Albany | featured news

Fort EdwardBird-watchers overeager to get pictures of hauntingly beautiful Arctic owls and other exotic northern birds in Washington County are being warned by state wildlife officials to keep their distance or risk a ticket.Several iconic snowy owls — striking mostly-white birds with yellow eyes — have been spending the winter hunting around grassy fields outside of Fort Edward, and are drawing a lot of attention from area birding enthusiasts.

TROY — A judge dismissed weapons charges and others offenses filed against four people after a police raid at a home Thursday at 14 Linden Ave., according to court records.Christopher T. Maier dismissed the charges after a preliminary hearing involving Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove's office and attorneys for the four people.The judge will allow prosecutors to refile charges against the four.

Bethlehem
Three generations of a Turkish family were stripped of their livelihoods, life savings, friends and culture in a sweeping purge by the authoritarian regime of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

They languish as political refugees in a cramped apartment along a busy commercial stretch of Delaware Avenue.

"We feel like prisoners. We are alone and afraid to go out. We don't know who we can trust," said Yavuz, 48, the father, a former elementary school teacher and government worker.

NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors and defense counsel on Tuesday morning offered competing portraits of Joe Percoco, a former top aide and confidant of Gov. Andrew Cuomo who stands accused of swapping bribes for official favors."The case is about corruption, the old-fashioned kind," Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Boone told the jury of seven women and five men.

TROY - Voters in the city school district are heading to the polls Tuesday to decide whether to renovate a wing of one of its elementary schools to better serve children and families in the neighborhood.The project at School 2 — a $1.2 million renovation to create private rooms for medical care, counseling and family services — would not require a tax increase, district officials had said.

SCHENECTADY - A massive power outage has left thousands of National Grid customers without service in part of Schenectady.The utility says 5,678 customers lost service Tuesday morning.

A 20-year-old Greenport man is facing a rape charge after police said he had a sexual encounter with a 13-year-old.

ALBANY - SUNY Polytechnic Institute professor Scott Tenenbaum has won a $2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

A Guilderland High School student was hit by a car in a hit-and-run early Tuesday morning, Guilderland police said.

COLONIE - A flood watch is in place in the Capital Region and the rest of eastern upstate New York as meteorologists try to determine if heavy rains expected on Tuesday will cause flooding on rivers and streams.Rising water and a recent rise in temperatures has broken up sheets of ice on the Mohawk and Hudson rivers that accumulated during a recent stretch of sub-zero temperatures.