A head-on collision between two cars on the New York State Thruway in New Baltimore around 1am Friday morning left two dead and two injured, including a four-month-old baby, police announced today.

According to a news release from the New York State Police. 43-year-old Julian With, a resident of Coxsackie, was driving the wrong way in the southbound lane when his Ford sedan collided with a Ford minivan carrying two women and a baby, killing one of the women.

Both With and minivan passenger Carol Dion, a 50-year-old Canadian from Stony Creek, Ontario, were pronounced dead at the scene. Their bodies were taken to St. Peter's Hospital for autopsy.

The driver of the minivan, 39-year-old Karen Weller of Hamilton, Ontario, was injured, along with her four-month-old baby Tajaye Weller. Both were taken to Albany Medical Center. 

A news report from the Capital Region's News10 states that police were alerted shortly before the crash that a car was traveling the wrong way on the Thruway. 

Photo by Flickr user manyhighways; published under Creative Commons license.

To butcher a quote from Henry Ford: You can have any color school bus you want, as long as it's yellow. But that wasn't always the case: Before a rural education professor led the charge to standardize the school bus, children were taken to school in everything from red, white, and blue buses to horse-drawn wheat wagons.

This week, the New York Times's City Room blog paid homage to longtime Stamford resident Frank Cyr -- yes, that Frank Cyr, whose name is now immortalized, at least locally, in the Frank W. Cyr Center in Stamford. 

Above: Aerial imagery of a property at 294 John Lockwood Road where two bodies were found Tuesday (highlighted in blue on the map). Source: Delaware County Community Online Mapping Tool.

On Tuesday afternoon, police conducting a criminal investigation at a house in Walton arrived to the sound of gunfire and the house in flames. Two bodies were found in the house, and have yet to be identified.

According to a release from the New York State Police issued on Wednesday, Delaware County Sheriff's Office senior investigator Karl Vagts and Walton Police Department chief Brian Laauser were on the scene around 2pm on Tuesday at 294 John Lockwood Road, a dead-end road in a rural neighborhood. While the officers were outside the house, two gunshots were heard from within. 

Vagts and Laauser entered the house, where they found a woman dead on the second floor, and flames beginning to engulf the building. Fire companies from Walton and Delhi arrived to put out the fire. After the fire was extinguished, the remains of a second body were found in the basement.

Willie Janeway, a Department of Environmental Conservation official who heads the agency's Region 3 in the Hudson Valley and lower Catskills, is leaving for a nonprofit job in the high peaks of the Adirondacks.

The Adirondack Council, a prominent conservation group, announced Tuesday that Janeway will be taking over as their new executive director in May. In Tuesday's press release, Janeway, who headed the Adirondack Mountain Club's North Country operations from 1985 to 1994, said he's excited to get back to the Adirondacks:

Photo of L1A1 SLR semi-automatic rifle by Flickr user Keary O. Published under Creative Commons license.

County governments across upstate New York are weighing in against New York State's new gun control law, the SAFE Act. By the time the dust settles on a spate of pending resolutions, the list of anti-SAFE Act counties is likely to include most or all of the Catskills region. 

On Friday, the Schoharie County Board of Supervisors voted 15-1 to pass a resolution opposing the SAFE Act. News 10 reports:

The resolution calls for repealing the new law; explaining the it infringes on people's rights and describes it as unnecessary.

The resolution opposes the process of the enactment and certain provisions, including the ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines.