“We want to make sure we have as many tools as possible to preserve open space ...,” Guilderland Supervisor Peter Barber told The Enterprise on Tuesday. “There could be people out there who want their land protected.”

“I was really worried because he’d been having seizures,” said Carl Burnham, whose pet pig was missing for most of Thursday.

Last September, the Albany County Legislature voted, 33 to 5, to prohibit the use and sale of sparkling devices defined as ground-based fireworks such as the cylindrical or cone fountains and wooden sparkler/dipped sticks.

Throughout the week, Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy has not reported more than four new cases of COVID-19 in any single day. And on Tuesday, for the first time in 10 months, he reported zero new cases. On Wednesday, McCoy announced that the county had marked another milestone with 60 percent of its 307,117 residents fully vaccinated.

Absentee ballots for the four candidates, according to the Albany County Board of Elections, were counted on Tuesday and came in the same order as the original vote.

GUILDERLAND — A buoyant stream of graduates flowed out of the county’s convention center into bright sunlight Friday afternoon — the young women in robes of white, the young men in robes of red.

SLINGERLANDS — On Friday morning, following two similar incidents in May, a truck traveling west on New Scotland Road got stuck under the rail-trail bridge.

The emergency was declared on March 7, 2020 to fight COVID-19 and had come under fire in recent months, particularly from Republicans, as an abuse of power by the governor. The announcement ended a week, statewide and in Albany County, in which infection rates and hospitalizations remained low and vaccination rates inched upward. The week before, Cuomo announced the statewide lifting of most COVID-19 restrictions.

Guilderland Democrats sent a mixed message Tuesday in the town’s first primary — a four-way race for two spots where the key issue was development.

“The nature of rare plants is that you almost never find them. To have discovered a state endangered species that hasn’t been seen in 100 years — it’s just amazing,” says Jesse Hoffman who discovered two Virginia marbleseed plants in the Albany Pine Bush Preserve.