Top Stories from NCPR

There's music for the holidays on Saturday night in Plattsburgh. Maestro Timothy Morningstar, director of the Champlain Valley Voices, spoke with Todd Moe about the community chorus’ concert this weekend.

Morningstar says the "Carols and Candlelight” concert will include contemporary music for the Christmas season - including works by Ola Gjeilo, Kirke Mechem, John Rutter and Gwyneth Walker.

It’ll be presented Saturday at 7:30 pm at the Plattsburgh United Methodist Church.

Legal defense for the poor is a hot-button issue in New York State. Lately, the state’s been under pressure to give counties more support with this mandate and help pay for services like assigned counsel.

St. Lawrence County Legislators are considering a proposal to turn an old landfill into a solar farm. The county could approve the project in the coming weeks.

Cuttlefish, a relative of the squid, is a favored food of sharks. It has a number of ways to avoid that fate, however, such as swimming away or taking on protective coloration.

A new study has discovered that cuttlefish are remarkably adept at playing dead and can even still the electrical impulses from muscles that a shark would detect.

The luna moth uses a different technique to escape becoming bat chow. The long "tails" that trail back from behind their wings confuse the echolocation of bats.

The bat might wind up with a little piece, but miss the body of the moth.

Curt Stager and Martha Foley discuss unique survival skills in prey animals.

Wildfires in the American West are reshaping whole regions, changing economies. Could it happen here?

If New York state hopes to reach a goal of getting half of its electricity from renewable resources by the year 2030, wind energy will have to be part of the formula. That was the focus of a wind summit held in Syracuse this week, and boosters of wind power are optimistic it will happen.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he had a "positive" meeting with President Donald Trump on Wednesday at the White House to talk about funding for a key train tunnel connecting Manhattan to New Jersey.

Opioid treatment programs in New York have not been using a state database that tracks opioid prescriptions, according to an audit from the state comptroller’s office released Monday.

After more horrific school shootings in the last year, many North Country school districts are considering adding a resource officer, essentially armed police in the schools. Essex County’s newly elected sheriff, David Reynolds, is making a major push to have his deputies provide those officers to the county’s 13 school districts. So far the response from the schools has been mixed.

SUNY Canton’s Living Writers series will feature Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah tonight. Adjei-Brenyah is a graduate of the Syracuse University MFA in Creative Writing and studied with the writer George Saunders.

Our book reviewer, Betsy Kepes, talks with Todd Moe about the short stories in Adjei-Brenyah’s book, Friday Black.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah will appear at 6:30 pm, Wednesday, November 28, in the Richard W. Miller Campus Center’s Kingston Theater at SUNY Canton. The event is free and open to the public, and books will be available for purchase and signing.