West Africa Treasures available at Crossgates
New store features handmade jewelry, bags, clothing, decor
West Africa Treasures, a store featuring an array of handmade, items like jewelry, bags, clothing, home decor and instruments from artists in West Africa, opened in Crossgates Mall this month.
The store is located on the lower level across from the Apple store in the mall. The owner, Hotalou “Justine” Goldberg, founded the store in 2019, but until earlier this month, sold her products at flea markets in Woodstock and at JB Enterprises shows in Colonie.
Goldberg is excited to be in one location permanently. Moving her products around
to different markets often damaged her items, and she’d hear from customers that they would come back to a show and not be able to find her.
“People really want to see and touch the product before they buy,” Goldberg said. “Being
at one location will help increase my sales.”
Some of the most popular items sold at the store include a decorative stand and bowl called a “unity,” prints, gem stones and the Mancala game, Please see
year time frame of this report.”
The report cites projects that haven’t been completed because of a lack of funds. In upstate New York, Syracuse Hancock International Airport has plans for improved parking and traffic circulation on the drawing board. Total cost, the report says, would be $116 million.
Among those supporting an increase in the PFC is Albany International Airport CEO Phil Calderone.
“The current Passenger Facility Charge has not been updated for nearly two decades and has not kept pace with the consumer price index nor the rising cost of required airport maintenance and infrastructure improvements,” Calderone said Tuesday. “Increasing the PFC makes good sense in a post-pandemic environment with the need to make improvements to infrastructure, including terminals, to accommodate lessons learned from the pandemic.”
Airlines have opposed increasing the PFC, arguing that airports typically have other streams of income to cover the cost of infrastructure improvements.
“The facts clearly show airport development is blossoming — and it is doing so within a multitool financing system that easily allows for investment without taxing passengers,” Airlines For America said during a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation
& Infrastructure in March 2019. It cited then-record amounts of revenue that airports collected in 2017 from such sources as airline rents and fees, concessions, parking, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airport Improvement Program.
It estimated that these sources provided about $30 billion that year.
But passenger traffic fell off a cliff one year ago in the lockdown following the pandemic with passenger boardings, the source of much of that airport revenue, down as much as 95 percent.
The American Rescue Plan does include $8 billion to help airports recover from their losses during the pandemic.
And at Albany International Airport, state funding has enabled at least some infrastructure projects to move ahead, including a new airport exit from the Adirondack Northway, a five-level parking garage, and numerous improvements throughout the terminal. Some improvements were actually completed ahead of schedule because of the lack of passenger activity.
And passenger traffic is growing again at Albany and elsewhere, as more people are fully vaccinated.
But the stepped-up coronavirus safety measures are expected to continue.
“9/11 changed a lot of things for airports,” a spokesperson for the Seattle-tacoma International Airport said in the ACI-NA report. “So will this pandemic.”
One year ago, “Today” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie was told by her bosses that growing concern over the COVID -19 pandemic could mean big changes for the NBC morning program.
“They said, ‘Listen, the network wants to install a studio in your home just in case,’” Guthrie recalled in a recent interview. “I thought it was hilarious. I just thought that was never going to happen.” But it did happen. Guthrie soon found herself in the basement of her upstate New York home doing live early-morning interviews with top government officials and business leaders as the national health emergency escalated. “And I could hear my kids riding their scooters right above me,” she said.
Guthrie, whose special “COVID One Year Later: Life After Lockdown” aired March 11 on NBC and streams on Peacock, was not alone. Anchors, correspondents and meteorologists across the country delivered reports from makeshift studio setups, while children occasionally interrupted and pets wandered by.
As more of the population gets vaccinated, many anchors have headed back to their familiar sets, where social distance is maintained. But the innovations and efficiencies are likely to last when the pandemic is a distant memory.
“I think the days of sending a full camera crew to grab what will ultimately be a 12-second sound bite for a ‘Nightly News’ piece are over,” said NBC News President Noah Oppenheim. “In many ways, it’s actually opened up what we can do because it means a lot of the logistics getting cameras to places or people to studios are no longer obstacles to conversations we want to have.”
While more consumers confined to their homes increased their dependence on streaming video for scripted TV shows and movies, TV news viewing grew by 30 percent over the past year, according to Nielsen data, thanks in large part to interest in the 2020 presidential election and coverage of the pandemic. The data showed viewers are willing to accept a presentation that may be less slick than usual if they are getting the information they need.
“We’ve learned that the audience is mostly interested in the substance, and so if you can get that expert and that newsmaker but you can only get him or her on Zoom in their living room, that’s fine and the audience will embrace that,” Oppenheim said.
Ken Jautz, executive vice president for CNN, said audiences likely empathized with what news operations have gone through.
“People in all walks of life were trying to figure out how to go about their businesses with great and unprecedented limitations,” Jautz said. “And our business was no different.”
Jautz said CNN had 2,500 guests across its channels in February, all from remote locations. He does not see that changing.
Wendy Fisher, vice president of newsgathering at ABC News, said her network always had a high priority on having guests in the studio, and will be eager to get back to it when conditions allow. But the pandemic also offered some lessons in what was possible in a pinch.
Fox News outfitted trucks with fully operational studios that rolled up outside of some on-air hosts’ homes so they could step inside and be on the air.
CNN has what it calls “flash studios” that in the past were used primarily for guests; these use a remotely operated camera and require no technicians on site. “We adapted those flash studios to have the anchors use them,” Jautz said.
ABC’S “Good Morning America” show held one of its summer concerts as if it were a drive-in theater, with audience members watching Alicia Keys perform from their cars.