Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

February 8, 2025

Spectacular fireworks light the sky above the ice palace in Saranac Lake, N.Y., where the Winter Carnival wraps up this weekend. Nancie Battaglia

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

It’s Super Bowl Weekend, when much of America will be torn between what they want to see less — the Kansas City Chiefs winning another Lombardi Trophy, or the country’s “most annoying” fans celebrating a victory by their Philadelphia Eagles.

Of course, the Chiefs are trying to do something no other team has done in the Super Bowl era — win it three years in a row — and the Eagles do have a star everyone can root for in Saquon Barkley — as well as a general manager who got to where he is with sheer grit and determination — so there definitely are compelling story lines. And if music is your thing, there is plenty of that, too, both beforehand and at halftime.

Then again, if you can’t get behind either team, there is an event Sunday that everyone can get behind — Puppy Bowl XXI, airing at 2 p.m. on Animal Planet. The Puppy Bowl, an annual event  to raise awareness about adopting pets from shelters and filmed for the fifth consecutive year at the Cool Insuring Arena  in Glens Falls, N.Y., will feature 142 rescue puppies from 80 shelters across 40 states and two countries, including a chihuahua-terrier mix named Willow from Lake George. Willow’s older sibling, Maddux, played in Puppy Bowl XI, the Albany Times Union reports, and was recently inducted into the Puppy Bowl Hall of Fame.

The pure joy is hard to miss. It’s why we love our dogs so much.

LITTLE HERO: A 10-year-old boy in Philadelphia is recovering from emergency brain surgery after he was injured protecting his little sister from flying debris that resulted from the crash of a medical flight eight days ago. When Trey Howard first spoke three days after the surgery, his father told a Philadelphia TV station, he asked, “Daddy, did I save my sister?” Indeed, he had. Young Trey’s visitors included one of his favorite NBA players, 76ers star Tyrese Maxey, a great player who, by all accounts, is just as great off the court.

SNOW BUSINESS: We’re having a real winter in the Northeast, creating ideal snow conditions at New York ski resorts that are often maligned for their icy slopes. “When you have cold air, the moisture content of the snow decreases so instead of having this East Coast cement, which we usually have, it’s this fluffy, champagne powder that is more typical of what you find in places out West,” the science manager of the Whiteface Mountain Field Station told the New York Post. “It is fantastic.”

MEET THE NEW BOSS: GlobalFoundries, the semiconductor giant headquartered in Malta, N.Y., announced this week that it has promoted COO Tim Breen to CEO, succeeding the widely respected Thomas Caufield, who was named chairman of the board. The moves take effect April 28. The chipmaker, employer of 2,500 people and beneficiary of billions of dollars in government investment over its lifetime, plans to triple its capacity in Malta over the next decade, and last month announced plans to build a $575 million advanced packaging and testing center in Malta.

CALLING THEM OUT: Readers of the Albany Times Union look forward to longtime columnist Chris Churchill’s tough, straight-talking commentary about issues both large and small, but always of legitimate concern. This week he called out the state’s Democratic leaders, who were hatching a plan to change a state law governing the timing of special elections in an effort to keep U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik’s district unrepresented in Congress for longer if, as expected, her nomination to be U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. is confirmed by the Senate. Later, his focus turned to a cemetery overseer in Troy, N.Y., who noticed errors on a gravestone — as in, wrong spelling, wrong date of death. She started contacting the probate lawyer responsible for the installation in September but got the brush-off. Then Churchill called. Fifteen minutes later, the lawyer promised to fix it. “I’ll let you know when the errors have been fixed,” he writes.

A New York State Trooper on routine patrol on the Adirondack Northway in the Essex County community of Moriah spotted an injured owl, rescued him and moved him to a safe place where the owl gathered himself and flew away. New York State Police

SURPRISING CONCLUSION: Anyone who’s spent any time around journalism is familiar with the maxim, evidently originating with newspaper baron William Randolph Heart Jr., “If it bleeds, it leads.” Or as Don Henley memorably crooned, “We got the bubble-headed bleached-blonde, comes on at five; She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye; It's interesting when people die; Give us dirty laundry.”  But researchers who analyzed thousands of network TV news segments from 1968 to 2013 say it’s surprise, not gore, that was more determinative in news value. You only thought it was sensationalism and lack of imagination.

DREAM DEFERRED: Persistently high interest rates and a housing crunch exacerbated by a nation of NIMBYs who assert private property rights beyond their own property boundaries are putting the dream of homeownership beyond the reach of more and more Americans, even those whose incomes far exceed the national average. As of last fall, according to the Atlanta Fed, the median homeowner in the U.S. was paying 42% of their income on homeownership costs. Four years ago, that was 28% and had not previously reached 38% since late 2007, just before the housing market crash. “The American dream, as our parents knew it, doesn’t exist anymore,” Jenn Petersen, a 42-year-old chiropractor living near San Jose, told ABC News.

JUDGE ME NOT: Richard T. Snyder’s attempt to weasel out of jury duty also got him removed from his post as a town court justice in a small town near Albany, N.Y., a position he’d held for more than a decade. The former judge resigned after it came to light that he tried to avoid jury duty in 2023 by first identifying himself as a judge, then saying, “I know everybody come [sic] in front of me. I know they are guilty. They would not be in front of me [sic again].” The New York Post reports on his sometimes incoherent but at all times oblivious attempt to defend himself after being hauled in front of the state Commission on Judicial Conduct.

EGGSISTENTIAL CRISIS: You know the price of eggs is out of control when Waffle House is slapping a 50-cent per egg surcharge on customers’ orders. It probably doesn’t help that 100,000 of them were stolen from the back of a trailer last weekend in rural Pennsylvania. And not to add to your breakfast blues, but bacon’s not getting any cheaper either.

NOT TOO NEIGHBORLY: State Farm, which annually spends millions of dollars of premium revenues telling everybody what a good neighbor it is, wants “an emergency rate increase” of 22% for homeowners in California because of the recent wildfires.

HEY, BUD. LET’S PARTY!: Fans of Fast Times at Ridgemont High — and honestly, who isn’t? — will be pleased to learn that the Spicoli Van rolls on, lovingly replicated and maintained for more than 30 years by a California couple who own and operate a restoration shop specializing in Volkswagen buses.

LAKE PLACID SOARING: Many of the top men’s and women’s ski jumpers in the world are in Lake Placid, N.Y., this weekend. The men’s ski jumping World Cup competition returned to Lake Placid last winter after a 33-year hiatus. This weekend, the women’s World Cup is there, too.

LEGENDS AT SPAC: Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Wilco are scheduled to headline the August 2 stop of the Outlaw Music Festival at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. The festival, a celebration of Americana music, is celebrating its 10^th year. Tickets went on sale Friday.

GOING HOME: Greg Gattuso, the  head football coach for the past 11 seasons at the University at Albany, announced this week that he was leaving to become a defensive line consultant at his alma mater, Penn State, where he played on the Nittany Lions’ 1982 national championship squad.

FAY VINCENT became the eighth commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1989 upon the sudden death of A. Bartlett Giamatti, his longtime friend who had convinced Vincent to become his deputy in 1988. His first major test came when an earthquake struck San Francisco moments before the scheduled start of Game 3 of the 1989 World Series, with Vincent making the call to delay the Series for 10 days. Shortly after, baseball owners staged a monthlong lockout of players in a labor dispute that delayed the start of the 1990 season, followed that summer by Vincent’s decision to suspend Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, a ban that lasted two years. By 1992, he had lost the support of a majority of the league’s owners, who asked for and received his resignation in September, 18 months  before his term was to expire. Even when his commissionership ended, Vincent wrote a letter to the editor of America Magazine in which he expressed confidence in the game’s staying power.  He was 86.

KULTIDA WOODS was working as a civilian secretary in a U.S. Army office in Bangkok when she met Earl Woods, who was stationed there. She spoke little English when she married him and left Thailand for the first time in 1968, first going to Brooklyn and then to Cypress, Calif., where her son Eldrick — whom the world would come to know as Tiger — was born in 1975. Woods said his mother, widowed in 2006, was a “force of nature” who was his biggest supporter from the time she drove him to junior golf tournaments in California to being there for his 15 major championships, often wearing her wide-brimmed visor and sunglasses. She was 80.

PHILIP MCINTYRE, an attorney and civic leader, offered his community one final piece of advice: Be kinder than necessary. He grew up in Glens Falls, N.Y., graduated from Bowdoin College and the Harvard Law School, and practiced law in his hometown for more than 50 years. He was a leading supporter of the community’s institutions, including The Hyde Collection, where he served as a trustee for 21 years; the First Presbyterian Church; and CWI (Community, Work and Independence). He was 81.

“That's the odd thing about Mr. Thompson. He can remember everything that would help him mount a defense for why he should not comply, but he has feigned ignorance on anything that would point to the whereabouts of the gold.”
— U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley on Tommy Thompson, a swindler who recovered millions in gold from a shipwreck but has been imprisoned since 2015 for refusing to disclose where he stashed it.

BEAR NECESSITIES: There are very few heartwarming stories out of the Los Angeles wildfires, but this one stands out. When the approaching fires forced Samy Arbid to evacuate his home in Altadena, a 525-pound bear moved in. He found refuge in a tiny crawl space. When the danger passed, a state wildlife expert lured the bear out with rotisserie chicken, sardines with tomato sauce and peanut-butter-smeared apples.

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Principal Author: Bill Callen.

Contributors: Ryan Moore, John Brodt, Kristy Miller, Jim Murphy, Amanda Metzger, Claire P. Tuttle 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