Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

October 4, 2025

The WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series takes place this weekend in Lake Placid, N.Y., against a backdrop of controversy concerning construction of the downhill course at Whiteface Mountain. Nancie Battaglia

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Kelly Mulholland would have turned 55 on Saturday, Oct. 11. Her children Connor and McKenna are all grown up now. Her husband Mark became a distinguished anchor and reporter in television news. How she would have loved to see all that — and to know the wonderful work her family has done in her honor.

Kelly died of cancer in 2007 at age 37. To help deal with their overwhelming grief, Connor, McKenna and Mark went to work forming a charity that has helped thousands of Capital Region kids who have lost a parent to cancer and families confronting life-threatening illnesses. This year, on Kelly’s birthday, their charitable organization, Kelly’s Angels, will celebrate 15 years of love with an evening devoted to raising money to help more local kids.  The public is invited to join the celebration.

AMAZING GRACE: Last Sunday, a deranged man drove his pickup through the front of a Mormon church in Michigan, killed four people and started a fire that destroyed the building before police killed him. Upon learning the attacker had a special-needs son, a Mormon in Utah started a fundraiser for his family that raised more than $340,000 by the end of the week. “James teaches us that ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction,’” organizer David Butler wrote. “The purpose of this GiveSendGo is to do that.” 

COMMUNITY RESPONSE: A bullied kid. A threat made against the tormentors. A law enforcement response. In many cases, that would be the end of the story, the result sometimes an arrest, sometimes a suspension or expulsion, and always a community on edge. But in Madison County, N.Y., east of Syracuse, a response team of 106 individuals representing 59 agencies and organizations went to work, examining the background and facts that led to the threat and developing a strategy to address the bullying at the root of it. The Madison County team formed in response to an executive order from the governor — issued after a gunman killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket — requiring each of the state’s 62 counties to create plans to address threats before they result in more deaths.

MODELING SUCCESS: As New York’s Capital Region awaits its turn to join the Costco universe, an MIT management professor takes a deep dive into the principles and practices that have made Costco, the membership-only wholesale retailer, one of the great successes in American business. “Its success is a testament to the Code of Ethics and five deeply held convictions that (co-founder and retired CEO Jim) Sinegal embedded in the company’s DNA,” Professor Zeynep Tan writes in Harvard Business Review. “They emphasize that taking care of customers and employees and treating suppliers with respect will lead to extraordinary customer and employee loyalty and shareholder value. How Sinegal ingrained his approach to business into Costco’s culture and operating model hold lessons for leaders of companies of all sizes.

The colors are filling in and the leaves are dropping on the Rensselaer Plateau. John Bulmer

 MURDER BY THE BOOK: The author of Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors — a book that is what the title suggests — said she believed no one “in their right mind” would take it seriously. “It became farcical to me, something out of a movie,” she told Abbott Kahler for an extraordinary piece in Vanity Fair. “It didn’t seem real to me. What happened didn’t seem like a possibility until after it happened.” What happened is that a hit man hired to kill a disabled boy, his mother and his caretaker did so using the techniques laid out by an author who went by Rex Feral and who has been haunted for decades by those murders in Maryland. A divorced mother of two when she wrote the book, Gayle McCool is now a 77-year-old great-grandmother who continues to wrestle with the demons her book unleashed. “This should never have happened,” she said. “Look at the hearts that broke and the negative impact it had on the world — not just mine.”

SUBPAR: If you paid any attention to golf’s Ryder Cup, you know two things, and not necessarily in this order: 1. That Europe won and 2. That the fans at Long Island’s Bethpage Black were an utter embarrassment. “I don't think we should ever accept that in golf,” Europe’s Rory McIroy, the subject of particularly vulgar harassment, told reporters. The New York Post zeroed in on rampant drunkenness. Golf legend Tom Watson, a former Ryder Cup player and captain, was so mortified by what he saw that he posted an apology on social media: “As a former player, Captain and as an American, I am ashamed of what happened.”

REMEMBERING A TRAGEDY: This week marked the 20^th anniversary of the sinking of the Ethan Allen in Lake George, a tragedy that resulted in the deaths of 20 elderly tourists. Margaret Kidon, a tour guide for visitors from Trenton, Mich., who were visiting to see fall foliage on a gorgeous afternoon, was among the survivors, recalling in an interview with the Albany Times Union that a vision of her dog compelled her to swim beneath the overturned vessel until she found a window to escape through. “I don’t know how I got through it,” she said. “It was sad all the way around.”

CHARM CITY: Saratoga Springs, N.Y., has charms aplenty, and it continues to draw national recognition as one of the best small cities in America. The latest comes from WalletHub, which ranked Saratoga Springs No. 1 in New York State and No. 8 in the nation.

A SOUND FURY: Syracuse City Hall was evacuated and police closed streets as they investigated a suspicious box strapped to a tree across from City Hall. It turned out to be a noise monitoring device related to a highway project and placed by the state Department of Transportation, which said it notified the city.

FERTILITY BREAKTHROUGH: Researchers have created human eggs from skin cells, a breakthrough that could potentially produce genetically related eggs for people who are infertile and same-sex couples.

A FIRST FOR THE CHURCH: Sarah Mullally was named the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, making her the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide and the first woman to occupy the post established more than 1,400 years ago. She will succeed Justin Welby.

EXPANDING VOCABULARY: Merriam-Webster announced this week that it was adding 5,000 words in a new edition that will be published in November, including “rizz,” “adulting” and “doomscroll.”

GROUNDS CREW: Ski areas in Vermont, in an effort to reduce reliance on gas-powered mowers, are using sheep and goats to clear vegetation. “They’re great employees,” the director of mountain and base area operations at Jay Peak quipped to The Associated Press, which also captured some delightful photos. “They take a lot of lunch breaks, but that’s kind of the idea.”

LAST CALL: In a storyline that tracks with polling that alcohol consumption continues its downward trend, more bachelors and bachelorettes are choosing to spend their traditional pre-wedding parties and getaways indulging in adventure and wellness instead of wine and spirits.

JANE GOODALL began her groundbreaking research on chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1960s, documenting how they lived and interacted and observing them as individuals with personalities and quirks. “Her perceptions of the emotions of chimpanzees was pathbreaking,” a professor emeritus at Penn and admirer of her work told NBC News. “Her careful, detailed observation and reports really got a whole generation of us — me included — and many others interested in this as a field of scientific endeavor.” As her career progressed and she saw how habitat destruction and illegal trafficking threatened the survival of chimpanzees, she made conservation and animal welfare a focus of her work. As Goodall became a prominent figure, she used her celebrity to advance animal causes and public interest in science. She wrote dozens of books about her interactions with chimpanzees, including many children's books. She was 91.

“In today's world, it seems like people can't have a dialogue without taking sides. It just seems like, ‘You’re either on my side or I hate you,’ and that's crazy. That's crazy. We should be able to disagree without contempt or any ill feelings toward one another. That’s what this country was based on.”
—  Jerry Cramer, a longtime resident of Alger, Ohio, on the controversy that erupted after the village council passed a resolution to rename a local park  in honor of Ray Brown, a Black village native who is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

DELAYED GRATIFICATION: With the weather getting a bit chillier, a man in Germany put on a coat he hadn’t worn since March and discovered a folded-up lottery ticket. He checked the numbers and found that he had won the equivalent of $18 million. Lottery officials had launched a campaign to find the winner. "I heard about it on the radio at the time and thought to myself, 'How stupid can you be not to collect it?'"

Some of the linked material in Facing Out requires a subscription to read.

Principal Author: Bill Callen.

Contributors: Mark Behan, Ryan Moore, Jim Murphy, Amanda Metzger, Kristy Miller, John Brodt, John Bulmer and Nancie Battaglia.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media. www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com