Mets third baseman David Wright was holding an impromptu news conference amid a crush of reporters around noon on Monday when the 5- to 7-year-old campers started to cheer his name repeatedly, followed by three thunderous claps. more

Fears of another terrorist attack are running high after a series of ruthless strikes in Western Europe and the United States over the past year, perpetrated with semiautomatic rifles and suicide vests. The gravest threat to humanity, however, remains nuclear arms, according to Holocaust survivor Bernard Otterman, 79, formerly of Merrick. It has been so since World War II, he noted. more

Alyssa Garbarino’s second concussion came on a frigid Sunday afternoon when she was 17. Under overcast skies, Garbarino, of North Merrick, who was then playing with the East Meadow Soccer Club’s Storm, bruised her way through a sea of bodies. As she battled with her opponent on the Northport Cow Harbor United Soccer Club, she was constantly driven to the ground, her head hitting the hard earth. As fast as she went down, though, she popped back up. As the game wore on, she began to feel dizzy and developed a sharp headache. more

The Town of Hempstead ripped out its wooden bulkhead at the Merrick Road golf course in recent months and is replacing it with a $1.66 million vinyl-and-wood bulkhead to hold back Merrick Bay. more

Ever since St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church moved from Freeport to Hewlett Avenue in Merrick in 1982, parishioners there have dreamed of constructing a community center where they could hold Greek language, culture and religious classes, said the Rev. Nikiforos Fakinos, St. Demetrios’s pastor. more

A Merrick woman was arraigned on Tuesday on a six-count indictment related to a Fourth of July fatal hit-and-run on Sunrise Highway in which the defendant was allegedly driving while intoxicated, as … more

In its final report, issued Dec. 10, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Common Core Task Force called on the state to place a four-year moratorium on the use of students’ state test scores to evaluate … more

A van carrying five disabled passengers careered off the Southern State Parkway in North Merrick around 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 10 and crashed into a tree, according to James Rogers, the North Merrick Fire Department chief. more

The drug addicts’ brain scans that Dr. Stephen Dewey takes appear in psychedelic shades of red, yellow, green and blue, each indicating a level of brain activity — or inactivity. Red means excited. Blue is dormant. Dewey is the laboratory director for behavioral and molecular neuro-imaging at the North Shore-LIJ Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. In that capacity, he’s put hundreds of addicts’ brains to the test — the positron emission tomography test, that is — seeking to understand precisely what happens to the mind when a pot smoker lights up or a heroin junkie shoots up. And, he has found, it isn’t pretty. more

Scott Resnik, president and chief of Bellmore-Merrick Emergency Medical Services, remembers the taste of the dust. “There was a metallic component,” he said. “There was a starchy component.” more