EXCLUSIVE I moved to a town where EVERYONE talks to the dead. Anyone can learn how to contact their loved ones
On New Year's Day, 2018, Tiffany Hopkins left her home in Brooklyn and drove 12 hours through a winter storm to the tiny New York hamlet of Lily Dale.
Beside her was Nika, her red, chicken-hunting Husky - rescued from doggy death row - and, packed into a U-Haul truck, all her earthly belongings.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
A socialist underdog makes history in New York
Archive: CBS News, CBS New York, PBS Newshour, Eyewitness News ABC7NY, Fox 5 New York, MSNBC, NBC News, CNN, Newsweek, PIX11 News
Times
4 days ago
- Times
Dogs are off the menu but still under threat in South Korea
Half a million dogs in farms across South Korea face uncertain futures or, in some cases, euthanasia unless a ban on the sale of their meat for food is properly managed, campaigners have said. In 2024, the government in Seoul, under pressure from animal rights groups, enacted a nationwide ban on the sale of dog meat, which has been a feature of the country's culinary culture for centuries. Farmers were given a grace period until February 2027 to close their operations and sell their animals. Anyone violating the ban faces fines or prison. Farmers have complained that the ban has taken away their livelihoods, while animal rights activists say there is no viable plan to rehome the animals — of which there are nearly half a million, according to government estimates. In February 2025, a government survey found that 623 of the 1,537 dog farms in South Korea — 40 per cent — had shut since the new law was passed. Some farmers are still hoping traders will buy their dogs. 'We're drowning in debt, can't pay it off, and some can't even find new work,' the Rev Joo Yeong-bong, a priest and president of the Korean Association of Edible Dog, told BBC News. 'It's a hopeless situation.' • Korean 'butcher pastor' fights for the right to eat dog meat The farm ministry is investing some 6 billion won (£3.2 million) to add capacity to animal shelters and offer up to 600,000 won per dog to farmers who close their businesses early, a BBC report said. Adopting dogs rescued from meat farms would be an option. However, many are either pure or mixed tosa, otherwise known as the Japanese mastiff — a breed not favoured by the majority of metropolitan dog-owners in big cities like Seoul, who prefer smaller lapdogs. The government designates the breed as dangerous and requires owners to get a licence. With animal shelters already overcrowded, many of the dog farm animals may be euthanised. 'Both adoption and euthanasia should be on the table,' Chun Myung-sun, director of the Office of Veterinary Medical Education at Seoul National University, told the BBC. '[But] if we've gone to the effort of rescuing dogs from cruel slaughter only to euthanise them, it's understandable that people would feel heartbroken and angry.' • Animal shelters race to rehome XL bullies abroad before ban Bosintang, or dog meat soup, has long been considered a delicacy in Korea, and was once prized for imparting virility. However, attitudes have changed in recent years and South Koreans are now more keen on keeping dogs as pets rather than eating them. Strollers for pets outsold baby prams last year, retailers said. In 2022, a Gallup survey found that only 8 per cent of respondents had eaten dog meat in the previous year, down from 27 per cent in 2015, and more than 60 per cent viewed consuming dog unfavourably.
The Independent
4 days ago
- The Independent
Workers digging at the World Trade Center site found a mystery boat. Now they're rebuilding it
A remarkable piece of American history, a Revolutionary War-era boat, is slowly being reassembled at the New York State Museum, 15 years after its improbable discovery beneath Manhattan's World Trade Center site. Workers excavating the site stumbled upon the sodden timbers of the 50-foot vessel, which had lain buried for over two centuries, a relic from the nation's formative years. After years submerged and centuries underground, the boat is now being transformed into a museum exhibit. More than 600 pieces of the vessel are undergoing painstaking reconstruction at the museum. Research assistants and volunteers have spent weeks meticulously cleaning the timbers with picks and brushes, arraying them like giant puzzle pieces on the museum floor before the reassembly process could even begin. Believed to be a gunboat constructed in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, the vessel's full history remains shrouded in mystery. Researchers are still piecing together its travels and the reasons for its apparent abandonment along the Manhattan shore, before it ultimately became part of a landfill around the 1790s. 'The public can come and contemplate the mysteries around this ship,' said Michael Lucas, the museum's curator of historical archaeology. 'Because like anything from the past, we have pieces of information. We don't have the whole story.' From landfill to museum piece The rebuilding caps years of rescue and preservation work that began in July 2010 when a section of the boat was found 22 feet (7 meters) below street level. Curved timbers from the hull were discovered by a crew working on an underground parking facility at the World Trade Center site, near where the Twin Towers stood before the 9/11 attacks. The wood was muddy, but well preserved after centuries in the oxygen-poor earth. A previously constructed slurry wall went right through the boat, though timbers comprising about 30 feet (9 meters) of its rear and middle sections were carefully recovered. Part of the bow was recovered the next summer on the other side of the subterranean wall. The timbers were shipped more than 1,400 miles (2,253 kilometers) to Texas A&M's Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation. Each of the 600 pieces underwent a three-dimensional scan and spent years in preservative fluids before being placed in a giant freeze-dryer to remove moisture. Then they were wrapped in more than a mile of foam and shipped to the state museum in Albany. While the museum is 130 miles (209 kilometers) up the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, it boasts enough space to display the ship. The reconstruction work is being done in an exhibition space, so visitors can watch the weathered wooden skeleton slowly take the form of a partially reconstructed boat. Work is expected to finish around the end of the month, said Peter Fix, an associate research scientist at the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation who is overseeing the rebuilding. On a recent day, Lucas took time out to talk to passing museum visitors about the vessel and how it was found. Explaining the work taking place behind him, he told one group: 'Who would have thought in a million years, 'someday, this is going to be in a museum?'' A nautical mystery remains Researchers knew they found a boat under the streets of Manhattan. But what kind? Analysis of the timbers showed they came from trees cut down in the Philadelphia area in the early 1770s, pointing to the ship being built in a yard near the city. It was probably built hastily. The wood is knotty, and timbers were fastened with iron spikes. That allowed for faster construction, though the metal corrodes over time in seawater. Researchers now hypothesize the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Thirteen gunboats were built that summer to protect Philadelphia from potential hostile forces coming up the Delaware River. The gunboats featured cannons pointing from their bows and could carry 30 or more men. 'They were really pushing, pushing, pushing to get these boats out there to stop any British that might start coming up the Delaware," Fix said. Historical records indicate at least one of those 13 gunboats was later taken by the British. And there is some evidence that the boat now being restored was used by the British, including a pewter button with '52' inscribed on it. That likely came from the uniform of soldier with the British Army 's 52nd Regiment of Foot, which was active in the war. It's also possible that the vessel headed south to the Caribbean, where the British redirected thousands of troops during the war. Its timbers show signs of damage from mollusks known as shipworms, which are native to warmer waters. Still, it's unclear how the boat ended up in Manhattan and why it apparently spent years partially in the water along shore. By the 1790s, it was out of commission and then covered over as part of a project to expand Manhattan farther out into the Hudson River. By that time, the mast and other parts of the Revolutionary War ship had apparently been stripped. 'It's an important piece of history,' Lucas said. 'It's also a nice artifact that you can really build a lot of stories around.'
