Above: AccuWeather graphic showing potential scenarios for a storm that's slated to move up the coast toward the Northeast next week, just in time for Thanksgiving. For more on that, see AccuWeather's Friday story about the storm.
Hang onto your Pilgrim hat: Forecasters say a couple of storms headed for the Northeast could combine forces to form an intense nor'easter by the middle of next week. Whether the storm takes the form of snow or rain depends on the track it takes, Hudson Valley Weather explains, but several major forecasting models are all predicting that a powerful storm is likely.
We're in for some cold -- and potentially snowy -- weather this weekend, too. The U.S. National Weather Service in Binghamton is currently predicting a couple of inches of snowfall in the Catskills on Saturday night and into Sunday, with higher snowfall west of us in the Syracuse/Cortland area. Watch out for blustery winds, too.
Speaking of wind: It's a hot topic in Denning, where actor Judd Hirsch wants to erect a 177-foot wind turbine on his 96-acre property. It's not going over so well with some of Hirsch's neighbors. The New York Times ran a story about the debate last week, and interviewed Hirsch, who calls objections to the wind turbine "the pollution of jealousy and the pollution of stupidity."
It was only a matter of time: Monticello mayor Gordon Jenkins has landed himself not only in court, but in a Daily Beast article entitled "9 Lousy Mayors Who Aren't Rob Ford." Jenkins' recent arrest on drunk-driving charges -- and his alleged wall-clock punching in the police station -- may not quite rise to the level of the antics of Toronto's crack-smoking mayor, but Jenkins is making headlines way beyond Sullivan County.
In Highland, in the Ulster County town of Lloyd, five young children living within a four-square-mile area have been diagnosed with leukemia in the last two years, prompting the state Department of Health to look into whether the cases might be connected as part of a "cancer cluster."
Greene County recently adopted a $103 million budget for 2014, over the objections of three Catskill legislators who think the proposed 5.7 percent tax increase is too high.
The Greene County legislature is also interested in getting in on the action when the state begins to approve casinos in the Catskills -- though, as some astute observers have pointed out, they're way behind Sullivan and Ulster County on that front.
Recent history repeats itself: A 19-year-old from Port Ewen was arrested Thursday and charged with hacking into someone else's Facebook account to post threatening messages to several Ulster County schools. Earlier this year, Walton resident Jennifer Morris pled guilty to a single charge of falsely reporting an incident, in a similar case that involved the repeated terrorizing of the Walton Central School District with online threats to made to children and the school.
There's been entirely too much news coming out of the Walton schools lately. In the last two years, the school has been in news headlines for the aforementioned spate of threats, a teacher arrested on statutory rape charges, and an alleged student plot to bring a shotgun into the middle school. Last Friday, the district announced on its website that Walton's high school principal, Nenette Greeno, has been put on indefinite leave, for an unspecified reason:
The Board of Education and the administration cannot legally publicly discuss the reasons or decisions other than to assure students, staff and community that this did not involve any impropriety.
Effective immediately, Assistant Principal Mark Lamoreaux will assume her duties until further notice. Under the terms of her contract, Ms. Greeno will continue to receive her full salary and benefits until the two parties resolve the situation.
Local apple cidermakers, raise a glass to Senator Chuck Schumer, who's stumping for a federal law that would allow cider with alcohol content higher than 7 percent to be taxed as cider instead of wine. The alcohol content of cider fluctuates depending on the level of sugar in the apples; Schumer's proposed law would allow cider to reach 8.5 percent alcohol before it is subject to higher taxes.
It's been a very bad year for monarch butterflies. This November, the smallest monarch migration in recorded history straggled into Mexico at less than a tenth of their 2012 numbers, Jim Robbins writes for the New York Times:
This year, for or the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn’t come, at least not on the Day of the Dead. They began to straggle in a week later than usual, in record-low numbers. Last year’s low of 60 million now seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far this year. Some experts fear that the spectacular migration could be near collapse.
Kinda newsworthy: The fact that three people were arrested for welfare fraud in Sullivan County last week. Wicked newsworthy: The fact that two of them were county Department of Social Services examiners. This week, several appalled county legislators announced a new investigation and department-wide review of the county's social service system. In the announcement, legislator Cora Edwards said that Sullivan County is in the process of "transitioning from being a benefits destination to being a resort destination." (Oof.)
In other local cleanup news, an EPA team is currently at work on a $1.1 million project to remove soil contaminated with wood tar from the site of a former factory in Hancock. State environmental officials have asked the federal EPA to class the site as a "Superfund" site -- joining four other existing Superfund sites in Delaware County and hundreds of others around the state, listed on the EPA's website. According to a story in the Walton Reporter, tar balls from contamination on the site have been found in nearby Read Creek, and fish in the area have been found with toxic levels of wood tar in their systems.
