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

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

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

The Senior Pops Orchestra, an intergenerational group under the direction of Stephen Michael Smith, will appear at the Brookside School in North Merrick on Sunday, Oct. 11, at 2 p.m. The suggested donation is $5. more

Sister Lynn Caton, a pastoral associate in charge of social ministries at Sacred Heart Parish in North Merrick, began a garden for the first time this summer. It’s a small patch of greenery under her office window, with a handful of bushy tomato plants and soaring sunflowers. There’s also a bird feeder and a clear-plastic cross. She calls it her little “corner of heaven.” more

Leeann Graziose, principal of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton School in Bellmore for the past 12 years, was at home when the envelope from the Diocese of Rockville Centre arrived last Friday afternoon. She … more

Former Nassau County Legislator David Denenberg began serving a three-month sentence at Fort Dix, a minimum-security prison in Burlington County, N.J., on Aug. 24, according to his attorney, Jason Russo, of Bay Shore. more

Merokean Dylan O’Shaughnessy was out east in Smithtown, helping his mom, Liz, a landscape designer, with a client’s garden in late June, when he got the call: He had been drafted by the New York Lizards, which this year was the best team in Major League Lacrosse. more

A group of Herald Community Newspapers editors, reporters and interns took a kayak tour on Nassau County’s wild side, at the Town of Hempstead’s Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve in Merrick, on July 24. more