Theatre group at all-women’s Mount Holyoke College will not stage “The Vagina Monologues,” stating the play is not inclusive enough. Instead, the group will produce its own student-written play about gender, according to Mount Holyoke senior Erin Murphy, who had the college’s dean of students send an email announcing the decision Wednesday.
■Leaders in law enforcement and community organizers came face to face for a discussion on race, protests and white privilege this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “I could have 100 Ph.D.s and be the director of whatever, but I bet you I still get followed in a store,” Whitney Battle-Baptiste, an archaeology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, said to a packed sanctuary in Edwards Church on Monday afternoon.