New York's Adirondack region includes six million acres of protected wilderness, featuring mountains, rivers, and lakes beloved by hikers and canoeists. The Adirondack Park is a checkerboard of public and private land, with 105 villages and towns — some home to just a few hundred people — scattered across rugged terrain. Vacationers crowd the region in the summer. Skiers come in winter.

But the year-round population is small, declining, and aging. Many residents patch together part-time and seasonal jobs — work that doesn’t come with health insurance. Twenty-eight percent of the residents in the congressional district that includes the Adirondacks rely on Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income people. Half of births and two-thirds of nursing home residents are covered by Medicaid.

John Rugge has spent half a century building a network of health clinics in the isolated villages and towns of New York’s Adirondack mountains. Now 80 years old, as most of his peers enjoy retirement, the locally celebrated outdoorsman and physician is organizing other rural doctors and community leaders in this strongly Republican part of the state to protect the health care system in the face of proposed cuts to Medicaid under debate in Congress.

Rugge says the federal cuts in health care spending — projected at $715 billion over the next 10 years — could have a devastating impact, not just on the New Yorkers who will lose insurance, but also on the rural hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics that rely on Medicaid payments.

Business groups have made no secret of their opposition to a major waste reduction bill currently advancing through the halls of Albany.

Like last year, dozens of industry interests have been lobbying against the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, a wide-reaching proposal to curb plastic pollution at its source. But this year, business interests aren’t just in opposition mode. They say they have a constructive solution.

A coalition led by the Business Council, the state’s leading business group, is rallying behind a bill introduced this February that proponents say would cut waste without hamstringing companies with mandates. Like the longer-standing bill, it would establish a version of “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, a policy that holds companies responsible for handling their products when they’re thrown away. But the new Affordable Waste Reduction Act shuns many of the more prescriptive elements of the older bill, which business groups say will drive products off shelves, businesses out of New York, and prices up for consumers.

The bill’s introduction comes amid a multimillion-dollar, years-long push by the chemical industry and wider business lobby to advance their preferred solutions to New York’s increasingly untenable waste problem.

On May 28, 2020, in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century, tens of thousands of people began flooding onto the streets of New York City. They joined millions across the country who’d risen up to protest Minneapolis cops’ killing of George Floyd and demand smaller, less violent, more accountable police forces.

Five years later, New York City’s mayor is a former cop, and the New York City Police Department eats up as many resources as it did before the protests. Though it’s a mayoral election year, no candidate has pledged to alter that.

Previously unpublished photos and video offer a look back at New York City’s role in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest movement — one of the largest in United States history.

Has anything changed?

For years, Rochester police and city officials have attempted to conceal information about police violence and misconduct, including in the case of Daniel Prude’s death.

City residents voted to create the Police Accountability Board to improve police transparency and accountability.

But political winds have shifted in the half-decade since the Rochester board’s formation, the police killings of Prude and George Floyd, and the nationwide push for change that followed.

Earlier this month, about a dozen workers arrived in Wolcott, a small town halfway between Rochester and Syracuse, to grow apple trees. At this time of year, farmworkers are grafting and budding — farmer-speak for fusing trees together — and planting long rows of seedlings.

They traveled to Wafler Farms, an apple orchard and fruit tree nursery, from Jamaica. Some have been making the journey for many years, living on the farm for up to three seasons and earning money to support their wives and send their children to school back home. It’s a precarious arrangement: They can only return to the farm, and therefore to the US, if their boss brings them back.

“Sometimes you have to see something being done wrong and shut your mouth — you can’t say nothing. Because if you say something, you just might not come back next year,” said Christopher, a seasonal worker who has been returning to the farm for a decade. (Four Wafler Farms workers spoke with New York Focus and asked to have their names changed to protect them from retaliation.)

Things were supposed to be different this year. A long-awaited union contract took effect in April, granting workers benefits including higher pay and the right to return each year if there is work for them.

So far, the contract is not being followed, according to the farmworkers.

Wafler Farms never agreed to the contract. The family-run farm refused to bargain with the union, which was formed in 2022 by a majority of the approximately 90 people working there during the peak of the harvest, and is affiliated with the United Farm Workers of America, a national labor union. So negotiations were moved to an independent arbitration process, as stipulated by state law. Wafler declined to participate in that process, as well, and a contract was finalized without the employer’s input.

It’s among the first few union contracts that farmworkers have won in New York since 2019, when the state legislature granted them collective bargaining rights as part of a package of landmark protections for agricultural workers. They are excluded from unionizing under federal law — a legacy of New Deal-era racial politics.

The fruit farm is now a testing ground for what workers can achieve under New York’s law, and how far the state will go to help them.