#100 brachos a day

[mameleh-life]

Dressing with Bubby in Mind💙✌🇮🇱

First piece of jewelry my bubby ever gave me was the most gorgeous heavy gold magen david it is absolutely stunning and I wear it almost every day. My bubby had Israel on her mind constantly and she would encourage my parents to take us to AIPAC and she loved collecting Israeli stamps and coins and in fact she had quite a collection she went to Israel when she was younger and she wanted to go again when she got older but instead she sent my mother on a kibbutz and lived vicariously through her tales of cooking eggs for about 100 people at a time! My bubby loved my books on Israel but interestingly she loved my Taschen book on Venice synagogues even more she loved it, she could look through it with me for hours and shed be sipping her Sanka coffee with splenda [I still remember how she held a cup of coffee that's how vivid her memory is in my mind] and shed hum some tune from a classic film while she looked at the pictures "malkeleh look at this did you ever see such a thing?" She was the most beautiful neshama my bubby- always davening always giving brachos to everyone and ending them with and brachos for all of klal yisroel. She loved when I wore navy and she loved Jerusalem stone and turquoise she loved Tzfat blue and I made her a collage because she loved the stunning photos of the azure blue doors my brother shlomo took when he was there. My bubby was such a spiritual woman and I want to live up to her in some way and I regret alot of the things that happened in my life things that my bubby would have been so worried for me and also giving me this look shed give me when she was disappointed and shed say malkeleh come on let's go [meaning stop it already] and you know after my divorce and up until recently the Malky I was was so lost because life gets so confusing sometimes and we just cant deal and if we dont have the proper support system we can just totally get things messed up and give into our vulnerability eventhough we know were not in a good situation and we give into pressure or loneliness but my bubby would never allow that for herself or for me and it's going to be her birthday tomorrow the day I would come over with bagels from the bialy store and lox and coffee from my favorite place and I would give her a scarf which shed pepper me with questions how much did you pay for this? Are you crazy malky? [I once gave her a vintage Hermes and she got so angry at me when I told her how much it was but she loved it all the same] Bubby wore a scarf every time she lit shabbos candles and davened kabalas shabbos from the siddur that now I daven kabalas shabbos from. And you know what my Bubby's favorite phrase was when things weren't going well? Shed kiss my farhead and say dont worry Malkeleh it will all be good and she was always right.

[cetacean-content]

SCIENTISTS RESCUE FIRST VAQUITA PORPOISE, MAKING CONSERVATION HISTORY

October 20, 2017

SAN FELIPE, BAJA CALIFORNIA – Scientists with the VaquitaCPR conservation project and Mexico’s Secretary of the Environment Rafael Pacchiano announced today they succeeded in locating and rescuing a highly endangered vaquita porpoise yesterday, but in an abundance of caution the vaquita, which was a calf, was released.  Experts say the calf was being closely monitored by marine mammal veterinarians and showed signs of stress, leading to its release.

“The successful rescue made conservation history and demonstrates that the goal of VaquitaCPR is feasible,” said Secretary Pacchiano.  “No one has ever captured and cared for a vaquita porpoise, even for a brief period of time. This is an exciting moment and as a result, I am confident we can indeed save the vaquita marina from extinction.

Experts had planned extensively for the scenario that unfolded on Wednesday and every precaution was taken to safeguard the health of the vaquita calf, which was estimated to be about six months old.

“While we were disappointed we could not keep the vaquita in human care, we have demonstrated that we are able to locate and capture a vaquita,” said Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, a senior scientist with SEMARNAT, CIRVA and VaquitaCPR Program Director. “We also succeeded in transporting one and conducting health evaluations that are part of our protocols safeguarding the animals’ health.”

Scientists returned the vaquita calf to the same spot in the Gulf of California where it was originally located and where other vaquitas were observed.  Before releasing the vaquita, various tissue samples were taken which scientists will analyze and share with colleagues at other research institutions like the Frozen Zoo in San Diego, California which will conduct genetic sequencing.

The precedent-setting rescue comes as the bold conservation plan led by the Mexican government (SEMARNAT) to save the endangered vaquita porpoise from extinction enters its second week of field operations.  During the first three days, scientists spotted several vaquitas using visual search methods and acoustic monitoring.  Vaquitas were repeatedly located by the VaquitaCPR ‘find’ team.

The vaquita porpoise, also known as the ‘panda of the sea,’ is the most endangered marine mammal in the world. Latest estimates by scientists who have been monitoring the vaquita for decades show there are fewer than 30 vaquitas left in the wild.  The vaquita only lives in the upper Gulf of California.

Secretary Pacchiano has visited the VaquitaCPR facilities in San Felipe several times and accompanied scientists during a day of field operations on the Sea of Cortez. “The individuals involved in this unprecedented conservation project are the best in their respective fields,” said Secretary Pacchiano.  “I’ve personally witnessed their dedication and incredible expertise.  We’re all committed to saving the vaquita porpoise and this is the team who can do it.”

The project, which has been recommended by the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita (CIRVA), involves locating, rescuing and then temporarily relocating the vaquitas to an ocean sanctuary off the coast of San Felipe. The explicit goal of CPR is to return the vaquitas to their natural habitat once the primary threat to their survival has been eliminated. Experts from all over the globe, including Mexico, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom are all working together on VaquitaCPR.

VaquitaCPR field operations, including efforts to locate and bring vaquitas into temporary sea pens, began on October 12 and are expected to continue for several weeks.

Windy conditions prevented VaquitaCPR field operations from taking place at sea for three days.  When there are sustained winds of more than about eight knots, conditions on the water are too choppy for scientists to visually locate vaquitas.  It also could risk the safety of vaquitas during the capture operation.

“We’ve unfortunately been at the mercy of the weather and were in the position of ‘waiting on the wind’ for several days,” said Dr. Cynthia Smith, VaquitaCRP Program Manager.  “However, the time hasn’t been wasted, as there has been a tremendous amount of productive discussion at all hours of the day as we continue to refine the process of rescuing the animals. Now that we’re back on the water and conditions are better, the entire team is optimistic and working together seamlessly to support the mission.”

In an unprecedented move in April of 2015 that demonstrated Mexico’s commitment to conservation, President Peña Nieto announced a two-year gillnet ban throughout the vaquitas’ range, compensated fishermen and related industries for their loss of income, and enhanced multi-agency enforcement of the ban led by the Mexican Navy.

In June of 2017, the ban on gillnet fishing was made permanent. The government also launched an extensive survey of the vaquita population using an approach that included both visual monitoring and advanced techniques that use sound to locate the animals.  All told, the Mexican government has committed more than $100 million in an effort to protect the vaquita and support the local fishing community.

A crucial part of CPR is the acoustic monitoring system that will help to locate the remaining vaquitas. This monitoring has been supported since 2012 by WWF and operated by the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change of Mexico (INECC) to help estimate the vaquita’s population, and will continue during the CPR operations.  WWF will also continue supporting the retrieval of lost or abandoned “ghost” nets, many of them illegal, which drift aimlessly and continue to entangle and kill vaquitas and other marine species. Both the acoustic monitoring and the net retrieval are conducted with the help and experience of local fishermen.

VAQUITACPR IS LED BY MEXICO’S MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES (SEMARNAT).

The National Marine Mammal Foundation, Chicago Zoological Society and the Marine Mammal Center are primary partners in this extraordinary conservation effort.

VaquitaCPR operates as a private and public partnership, relying on both private donors and government funds. VaquitaCPR has many key collaborators including the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) and groups like the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, Baja Aqua Farms, and Museo de la Ballena.

As part of VaquitaCPR, large floating sea pens will be anchored off the coast of San Felipe, where veterinarians and animal care experts will carefully monitor the health of any vaquitas that are successfully rescued.  The sea pens have been designed and built by Baja Aqua Farms, a fish farm operation based in Ensenada.

The Museo de la Ballena’s mission is to promote the knowledge, study and conservation of cetaceans. Since the museum initiated a conservation operation last year, its vessel has succeeded in retrieving more than 900,000 linear feet of ‘ghost’ and illegal fishing nets. The museum is providing key logistical support for the VaquitaCPR team.

In order to make the Gulf safe for the vaquita in the future, experts agree it’s important to prevent illegal fishing of the also-endangered totoaba fish and to support alternative economies for the fishing community.

VaquitaCPR has been adopted by Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT) on the recommendation of their expert advisory group, the Comité Internacional Para La Recuperación De La Vaquita (CIRVA).

[newstfionline]

In Venezuela, Cooking With Firewood as Currency Collapses

By Ana Vanessa Herrero and Nicholas Casey, NY Times, Sept. 2, 2017

CARACAS, Venezuela--Food shortages were already common in Venezuela, so Tabata Soler knew painfully well how to navigate the country’s black market stalls to get basics like eggs and sugar.

But then came a shortage she couldn’t fix: Suddenly, there was no propane gas for sale to do the cooking.

And so for several nights this summer, Ms. Soler prepared dinner above a makeshift fire of broken wooden crates set ablaze with kerosene to feed her extended family of 12.

“There was no other option,” said Ms. Soler, a 37-year-old nurse, while scouting again for gas for her stove. “We went back to the past where we cooked soup with firewood.”

Five months of political turmoil in Venezuela have brought waves of protesters into the streets, left more than 120 people dead and a set off a wide crackdown against dissent by the government, which many nations now consider a dictatorship.

An all-powerful assembly of loyalists of President Nicolás Maduro rules the country with few limits on its authority, vowing to pursue political opponents as traitors while it rewrites the Constitution in the government’s favor.

But as the government tries to stifle the opposition and regain a firm grip on the nation, the country’s economic collapse, nearing its fourth year, continues to gain steam, leaving the president, his loyalists and the country in an increasingly precarious position.

Petróleos de Venezuela, the state oil company that is the government’s main source of income, reported in August that its revenue fell by more than a third last year amid production declines--part of a long collapse that chokes the country’s supply of dollars needed for imports of food and other goods.

The falling production mirrors trends in nearly every product that the nation depends on, from potatoes and corn to automotive manufacturing, with fewer than 1,100 cars made in the country through July this year.

And while production falls, prices continue to rise with inflation. The price of food in Venezuela increased by more than 17 percent in July alone, according to the main nongovernmental group that tracks inflation, aggravating a food crisis that had already shattered the image of Venezuela, an oil-rich nation that, until recent years, was the economic envy of many countries in the region.

“This is unprecedented,” said Ricardo Hausmann, an economist at Harvard University and former Venezuelan planning minister, contending that the economic declines are worse than those in Mexico during its economic collapse in the 1990s, Argentina in the 2000s and Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In one nine-day stretch in late July and early August, the price of the bolívar, the national currency, fell by half against the dollar on the black market, cutting earnings for people who make the minimum wage to the equivalent of just $5 per month.

Even though the government has been raising the minimum wage relentlessly, it has not nearly kept up with inflation, leading to an 88 percent drop in earnings over the past five years for the workers who rely on it, Mr. Hausmann said.

Luis Palacios, a 42-year-old former security guard here in the capital, Caracas, has gone hungry as inflation has decimated his wages. He spent a year watching his family lose weight, until his wife took their two children, 1 and 5, to Colombia five months ago in order to get more food.

“My child was thin,” he said. “We couldn’t get medicine when she was sick.”

His wife decided not to return. Mr. Palacios, unable to afford the public bus to get to work, quit his job a month ago because inflation rendered his salary nearly worthless. His severance pay lost much of its value in the two weeks he had to wait for it to arrive.

“I’ve lost seven kilos in just a few months, and since my family left, I can only think of my children,” he said.

Cash has dwindled so much in value that it has disappeared in places, like Mariel Bracho’s taxi stand at the country’s main airport. Ms. Bracho takes only debit cards or bank transfers, and still has a sign with prices dating back a year ago because the company hasn’t been able to find paper or ink to print a new one.

“But there’s not even many people who take a taxi from the airport anymore,” she said, given the cost.

It’s a pattern that leaves people like Olympia Jiménez, a 49-year-old waiter in Caracas, terrified about his wages and tips. They’re vanishing, he says, because even when people are well off enough to eat at a restaurant, they cannot carry enough bills to leave even a small tip on the table.

Mr. Jiménez’s solution: He leaves clients his full name, address and banking details so they can transfer money to his checking account.

“They’ve given me up to 40,000 bolívars that way,” he said, which is about $2.50 at the current black market exchange rate but would require a staggering amount of cash in a country where the main note remains the 100 bolívar bill.

Many economists trace the inflation to problems at the state oil company.

As the company’s production declined, it became increasingly dependent on the outside world, depending on foreign companies to pump its oil and even on the United States for the crude oil used in refining. Now the use of these foreign contractors is generating steep bills at a time when the company has little income to pay them.

The Venezuelan government’s answer has been to pay in bolívars whenever possible and to print more cash. In a single week in late July, the country’s monetary base, or the amount of cash that exists in the country, rose by 13 percent, the highest increase many economists said they had ever seen. While printing more cash shores up the oil company in the short-term, it lowers the value of the currency for Venezuelans.

“Bolívars are like ice cubes now,” said Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, who leads the Latin America practice at Greenmantle, a macroeconomic advising firm, and teaches at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “If you’re going to go to the fridge and take one, it’s something you have to use right now, because soon it’s going to be gone.”

For the 34-year-old owner of a fireworks company in Caracas, one of the main challenges has been converting the bolívars he receives into dollars. Last year, he could find people selling dollars, the owner said, declining to give his name because exchanging bolívars on the black market is illegal. Now, he can still find black market dealers, he said, but it is much more costly.

Most Venezuelans, like Ms. Soler, the nurse who began cooking with firewood, don’t have access to dollars.

Since running out of gas this summer, Ms. Soler’s family members have been able to find it only intermittently, buying it as soon as it’s available because the value of their money depreciates so quickly. If the gas runs out again, the family say it is prepared, having learned to cook on the bonfire set up in the patio.

But Ms. Soler’s main fear, she says, is the price going beyond what she can afford.

“Before it was cheap; you just had to wait six hours in line,” she said. “Now you might get it, but it’s expensive.”

[newstfionline]

More Venezuelan Children Dying From Preventable Diseases Amid Crisis

Reuters, June 28, 2017

CARACAS/LA GUAJIRA, Venezuela--Twelve-year-old Samuel Becerra went to Venezuela’s main pediatric hospital for routine dialysis in March.

Within two months, he was dead, along with three other youngsters who also developed bacterial infections at the J.M. de los Rios children’s hospital in Caracas.

They were just a few of the many children who have died during a rapidly worsening health crisis in Venezuela, according to doctors, patients, and official and private data.

Millions of Venezuelans are struggling with shortages and triple-digit inflation during political and economic upheaval that has triggered months of street protests where at least 75 people have been killed.

Declining production of oil, a major export, has left the government increasingly short of cash, and lack of everything from food to medical equipment is hitting vulnerable groups like the elderly and children particularly hard.

Becerra’s mother, Judith Bront, still cries as she discusses her son’s death.

“Samuel has had chronic renal failure since birth,” said Bront, 53, “He had been receiving dialysis for nine years, and this had never happened.”

A dozen other children have the same infection, which doctors traced back to dialysis machines that were improperly maintained due to lack of resources, according to Belén Arteaga, head of the hospital’s kidney unit.

Surveys conducted in October by Catholic non-profit organization Caritas in poor sectors of Venezuela’s four most populous states found that 48 percent of children younger than 5 were malnourished. By April, that figure had risen to 56 percent.

Those at high risk of death from malnutrition increased to 11.4 percent of the sample from 8 percent in that time, the surveys showed.

Many treatments at J.M. de los Rios are available only because of private donations, according to parents and doctors. Parents routinely clean the rickety rooms, and there is no drinking water.

A survey earlier this year by Venezuela’s opposition-led Congress showed that nine of the country’s 10 main hospitals did not have adequate diagnostic facilities, such as X-ray machines and laboratories, and 64 percent did not offer food to the patients.

Neither Venezuela’s Information Ministry nor the Health Ministry responded to requests for comment.

Of the young patients, infants suffer most.

Last year 31 Venezuelan infants died every day on average. Many were victims of diarrhea, bacterial infections and other diseases that, according to the local pediatric society, could have been prevented or easily treated.

“There are vaccines and antibiotics available, but Venezuela is so lacking that these illnesses are coming back,” said Dr. Huniades Urbina, president of the Venezuelan Society of Childhood and Pediatrics.

Deaths of babies younger than 1 year old jumped 30 percent in Venezuela in 2016, according to government figures. That is a stark contrast to declines across Latin America.

Critics blame the problems on strict currency and price controls that reduce incentives to produce food and restrict imports.

The government says the opposition and Washington are waging an “economic war” against it.

Caritas found that Venezuela’s highest rate of malnutrition was in the La Guajira region of the western state of Zulia, on the arid and volatile Colombian border.

In Caracolito, a tiny settlement of three dirty and crumbling houses containing a total of some 30 people, a woman scavenged for food for her 6-month-old boy at a garbage dump near their home. The child was recovering from a weeks-long stay in a nearby hospital, where he overcame chronic malnutrition.

His brother had died in March from the condition.

“We were told to take vitamins but couldn’t find them,” said their mother, Lideibis Bracho, who is 26 and unemployed. “We went to search in Colombia, but they’re too expensive.”

Susana Raffalli, a nutritional coordinator at Caritas, said the health crisis was catastrophic.

“It’s not normal for you to go to a community, weigh 100 children and have 30 of them close to dying,” Raffalli said.

The government has been slow to publish data, and the previous health minister was fired shortly after the publication of recent infant mortality figures.

Back at the J.M. De Los Rios hospital in Caracas, double the number of children have come in for malnutrition-related issues this year, compared with all of 2016, according to Raffalli.

One mother caressed her son, who was suffering from malnutrition, pneumonia, macrocephaly and a severe lack of calcium.

“He’s nine months old, and he looks like a two-month-old,” said Marisela Huertas, 39. “I was told to give him whole milk, but I can’t find it.”