NASA’s new eye in the sky snapped a pic of a star and its ancient galactic buddies. Plus, a spacewalk amid another week of heightened global tensions, and rolling out the next lunar rover. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Day: March 17, 2022
St. Patrick’s Day celebrations across the country are back after a two-year hiatus, including the nation’s largest in New York City, in a sign of growing hope that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic may be over.
The holiday served as a key marker in the outbreak’s progression, with parades celebrating Irish heritage among the first big public events to be called off in 2020. An ominous acceleration in infections quickly cascaded into broad shutdowns.
The full-fledged return of New York’s parade on Thursday coincides with the city’s wider reopening. Major mask and vaccination rules were recently lifted.
“Psychologically, it means a lot,” said Sean Lane, the chair of the parade’s organizing group. “New York really needs this.”
The city’s entertainment and nightlife scenes have particularly welcomed the return to a normal St. Patrick’s Day party.
“This is the best thing that happened to us in two years,” said Mike Carty, the Ireland-born owner of Rosie O’Grady’s, a restaurant and pub in the Theater District.
“We need the business, and this really kicked it off,” said Carty, who will be hosting the parade’s grand marshal after the procession.
Celebrations are back in other cities, too.
Over the weekend, Chicago dyed its river green, after doing so without much fanfare last year and skipping the tradition altogether during the initial virus onslaught.
Boston, home to one of the country’s largest Irish enclaves, is resuming its annual parade Sunday after a two-year absence. So is Savannah, Georgia, where the parade’s cancellation disrupted a nearly two-century tradition.
Some communities in Florida, one of the first states to reopen its economy, were also bringing their parades back.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis chose St. Patrick’s Day two years ago to shutter restaurants, bars and nightclubs — a dramatic move by the Republican and which underscored the fear and uncertainty of the time.
Since then, DeSantis has been one of the country’s leading voices against mask and vaccine mandates, as well as other pandemic measures.
New York’s parade — the largest and oldest of them all, first held in 1762 — starts at 11 a.m. and runs 35 blocks along Fifth Avenue, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Central Park.
It’s being held as the city emerges from a discouraging bout with the highly contagious omicron variant, which killed more than 4,000 people in New York City in January and February.
New infections and hospitalizations have declined since the surge, prompting city officials to green-light the procession.
On the eve of the holiday, Mayor Eric Adams raised the Irish flag at a park located on the southern tip of Manhattan, not far from Ellis Island, to honor the city’s Irish history.
“This St. Patrick’s Day, we honor those Irish immigrants who relocated and helped build our city, and the many Irish Americans who serve New York City to this day,” the mayor said. “Today, we celebrate the fighting spirit of the Irish with the courage and resilience of this entire city.”
Currently, you don’t need to show proof of vaccination to dine indoors at a restaurant in New York, but huge numbers of people still wear masks in public and avoid big crowds. Office towers remain partially empty, as many businesses still haven’t called employees back to their cubicles. Tourists, once thick enough to obstruct Manhattan sidewalks, are still not back in their usual numbers.
“If you walk around the city, it’s still very different,” said Lane, the parade organizer and a financial adviser at a major Wall Street firm. “It’s a very different vibe when you walk in Manhattan versus what it would have been two years ago, because the people aren’t fully back yet.”
Allowing the parade to proceed, he said, could provide a surge of confidence among New Yorkers to return to public life.
This year’s parade is two years in the making, after token processions during the pandemic.
To keep the tradition going, organizers in 2020 and 2021 quietly held small parades on St. Patrick’s Day, right around sunrise, when the streets were empty. Bagpipes accompanied a tiny contingent of officials and a smattering of people drawn by the music.
It remains to be seen if big crowds will show up for this year’s parade, although organizers expect hordes — even if many New Yorkers remain skittish about massive, potentially virus-spreading public events.
Organizers hope people will turn out not just to commemorate the holiday, but to honor the first responders who helped the city get through the pandemic, as well as in support of a delegation of Ukrainian marchers bringing attention to the war in their homeland.
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African health groups have warned that the COVID pandemic has led to a rise in drug and alcohol abuse on the continent, but a gap in data is making it hard to monitor. In South Africa, a Soweto-based nonprofit is scrambling to help youth to stay clean and sober.
Substance abuse — particularly alcohol consumption — has been on the rise in Africa for years, according to the World Health Organization.
The coronavirus pandemic that resulted in job losses and school closures has now amplified the problem.
The Ikageng children’s charity in Soweto says as many as 10 young people contact them daily suffering from addiction. Lydia Motloung, the acting program manager says that “during the lockdowns, they used to go and drink and some they were left in the houses alone, the parents are at work. And they start having the house parties and introduced to the alcohol, end up into crystal meth, which is very common around here, especially with schoolchildren.”
While Ikageng monitors the rise of addiction in the young people they’re helping, Motloung says national statistics on drug and alcohol abuse are sorely lacking.
“We normally get the statistics for COVID, you get the statistics for HIV, but we will never had any statistics for drugs and substance. I think if we can have that plan, the government can have that plan. … And then start funding the organization that are working with drugs and substance so that they fight it as they’re fighting for HIV and AIDS as they’re fighting for COVID,” she noted.
It’s not just South Africa that is lacking data on substance abuse, but the continent as a whole.
Florence Baingana is the African regional advisor on substance abuse for the World Health Organization.
“We may not count the exact numbers in each and every country. We know we have a problem. We also know that the services are inadequate, that one we know for a fact. Very often the alcohol treatment centers in the government facilities are underfunded. But I think if we were to begin by investing resources into building up the services, then we would be able to collect the data,” Baingana expressed.
She says investing in prevention would also be beneficial and less costly than treating addiction later on.
Ikageng’s caregivers like Nomali Monareng look for warning signs among the children they support.
She knows them first-hand, having struggled with addiction herself.
“Sometimes we need to start with parents. Most of children don’t, you don’t know how to talk about their feelings, don’t know how to express. Children need to be, to be taking care in all of their life, in all areas, like talking, having the conversation, even if it’s deep, even if it’s uncomfortable, you need to give the child a chance to talk,” she pointed out.
For those looking to get clean, the organization refers them to support groups that help people transition in and out of rehab.
They’re trying to offer skills training as well, so recoverees can find jobs and a purpose.
Vusi Nzimande is a project manager for the support program called Still We Rise.
“Where you find people idling, they don’t do nothing with their lives. That’s one of those things that causes us because of the mind is playing around. You started thinking too much. You don’t have a job; you don’t have anything to do. And then suddenly you see yourself going back to your old ways,” Nzimande said.
For the young people he’s helped, getting clean has been the first step. But experts say they’ll need opportunities and jobs to give them hope and keep them out of trouble in the long run.
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Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the groundwork had already begun — online. Russian disinformation is a key part of what many are calling a hybrid war. VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
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