Undaunted, Mr. Nicholson spent four years making the rounds of every fire hall, village board, town council and county legislature he could find in his part of the state.
These days, Ms. Kovner crosses three county lines and rides a ferry to take garbage from her Upper West Side apartment to her house in the Fire Island village of Saltaire.
Property owners pay for the pensions in taxes collected by fire districts, villages and towns.
The statement cited such actions as demolishing homes, firing machine guns into neighborhoods in response to mortar fire, blockading villages and shooting at boys throwing stones.
Reuters reporters witnessed Islamic State mortar fire in villages on the plain east of the city as the militants sought to counter a push by Kurdish forces.
According to a Chadian news site, insurgents "abducted many woman and children" as they fled Saturday's fighting, looting and setting fire to villages along the way.
All fires in a village, including the sacred fire, were allowed to die once a year on the eve of the midsummer Green Corn ceremony, or Busk.
The firing from villages has escalated in the last few weeks, he said, something Israel used to justify its bombing.
When Mr. Levy was explaining why Israel had bombed Lebanon -- in response to the guerrillas' killing of soldiers by firing from villages, he said -- the lawmakers interrupted.
Ms. Maathai, 64, born in Nyeri, Kenya, founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, to organize poor women in rural Kenya to plant millions of trees to combat deforestation and to replenish the source of fuel for cooking fires in villages.
