News 2 You: Changing attitudes, weather similarities

BUFFALO, New York — Ten years ago this week:

The New York State Legislature has finally approved the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would only sign the law if it gave him the authority to suspend the program, which was subject to the strictest guidelines in the nation. This included a limited list of illnesses it could be used for and limitations on how it could be injected, including a ban on smoking it.

Ten years later, the state now funds both the sale and recreational use of the drug.

There is growing concern over the number of illegal southern border crossings by unaccompanied children, which has reached 47,000 in one year. In recent years, this figure has been reached within a few months.

Controversy has erupted in Lancaster amid a new push to change the name of the school district’s school sports teams.

Despite the sentiment of most district students and parents who wanted the school to remain Redskins, the school board ultimately changed the name. Today, the teams are called the Legends, and the state Department of Education has forced other schools to change their team nicknames under a policy that now prohibits the use of names that could be associated in any way with Native Americans.

20 years ago this week:

In Washington, DC, the new National World War II Memorial welcomed its first visitors, and Space Ship One made history by becoming the first privately developed and owned rocket to cross the edge of space this week from 2004.

Just like now, it was hot in Buffalo at times and the city was in the middle of a heatwave almost identical in temperature and duration to the one predicted for this week.

So while the weather here really hasn’t changed over time, at the time the city hadn’t yet developed its “cooling center” program. To relieve themselves, neighborhood residents often opened, without authorization, fire hydrants near which children happily splashed around to relieve themselves from the heat. This has been accompanied by annual reminders from the city’s fire department about the danger posed by children playing in the streets, to passing motorists and to the city’s water system which could experience a drop in pressure dangerous when a sufficient number of fire hydrants were opened illegally.

New York State began pushing to finally complete a long-planned highway project in Western New York, which involved the expansion of a major highway. It’s also the subject of this week’s News 2 You Pop Quiz (the answer to which can be found at the end of the video attached to this story).

Every time Governor Mario Cuomo

40 years ago this week, when Gov. Mario Cuomo came to Buffalo, he was often accompanied by an aide who hailed from south Buffalo and whose face would soon become even more familiar than that of the governor he served.

Tim Russert, who previously worked as an aide to U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan before joining Cuomo’s administration, would soon join NBC News and become the host of its popular Sunday morning talk show, Meet the Press.

Russert died suddenly in 2008 at the age of 58.