BERLIN — Rare view of new life: This photo released by the Zoo Berlin on Tuesday, Aug. 27, shows a newborn panda at the Zoo in Berlin.   Ben Shelton, of the United States, returns a shot to Dominic Thiem, of Austria, during the first round of the U.S. Open tennis championships, Monday, Aug. 26, […]

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New York Carnival Week has begun in Brooklyn, starting on Thursday, Aug. 29 and culminating on Labor Day Monday, Sept.  2.

The West Indian American Day Carnival Association (WIADCA), organizer of the gigantic carnival, celebrates 57 years of Caribbean culture, cuisine, programs, contribution, mas, steel band music and much more.

Festivities kick off at the Brooklyn Museum Grounds (parking lot) and culminates on Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, described as “Caribbean Cultural Row” for New York Carnival Parade, complete with live television broadcast.

Parade Grand Marshals include: Hazra Ali, Caribbean community catalyst; Jonquel Jones, New York Liberty; Beverly Ramsey-Moore, president Pan Trinbago; Dennis Francis, president of the United Nations General Assembly; Aaron “Voice” St. Louis, soca artist; Phil Taitt – WABC Eyewitness News reporter; Dr. Adrenia Burgis, Community catalyst; and Glenn Turbull, president D’Midas Foundation/International.

Junior Grand Marshals include: Khalisa Kimoi Gairy-Bartholomew; Andreas Hardwood; Hudson Holmes; and Aliyah Mathis.

With much pageantry and fanfare, WIADCA, on Aug. 15, actually launched its 57^th New York Carnival Week at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

The elaborate ceremony, held under the theme, “The Evolution,” featured, among others, presentations from senior and junior masquerade bands, dance performances, cultural presentations and speeches by local elected officials.

WIADCA also presented its advisory board, with new chairman Andrew Maloney, a Vincentian-born attorney.

City Council Members Crystal Hudson, who traces her roots to Jamaica, and Haitian-born Rita Joseph, representatives for the 35^th and 40^th Council District, respectively, appeared together.

“We’re here to support the carnival,” declared Hudson, noting that the carnival parade on Eastern Parkway runs through her district in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “We’re going to mash it up!”

WIADCA said the carnival week is “powered by cultural partners” – Brooklyn Museum, US Mas Bands Association, US Steelband Association, several local Carnival presenters, Black Star Entertainment, Gemini Productions/One Fete, Jay Upscale and more.

The carnival group also said the spectacle is supported in part by the City and State of New York, a host of elected officials, and corporate and media partners.

Festivities begin at the Brooklyn Museum Grounds on Aug. 29 and culminate on Eastern Parkway on Labor Day Monday with the extravagant parade.

The line-up features: Aug. 29^: Vibez w/Voicey the Graduation Tour by BlackStar Entertainment | 4 p.m., featuring Kerwin Dubois, Nadia Batson, Ding Dong, Skinny Fabulous, Adam O, GBM Nutron, Boizie, Wadicks, Lyrikal, Ravi B, Mical Teja, Nylah Blackman, Pumpa, V’GHN, Jadel, Asa Banton, Rane Blackman and more.

Aug. 30: Socafest by One Fete/Gemini Productions | 7 p.m., featuring Patrice Roberts, Mical Teja, Farmer Nappy, Christopher Martin, Nigy Boy, Pumpa, Raymond Ramnarine, Tallpree, Mr. Killa, Terra D Governor & A Team Band.

Aug. 31: Youth Fest | Junior Carnival Parade | 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.: “Watch as our youth celebrate Caribbean heritage through their carnival regalia, depicting many characters and themes,” WIADCA said.

“Live entertainment provides an end of summer Caribbean talent showcase with the first-time inclusion of ‘Youth Fest 2024’ highlighting live performances by emerging talent,” it added.

New York Panorama 2024 | 7: p.m. – 3 a.m.: “Featuring the sweet sounds of steel, watch as NY Panorama 2023 Champs, Metro Steel Orchestra, defend their title against some of New York’s renowned orchestra’s like Despers USA, Metro Steel Orchestra, Steel Sensation, Pan in Motion, Eruption Steel Orchestra, Harmony Steel Orchestra, Pan Evolution Steel Orchestra, D’Radoes, Pan Alley and Philadelphia Pan Stars,” WIADCA said.

Sept. 1: Sizzla Kolonji, YG Marley, Spragga Benz w/Jay Upscale Entertainment | 3pm

Reggae vibes all night long.

Sept. 2: | 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. – New York Carnival Parade 2024 – The Evolution – presented by WIADCA and NY Carnival Bandleaders.

WIADCA said they “present an array of costumed masterpieces, celebrating all Caribbean cultures, music, delicious food and more led by our esteemed elected officials, cultural partners, sponsors and our beautiful Caribbean community members.”

Participating Adult Bands include:  Sesame Carnival, Antoine International, Branches Mas’, Suga Candy Mas’, Big Boy Productions, Sky Maxx Mas’, D’Midas International NY, 1199SEIU Mas’ and more.

NYC public school nurses will undergo suicide-prevention training as part of a new program that the city’s Department of Education (DOE) announced Tuesday.

School nurses, who can be a student’s first point of contact when they need assistance, play a critical role in suicide prevention, city officials said. The DOE, in collaboration with The Jed Foundation (JED), a suicide-prevention group, developed the program as an online training course for nurses who work across the city’s K through 12 public schools. 

“Our schools are not only centers of learning, but safe havens where our young people can find trusted adults and support for whatever may be going on in their lives. Our school nurses are champions of students’ well-being, and they must be equipped to jump into action and help any student calling out for it,” Schools Chancellor David Banks said. “I’m so proud to be partnering with JED to bring this training to school nurses across the city as we continue the critical work of supporting the mental health of our students.”

As part of the program, all school nurses will participate in JED’s 90-minute, eight-module online course by the end of October. The training uses a scenario-based learning format and an Ask Suicide-Screening Questions tool to sharpen the medical workers’ abilities to identify, screen and refer students at risk for suicide. 

Nearly 400 nurses have completed the course so far. According to a city press release, they learned about common mental health challenges, signs of distress, when to mobilize a crisis team, and tips for managing “emotional carryover and burnout. ”  

Depression in teens

The JED Foundation reported that one in four young people experience a mental illness. This includes issues such as anxiety and depression. 

A 2023 teen mental health survey from the city showed that 48% of teens experience depressive symptoms that range from mild to severe. 

Experts note that people of all ages with thoughts of suicide sometimes feel hopeless. But school nurses can help.

Tony Walker, JED’s senior vice president of academic programs, explained that school nurses are frequently the first faces students turn to for help, whether they are hurting physically or emotionally. 

“For this reason, JED is proud to partner with OSH and NYCPS to create a foundational training that will provide all school nurses in America’s largest public school district with the knowledge they need to safeguard at-risk students and help prevent suicide,” Walker said. “Through this comprehensive public health approach, we hope to empower school nurses to initiate potentially life-saving conversations and create healthier school communities — both in and out of the classroom.” 

The initiative is the latest in a series of ways NYC is providing mental health help to students.

The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene launched this year NYC Teenspace, a virtual mental health therapy program for teens around the city. 

The city also has school-based mental health clinics that serve 340 schools, including 17 new clinics added this year. The city plans to add 20 more clinics in 2025. 

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn) introduced the Expanding Access to Mental Health Services in Schools Act last week. If passed, the bill would increase the number of mental health service providers in schools by providing grants to local educational agencies for the recruitment, hiring, retention and diversification of mental health service providers.

“Now more than ever, it is critical that we address the lack of mental health professionals in our schools,” Goldman said. “America’s children are going through an unprecedented mental health crisis that was intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools play a crucial role in addressing this challenge, so it’s essential that we equip them with the resources needed to help our children and change the course of this crisis.”

New York City will build 600 new electric vehicle chargers across the five boroughs after winning a $15 million federal grant, Mayor Eric Adams announced on Wednesday.

The new Level 2 chargers, which can usually fully juice up an EV battery within 10 hours, are to be installed along the curbside in all five boroughs. City Hall says at least half of these chargers will be sited in “disadvantaged and low-income neighborhoods.”

The announcement — which will substantially increase the size of New York’s network of publicly accessible EV chargers — is funded by $15 million from the Federal Highway Administration’s Charging & Fueling Infrastructure grant program, part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

It comes as City Hall seeks to convert its fleet of municipal vehicles, plus the tens of thousands of for-hire rides transporting New Yorkers around the city, to clean electric power.

“This $15 million grant will let us build the nation’s largest EV charging program, focused on low-income and disadvantaged areas so people living in all five boroughs can afford to drive and charge electric vehicles — especially as we continue to transition all of our for-hire vehicles to EVs through our ‘Green Rides’ initiative,” Hizzoner said in a statement.

The administration also plans to build 32 solar-powered “charging ports” across eight parking lots owned by the city’s Parks Department, the administration announced.

City Hall did not immediately return an inquiry as to the locations and timeline for the project.

New York City officials took the field trip to Long Island Wednesday to torch 4 tons, or 576 bags, of illegal cannabis products local authorities have seized from unlicensed sellers over the past few months.

The officials, Mayor Eric Adams and Sheriff Anthony Miranda, also announced that the city has shut down over 1,000 of the roughly 4,000 illicit weed shops in the five boroughs since its latest push to close the stores launched in early May. The effort, billed “Operation Padlock to Protect,” was launched soon after the state gave local law enforcement, including the city Sheriff’s Office and the NYPD, the authority to padlock unlicensed cannabis sellers for up to one year.

The mountain of illegal weed was burned as part of the NYPD’s usual process for disposing of illicit substances at the Reworld facility in Nassau County, which purports to turn the burned waste into renewable energy.

“We’re gonna destroy illegal cannabis in the city,” Adams said during a news conference before the products were destroyed. “It’s not going to go in our neighborhoods. It’s not going to target our children.”

No contact highs

The mayor said they are destroying the cannabis products, rather than putting them into a landfill, in order to prevent them from reentering the market.

“The goal is, we don’t want it recycled back into the communities,” he said. “You place it in a landfill, you really just open the door of people going back into the landfills and trying to salvage whatever they can. The goal is the destruction of the product and not allowing people to just dump it wherever they can.”

However, according to Reworld manager Bobby Green, incinerating cannabis products does not impact the facility’s surrounding communities. Green said the facility uses filtration systems that allow it to “scrub” most of the fumes and expel 99% water vapor into the air.

“All of the smells and fumes are contained within the process, they are destroyed in the process so that it does not affect the community that we surround,” Green said.

Adams said that while the city has shuttered 1,000 shops under its latest enforcement action, it has also inspected over 4,000 locations. The cannabis products seized during the inspections equate to $63 million.

The administration has made a concerted effort to close the illegal stores, which proliferated across the city since cannabis was legalized in 2021, out of concern that they are hurting the still young legal market. The unlicensed stores have been able to spread throughout the city due to the state’s glacial rollout of licenses to legal sellers.

The mayor and governor have argued the shops both hurt the quality of life in the city and endanger public safety by selling products that are unregulated and often marketed to children. Additionally, they argue the illegal sellers are hindering the state’s program to first distribute licenses to entrepreneurs who were impacted by the so-called “War on Drugs.”

When asked about the roughly 3,000 shops that have not yet been closed, Miranda said many of them have been inspected and will be reinspected. But he notably did not say if or when they would be padlocked.

“Over 1,000 locations have been sealed,” Miranda said. “And we will be required to go back to some of these locations for reinspection. Some of them received cease-and-desist orders, which require a second visit. So there are ongoing investigations and we will be revisiting some of them a couple of times.”

The Gowanus Canal has lived many lives.

Most recently, the 1.8 mile canal is known for its pollution: it was named a Superfund site in 2010, thanks to the oily sheen on its surface and less-than-natural smells that sometimes rise from its waters. 

Before it was the subject of federal attention, the canal was rumored to be a favored dumping ground for mafiosos. Before that, it was a critical hub for shipping and industry. And long before that, it was a humble creek where Native Americans farmed and European settlers searched for oysters. 

The full history will be recounted through song on Aug. 30, as Wes Braver’s new musical “The Fish Queen of the Gowanus Canal” debuts for two nights only on a floating stage on the surface of the canal. 

Braver moved to Gowanus in 2017, and hovered on the edges of the nabe’s thriving arts scene for several years, he said. Then, he got involved with Voice of Gowanus, a local advocacy group. 

At the time, Braver was writing songs for a monthly backyard event he hosts in his backyard, the Gowanus Salon. Everything he was learning about the canal started to seep into his songwriting, “kind of like the vapor intrusions that are in buildings near the Gowanus Canal,” he joked.

The end result was “The Fish Queen,” an off-the-wall musical about the past and present of the body as told through sad songs, happy songs, love songs, all performed by the Fish Queen herself.

The musical’s central construct — and character — are heavily influenced by the infamously large amount of human excrement in the canal. An “extremophile” who thrives in intense environments, the Fish Queen is an amalgamation of various marine life all stuck together by, well, poop. 

A monstrous and magical creature, the Fish Queen has the memories of every human whose excrement she’s come in contact with through history. 

“It’s a dramatical device that allows us to tell this 400 year history, because she remembers all of it,” Braver said. “She has the colonists who first came, the mafiosos who dumped bodies in the canal, she contains all of them.” 

Eight different actors — Nico Raimont, Danni Hoshino, Ri Lotz, Julia Melloni, Hanna Bailey Nery, Evan Crommett, and Cameron Giordano — perform as the Fish Queen throughout the musical, as she recounts different people’s memories. 

The musical had a lot of material to cover over 400 years of history, Braver said. He and book writer Rebecca Slaman tried to choose the biggest “inflection points” of the story of the canal, like the Lenape natives meeting the first European settlers, the canal being made from a creek into a canal, and the night cops kicked Irish tenants out of the tenements around the canal. 

Those moments reflect the current circumstances of the canal, Braver said. With the Superfund cleanup partway done, it’s much cleaner than it used to be — but still has a long way to go. The 2021 rezoning is totally changing the topography of the neighborhood and adding to fears of displacement of artists and locals. 

The composer hesitated to give away too many details about the show’s whacky constructs. The Fish Queen does have a physical form, he said, but didn’t elaborate on whether she was a puppet, a costume, or something else. 

The all-original songs will likely ring true to locals and Gowanus Canal enthusiasts, with titles like “The System Works (But You’re Just Not Good Enough,)” “What the F Are You Doing on the G Train?” A love song, “Down Apocalyptic,” is a sort of play on “toxic love, toxic obsession,” Braver said. 

Braver put the show on for the very first time this summer. In the audience that night was Brad Vogel, a former captain of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. Vogel fell in love with the show, and “championed” a larger production. 

“I laughed out loud, but I also felt shivers down my spine when I first saw the show a few weeks ago in a backyard,” Vogel said in a statement. “I knew we had to experience this on the waters of the Gowanus.”

On Aug. 30 and 31, Braver, Vogel, co-producers Allison Skopec and Joseph Alexiou, and the Dredgers are hosting two nights of performances on a floating barge near the canoe club’s headquarters. Some audience members will be watching from canoes drifting on the surface of the canal. 

The show was originally supposed to be one-night-only, on Aug. 30, but sold out so quickly they added a second performance. 

Braver said it felt “incredible” to perform the show on the Gowanus Canal. The Dredgers and other local groups have “real hope” that the canal’s future will be better than its past, but that achieving that will require a lot of support from the community. 

“I do hope this gets done in a theater someday, but to me, this is what it’s all about,” Braver said. “You’ll smell it in the air a little bit … it’s just a great place to show it off, and the themes are right there on display. 

“The Fish Queen of the Gowanus Canal” will be performed at 7 p.m. on  Friday, Aug. 30 and Saturday, Aug. 31 at the Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse, 2 19th St. near Home Depot in Gowanus. Tickets start at $28.52.

Two U.S. House members who first pushed the Food and Drug Administration in 2023 to investigate the health risks of hair straighteners used primarily by Black women are now asking the agency why it has twice delayed its target date to propose a ban on products containing formaldehyde, which studies link to increased rates of cancer. […]

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