TIMELINESS

Because it has to do with new information that just happened.
Lawmakers in Crimea Move Swiftly to Split from Ukraine.

TURMOIL IN UKRAINE

Lawmakers in Crimea Move Swiftly to Split From Ukraine

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ALAN COWELL 9:17 AM ET

Vasily Maximov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

People waved Russian flags at Lenin Square on Monday in Simferopol, the Crimean capital.

The Crimean Parliament declared its independence from Ukraine and formally asked to join Russia, and while Moscow embraced the result of Sunday’s vote, the Kremlin has not declared its intent to annex Crimea.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/europe/european-union-ukraine.html?ref=world

CONFLICT

Because its showing the conflict between The United States of America and Russia as well as Russia and Crimea.

Global Crises Put Obama’s Strategy of Caution to the Test

By DAVID E. SANGERMARCH 16, 2014

SECESSION APPROVED Crimeans in Simferopol celebrated a vote on Sunday to break from Ukraine and join Russia. CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — For five years, President Obama has consciously recast how America engages with the world’s toughest customers. But with Russia poised to annex Crimea after Sunday’s referendum, with a mounting threat to the rest of Ukraine and with the carnage inSyria accelerating, Mr. Obama’s strategy is now under greater stress than at any time in his presidency.

In his first term, the White House described its approach as the “light footprint”: “Dumb wars” of occupation — how Mr. Obama once termed Iraq — were out. Drone strikes, cyberattacks and Special Operations raids that made use of America’s technological superiority were the new, quick-and-dirty expression of military and covert power. When he did agree to have American forces join the bombing of Libya in 2011, Mr. Obama insisted that NATO and Arab states “put skin in the game,” a phrase he vastly prefers to “leading from behind.”

As he learned to play the long game, the Treasury Department became Mr. Obama’s favorite noncombatant command. It refined the art of the economic squeeze on Iran, eventually forcing the mullahs to the negotiating table.

A crowd supporting Russia gathered Sunday in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It briefly confronted police officers outside a government office. CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times

But so far those tools — or even the threat of them — have proved frustratingly ineffective in the most recent crises. Sanctions and modest help to the Syrian rebels have failed to halt the slaughter; if anything, the killing worsened as negotiations dragged on.

The White House was taken by surprise by Vladimir V. Putin’s decisions to invade Crimea, but also by China’s increasingly assertive declaration of exclusive rights to airspace and barren islands. Neither the economic pressure nor the cyberattacks that forced Iran to reconsider its approach have prevented North Korea’s stealthy revitalization of its nuclear and missile programs.

In short, America’s adversaries are testing the limits of America’s post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan moment.

“We’re seeing the ‘light footprint’ run out of gas,” said one of Mr. Obama’s former senior national security aides, who would not speak on the record about his ex-boss.

“No one is arguing for military action, for bringing back George Bush’s chest-thumping,” the former aide said. At the same time, he said, the president’s oft-repeated lines that those who violate international norms will be “isolated” and “pay a heavy price” over the long term have sounded “more like predictions over time, and less like imminent threats.”

Mr. Obama acknowledges, at least in private, that he is managing an era of American retrenchment. History suggests that such eras — akin to what the United States went through after the two world wars and Vietnam — often look like weakness to the rest of the world. His former national security adviser Thomas Donilon seemed to acknowledge the critical nature of the moment on Sunday when he said on “Face the Nation” that what Mr. Obama was facing was “a challenge to the post-Cold War order in Europe, an order that we have a lot to do with.”

But while Mr. Donilon expressed confidence that over time the United States holds powerful tools against Russia and other nations, in the short term challengers like Mr. Putin have the advantage on the ground.

Not surprisingly, the testing of administration policy at a time the president is politically weakened at home has sparked a critical question. Is it Mr. Obama’s deliberative, pick-your-battles approach that is encouraging adversaries to press the limits? Or is this simply a time when exercising leverage over countries that defy American will or the international order is trickier than ever, and when the domestic pressure to stay out of international conflicts is obvious to overseas friends and foes alike?

It is almost certainly some combination of the two. But the most stinging critique of Mr. Obama is that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of nonintervention. Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush’s secretary of state, argues that five years of signaling that others need to step in, of stressing that America can no longer police the world, have taken a toll.

“There was a view that if the United States pulled back and stopped ‘imposing’ and ‘insisting’ in the world, the vacuum would be filled by good things: the international community and the allies,” Ms. Rice said in a recent phone conversation from Stanford University, where she teaches. “But what has filled that space has been brutal dictators; extremist forces, especially in Iraq and Syria; and nationalism.”

Ms. Rice was enthusiastic about Mr. Obama’s election in 2008, and talked to him frequently during the transition. But she argues now that many of his decisions — such as abandoning a plan to strike Syria for its use of chemical weapons and proposing a defense budget that shrinks the Army to its lowest levels since World War II just as the Chinese announced a 12 percent increase in their military spending — send clear signals.

“Asia’s in an all-out nationalist mood that’s the real cost of American withdrawal,” she argues.

That perception, right or wrong, is shared by some traditional allies. The Israelis worry there is diminished interest in keeping American aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, and fear that if a nuclear deal is struck with Iran, Washington will no longer anchor an alliance to contain Tehran. The Saudis are talking anew about the possibility of needing a nuclear deterrent of their own.

Mr. Obama and his senior staff members tell a very different story — one in which the president has capitalized on the benefits of getting out of Iraq, and almost out of Afghanistan, to employ more subtle, smarter tools of national power. The “pivot to Asia,” which has been slow to materialize, was supposed to be emblematic of a new combination of soft and hard power; it was as much about building trade relationships as making it clear to the Chinese leadership that America has no intention of ceding the East and South China Seas as areas where Beijing could expect to become the sole power.

The latest budget invests more in drones and cyber and Special Operations forces, and pares back on conventional troops and the equipment for long land wars.

“If we are constantly overextending ourselves, chasing every crisis, we’re not going to be able to play the long game required for American primacy,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.

Mr. Obama insists he is sending the right signals: He argued to Jeffrey Goldberg in Bloomberg View recently that there are “35,000 U.S. military personnel” in the Middle East who are constantly training “under the direction of a president who already has shown himself willing to take military action in the past.”

But the president also made the case that Washington is awash with muscle-flexing by those who have not learned the lessons of the past decade. If he had sent troops to Syria, Mr. Obama argued, “there was the possibility that we would have made the situation worse rather than better on the ground, precisely because of U.S. involvement, which would have meant that we would have had the third or, if you count Libya, the fourth war in a Muslim country in the span of a decade.”

Teaching good sex

Still, some senior officials who left the White House after the first term concede — when assured of anonymity — that Mr. Obama erred in failing to have a plan to back up his declaration that President Bashar al-Assad had to leave office. And Arab leaders argue that Mr. Obama’s last-minute decision to pull back from the missile strike on Syria will embolden the Iranians as they decide how much, if any, of their nuclear program to give up.

Foreign leaders say they see America’s unwillingness to act as the inevitable backlash of too many years at war. “In the past decade we’ve seen the consequences and the limits of taking action,” said David Miliband, the former British foreign secretary who now runs the International Rescue Committee, as he described his organization’s efforts to help an overwhelming influx of refugees over Syria’s borders. “Here we’re seeing the consequences and limits of inaction.”

Egypt is a good example. Despite threats by the United States to cut off several billion dollars in support for the Egyptian military if its generals continued their brutal crackdowns, protesters are still in jail, and the coming presidential election seems all but certain to be manipulated. Asked why the generals are so cavalier about losing American aid, a senior American diplomat who deals often with the Egyptians has an easy answer: “We don’t give them enough that they really care.”

Russia is the next test. Ukraine’s best defense today against a Russian incursion beyond Crimea is not its army or its allies, but the markets. The ruble has already fallen 10 percent this year, Russia’s exports are down, and a full-scale invasion would most likely force even the most reluctant Europeans to enact real sanctions. Among them is Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who changed her tone the other day and warned that if Russia “continues on its course,” the result will be “massive damage to Russia, both economically and politically.”

Mr. Obama’s critics, seeing political advantage, argue that the world smells weakness. “There are no consequences when you defy what Obama’s telling you to do,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who is one of the president’s harshest critics.

Mr. Rhodes dismisses such arguments. “There’s a lot of magical thinking going on that if we had gone to war in Syria, Vladimir Putin would have never gone into Crimea,” he said. “That is fantasy. The United States went into Iraq, and it never stopped Putin from going into Georgia.”

In fact, said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Republican who worked for both the first President George Bush and his son, to put the blame on Mr. Obama is to “ignore history, geography and politics, and lets both the Europeans and the Ukrainians themselves off the hook.”

But the multiple crises on Mr. Obama’s plate will shape the world’s view of American power. “You can bet the Chinese are watching our every move” to see if the United States imposes biting sanctions and if the Russians figure out how to evade them, one senior intelligence official said. “They want to know where the limits are, or if there are any.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/obamas-policy-is-put-to-the-test-as-crises-challenge-caution.html?ref=world

PROXIMITY

Because people who are close to Paris or that area would be interested in this news story because it affects their lives.

Fighting Pollution, Paris Imposes Partial Driving Ban

PARIS — With pollution in and around Paris still unusually high, the government imposed a partial driving ban in the capital on Monday for the first time in nearly 20 years, and public transportation was free for a fourth consecutive day.

Seven hundred police officers were deployed throughout the city, France’s capital, the authorities said, to stop and fine the drivers of vehicles with even-numbered license plates. Electric and hybrid vehicles were exempted, as were cars with three or more passengers, the cars of public transport employees and those with foreign plates. Cars with even-numbered license plates were allowed to park free.

Drivers with odd-numbered plates were doubly lucky on Monday: Not only were they authorized to drive but also traffic jams in and around the city were reduced by as much as 60 percent, the police and government officials said.

If the measure is extended Tuesday, vehicles with odd-numbered plates will be banned.

Speed limits around Paris have already been reduced by 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles, per hour, and heavy trucks are being diverted from the region. Regional trains, the Paris subway and bus system, the Vélib’ bike-sharing program and Autolib’ car-sharing service have been free.

Pollution levels, especially of the particulate matter that is partly attributable to vehicle emissions, appear to be dropping after a high late last week. With unseasonably warm days, cool nights and little wind, pollutants have settled in high concentrations over Paris and about 30 other French cities, especially in northern France.

Particulate matter known as PM 10, or particulate matter of less than 10 microns in diameter, which can cause respiratory problems and general discomfort when inhaled, reached a level of about 140 micrograms per cubic meter last week, according to French and European measurements, well above the official alert level of 80. Hospital visits have risen noticeably in and around this city in recent days, especially for young children, the French health minister, Marisol Touraine, told RTL radio on Monday morning. By then, particulate matter had fallen below the alert level, according to Airparif, which monitors air quality in Paris.

The PM 10 level on an average day in Paris has been about 25 in recent years. By comparison, PM 10 readings in Beijing generally hover around 120, with peaks of more than 750, according to measurements by the American Embassy there.

Paris officials last imposed a partial driving ban for one day in 1997. Whether the measure had any noticeable effect on pollution levels remains a matter of dispute. But as of 10:30 a.m. on Monday, 3,000 drivers of even-numbered cars had already been stopped for defying the ban, the police said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/europe/fighting-pollution-paris-imposes-partial-driving-ban.html?ref=world

PROMINENCE

Because this has important information in it and can be considered news worthy.

Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.

He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.

If true, the rapid engorgement would solve paradoxes like why the heavens look uniform from pole to pole and not like a jagged, warped mess. The enormous ballooning would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities. Those particles were not missing, but would be diluted beyond detection, like spit in the ocean.

“SPECTACULAR REALIZATION,” Dr. Guth wrote across the top of the page and drew a double box around it.

On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.

If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.

The Theory of Inflation

Astronomers have found evidence to support the theory of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see, extending 14 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.

In our own universe, it would serve as a window into the forces operating at energies forever beyond the reach of particle accelerators on Earth and yield new insights into gravity itself. Dr. Kovac’s ripples would be the first direct observation of gravitational waves, which, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, should ruffle space-time.

According to inflation theory, the waves are the hypothetical quantum particles, known as gravitons, that carry gravity, magnified by the expansion of the universe to extragalactic size.

“You can see how the sky is being distorted by gravitational waves,” said Andrei Linde, a prominent inflation theorist at Stanford. “We are using our universe as a big microscope. The sky is a photographic plate.”

Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, an early-universe expert who was not part of the team, said, “This is huge, as big as it gets.”

“Although I might not fully understand it,” Dr. Kamionkowski said, “this is a signal from the very earliest universe, sending a telegram encoded in gravitational waves."

The ripples manifested themselves as faint spiral patterns in a bath of microwave radiation that permeates space and preserves a picture of the universe when it was 380,000 years old and as hot as the surface of the Sun.

Dr. Kovac and his collaborators, working in an experiment known as Bicep, for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, reported their results in a scientific briefing at the Center for Astrophysics here on Monday and in a set of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

Dr. Kovac said the chance that the results were a fluke was only one in 3.5 million — a gold standard of discovery called five-sigma.

Dr. Guth pronounced himself “bowled over,” saying he had not expected such a definite confirmation in his lifetime.

“With nature, you have to be lucky,” he said. “Apparently we have been lucky.”

The results are the closely guarded distillation of three years’ worth of observations and analysis. Eschewing email for fear of a leak, Dr. Kovac personally delivered drafts of his work to a select few, meeting with Dr. Guth, who is now a professor at M.I.T. (as is his son, Larry, who was sleeping that night in 1979), in his office last week.

“It was a very special moment, and one we took very seriously as scientists,” said Dr. Kovac, who chooses his words as carefully as he tends his radio telescopes.

Dr. Linde, who first described the most popular variant of inflation, known as chaotic inflation, in 1983, was about to go on vacation in the Caribbean last week when Chao-Lin Kuo, a Stanford colleague and a member of Dr. Kovac’s team, knocked on his door with a bottle of Champagne to tell him the news.

Confused, Dr. Linde called out to his wife, asking if she had ordered Champagne.

“And then I told him that in the beginning we thought that this was a delivery but we did not think that we ordered anything, but I simply forgot that actually I did order it, 30 years ago,” Dr. Linde wrote in an email.

Calling from Bonaire, the Dutch Caribbean island, Dr. Linde said he was still hyperventilating. “Having news like this is the best way of spoiling a vacation,” he said.

By last weekend, as social media was buzzing with rumors that inflation had been seen and news spread, astrophysicists responded with a mixture of jubilation and caution.

Abraham Loeb, a Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer who was not part of the team, said: “It looks like inflation really took place. Since 1980, this was really speculative physics.”

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at M.I.T., wrote in an email, “I think that if this stays true, it will go down as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.” He added, “It’s a sensational breakthrough involving not only our cosmic origins, but also the nature of space.”

Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, hailed it as the kind of discovery that could lead eventually to resolving riddles like dark matter and dark energy, writing in an email, “I am starting to feel like a 20-something-year-old postdoc!”

Lawrence M. Krauss of Arizona State and others also emphasized the need for confirmation, noting that the new results exceeded earlier estimates based on temperature maps of the cosmic background by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite and other assumptions about the universe.

“So we will need to wait and see before we jump up and down,” Dr. Krauss said.

Corroboration might not be long in coming. The Planck spacecraft, which has been making exquisite measurements of the Big Bang microwaves, will be reporting its own findings this year. At least a dozen other teams are attempting similar measurements from balloons, mountaintops and space.

The Bicep2 telescope, in the foreground, was used to detect the faint spiraling gravity patterns — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart at its birth. CreditSteffen Richter/Associated Press

SPIRALS IN THE SKY

Gravity waves are the latest and deepest secret yet pried out of the cosmic microwaves, which were discovered accidentally by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both then at Bell Labs, 50 years ago. They got the Nobel Prize.

Dr. Kovac has spent his whole career trying to read the secrets of these waves. He is one of four leaders of Bicep, which has operated a series of increasingly sensitive radio telescopes at the South Pole, where the air — thin, cold and dry — creates ideal observing conditions. The others are Clement Pryke of the University of Minnesota, Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology and Dr. Kuo of Stanford.

“The South Pole is the closest you can get to space and still be on the ground,” Dr. Kovac said. He has been there 23 times, he said, wintering over in 1994. “I’ve been hooked ever since,” he said.

In 2002, he was part of a team that discovered that the microwave radiation was polarized, meaning the light waves had a slight preference to vibrate in one direction rather than another.

This was a step toward the ultimate goal of detecting the gravitational waves from inflation. Such waves, squeezing space in one direction and stretching it in another as they go by, would twist the direction of polarization of the microwaves, theorists said. As a result, maps of the polarization in the sky should have little arrows going in spirals.

Detecting those spirals required measuring infinitesimally small differences in the temperature of the microwaves. The group’s telescope, Bicep2, is basically a giant superconducting thermometer.

“We had no expectations what we would see,” Dr. Kovac said. The earlier Planck study had concluded that a parameter r, which is a measure of the swirliness of the polarization, could not be higher than 0.11, which would have knocked many popular versions of inflation. But it was not a direct measurement, as the Bicep team was attempting.

The Bicep measurement of r clocked in at nearly twice that, 0.20, putting the most favored models back into contention.

The strength of the signal surprised the researchers, and they spent a year burning up time on a Harvard supercomputer, making sure they had things right and worrying that competitors might beat them to the breakthrough.

A SPECIAL TIME

The data traced the onset of inflation to a time in cosmic history that physicists like Dr. Guth, staying up late in his Palo Alto house 35 years ago, suspected was a special break point in the evolution of the universe.

Physicists recognize four forces at work in the world today: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But they have long suspected that those are simply different manifestations of a single unified force that ruled the universe in its earliest, hottest moments.

As the universe cooled, according to this theory, there was a fall from grace, not unlike some old folk mythology of gods or brothers falling out with each other. The laws of physics evolved, with one force after another “freezing out,” or splitting away.

That was where Dr. Guth came in.

Under some circumstances, a glass of water can stay liquid as the temperature falls below 32 degrees, until it is disturbed, at which point it will rapidly freeze, releasing latent heat in the process.

Similarly, the universe could “supercool” and stay in a unified state too long. In that case, space itself would become temporarily imbued with a mysterious kind of latent heat, or energy.

Bill Cunningham's "Facades"

Inserted into Einstein’s equations, the latent energy would act as a kind of antigravity, and the universe would blow itself up. Since it was space itself supplying the repulsive force, the more space was created, the harder it pushed apart. In a runaway explosion, what would become our observable universe mushroomed in size at least a trillion trillionfold — from a submicroscopic speck of primordial energy to the size of a grapefruit — in less than a cosmic eye-blink.

Almost as quickly, this energy would decay into ordinary particles and radiation that were already in sync, despite how far apart they wound up, because they had all sprung from such a tiny primordial point, as if the galaxies had gotten together in the locker room to make a plan before going out. All of normal cosmic history was still ahead, resulting in today’s observable universe, a patch of sky and stars 14 billion light-years across.

“It’s often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch,” Dr. Guth likes to say, “but the universe might be the ultimate free lunch.”

Make that free lunches. Most of the hundred or so models that have been spawned by Dr. Guth’s original vision suggest that inflation, once started, is eternal. Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion with atoms, stars and planets, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles here and there endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse.

The Bicep data does not reveal what this magical-sounding inflating energy is. Antigravity might sound crazy, but it was Einstein who first raised the possibility of its permeating space in the form of a fudge factor called the cosmological constant, which he later abandoned as a blunder. It was revived with the discovery 15 years ago that something called dark energy is giving a boost to the expansion of the universe, albeit far more gently than inflation did.

So the future of the cosmos is perhaps bright and fecund, but do not bother asking about going any deeper into the past.

As Dr. Guth will be the first to say, we might never know what happened before inflation, at the very beginning, because inflation erases everything that came before it. All the chaos and randomness of the primordial moment are swept away, forever out of our view.

“If you trace your cosmic roots,” Dr. Loeb said, “you wind up at inflation.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/science/space/detection-of-waves-in-space-buttresses-landmark-theory-of-big-bang.html?ref=world

HUMAN INTEREST

Because the news is concerning a drama that concerns a certain person in an emotional struggle.

Reports: L'Wren Scott found dead of apparent suicide

Cindy Clark, USA TODAY12:58 p.m. EDT March 17, 2014

The designer was 47.

Fashion designer L'Wren Scott has been found dead of an apparent suicide, reports ABC News and the New York Daily News.

Scott's body was found hanging from a scarf on a doorknob by her assistant at her New York apartment around 10 a.m. today, reports the Daily News. The medical examiner's office will determine the cause of death.

Scott had been in a relationship with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger for more than a decade.

Jagger is currently on tour with his band and recently arrived in Australia.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/03/17/reports-lwren-scott-found-dead/6525343/

NOVELTY

Because it has to do with an unusual thing that people will be interested to learn about.

St. Patrick's Day traditions explained

Get out your green on Monday: It's St. Patrick's Day. USA TODAY Network explains the origins of some of the Irish holiday's traditions.

Who was St. Patrick?

St. Patrick — brace yourself — was not actually Irish.

Patrick was a nobleman born in about 400 A.D. in Britain and kidnapped by Irish pirates at the age of 16, said Philip Freeman, author of St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography.

Patrick was born into a religious family, but was an atheist early in his life. However, he rediscovered his faith while enslaved in Ireland, Freeman told USA TODAY Network.

After 17 years as a slave, St. Patrick escaped Ireland and found his way home, but returned to Ireland as a missionary.

"He said he was ready to die in Ireland in order to make his mission successful," Freeman said.

It's unclear if St. Patrick did in fact die in Ireland, but March 17 is widely believed to be the day of his death, according to Freeman.

Spectators are dressed as leprechauns at a St. Patrick's Day parade on March 17 in Dublin, Ireland. (Photo: Peter Muhly, AFP/Getty Images)

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Parades

St. Patrick's Day began as a religious holiday in Ireland but became a celebratory affair because of Irish Americans, according to Timothy Meagher, a history professor at Catholic University in D.C.

In the United States, St. Patrick's Day was first celebrated with banquets at elite clubs in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga., Meagher said.

YOUR TAKE: Share your St. Patrick's Day photos

New York City hosted the first St. Patrick's Day parade in 1762, and by the mid-19th century parades were common, he said.

"The parades are a statement of showing our colors, showing our numbers, showing that we are powerful and important," Meagher said of the role of parades in celebrating Irish-American identity.

Shamrocks

Legend has it that St. Patrick used the three-leaved shamrock to explain the Christian Holy Trinity.

But Freeman said, "There's no evidence St. Patrick ever did that."

Traditions as early as the 17th century incorporated the plant, said Mike Cronin, author of Wearing the Green: A History of St. Patrick's Day.

People wore shamrocks on their coats and closed the day by "drowning the shamrock" — placing it in a glass of whiskey before drinking, Cronin said.

Leprechauns

Today's leprechauns, usually rosy-cheeked, boozy little men in green attire, come from Irish folklore.

The first recorded mention of a leprechaun goes back to the 8th century, coming from the word luchorpán, meaning "little body" to describe water spirits, according to John and Caitlin Matthews in The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures.

Another possible origin is the Irish god Lugh, whose Welch variant is known as one of the "Three Golden Shoemakers."

There's also the Irish fairy Cluricaune, "a cunning spirit who haunts cellars, drinks, smokes and plays tricks," the Matthewses write. Cluricaune was popularized in a 1825 publication called Fairy Legends.

Corned beef and cabbage

Although a classic St. Patrick's Day meal, corned beef and cabbage is more American than Irish.

Irish Americans in the 19th century were mostly poor. The most affordable meat available was corned beef, according to Cronin.

And cabbage? "It's a spring vegetable and it's cheap," Cronin said.

Guinness

The Irish stout is the drink of choice on St. Patrick's Day.

On a typical day, Americans drink about 600,000 pints of the Dublin-based beer. But on St. Patrick's Day, about 3 million pints of Guinness are downed, according to Guinness in an email to USA TODAY Network.

Planning on drinking a pint on Monday? Tips from Guinness on the perfect pour: Tilt the glass at 45 degrees when pouring until it is three-quarters full, then let the beer settle before filling the glass completely to the top.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/03/14/saint-patricks-day-traditions/6297821/

IMPACT

Because it has a big effect on the reader, and makes them think about the topic more deeply.

SXSW crash claims 3rd life

KVUE-TV, Austin, Texas1:05 p.m. EDT March 17, 2014

AUSTIN, Texas — A third person died Monday from injuries sustained in last week's tragedy in which a drunk driver plowed through a crowd outside a nightclub at the South By Southwest music festival.

A car hit the victim, Sandy Le, on Thursday outside The Mohawk nightclub, according to the Travis County Medical Examiner's Office.

Le, 26, was an Austin resident but was a native of Pass Christian, Miss., according to her family. She had been on life support in critical condition since the accident occurred.

"She lived in this whimsy that almost made you jealous, she was a very carefree and nonchalant person with a definitely giving spirit, and she was very selfless," said her brother-in-law, Stuart Gates of Hattiesburg, Miss. "She was full of life, she was quirky, and she was always someone you were looking forward to seeing."

Le was with a group of friends, some also injured, when police say Rashad Owens, 21, of Killeen, Texas, crashed through a barricade closing the downtown street to vehicle traffic. He's accused of driving drunk, fleeing from police and intentionally driving into a crowd of festival-goers.

STORY: Vigils honor victims of SXSW tragedy
STORY: Suspect in SXSW crash charged with capital murder

Jamie West, 27, of Austin; and Steven Craenmehr, 35, of Amsterdam, were killed that night. Twenty-two others were injured. Seven people remain hospitalized, including one other in critical condition.

Owens has been charged with capital murder, which means he will face the death penalty in court, and aggravated assault with a motor vehicle. He remained in jail Monday on $3 million bond.

Owens' blood-alcohol level was 0.114 at the time of his arrest, police say. The legal limit in Texas is 0.08.

Craenmehr was on a bicycle, and West was on a moped with her husband, police say. West's husband remains in the hospital.

Le's family — her parents, a brother, and three sisters — came to Austin to be with her, Gates said.

"We've been through the indecision and the hope of pulling for a miracle," Gates said. "Now we're starting the business side of things, the funeral and the logistics."

Le graduated from the Mississippi School for Math and Science in 2006 and attended college at both the University of Southern Mississippi and Mississippi State University, Gates said. She had moved to Austin to establish residency and planned to return to school there.

Le's family has had several tragedies in the past several years, Gates said: They lost their home in Hurricane Katrina, their shrimping business was hit during the BP oil spill, then Le's uncle disappeared from his dive boat in July and never was found.

"I'm just … hurting for adjectives right now," he said. "We've lost someone who knew how to live life and knew how to make people happy."

SXSW ended its 28th year early Sunday

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