In the first installment of a three-part series, Shelley Gilbert, whose son, Thomas, is serving a 30-year term for murdering his father, talks about his childhood.

“We are not protesters, we are protectors,” Margo Thunderbird, an elder, told a crowd that gathered outside the Shinnecock Nation Cultural Center and Museum on Tuesday morning to prepare for a demonstration in front of a construction site on land that the Shinnecock Indian Nation considers the site of sacred burial grounds. 

The 28th Guild Hall Student Art Festival aims to bring students’ artistic experiences together in a cohesive way.     

Construction crews working at the Sag Harbor Learning Center last spring removed about 300 tons of soil contaminated with arsenic, which school officials said likely seeped into the ground from wood treated with chromated copper arsenate that was thought to exist on the property at one point in time. 

The East Hampton Town Planning Board agreed to fast-track a proposal from AT&T to build a 185-foot-tall cell tower on land adjacent to an East Hampton Fire Department substation under construction in Northwest Woods, and inched closer to scheduling a public hearing of an application to build a car wash next to the East Hampton Town Recycling Center on Springs-Fireplace Road, at a meeting on Jan. 8. 

An acrimonious exchange on Friday between the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals and an attorney ended in the board’s abruptly adjourning a hearing.

State Senator Kenneth LaValle, who will be 81 in May, will retire this year after serving the First District since 1976, he announced on Friday at a waterfront gathering in his hometown of Port Jefferson.   

An anonymous donor in December gave $1 million to the Montauk Playhouse Community Center — its largest private gift to date — as the nonprofit organization continues to fund-raise for the aquatic and arts center it first envisioned in 1999 in partnership with East Hampton Town.