If you get a beer from Four City Brewing Company in Orange, you’ll immediately notice some unusual names.

There’s the “Miseducation of Loral Hops,” a not-so-subtle reference to South Orange native Lauryn Hill and her Grammy-winning project from the late 1990s. You can also order the “You Down With FCB?” wheat beer, a play on East Orange hip-hop trio Naughty By Nature’s famous line “you down with O.P.P.?” Other beers honor local landmarks.

It’s what happens when three musicians from the Oranges -- Roger Apollon Jr., Anthony Minervino and Jeff Gattens -- open a brewery. Music, art and history are baked into the place. Local musicians have played there, and there’s always a solid rotation of tunes on. And, Four City partners with a nonprofit community organization called the University of Orange to host an art installation each month.

Years of federal government delays in the process to build new Hudson River tunnels have made the massive project more expensive, officials overseeing the project said.

The price to build two new tunnels under the Hudson River and rehabilitate the existing 110-year-old tunnels -- dubbed the Gateway project -- is now estimated at $11.6 billion, a $300 million increase over its last project estimate, said Frank Sacr, Gateway Development Corporation interim executive director. He announced the increase during the inaugural meeting of the new seven-member, bi-state Gateway Development Commission on Friday.

“In 2020, we did add back $300 million in cost, or $1 million a day,” he said at Friday’s virtual meeting.

There has been a recent avalanche of bills introduced by Republican state lawmakers across the US designed to make it harder to vote, triggered by a pretext that election fraud played a role in the national humiliation of Donald Trump.

So it is no surprise that a Trump supporter endorses two restrictive voting laws for our state, and the fact that this acolyte could be our next governor cannot be dismissed casually.

Jack Ciattarelli, the clubhouse favorite for the GOP nomination, is too genteel to be a Trump sock puppet, but he insists that “a great many people have lost faith in the voting system, and we have to restore that faith.”

Pope Francis has tapped New Jersey’s highest ranking Catholic leader to be one of the few Americans sitting on a powerful Vatican committee that helps him appoint bishops around the world.

Cardinal Joseph Tobin, head of the Archdiocese of Newark, was named Wednesday to the Congregation for Bishops, according to a Vatican announcement. The group’s duties include advising the Pope on which priests should be selected to be bishops in dioceses around the world.

WASHINGTON — House Democrats passed sweeping voting and ethics legislation Wednesday over unanimous Republican opposition, advancing to the Senate what would be the largest overhaul of the U.S. election law in at least a generation.

House Resolution 1, which touches on virtually every aspect of the electoral process, was approved on a near party-line 220-210 vote. It would restrict partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, strike down hurdles to voting and bring transparency to a murky campaign finance system that allows wealthy donors to anonymously bankroll political causes.

The bill is a powerful counterweight to voting rights restrictions advancing in Republican-controlled statehouses across the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s repeated false claims of a stolen 2020 election. Yet it faces an uncertain fate in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where it has little chance of passing without changes to procedural rules that currently allow Republicans to block it.

The stakes in the outcome are monumental, cutting to the foundational idea that one person equals one vote, and carrying with it the potential to shape election outcomes for years to come. It also offers a test of how hard President Joe Biden and his party are willing to fight for their priorities, as well as those of their voters.