Singer Willie Nelson is taking his annual Farm Aid benefit concert to upstate New York with an all-day festival of music and locally grown food in September. The event in Saratoga Springs will feature Nelson and other Farm Aid board members John Mellencamp, Neil Young and Dave Matthews, as well as other artists to be announced soon. Tickets go on sale to Farm Aid members Tuesday and to the general public June 28, the Farm Aid organization announced Friday. The concert will be Sept. 21 at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. At a stop in Albany on Thursday, Nelson said the Northeast is fertile ground for new farmers and sustainable agriculture. Farm Aid’s mission is to keep family farmers on the land and support the movement toward healthy, locally grown food, he said. “There’s a whole lot of small family farmers in upstate New York,” Nelson told reporters on his tour bus in Albany. “I think this is a great place to try to reach some family farmers.”

Actress Scarlett Johansson is suing a French publishing house over a novel that uses her name and image and explores the challenges of being beautiful. The JC Lattes publishing house said Friday that a lawsuit was filed last week about Gregoire Delacourt’s book The First Thing We Look At. JC Lattes spokesman Emmanuelle Allibert said the publisher’s lawyers are preparing to respond to the court, which will then decide whether to take up the case. Allibert said the book is entirely fiction and is about a character who looks just like Johansson, not Johansson herself. That character is enmeshed in a romance with another look-alike - one modeled after film star Ryan Gosling. Johansson’s French lawyer, Vincent Toledano, said in a statement that Johansson is protesting the use of her name and image for “mercantile” purposes and accuses the book of invading her privacy.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 06/15/2013