Good morning, we are one day away from Friday (AKA Thursday).
If you’re a fan of fresh fruits and veggies, it’s a great time to live upstate. Farmers markets, roadside stands, and even chain supermarkets are starting to stock a wide variety of local produce, and the bounty will continue well into apple/pumpkin season this fall.
It’s a lot easier to eat healthy – and simply – when you have access to fresh food. Knowing where it came from and being able to support local farmers is an added bonus. When people who aren’t from New York think about this state, they don’t often consider it to be synonymous with agriculture. That’s more for, you know, the midwest, the west coast, or even the south.
But, New York is actually one of the nation’s leading agricultural producers, ranking in the top 10 for a number of commodities – including dairy, apples, cabbages (?!), and maple syrup.
Yes, I know, the cabbage thing was a surprise to me, too. As it turns out, we rank third in the country for cabbage production and acreage. In fact, some say cabbage is the state’s highest earning vegetable.
Before you poo-poo cabbage – and I am a fan, FWIW – remember that it is the main ingredient in coleslaw. You can have a cookout without it, IMHO.
I don’t know about you, but I have tried my hand at growing vegetables and it is real work. The planting, the weeding, the harvesting, the constant fighting off of a wide variety of predators – from bugs to deer. And all for a few measly tomatoes and cucumbers, which, granted, do taste a heck of a lot better than some of what one is able to procure from a store in the off season.
And you have the added benefitted of the satisfaction of truly being self sufficient.
Herbs are admittedly easier, and also nice to have around if you do any cooking on the regular. Fruit trees present challenges of their own, as they drop their bounty all over your lawn – again, drawing the aforementioned pests and predators – unless you are on top of harvesting things as they ripen.
All of this work occurs outside, which is to say in the beating sun or intense heat of the pouring rain or the driving wind. It is not for the faint of heart – especially when done on a large scale.
And without this work – largely done on our behalf by others – we would not eat. Full stop.
So, my hat is off to the farmworkers of the world, including the estimated 2.4 million to 2.9 million of them toiling across the U.S., the large majority of whom are immigrants – some documented and here either permanently or on a range of work visas, others not, which is part of the reason why the range of how many are actually employed in this sector is so broad.
New York employs somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 farm workers annually, according to the state Department of Labor. Those figures include the entire spectrum of workers – domestic, guest worker, year-round, migrant and seasonal – who do everything from plant and harvest to milk cows and toil in greenhouses.
As an aside, while I was writing this post in advance – yes, sometimes I manage to carve out time to do that – I received a press release from Gov. Kathy Hochul announcing:
“(A)pplications are now open for New York’s first-ever collaborative youth agriculture leadership conference to support further collaboration among youth agriculture organizations and identify opportunities for youth engagement that reflects the industry’s future workforce needs.”
In case you know someone who fits the bill, more information and an application can be accessed here.
There are conflicting reports as to whether today is National Farm Workers Day, or it’s actually on March 31, (AKA Cesar Chavez Day) at the end of National Farmworker Awareness Week. There’s also Farmworker Appreciation Day (Aug. 6).
No matter, I’ve come to the end of this (rather lengthy) post already, and personally think that farm workers deserve recognition any day of the week.
It will be on the warmer side today, with a mix of sun and clouds and temperatures reaching into the mid-80s.
In the headlines…
President Joe Biden and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will sign a bilateral security agreement between the U.S. and Ukraine on today when they meet on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit in Italy.
Amid signs that Americans are tiring of sending weapons to Ukraine after two years of war, Biden this week will huddle with other world leaders in search of new ways to get aid to the country as it struggles to fend off Russia’s invasion.
Biden will arrive at the G7 summit in Italy with over 300 new sanctions aimed at further isolating and financially weakening Russia.
Biden’s undertaking will come up against growing concerns in Europe that he will merely be an interregnum between two Donald Trump administrations.
The Biden administration announced new financial sanctions aimed at interrupting the fast-growing technological links between China and Russia that US officials believe are a broad effort to rebuild and modernize Russia’s military during its war with Ukraine.
Celebrities are increasingly lending their star power to Biden, hoping to energize their fans to vote for him in November and to entice donors to pony up for his reelection effort.
An attempt by the Biden administration to extend Title IX equality protections to LGBTQ+ students has been blocked by a federal judge in Texas, who branded it an “unlawful action.”
House Republicans muscled through a measure recommending that Attorney General Merrick Garland be held in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena.
The G.O.P. acted over Democratic opposition after the Justice Department declined to provide audio recordings of President Biden’s interview with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents.
The lower chamber voted along party lines, 216-207, to hold Garland in contempt. He is now the third attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt.
Speaker Mike Johnson called the outcome “a significant step in maintaining the integrity of our oversight processes and responsibilities.”
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging President Biden’s decision to shut down the southern border to nearly all migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
Hunter Biden is expected to appeal his felony conviction for falsifying a federal firearms application, likely arguing that the judge in the case violated his constitutional rights in her instructions to the jury, according to people in his orbit and legal experts.
Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has signaled that any appeal would be based on the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision that vastly expanded gun rights, which spawned legal challenges to the part of the federal firearms form at the center of this case.
A White House spokeswoman did not rule out the possibility that President Biden might commute the sentence of his son Hunter Biden, who was convicted on three federal felony counts for illegally purchasing a handgun during his addiction to crack cocaine.
“As we all know, the sentencing hasn’t even been scheduled yet,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Air Force One as President Joe Biden traveled to the Group of Seven summit in Italy.
Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged at their June meeting and predicted that they will cut borrowing costs just once before the end of 2024, taking a cautious approach as they try to avoid declaring a premature victory over inflation.
While the Fed had been expected to leave rates unchanged, its projections for how interest rates may evolve surprised many economists.
Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization.
The vote was an indication that evangelicals are increasingly open to arguments that equate embryos with human life, and that two years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, “fetal personhood” may be the next front for the anti-abortion movement.
At the same time, the Southern Baptists rejected a move to crack down on congregations with women in pastoral leadership – an unexpected rebuke to a hard-right faction that has been jockeying for influence in the country’s largest Protestant denomination.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was reportedly found at fault for a car crash that landed himself, his wife and a 62-year-old woman in a West Virginia hospital Sunday.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is asking a state judge to force the state comptroller’s office to pay his legal costs in litigation related to a sexual harassment case brought against him two years ago.
A new coalition of environmental groups, disability rights advocates and businesses in the so-called congestion zone threatened Gov. Kathy Hochul with legal challenges aimed at starting congestion pricing by its previously planned June 30 launch date.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said Hochul’s abrupt cancellation of congestion pricing was not only unwise but potentially unlawful, and he promised to carry out legal action if the plan does not go into effect on the originally planned June 30 date.
“The governor’s sudden, and potentially illegal reversal wronged a host of New Yorkers who have a right to what was long promised to all of New York — a world-class mass transit system that works for everyone,” Lander said.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside Hochul’s Third Avenue office yesterday, demanding she backtrack her decision to hault congestion pricing.
Hochul and Netherlands Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Liesje Schreinemacher announced a new partnership to strengthen innovation and collaboration in the semiconductor industry between the Netherlands and New York.
Small distillers across the state are celebrating passage of a long-awaited measure that, if signed into law by the governor, would allow them to ship their product directly to consumers — similar to the way that New York wineries have been able to do for years.
People who rent out their homes through short-term rental services such as Airbnb could soon have a new set of rules to follow after the state Legislature last week approved a bill targeted at the industry.
New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks lent his support to a recent state Education Department proposal to drop the Regents exams as a high school graduation requirement.
“I’m in favor of it,” Banks said on PIX11 Morning News, “and not in lowering standards. You have to have academically rigorous programming. But I think that there are other ways for kids to demonstrate what they know and what they’re able to do.”
Mayor Eric Adams told a journalist that it looked like he was working out and complimented his “summer body.” It wasn’t his first inappropriate public remark about someone’s appearance.
For years, Adams went to extraordinary lengths to privately pacify Lamor Whitehead, as the ex-con-turned-pastor picked fights with his top adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, and pressed him for financial and political help, a text messages between the two men reveal.
Adams weighed in on the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest drama. “Stop being such weenies! It would be ‘impossible’ to have this year’s Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest without Joey Chestnut,” Hizzoner wrote yesterday on X.
Coney Island’s war of wieners escalated as organizers of the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest debunked Chestnut’s claim that they were “changing the rules” — after the rules cost the perennial champ his spot at next month’s eat off.
For the first time in 15 years, Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi will once again square off in a hot dog eating contest — this one streaming live on Netflix on Labor Day.
The issue of real estate broker fees came to a head at a heated City Council hearing yesterday, when hundreds showed up to testify both for and against a bill that would essentially shift the burden of paying the dreaded fees to landlords.
Hundreds descended on City Hall to testify about the FARE Act, which would make whomever hires a broker — tenant or landlord — pay their fee. Currently, prospective tenants commonly pay broker fees, even when they found an apartment on their own.
New York City will receive $27 million as part of a year-old settlement against Juul Labs, the controversial purveyor of vape pens that was ordered to pay out a total of $462 million as part of a court deal in April 2023, city and state leaders announced.
The city is flexing its new enforcement powers to close hundreds of unlicensed cannabis stores. Critics have likened some of the authorities’ tactics to those used during the war on drugs.
A Brooklyn bus driver says she was punched in the face in East New York after a passenger missed his stop on Friday, one of at least three assaults on transit workers in four days including a brutal stabbing.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office dropped felony burglary charges against seven CUNY students and faculty who were arrested during a pro-Palestinian encampment at City College earlier this year, ending all prosecution against them.
Pro-Palestinian protesters vandalized the homes of Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak and several Jewish board members early yesterday in what local elected officials are calling an act of “vile antisemitism.”
Investigators are looking to see if several disturbing acts of vandalism in New York City, including at the home of the Brooklyn Museum’s Jewish director, are connected — as police released footage of some of the suspects.
The homes of the officials were vandalized with red paint, and a banner at the museum director’s building called her a “white supremacist” Zionist.
An explosion of blatant antisemitism by anti-Israel protesters in New York, most covering their faces to avoid being identified, is leading some Jewish leaders to call for the return of an anti-mask law that was previously used to fight the hoods of the KKK.
An unprecedented “Vote Shabbat” campaign is underway to galvanize Jews in Westchester County to help vote out lefty anti-Israel “Squad” Rep. Jamaal Bowman and elect moderate County Executive George Latimer in the June 25 16th CD Democratic primary.
The mystery of whose remains were discovered in April during the construction of a home in Putnam County appears to have been solved. But the answer has raised only more questions about the circumstances of her disappearance.
A crew of Westchester County Jail workers – including corrections officers and commissary workers – have been slapped with bribery charges in a jailhouse crackdown, officials confirmed.
Kevin C. Miller, the former leader of Rensselaer County’s veterans office, was taken to the hospital with burns after a fire late yesterday morning damaged a two-car garage at his home, officials said.
The Rensselaer County Legislature’s Republican majority made it clear that they support the county’s new drug dealer registry as they united to reject a resolution to repeal the measure.
The Rensselaer County Board of Elections consolidated polling places for the 107th Assembly District Democratic primary to streamline services and save money, though that drew complaints from the leader of The Justice Center for Rensselaer County.
Albany Symphony orchestra has found its new executive director. Emily Fritz-Endres, who previously worked with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra, will take the helm in August.
The Capital Region hosted King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands yesterday, as they learned more about the state’s future in chip manufacturing.
Democratic candidates for the 103rd Assembly District met virtually for their first and only scheduled debate this week, with incumbent Assembly Member Sarahana Shrestha and challenger Gabi Madden tackling mostly local topics.
Fifty-three years after a private plane carrying five men disappeared on a snowy Vermont night, experts believe they have found the wreckage of the long-lost jet in Lake Champlain.
Photo credit: George Fazio.
