On January 4, a pedestrian was killed by a vehicle on a road in South Hadley, Massachusetts. James Collins was 68 years old. Traveling by walking or riding a bicycle rather than by car is one of the best ways to prevent climate change. Sidewalks, crosswalks, and bicycle paths that are separated from cars by a physical barrier save lives. More information on how people are working to make walking and bicycle riding safer is at:

-for Massachusetts www.MassBike.org and www.WalkBoston.org/who-we-are/mission (both groups work state-wide)

-for New Hampshire www.bwaNH.org

It’s not every day that the world’s most famous newspaper publishes an article about South Hadley, Massachusetts. But that’s what The New York Times did on March 30. It took the disturbing death of a school girl to make that happen.

Phoebe Prince was a 15 year-old student at South Hadley High School (near Northampton) when she hung herself in January. On March 29, several students at the school were charged by District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel with the felony crime of bullying Prince so severely that she killed herself.

In the past two decades, DNA tests have freed more than 240 innocent people from U.S. prisons. Together, they served over 3,000 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit. This is the subject of a free public event on March 10 at 7:30 p.m. in South Hadley, Massachusetts, near Holyoke.

The speakers will be Betty Anne Waters and Maddy deLone. DeLone is director of the Innocence Project, a non-profit group that has helped get innocent people out of jail. Waters got her own brother out of jail.