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For the second time this week, a math teacher has been killed by a student. Authorities in the quiet Massachusetts town of Danvers are trying to determine why a beloved young math teacher was murdered Tuesday in the bathroom of her high school. A judge on Wednesday ordered Philip Chism, 14, held without bail on a murder charge at an arraignment hearing in adult court, just hours after the body of Colleen Ritzer, 24, was found in woods near Danvers High School 20 miles north of Boston. A search began for Ritzer Tuesday after police were notified that she had not returned to her home from work and was not answering her cellphone. Investigators found blood in a school bathroom and soon located her body. The teen, who transferred to Danvers High this year, stabbed Ritzer, then dumped her body in the woods behind the campus. Chism, a leading scorer on Danvers' junior varsity soccer team, had been reported missing Tuesday after failing to return home from school. He was found about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.
In Other News • Contractors who helped develop the embattled HealthCare.gov website blame each other and the government, but not themselves, in testimony prepared for the first congressional hearing on the problems engulfing the online enrollment system. House Energy and Commerce Committee members will grill officials from CGI Federal, Optum/QSSI, Equifax Workforce Solutions and Serco at the hearing to examine technological problems faced by people trying to buy health insurance under President Barack Obama's signature reforms. Complaints of inability to log in, lengthy delays, incorrect information relayed to insurance companies and other problems have plagued the website since it opened on October 1. • A Washington state middle school boy was arrested Wednesday and faces an attempted murder charge, after he brought 400 rounds of ammunition, multiple knives and a handgun to his school. The 11-year-old was booked into a juvenile detention facility after the incident that caused the lockdown of Frontier Middle School. There were no injuries. Police did not say who was allegedly being targeted. • Scientists say they've found a galaxy that's the most distant from our own that's been discovered yet. Astronomers say the galaxy, called z8_GND_5296, is the most remote one they can confirm with spectroscopy, a technique that looks for the chemical signatures of elements. In this case, that element was hydrogen, the main fuel of stars. Because of its distance, it shows what things would have been like 700 million years after the Big Bang. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, so 700 million years after the start is actually quite early by comparison. • A paid channel initiative on YouTube began in May as a pilot program with a few dozen accounts, including popular brands like Sesame Street and the Professional Golf Association. Now any video creator who has 10,000 subscribers and has been verified by YouTube will be able to set up a new paid channel and charge a fee for access to their content. Creators can set their own subscription rates, though YouTube has final authority to determine pricing. Every paid channel will offer an initial 14-day free trial.
