Good Thursday morning.. This week is flying by. Why does time seem to accelerate during the summer and slow down maddeningly during the winter? Maybe it’s just me.
Today is St. John’s Day, which roughly marks midsummer. It’s a Masonic feast, commemorating St. John the Baptiste, not to be confused with the feast of St. John the Evangelist, which falls roughly around midwinter.
Says the interwebs:
In the Gospel of Luke, certain verses imply that John the Baptist was born six months earlier than Jesus. And since it has become a tradition that Jesus was born on December 25th (Christmas Day), Midsummer day, being six months before, was taken to be the feast day of St. John the Baptist.
A central theme of the celebrations on this day is bonfires, which are lit to ward off evil spirits.
It is also National Pralines Day, and I confess I had to look that up to remember what the heck a praline is – a confection made from nuts (in whole pieces or ground) and sugar syrup. The word might also be used to refer to any chocolate cookie containing ground nuts powder.
Pralines might vary differently depending on where in the world you’re eating them. In the U.S., they generally contain milk or cream and are softer and creamier, resembling fudge.
At the Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte during the 17th century, the French sugar industrialist Marshal du Plessis-Praslin is believed to have inspired the early pralines, which were then whole almonds, individually coated in caramelized sugar. French settlers brought the recipe to Louisiana, where chefs in New Orleans exchanged pecans for almonds and added cream to the concoction.
The temperature will be heading back up toward 80 degrees today, and we’ll have mostly sunny skies.
In the headlines…
Senators on both sides of the aisle said last night that there’s an agreement with White House officials and 10 senators on a bipartisan infrastructure deal, with senators planning to meet with President Joe Biden at the White House today to discuss it.
Though specifics are sparse, the framework is expected to increase federal spending by nearly $600 billion to invest in roads, broadband internet, electric utilities and other federal infrastructure projects.
Biden announced a range of actions targeting rising gun violence, according to the White House, as homicide rates jump heading into the summer months and Republicans blame him for it.
The worry over crime is real and believed to be fueled by the pandemic, which has created economic hardship, displacement and anxiety. The spike in crime has become a GOP talking point and a frequent topic of conversation on conservative media.
A strong showing by Eric Adams in the New York City mayoral race and Biden’s announcement of a new crime-fighting agenda signal a shift by Democrats toward themes of public safety.
The president made clear that he intends to approach crime prevention by investing in, rather than defunding, the police as he waded into an urgent national debate over policing.
Cindy McCain, who has long used her voice for humanitarian causes worldwide, is Biden’s pick as the U.S. representative to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, where she would help combat global hunger.
Biden designated Sandra L. Thompson as the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) after ousting the agency’s previous chief earlier in the day.
The Biden administration is forcing out the chief of the United States Border Patrol, Rodney S. Scott, who took over the agency during the final year of the Trump administration, a Department of Homeland Security official said.
California’s secretary of state confirmed that the effort aimed at recalling Gov. Gavin Newsom has enough signatures to trigger an election.
By rooting through files stored on Google Cloud, a researcher says he recovered 13 early coronavirus sequences that had disappeared from a database last year.
The U.S. is set to ship 3 million doses of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine to Brazil, where more than 500,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said the delta variant now accounts for roughly 20% of newly diagnosed cases in the U.S. and will become the dominant Covid strain in the nation in a matter of weeks.
A CDC safety group said there’s a “likely association” between a rare heart inflammatory condition in adolescents and young adults mostly after they’ve received their second Covid-19 vaccine shot, citing the most recent data available.
The cases of myocarditis and pericarditis are seen mostly in teens and young adults between 12 and 39 years old — mostly after the second vaccine dose. Most people who have experienced this side effect have recovered from symptoms and are doing well.
The benefits of Covid-19 vaccination far outweigh the risks of heart inflammation in young people, a panel of independent advisers to the CDC maintain.
Although the risk of vaccinated people becoming infected with the coronavirus is low, it can still happen, the C.D.C. says. Here’s what you need to know.
There’s no evidence yet to suggest that a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot is needed, according to a CDC working group. That could change, however, as the pandemic evolves.
The FDA plans to “move rapidly” to add a warning to fact sheets for Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines about the rare risk of developing inflammatory heart conditions, an agency official said.
The city of San Francisco told its 37,000 employees they must either be vaccinated for COVID-19 within 10 weeks of the FDA giving final approval to a coronavirus vaccine or lose their jobs.
Colleges and universities everywhere face daunting challenges, logistical and political, as they try to create safe campus spaces for living and learning in a nation weary of the coronavirus and divided over masks and vaccines.
SEIU 1199, the country’s largest health carer union, plans to fight vaccine mandates.
New York’s Covid state of emergency ends today.
Among the rules expiring: The ability to get alcoholic beverages to go, which was enacted as a measure to help keep restaurants and bars afloat while indoor dining restrictions were in place.
The sudden halt to the freer sale of alcohol may be a boon to liquor stores, while surprising the bars and restaurants that came to rely on the business they generated to weather the pandemic.
While the executive orders will expire with the emergency declaration, Gov. Andrew Cuomo says guidance from the CDC will still be in place. This means unvaccinated people will still be required to wear masks in some situations.
Adams has a significant lead in the New York City mayor’s race thanks to his support from a traditional Democratic coalition of unions and Black and Latino voters.
The winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary hinges on a new ranked-choice voting system and will come down to voters’ second and third picks in the race, candidates and political consultants say.
Under ranked-choice voting, it is mathematically possible for the second- and third-place finishers, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, respectively, in Tuesday’s Democratic primary to overtake Adams — but it will be tough.
Garcia, who is in third place, urged New Yorkers to stay patient as election officials start the arduous process of tallying votes.
Wiley, in second place, urged her supporters to “wait patiently” as officials begin the process of tabulating the ranked-choice votes. “We have a path to victory and it looks like the city of New York,” she insisted.
Councilman I. Daneek Miller, a Queens Democrat who co-chairs the council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, accused Adams’ rivals of of exploiting the city’s new ranked-choice voting system to devalue the ballots of black and Latino New Yorkers.
Ray McGuire, the former Citigroup executive who mounted a long-shot and apparently unsuccessful Democratic bid for mayor, won 18,503 first-place primary votes. Early indications suggest he and his supporters paid dearly for each of them.
Cuomo weighed in on the city’s mayoral primary and did little to disguise his true feelings for Mayor de Blasio whose administration he deemed “hyper-political and is not competent.”
De Blasio still hasn’t shared who he voted for to replace him, but said he’s “satisfied” with early results for the mayor’s race, which have Adams ahead by about 10%.
Lindsey Boylan, one of the women accusing Cuomo of sexual harassment, pulled the plug on her campaign to become Manhattan’s next borough president after early primary results showed her trailing far behind front-runners Mark Levine and Brad Hoylman.
City Councilman Antonio Reynoso grabbed a strong lead in the Democratic primary race for Brooklyn borough president, with primary races in the four other boroughs still considered tossups.
Progressive Councilman Brad Lander held a significant first-choice vote lead over Speaker Corey Johnson in the race for city comptroller, according to late election results.
The New York City Council is set to become mostly women — as Manhattan mainstay Gale Brewer and other political vets make returns to the City Hall chambers, Tuesday’s primary election results show.
Newly minted GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa shares his apartment with his wife and 15 cats.
Making a comeback bid, disgraced ex-Congressman Vito Fossella was locked in a battle for first place with Councilman Steven Matteo on Tuesday night in the Republican primary for Staten Island borough president, according to unofficial election results.
In a victory for the city’s powerful police unions, a state Supreme Court judge struck down a city law banning police officers’ use of chokeholds and other physical restraints, saying the wording of the law was “unconstitutionally vague.”
The powerful board that determines rent for New York City’s 1.2 million rent-stabilized apartments approved a modest increase on rents – a compromise between tenant groups that wanted to freeze rates and landlords who sought sizable increases.
A public meeting to address de Blasio’s controversial Soho rezoning plan devolved into chaos with constant interruptions from opposing locals.
New York has revealed its plans for its Essential Workers Monument, honoring workers who were deemed essential and went to work while others stayed home during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
City officials voted unanimously to designate an Indigenous archaeological site on the South Shore of Staten Island and the Kimlau War Memorial in Chinatown in Manhattan as protected landmarks.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said that booth workers — who once handled thousands of cash and fare transactions each day — will no longer accept riders’ cash or swap their damaged MetroCards.
New York City subway riders are likely to face delays and disruptions for months because of staff shortages caused by a hiring freeze during the Covid-19 pandemic, the system’s leaders said.
Less than 24 hours after India Walton’s stunning upset of four-term incumbent Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown in the Democratic mayoral primary, the union representing Buffalo Police officers announced opposition to police reforms Walton has proposed.
A spokesperson for Brown said the mayor had nothing new to share about 12 hours after he refused to concede the race, in which he trails Walton by 1,507 votes after the counting of all early and Primary Day results. Absentee ballots remain uncounted.
Walton’s apparent win underscored the energy of the party’s left wing as yet another longtime incumbent in the state fell to a progressive challenger, echoing the congressional wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman.
Asked about Walton’s victory, Cuomo suggested Brown’s campaign strategy — in which he largely avoided acknowledging his challenger and her platform — may have backfired.
The Syracuse primary for the two Democratic candidates could come down to a hand count of every single vote cast in the race.
The Supreme Court ruled that a Pennsylvania school district had violated the First Amendment by punishing a student for a vulgar social media message sent while she was not on school grounds.
The NYPD has added new training to help officers deescalate situations with the mentally ill who are unarmed or carrying a weapon other than a gun.
Thomas Richardson, a 40-year FDNY veteran, who began his career at a small Brooklyn firehouse, has been named the department’s top uniformed officer, fire officials confirmed.
New York plans to co-lead a multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Google over the tech giant’s management of its mobile app store.
A House committee approved far-reaching legislation to curb the market dominance of tech giants, but much of the effort faced intensive lobbying by affected firms that slowed the committee’s work and foreshadowed a pitched battle in the Senate.
Reports of a group of people fighting in the streets, including one reportedly with an axe, led to a police chase that resulted in a sedan being crushed by a FedEx truck in Schenectady.
An effort to enlarge Saratoga County Airport’s runway protection zones and seek state grant funding to build a terminal with a café and other amenities is already facing opposition.
Democratic primary candidate Emily Menn took 80 percent of the machine votes in her campaign for the Troy City Council’s District 4, while Kiani Conley-Wilson scored a two-to-one margin Tuesday in the party primary for the city’s 5th District seat.
A ruling last month by the state’s highest court blocking tree removal for snowmobile trails in protected forest areas has created uncertainty for other recreational projects in the Adirondack Forest Preserve.
Airline and hotel chains have long offered them and now New York is offering loyalty points for campers who stay overnight in state-run campgrounds.
Regulators are launching an investigation into National Grid’s upstate gas operations and lowering other utility revenues for failure to meet performance metrics.
The Rocket Man is set to perform at Syracuse University’s Carrier Dome on Saturday, Sept. 10, 2022.
Fans of Britney Spears and fellow pop stars rallied around the singer after she delivered scorching remarks in court regarding her more than a decade-long conservatorship.
“I’ve been in denial. I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized,” Spears, 39, said in an emotional 23-minute address by phone that was broadcast in the courtroom and, as she insisted, to the public. “I just want my life back.”
Spears bared a piece of her soul in a stunning statement to a judge, saying she feels “enslaved” by her “abusive” conservatorship and wants it to end so she can marry and have another baby.
Buzzfeed is reportedly close to finalizing a deal to go public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, commonly referred to as a SPAC.
A Canadian Indigenous group announced the “horrific and shocking discovery” of the remains of hundreds of people, mainly children at the site of a former school in the province of Saskatchewan, the largest such discovery to date.
Eccentric antivirus software company founder John McAfee was found dead of a suspected suicide in his prison cell in Barcelona, Spain shortly after that country’s National Court approved his extradition to the United States to face criminal tax evasion charges.
More than 1 million adults in the U.S. identify as nonbinary, according to a groundbreaking new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, the nation’s leading research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.
Answering to questions about the content of its tuna sandwiches once more, Subway went on defense arguing that a story over the weekend claiming lab tests detected no tuna DNA in its sandwiches has turned into a big fish tale.
Chickens may not really fly but the cost of their wings is soaring in restaurants and bars — at least for those that still offer them.
Warren County has a bridge to sell you.
