You can divorce in NY over “physical or sexual abandonment,” but not over “social abandonment,” new ruling determines. Court Rejects Bid to Extend Grounds for Divorce in New York (Gotham Gazette, Jan 2010) – “Social interaction between spouses, while certainly important to a healthy marital relationship, receives less legal recognition and protection.”

Food Deserts Could Bloom if City Hall Helps (Gotham Gazette, Jan 2010) We need to move from encouraging better food choices to improving the food access to enable and empower those choices… better food market planning (not big chain displacement), urban agriculture, better greenmarkets, CSAs… “The new [supermarket zoning] initiative can pave the way for giant retailers to move into low-income areas that are in transition to upper income communities, helping to push out the very people that are most in need of access, and thus not solving the problem of access.”

Related, the Five Borough Farm project is interesting – it will partner New York City’s most successful urban farm – Brooklyn-based Added Value – with New York’s largest landowner – the City itself – to create the nation’s first citywide plan for urban agriculture. It will inventory existing agricultural activity in the five boroughs and assess underutilized arable land in order to identify opportunities for City agencies to support urban agriculture.