Boston: Former Globe editor Thomas Winship dies

Thomas Winship, who as editor of The Boston Globe led the paper to 12 Pulitzer Prizes during two decades, died Thursday at age 81.

Winship was editor from 1965 to 1984, including the turbulent years of Boston’s desegregation and busing crisis. The paper won the Pulitzer for public service in 1975 for its coverage of the crisis.

He died at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was being treated for lymphoma.

“The thing that strikes me about him is that he was the perfect editor for the Boston Globe at the perfect time,” said Washington Post vice president and former executive editor Ben Bradlee, who met Winship at Harvard, worked with him at the Post and remained a lifelong friend.

“That was a difficult time, lots of different factions, and he was a great healer in that sense.”

San Francisco: Judge dismisses molestation charges

A judge threw out all 224 child-molestation charges against a defrocked Roman Catholic priest Thursday in a dispute over whether the statute of limitations had run out.

The ruling, unless overturned on appeal, means prosecutors cannot try former Monsignor Patrick O’Shea, 67, on charges of molesting nine boys in the 1960s and ’70s.

The case has zigzagged though the courts since its filing in 1995, a year after the Legislature passed a law allowing prosecutors to file molestation charges even after the six-year statute of limitations expired.

The case was thrown out in 1997 by a state appeals court that said the law did not apply retroactively. Legislators later reworked the law to try to get around the problem.

Virginia: Killer implicated by DNA executed

A convict matched to a 1987 slaying through a search of a DNA database was executed by injection Thursday in Jarratt.

After being strapped to the gurney, James Patterson, 35, apologized for “the evil I brought into this world by my evil deeds.”

Patterson was implicated in the slaying of Joyce S. Aldridge when the state compared DNA samples from the crime with DNA samples in its database of 175,000 inmates.

After the 1999 match, Patterson confessed and pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting and killing Aldridge on Oct. 11, 1987. He had been imprisoned for nearly 14 years and would have been released in 2004 without the cold hit.

The Death Penalty Information Center in Washington said it was unaware of any other such case.

New Hampshire: Hundreds of students infected with pink eye

Hundreds of students at Dartmouth College in Hanover have contracted pink eye infections, and experts fear the outbreak could spread during spring breaks.

Also, more than 250 Princeton University students at Princeton, N.J., have reported symptoms of conjunctivitis since officials began tracking the infections last month.

At Dartmouth, the number is nearing 500, and another 500 students may have had the infection and not reported it, said Dr. Jack Turco of Dartmouth’s student health center.

That number is at least five times higher than usual and isn’t easing up as spring break begins, Turco said.

“Some students are just developing pink eye now. There is a possibility it will blossom in the different places they go during their break,” Turco said. He urged other schools to watch for signs of the infection.