The annual St. Clement's Saratoga Horse Show kicked off its 49th year today at the Yaddo. The competition, which runs over two weeks, is billed as the oldest and one of the largest volunteer-operated horse shows in the country. Competition continues through Sunday, then resumes from May 14-18. Proceeds from the annual event benefit St. Clement's Regional Catholic School, an elementary school in the city that serves students from preschool through sixth grade.

Earthworms, starlings and honeybees. Oh my. Perhaps they’re not as threatening as lions, tigers and bears, but at the New York State Museum they’re three of the more than 50 invasive, nonnative species — bugs and plants included — that make up a new exhibit called “The Invaders.” In many ways they make things a bit tougher for the natives, but that doesn’t mean Cliff Siegfried and his staff at the New York State Museum are out to get all of them.

With the Beijing Olympics just 100 days away, activists brought the Human Rights Torch Relay to the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday to remind people of China’s crackdown in Tibet and its record on human rights.

Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish engineer they named the Northway’s twin bridges after, knew how to build things to make them last. Take the earthworks at Peebles Island, for instance, more than 230 years old. “Where else in the area can you see the original remains of earthworks from the American Revolution?” asked Paul Huey, an archaeologist with the State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation whose headquarters are on Peebles Island. “They haven’t been restored, enhanced or improved for interpretation. They’re unchanged, just the way they left them. That’s pretty unique.”

Four buildings were destroyed and several others damaged by a massive fire along West State Street in Johnstown on Thursday.

Four people have been charged with the armed invasion of a home at 59 University St. in Selkirk early Wednesday.

Volunteers throughout the Capital Region took time out on Earth Day to participate in a host of activities designed to help take care of our natural resources.

What used to be the fringe of the industry, reserved only for the wealthy, has started to come into the mainstream. Helped along by new programs from the National Association of Home Builders, more builders and remodelers are offering their customers the option to build and improve environmentally friendly homes, better for Earth and for those who live in them.

There’s no question that the name “Stickley” is synonymous with furniture. If asked the question, “Who is Gustav Stickley?” the majority of people would most likely respond, “A furniture maker.” While that is true, there was much more to this man. The Fenimore Art Museum’s latest exhibition, “Gustav Stickley: The Enlightened Home,” which runs through Aug. 10, explores this icon of American decorative arts in the context of how he profoundly influenced American lives and culture in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Children and their families were invited to help release 600 brown trout and 300 brook trout into Geyser Creek. Technicians from the Van Hornesville Fish Hatchery operated by the Department of Environmental Protection stock the streams each year with volunteers' help. The day also included live wildlife presentations by Beth Bidwell and the Wildlife Institute of Eastern New York, Demonstrations by Eastern Mountain Sports and Capital District Flyfishers Association,Clearwater Chapter of Trout Unlimited.

Members of the Army National Guard, including local troops are training at Fort Drum this week as they prepare deploy to Iraq in June.

Adults in their Sunday best, teenagers in sweat shirts, law enforcement officers in dress uniform and elected officials in dark business suits filled the sanctuary at the Presbyterian New England Congregational Church on Sunday to share stories, offer support and rally for rights of crime victims. Launching National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, the gathering was the first in a series of local events that will include a rose garden remembrance, a memorial brick dedication ceremony and Take Back the Night walk.

The famous fedora and bullwhip return to movie screens next month. Harrison Ford will be wearing them as rough-and-tumble archaeologist Indiana Jones. The fictional explorer and veteran of three previous big-budget films is back in cinema action for the first time since 1989 in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Adventure fans will get the usual close calls and witty dialogue in a story big on mayhem and mysticism. Fashion, too: Jones just about always wears that brown hat. Fedora experts say the return of the character, who hasn’t been at the movies since “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” could boost sales of men’s headgear. “First, history always repeats itself,” said Vince Rua, owner of Christopher’s mens’ clothing store in Colonie Center. “Second, when the fashion role models, which are basically actors, start wearing different items such as hats, younger people take notice and start to emulate those idols.”

If you want to create something new, dare to be different and learn from your mistakes. “Free yourself to withstand rejection and humiliation,” advises Douglas Trumbull, special-effects wizard for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Star Wars” and “Blade Runner.” A Hollywood legend with a lifetime achievement Oscar, Trumbull now lives and works in the Berkshires. In the 1800s, novelist Herman Melville lived on Arrowhead Farm in Pittsfield, Mass. He struggled to support his wife and four children, but never stopped writing. Trumbull and Melville are just two of the Berkshire brains who share their secrets to success in the Feigenbaum Hall of Innovations, a new $1.2 million exhibit space at the Berkshire Museum. The 3,000-square-foot, interactive attraction was the brainchild of museum benefactors Donald S. and Armand V. Feigenbaum, founders of General Systems Co., a world-renowned pioneer in systems management and technology. Although Pittsfield is their hometown, the Feigenbaum brothers graduated from Union College in the 1940s and have a lifelong connection to Schenectady.

A Friday morning fire caused significant damage to a home at 543 Mumford St. in Schenectady and sent three people, including a baby, to the hospital.

Five people were left homeless Tuesday afternoon after fire ripped through a two-family house less than a block away from the Schenectady Christian School off Second Avenue in Scotia.

A circle of women slowly sidestep. As they move in rhythmic unison, their hips pulse — to the right, to the center, to the left. With each flick of the hip, copper coins that dangle from colorful hip scarves jangle to the beat.

New and improved air bags, superstrong metals, higher-voltages and batteries located in different places in vehicles are among changes that make cars safer, but at the same time complicate the task of removing passengers when crashes occur. Teams of firefighters from the Amsterdam Fire Department spent hours during the past two weeks training both in a classroom and in a vehicle graveyard to tune up their skills, which can help save not only the lives of victims, but also their own.

Two men were taken into custody Monday after a standoff at the Southgate Apartments that followed a morning shooting on Frank Street.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of excitement lately at Kelly’s Station, a now-defunct hamlet in the town of Princetown about halfway between Schenectady and Duanesburg. The only noise you might hear is the running water of the Bonny Brook and the nearby Normanskill, the traffic speeding along Route 7, and perhaps the occasional blaring horn as motorists cautiously enter the Kelly’s Station Road tunnel.

The Bouck family of Perth a year ago purchased what remained of Bojud Knitting Mills and continues to make lace under a new name: Willow Street Lace. While some textile mills in the area have survived, Willow Street Lace is the only mill in New York and one of only a handful in the country that make lace.

Seven fifth-graders at Schenectady's Paige Elementary School presented a dress rehearsal Wednesday of the skit they will perform Saturday during the state Odyssey of the Mind competition at Binghamton University. The team had to create a scenario responding to the question "What might have happened to the dinosaurs that lived years ago?"

Unlike blacks, American Indians good enough to earn a spot on Major League Baseball rosters early in the 20th century weren’t told they couldn’t play. That’s the good news. The bad news is that despite an unofficial policy that worked something like “don’t ask, don’t tell,” American Indians were often targets of the same racially based vitriol that marked Jackie Robinson’s entry into the game in 1947. Keeping a low profile may have worked for some, but for men like Louis Francis Sockalexis, prejudice was very much a part of the game and their lives.

The walls of the Saratoga Springs History Museum are now decorated with more than 30 different varieties of wallpaper: a whimsical landscape neighbors a bold geometric print; fair maidens share a wall with pensive cherubs. A vine of periwinkle posies climbs alongside a dazzling damask design. Is this curious assemblage the brainchild of some off-the-wall interior designer? Absolutely.

When Pat Goodale returns from a trip, her friends don’t ask to see the photos she took. They want to see her sketchbook journal — a diary of people, places and memorable moments that she compiles while on the road.

Schenectady's annual public Stations of the Cross procession traveled through the Hamilton Hill and Vale neighborhoods on Good Friday.

If you want to wow your Easter guests — or any special-occasion invitees, for that matter — before they even put a fork to their lips, start with your table setting.

Glens Falls celebrates its 100th anniversary as an incorporated city today — March 13, 2008. The city’s Chapman Historical Museum will observe the milestone with the exhibition “Building Blocks of a Community: 100 Years of Commerce in Glens Falls.” The Chapman recently allowed The Gazette to view photos in its electronic scrapbook; here are some of our favorites.

The Siena Saints celebrate after a 74-53 victory over Rider in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championship game at the Times Union Center in Albany Monday. With the win, the Saints clinched their first NCAA tournament berth since 2002, and the fourth since the school went to Division I.

It may seem an unlikely time to be talking about a building boom, but that’s what’s happening, thanks in part to the New Urbanist credo of live where you work and work where you live. In downtown Glens Falls, developers are pouring millions into new high-end condominiums and refurbished apartments. In the city’s various bucolic neighborhoods, homes are selling relatively well because, real estate agents say, they’re reasonably priced. And new jobs are coming into town by the hundreds.

Several chiefs put a half-dozen Johnstown firefighters through drills Friday in an abandoned city-owned house on Hoosac Street, teaching firefighter survival, rapid intervention and simulating the rescue of a downed firefighter.

For the longest time, Stacy DeMeo peppered her husband, Mark, with one question: “Can we look at the plans again?” The “plans” were the blueprints, the drawings, the pages ripped out of catalogues detailing their dream house.

Today, tentlike maternity dresses and cutesy patterns for pregnant women are a thing of the past. Just because you are pregnant doesn’t mean your stylish days are over.Today, tentlike maternity dresses and cutesy patterns for pregnant women are a thing of the past. Just because you are pregnant doesn’t mean your stylish days are over.

Dormitory living was something of a novel idea in the first half of the 19th century, and Union College president Eliphalet Nott decided to take things a step further: He and his family would share living quarters with the student body. What the students thought of it we can only guess, but his third wife, Urania Eleanor Sheldon Nott, definitely had her own ideas on the subject. In 1857, with her husband in his eighties, Urania finally put her foot down and Eliphalet relented. Four years later, in July 1861, the Notts moved out of the South Colonnade and into the President’s House, a beautiful two-story structure near the Blue Gate entrance on the southern side of the campus near Union Street.

Jeff Mirel sees genuine potential where there is, quite frankly, urban decay. On a recent tour of the former St. Joseph’s Academy in the Arbor Hill neighborhood here, the 29-year-old Mirel seems to see beyond the broken windows, the water dripping through ceilings, the pigeons flying about or the piles of bird dung that litter the floor of this former, long-vacant school. For the past two years, Mirel has had the vision of turning an unused urban space into a breathing, multifaceted arts venue with affordable live/work space for artists. His mission has led him to form a nonprofit called Albany Barn. Besides the organization’s other efforts to support the region’s arts scene, its most ambitious objective by far is to create an arts incubator out of the ashes of the old St. Joseph’s Academy.

Former Schenectady resident Antonio Ferrera did much of the film work for “The Gates,” an 89-minute documentary about the decorating of New York City’s Central Park in bright saffron orange-yellow during the winter of 2005. The show will premiere for a national audience next Tuesday at 10 p.m. on cable television network Home Box Office and will air several more times this month and March.

Phil and Bunny Savino are collectors, and like many people who are interested in a variety of things, the stuff they’ve accumulated over the years is vast and varied. When it comes to hoarding hitching posts, however, particularly the cast-iron type that was so prevalent throughout much of the second half of the 19th century, the Savinos and their friends at the Albany Institute of History & Art are in a class by themselves.

When Kim and Ray Faiola are expecting guests at their Greenfield home, you won’t find them hastily straightening up a spare room, throwing a set of sheets on a sofa sleeper or inflating an air mattress. Instead, when guests arrive, Rudy greets them and shows the way to the always-ready guest quarters — a tiny cottage that mirrors the design of their main house, which Faiola built in 1984.

A massive Monday night fire destroyed three buildings on Main Street in Corinth.

One hundred years ago this week, magnificent men and their driving machines visited the Capital Region. An endurance competition that matched autos and men from the United States, France, Germany and Italy departed New York City's Times Square on Wenesday, Feb. 12, 1908. Their destination was Paris, their adventure was destined for the history book. Six cars, featuring the best technology of the day, would be on the road for months, 22,000 miles through Albany, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Alaska, Japan, Russia, Berlin and finally Paris.

From Portland, Maine, to Pasadena, Calif., art nights have popped up in downtowns across America. While the concept is the same, with people taking to the streets on a special evening each month to see local art in galleries, coffee shops, boutiques and bistros, each city’s event has its own unique personality.

Sallie Way hands me two photos of a charred center-hall colonial — glossy 4x6 glimpses of a nightmare — now smudged with fingerprints, curling slightly at the edges. The once-stately home pictured there, she tells me, is the Kalinkewicz farm, which stood for close to a century here in Galway.

Firefighters from Fulton and Montgomery counties battled a huge blaze at Fiber Conversion along Route 29 in Broadalbin on Thursday afternoon.

For the past decade, Leiah Bowden, largely a self-taught artist, has concentrated on creating what she calls energy portraits or soul portraits.

Seven men face gambling charges after the completion of a four-month investigation by state police and the Fulton County District Attorney's office.

The state of New York celebrated the federal holiday honoring noted civil rights leader Martin Luther King with an event Monday morning at the Empire State Convention Center in downtown Albany.

These images tell the story of a tumultuous 2007, from a massacre on a college campus and the collapse of a major metropolitan bridge to the beginning of the 2008 presidential campaign.

A record crowd was expected Monday night at the 12th annual First Night Saratoga, which included 80 musical and other performances at more than 35 locations in and near downtown Saratoga. Saratoga's even was the only First Night celebration held in the Capital Region this year.

Three Schenectady teenagers have been charged with robbing a Domino's pizza deliveryman Sunday night on Linden Street.

Longtime Adirondack guide Paul Gibaldi has published "Spirit of the Adirondacks: A Photographic Journey," which chronicles the natural beauty he has been showing the public for the last 20 years.

Movie stars, parade balloons, teenagers, musicians, familiar faces in strange places — they were all part of The Daily Gazette’s history page in 2007. As the year ends, the newspaper’s history department decided some favorite photos deserve encore appearances. So here they are, back in black and white.

The fast-moving winter storm that dumped 1 to 3 inches of snow on the region Thursday afternoon caused a host of traffic problems as roads quickly became slippery.

Every year, Daily Gazette photojournalists shoot thousands of photos in their pursuit of the images that will inform, entertain, and educate readers. These images represent their favorites from a year of news, features, sports and the myriad unpredictable events that make news in the Capital Region. Each photo includes comments from the photojournalist.

The Melodies of Christmas performance is celebrating its 28th year with performances by the Empire State Youth Orchestra and Chorale at Proctors in Schenectady from Thursday, Dec. 13, through Sunday, Dec. 16. Funds raised from these performances support the Center for Childhood Cancer & Blood Disorders at the Children's Hospital at Albany Medical Center. CBS 6 will broadcast Melodies of Christmas at 7:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve and noon on Christmas Day, and the Capital Region's CW will broadcast Melodies of Christmas at 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve and 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Christmas Day.

Gazette Life & Arts writer Jeff Wilkin has portrayed Mother Ginger for 10 years in Northeast Ballet's annual production of "The Nutcracker" at Proctors in Schenectady.

The village of Broadalbin hosted its annual holiday parade Monday night, with people braving cold temperatures and lingering snow from the weekend's storm.

The neighboring Schenectady County Historical Society and YWCA of Schenectady are hosting the annual Festival of Trees through Dec. 9. Organizations from around Schenectady County have decorated a variety of trees for display, with 10 fully decorated trees up for silent auction. The festival is open weekdays from 1 to 5 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $6 for adults, $3 for children ages 6-12 and free for children younger than age 6. Proceeds benefit both the historical society and the local YWCA.

Concern For the Hungry distributed its' annual Thanksgiving dinners and pet food for area residents on Tuesday.

Thousands flocked to downtown Schenectady on Saturday evening to watch the annual Gazette Holiday Parade. This year's parade theme was classic television.

The annual Johnstown Holiday Parade brought out hundreds of marchers and spectators along the city's Main Street on a cold and snowy Friday night.

The city of Albany hosted its annual Veteran's Day parade on Monday.

After 134 years, the stained glass windows at Stillwater United Church are getting a much-needed upgrade by workers from Willet Hauser Architectural Glass, a Minnesota company.