Top Stories from NCPR

The state budget is due in less than a month, but the biggest push at the Capitol is for a change that is not a spending item. It’s a measure to treat 16- and 17-year-olds as children, not adults, when they are charged with serious crimes. Many leading legislators say, for them, the issue is personal. [full story]

Tim Wynne-Jones lives near Perth, Ontario and writes of a young navigator from Vermont who survives a plane crash on a small Pacific Island during WWII. The island has one other living inhabitant, a Japanese soldier, and several kinds of ghosts. Wynne-Jones’s Young Adult novel received seven starred reviews, a rare honor. [full story]

Sandy Maine was one of the first women to become a licensed wilderness guide in the Adirondacks. In 1979, Sandy took the first leadership wilderness course offered at North Country Community College. She spent the next few years of her life leading groups into the remote regions of the Adirondack Park. [full story]

Disability rights advocates say they are fed up with what they say is a lack of response from Governor Cuomo on funding for services that help them stay in their communities, including lack of funds to pay home health care workers adequate wages. At a protest outside the governor’s offices, Bruce Darling, with the Center for Disability Rights, displayed a special award that the group fashioned for Cuomo, it features a five inch gold screw on a trophy pedestal. [full story]

The state Assembly held a hearing Monday on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to spend $8 billion in subsidies to keep three upstate nuclear power plants operating for the next 12 years. But no one from the Cuomo administration showed up. [full story]

A guitar maker in Essex County uses the sunken logs he finds at the bottom of Schroon Lake to make his one-of-a-kind instruments. In some instances, while diving for the wood, he finds a piece of history. [full story]

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik continues to draw fire in the North Country for not holding open town hall meetings, where all her constituents are able to come and ask questions and share their opinions. In a lead editorial last week, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise argued that avoiding town hall-style meetings “reflected poorly” on the Republican lawmaker. [full story]

A tale of false accusations and forgiveness concerning the zen master Hakuin.Story Traveler is unscripted storytelling from everywhere in the world, stories for the heart to hear and the mind to imagine. [full story]

The Trump Administration could be proposing a 97 percent cut in Great Lakes Restoration Initiative funding when it unveils the federal budget later this month — a move that is drawing harsh criticism from some regional officials. The initiative is one of many Environmental Protection Agency programs in jeopardy. [full story]

An Indian snowshoe racer was released from Essex County jail on Friday and is staying with a family in Saranac Lake as he awaits a preliminary hearing tomorrow, according to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise newspaper. [full story]