Greater Worcester

When news of the first confirmed Ebola case in West Africa broke in March, Patricia McQuilken, a University of Massachusetts Medical School doctor working at a hospital in Liberia, felt confident the virus could be contained. But it was not, and today she and a UMass team are back in Liberia

Worcester city councilors next week are expected to hold their annual tax classification hearing, and the business community is again lobbying to shrink the gap between the residential and commercial/industrial rates. The council has done that in two of the last three years, and should do so again.

The Telegram & Gazette will soon have its third owner in a little more than a year after its parent firm, Halifax Media Group, announced it's being acquired by the parent of GateHouse Media, which owns the MetroWest Daily News and other notable media properties in Massachusetts.

A proposed six-story, 120-room hotel next to the Washington Square rotary in Worcester would fill a need in the city and complement its downtown economic development strategy, the hotel's developers told a neighborhood group Thursday night.

UMass Memorial Health Care (UMMHC) will post a $29 million operating surplus in fiscal 2014, according to preliminary results the Worcester-based health care system shared with bond investors this week.

In the world of cyber security, an entire industry has materialized around selling information about vulnerabilities in programs, alternately offering the ability to protect against these flaws in the programs and allowing them to be used as cyber weapons.

Several major companies with operations in Central Massachusetts received the highest scores on equality from a national advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans.

VSA Massachusetts of Boston has merged with the Integrated Health and Human Services Network of Worcester's Seven Hills Foundation.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $9.5 million grant to investigators at the University of Massachusetts Medical School to establish a research center that would investigate the cause and treatment the most common form of inherited intellectual and developmental disability, known as Fragile X.

Fallon Health of Worcester said it earned $1.9 million in the third quarter of this year on revenue of $323 million.