Good Thursday morning.
We’re in for more rain, which is a bummer, but don’t let the less-than-summery weather dissuade you from celebrating a very important holiday today…National Soft Ice Cream Day.
Soft ice cream has several competing origin stories, but one of them is New York based! The story goes that Greek-American businessman Tom Carvel began selling hard ice cream out of his truck in Hartsdale, Westchester County (about 20 miles north of New York City) in 1929. This was all well and good until Memorial Day 1934, when his truck got a flat tire.
He pulled into the nearest parking lot, which happened to belong to a pottery store whose friendly proprietor allowed Carvel to use his electricity and sell his quickly melting product to passersby.
It turned out to be enormously popular, and Carvel determined that he would be able to sell more ice cream from a fixed location than a truck.
He bought the pottery store two years later and developed a soft ice cream product that was a big hit. After WWII, Carvel began to franchise his stories, and sometime after that Fudgie the Whale – and weird blue gel icing and chocolate cookie crumb layers and super-sweet frozen whipped cream frosting – were born.
Carvel died in Pine Plains, Dutchess County, in 1990. He’s buried with his wife Agnes in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, which is only a couple of miles away from the spot where he began selling ice cream in 1929. (There’s kind of a crazy story involving a conspiracy theory surrounding his death that’s worth a read if you have time).
Carvel’s original soft serve was just a warmer, softer version of the ice cream he normally sold, but modern soft serve contains significantly more air than frozen ice creams.
Also, maybe Margaret Thatcher had something to do with soft ice cream? Or maybe not? WHAT THE WHAT?
And guess what? Soft serve ice cream is HEALTHY! OK, well not health food healthy, but definitely healthier than the hard version of this sweet dairy treat, because it usually contains less milk fat because it employs milk instead of cream.
That’s good enough for me. Soft ice cream for breakfast all around!
Even though it’s going to be in the high 70s with scattered thunderstorms and a flash flood warning in place through the end of the day. Thanks a lot, post Tropical Cyclone Fred, or maybe Henri is to blame? Anyway, the weather is crummy, full stop.
In the headlines…
President Joe Biden suggested for the first time that he’s willing to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan until all American citizens who want to leave are out of the country, but stopped short of making the same commitment to the United States’ Afghan partners.
“We’re gonna go back in hindsight and look – but the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how that happened,” Biden told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
Biden told Stephanopoulos the U.S. will try to complete its troop evacuation by August 31. While he stopped short of saying troops will remain in Afghanistan past this deadline, he said the U.S. would “determine at the time who’s left.”
A senior Taliban commander laid out the broad strokes of how Afghanistan will be governed after the stunning fall of Kabul, saying there will be an Islamic government with Sharia law and no democratic system “at all.”
Afghan women who worked with the U.S. or international groups are frantically erasing any trace of those links for fear that they will be targeted by the Taliban.
The Taliban will be hard-pressed to tap Afghanistan’s financial assets and manage their new economy after the U.S. froze the country’s reserves and halted shipments of dollars to the country.
While the militants appear firmly in control, some prominent figures vowed to continue resistance as protests erupted in two cities and millions of Afghans parsed clues about the Taliban’s intentions.
Intelligence reports presented to Biden in the final days before the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan this past week failed to predict the imminence of the Afghan government’s collapse, even after their earlier warnings had grown increasingly grim.
Britain is unable to evacuate unaccompanied children from Afghanistan, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said when asked about footage which showed a young child being handed over a wall to Western soldiers at Kabul airport.
Montana Republican Sen. Josh Hawley called for Biden administration officials to resign over the bungled U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, marked by the Taliban’s quick return to power.
The president announced that staff members at nursing homes would now be required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or those facilities would risk losing their Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Biden also directed the U.S. Education Department to use its legal authority against Republican governors who are trying to block local school officials from requiring students to wear masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
U.S. health officials and medical experts announced in a joint statement that booster doses of Covid-19 vaccine will be offered this fall, subject to authorization from the FDA and sign off from the CDC.
The announcement that boosters will be offered to all Americans has spurred renewed criticism about existing vaccine inequities and fears that the world’s poorer nations will remain unprepared for new and potentially deadlier coronavirus variants.
Top Biden administration health officials concluded that mostAmericans will soon need coronavirus booster shots after reviewing a raft of new data from the CDC that showed a worrying drop in vaccine efficacy over time.
One of the most vaccinated societies, Israel now has one of the highest infection rates in the world, raising questions about the vaccine’s efficacy.
More Americans are being hospitalized for Covid-19 in recent weeks, as some states surpass rates seen at the height of the pandemic, according to state and national data.
Just days into the new school year, thousands of kids are under quarantine in public school districts after being exposed to COVID-19.
A Tampa-area school district, the eighth largest in the U.S., voted to issue a mask mandate after more than 10,000 students and staff members were forced into quarantine or isolation at the start of the school year.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has brought back a statewide mask requirement and ordered all public, private and charter school employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as subject to their employment.
Mississippi’s state health director said the pandemic is worse in the state than it’s ever been, as hospitals run out of beds and thousands of students have already tested positive for the virus since schools opened earlier this month.
Fox News, whose top personalities have assailed the concept of vaccine passports and argued that asking about vaccine status amounts to a major intrusion of privacy, told employees they must disclose their vaccination status to the company.
Despite informing employees that they won’t be returning to the office until 2022, Facebook’s contractors have been working in-person since October 2020.
Air travel that appeared to be rebounding post-lockdown earlier this year has sagged, with the Transportation Safety Administration screening a 10-week low of 1.6 million passengers this week.
New York health officials saw a growing number of breakthrough Covid-19 infections as the Delta variant hit the state this summer – but also witnessed the staying power of related vaccines when it came to keeping those infected out of the hospital.
The New York State Fair is poised to open tomorrow at full capacity with various COVID-19 restrictions, potentially drawing hundreds of thousands of people to the Syracuse area as coronavirus cases surge nationally.
A group of small businesses is suing New York City, hoping to stop the city’s first-in-the-nation vaccine mandate for restaurants, gyms and other indoor public venues.
The coalition of establishments, including an Italian restaurant on Staten Island and a Brooklyn gym, sued NYC Mayor Bill Blasio and the city, saying they’re unfairly targeted by the mandate that is based on questionable science and devastating to their bottom line.
Coney Island USA has, for the second consecutive year, canceled its annual Mermaid Parade as a result of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
More than half of the NYPD isn’t vaccinated for COVID-19, so the department has issued an ultimatum: vax up, or mask up.
Director Spike Lee debuted a new documentary film in front of a vaccinated outdoor crowd of several hundred people at Rockefeller Park in downtown Manhattan.
The de Blasio administration failed to adequately prepare New York City for a pandemic, leaving officials scrambling in the early months of the devastating COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, according to a scathing new report from City Comptroller Scott Stringer.
Stringer’s report also revealed that agency infighting, communications breakdowns and inventory tracking failures hampered efforts to contain the initial wave of infections, which killed thousands and forced a lockdown that crippled the city.
A year ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and California Gov. Gavin Newsom were bandied about as future Democratic presidential candidates. By next month, both could be political exiles.
Cuomo, whose resignation will be effective next Tuesday, put in for his retirement this week, and he is expected to get about a $50,000-a-year pension for his 15 years of state service — 11 as governor and four as attorney general.
“I struggle to see why that’s OK,” de Blasio said of Cuomo collecting a pension after resigning in the face of almost certain impeachment over multiple allegations of sexually harassing much younger female staffers.
The New York State Fair is scrapping its traditional “Governor’s Day” event as Cuomo prepares to resign from office next week.
The owner of Tioga Downs casino in the Southern Tier, said he believes in 2014 – after New York legalized full-scale casino gambling – Cuomo’s administration had “rigged” the process of bidding out the three initial licenses to casino operators.
Cuomo and his staff would be required to save their records and documents for at least two years under a bill introduced by Republican state Sen. Daphne Jordan.
Kathy Hochul has kept a busy schedule in her first week as New York’s governor-in-waiting, basking in the limelight as she juggles national media attention and a government transition after Cuomo announced he would resign next week.
“I’m excited about this,” Hochul said after touring a school in Corona, Queens, with a group of elected officials. “I’m excited about this opportunity and, I’d like to reiterate, I’m very prepared for this.”
Hochul said the state has the authority to mandate masks at schools.
“The (Health Department) has that authority now and I’ll assess whether or not we’ll know that’s been called for. I believe that we will need mask mandates for children to go back to schools and that will have to be universal, it will be statewide,” Hochul said.
State Sen. John Liu, chairman of the state Senate’s New York City education committee, warned of a troubled start to the school year — and didn’t rule out a delay if ongoing issues aren’t solved in the coming weeks.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said he’s not “seeking” the position of lieutenant governor as Hochul, who currently holds the post, is set to choose her successor after taking over as governor next week.
“I’m considering the governor position, but there is a whole lot to consider, and what I’ve said is that it’s probably best to consider it after the transition has occurred,” Williams said.
Hochul is leading among potential 2022 Democratic gubernatorial candidates in a new poll.
Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they would support Hochul in a Democratic primary, followed by 24 percent who said they would vote for AG Tish James and 5 percent who threw their support behind de Blasio.
A fundraiser for Hochul in her hometown of Buffalo had to be relocated to accommodate a larger-than-expected crowd.
Former Rep. Steve Israel writes: “Hochul has a way of breaking out of relative obscurity on her own terms. Combine that with a tenacious, almost relentless, work ethic and you begin to understand her.”
A Yonkers man was charged with attempted murder after a seemingly random hatchet assault at a Manhattan bank turned a mundane errand into a bloody struggle.
Seven months after being pardoned by President Donald Trump, a onetime editor of The New York Observer, Ken Kurson, a close friend of Jared Kushner, faces new charges of unlawfully spying on his former wife by secretly gaining access to her computer.
As R. Kelly’s trial opened, a woman testified that the R&B singer sexually and physically abused her when she was 16 — the first time one of his several accusers has ever taken the stand in a criminal case.
The former owner of a Schenectady ice cream parlor violated the civil rights of racial justice activists last summer by pointing a pellet gun at them and engaging in other threatening behavior, a state Supreme Court justice ruled.
One person was killed and another injured in a shooting Tuesday night at Henry Hudson Park in Bethlehem that happened during a memorial service for another crime victim, police said.
In a blunt letter, Mayor Bill Keeler and Assemblyman John McDonald say the Norlite aggregate plant has been a “serial violator” of pollution laws and should immediately address complaints about dust from its rock piles.
The Argyle man who died with his daughter when his helicopter crashed on Aug. 7 did not have a rating to fly the experimental craft, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s initial investigation of the crash.
A Republican attorney in White Plains has created a campaign committee to raise money for a possible state attorney general run, according to state Board of Elections records.
The Biden administration announced that it is banning a common pesticide, widely used since 1965 on fruits and vegetables, from use on food crops because it has been linked to neurological damage in children.
A federal appeals court upheld a Texas law banning the most common form of second-trimester abortion, ruling that a lower court had erred in finding that the law imposed “an undue burden on a large fraction of women.”
A federal judge in Alaska ruled against the Trump administration’s approval of a massive oil drilling project in the state, arguing that the Interior Department did not adequately measure the true environmental impact the project could pose.
For the first time, line-skipping privileges at Walt Disney World in Florida will cost $15 per person, an added cost for what is already an expensive destination.
Next year, second-level Girl Scouts won’t be the only Brownies showing up at your house. Adventurefuls, a brownie-inspired cookie will be released as part of the ever-growing line of guilt-free treats from the young girls organization.
