Brooklyn-based Torah Animal World, a taxidermy "zoo" featuring animals that appear in the Old Testament, is leaving its home in a Borough Park townhouse for financial reasons and is moving to the Catskills, according to a slew of reports in NYC press.
It's going to be quite a move. The Brooklyn location features 350 stuffed animals, including more than 30 kinds of kosher birds, a diorama of a bear catching a deer, a giraffe and an elephant.
Above: "This is a life expectancy, folks," says John Parete, the new chairman of the Ulster County Legislature, holding up a tailor's tape measure. "Well, on the average, that's what I got left. And I'm not going to spend one minute anymore on partisan politics or bickering.” Video shot by the Daily Freeman's Patricia Doxsey at a January 7 meeting of the Ulster County Legislature.
John Parete, a longtime Ulster County Democratic operative, allied himself with 10 Republicans and two rogue Democrats to seize the chairmanship of the Ulster County Legislature last night in a 13-10 vote, according to the Daily Freeman and the Times Herald-Record.
In 1999, [Phil] Sinagra, R-Hurley, was poised to be elected chairman of the Legislature, but Democrats joined forces with some Republicans to stage an 11th-hour coup, resulting in the election of Daniel Alfonso, R-Highland, as chairman.
This time, the power play put a Catskills local in charge.
Above: Screenshot from Central Hudson's outage map showing widespread power outages in the Ulster County towns of Woodstock and Olive.
On Tuesday evening, with temperatures in the single digits and subzero wind chills, Central Hudson was reporting widespread power outages in the Ulster County towns of Woodstock and Olive.
As of around 10 p.m., 1,841 Central Hudson customers were without power: 1,073 in Woodstock, 741 in Olive, 23 in Hurley and four in Denning.
According to the Central Hudson website, the Woodstock and Olive outages were expected to be resolved by 11:30 p.m. No restoration time was listed for the Hurley or Denning outages.
Some outages also occurred in the area early Tuesday morning and throughout the day, according to reports on social media. Information on the cause of the outages was not immediately available.
Officials at the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the nonprofit company that manages and monitors New York State's complex electrical power system, are worried that abnormally cold temperatures may take a toll on the electrical grid.
It's been ten years since anyone cut a figure eight on the ice rink in Middleburgh's Badgley Park. Built in the 90s by the village Rotary Club, the rink has been defunct for years, put out of commission after the rubber seals at the bottom that hold the water in place while the rink is freezing began to leak.
Today, the rink is open again -- thanks to the ingenuity of village trustee Bill Morton, who came up with an inexpensive way to fill the rink without fixing the seals. Morton was also behind a village-wide wildflower planting project that began last year.
Left: An image taken from a NY Thruway traffic webcam near Exit 57 at 3:21 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 6. For more Thruway webcams in the Buffalo region, see this page on the NY Thruway website.
The New York State Thruway will be partially shut down due to weather conditions today, for the second time in a week.
The Thruway between Exits 55 and 61 in western New York will be closed to commercial traffic starting at 3 p.m., and closed to all traffic starting at 8 p.m.
Local forecasters at the National Weather Service in Binghamton are predicting that temperatures Monday night and Tuesday could be the coldest in a decade or more. In a detailed briefing issued Monday morning, NWS forecasters warned that Tuesday would be the coldest day of the cold snap, with temperatures down to 10 below zero or lower and wind chills of up to 30 to 35 below zero in their forecast area, which extends to the western Catskills.
To the east, the National Weather Service's Albany station warned that the Hudson Valley and eastern Catskills -- which warmed up to the 40s and 50s on Monday -- would drop back below freezing on Monday afternoon.
We're tracking the local impacts of the cold front in real time on Storify. Let us know of any road accidents, power outages or other issues in your neighborhood at [email protected], and we'll post them to the liveblog below. (We'll gladly share your gorgeous ice pictures, too.) The latest updates appear at the top of the liveblog.
Thousands of households in rural Delaware County lost power during the early morning hours on Saturday, January 4, in a NYSEG power outage that struck on the same night as a brutal cold snap.
The outage struck over 4,000 of NYSEG's customers in the county, according to a post on Facebook from the Downsville Volunteer Fire Department. Other reports on social media indicated that power outages occurred in Walton, Delhi, Hamden, Colchester, Bovina and possibly other towns in the county. The outages occurred around 2:30 a.m., and power was restored within a few hours.
Skies over the Catskills are dazzling blue today, in the wake of a snowstorm that left over a foot of snow in some areas. But watch out -- with temperatures in the single digits, and expected to fall below zero overnight, it's still frostbite weather out there.
In the Hudson Valley, I-84 will be closed to commercial traffic starting at 5 p.m. At midnight, I-84, the New York State Thruway south of Albany, and the Long Island Expressway will all be closed to all traffic.
Officials tentatively plan to reopen the roads at 5 a.m., but will make a decision based on road conditions by 4 a.m., according to a report by the Associated Press.
Left: An image taken from a NY Thruway traffic webcam near Exit 57 at 3:21 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 6. For more Thruway webcams in the Buffalo region, 
