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fashournalist · 5 years ago

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Regular Segment: Favourite Stories [February]

From the moving story of Quaden Bayles to the Jules Schiller’s stories at ABC Radio Adelaide...keep reading to see at least 10 of my favourites this month. :) [cont]

The Australian War Memorial has launched a collection of artifacts and family heirlooms from the Holocaust. Survivors and their loved ones are the first to experience the moving exhibition, revealing stories of sadness, horror, and hope for the future. What struck me most was what Naomi Shaw said, "No matter what happens to you, there is an opportunity if you have faith and have courage...and you look towards the beauty of the world." Naomi is the duaghter of Henryka Shaw, a Holocaust survivor.

Read more here.

Celebrities like Hugh Jackman and Brad Williams as well as sports stars are uniting for a Brisbane boy with a disability after a heartbreaking video captured his battle to overcome bullying. Williams' campaign for the family to visit Disneyland has attracted nearly $200,000. The NRL's Indigenous players reached out to the young Queenslander and invited him to this weekend's All Stars game.

Quaden’s story really moved me, as one of my advocacy is anti-bullying as well. It’s really great that Quaden got to meet NRL’s biggest players. There was even a fundraising to send his family to Disneyland! But he turned the offer down.

Read more here.

There were emotional scenes in Bungendore, Canberra as a convoy of fire crews arrived with the fridge donated by Claire Hooper, which will be the centrepiece of an exhibition at the National Museum. It became an icon and a way for the community to reach out to all Emergency Services personnel. The firefighters are providing cool relief for crews on their way to the fire grounds. People wishing to contribute to the exhibition can search Fridge Door Fire Stories on Facebook. I am really touched by the power of community in this story.

Read more here.

Akec Makur Chuot who was born in South Sudan and spent much of her childhood in a refugee camp is Richmond Tigers' new recruit.

Read more here.

The 42nd Mardi Gras Parade and Party is set to descend Sydney's Oxford Street. Thousands of people are preparing for their costumes. It has become an international event, wherein US LGBTIQ+ activist Stuart Milk who is the nephew of iconic gay rights campaigner Harvey Milk. Mardi Gras is Australia’s Pride March and all the stories of empowerment are moving.

Read more here.

Heather Garriock says she is prepared to embrace the unknown ahead of her final game as coach of Canberra United. What inspired me here was Garriock’s attitude. She said when one door opens, another one opens. Now we all know that’s not new, but to hear it from someone who will no longer coach the team she used to lead, it’s inspiring. She may have been sacked, but she stays positive.

Read more here.

A state memorial has been held to recognise the devastating toll of the bushfires that ravaged NSW. Of the 33 people killed during the national bushfire emergency, 25 were in NSW including six volunteer fire crews and American aircrew. Six pairs of boots were a symbol of the six firefighters who died while battling the blazes across the state. Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O'Dwyer were killed in December when a fallen tree hit their tanker. Samuel McPaul died after his truck was flipped over in a fire tornado. Captain Ian MacBeth, First Officer Paul Clyde Hudson, and Flight Engineer Rick DeMorgan Jr died in a plane crash near Cooma in the Snowy-Monaro region last month. Among the 35,000 people who came to pay their respects to bushfire victims today were those who inquired about joining the NSW Rural Fire Service. An independent inquiry and Royal Commission will now investigate the causes and lessons to be learned from the unprecedented bushfire season.

Read more here.

Queensland Coroner James McDougall, who was tasked with examining the 2016 Dreamworld tragedy, found systemic failures to follow safety procedures contributed to the deaths of Roozbeh Araghi, Luke Dorsett, Kate Goodchild, and Cindy Low on the Thunder River Rapids ride when it malfunctioned. McDougall said Dreamworld had a reputation as a modern, world-class theme park but its safety systems were rudimentary at best, stating an accident is inevitable given the state of safety practices. He recommended changes to the regulatory framework to include annual risk assessments at rides, addressing the issue of a shortfall of experienced ride engineers, and to have the conduct of the engineer who inspected the rides assessed by the regulatory body. He has referred Dreamworld's parent company, Ardent Leisure, to the Office of Industrial Relations. Ardent Leisure says it is committed to implementing the recommendations and will create a memorial garden to honour the memory of everyone affected.

This is not inspiring, but it struck me because I am a huge fan of theme parks and I just hope each theme park commits to their safety procedures. Read more here.

As for interviews, I’m featuring this one with Tan Le, founder of EMOTIV. What struck me most was when she said “the brain has the ability to continually rewire, reprogram itself and that creates a lot of opportunities for healing.” Le has been fascinated by the untapped potential of the human mind since Le was a kid. She explained the emerging field of brain-computer interface or BCI. EMOTIV has developed these headsets or 'brainwear' to facilitate these interactions. Moreover, I have been inspired with the story of Rodrigo Hubner Mendes, a quadriplegic man who drives a Formula One using his thoughts. Le states they worked with Globo, a Brazilian broadcast TV network to create a campaign around respect. Le discusses the challenges she encountered in developing EMOTIV headsets and how she overcome them. She thinks in Australia, people tend to focus on the hero's story. She also mentioned different limitations in studying brains.

Read more here.

Another one of my favourites is Jules Schiller of ABC Radio Adelaide! He is my compere crush haha he is naturally hilarious, with every story connecting to listeners in a personal way. We’re also both big fans of The Carpenters, and we both hoard books haha. One difference we have though, is he had a lot of girlfriends and I never had a boyfriend yet haha. Sonya Feldhoff used to joke Schiller had 800 girlfriends. Haha.

So these are just some of the stories that stuck with me this month :)

#stories #australia #news #jules schiller #heather garriock #emotiv #tan le #mardi gras

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Desperate Rohingya Flee Myanmar on Trail of Suffering. ‘It Is All Gone.’

By Hannah Beech, NY Times, Sept. 2, 2017

REZU AMTALI, Bangladesh--They stumble down muddy ravines and flooded creeks through miles of hills and jungle in Bangladesh, and thousands more come each day, in a line stretching to the monsoon-darkened horizon.

Some are gaunt and spent, already starving and carrying listless and dehydrated babies, with many miles to go before they reach any refugee camp.

They are tens of thousands of Rohingya, who arrive bearing accounts of massacre at the hands of the Myanmar security forces and allied mobs that started on Aug. 25, after Rohingya militants staged attacks against government forces.

The retaliation that followed was carried out in methodical assaults on villages, with helicopters raining down fire on civilians and front-line troops cutting off families’ escape. The villagers’ accounts all portray indiscriminate attacks against fleeing noncombatants, adding to a death toll that even in early estimates is high into the hundreds, and is probably vastly worse.

“There are no more villages left, none at all,” said Rashed Ahmed, a 46-year-old farmer from a hamlet in Maungdaw Township in Myanmar. He had already been walking for four days. “There are no more people left, either,” he said. “It is all gone.”

The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority who live in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine State. Most were stripped of their citizenship by the military junta that used to rule Myanmar, and they have suffered decades of repression under the country’s Buddhist majority, including killings and mass rape, according to the United Nations. A new armed resistance is giving the military more reasons to oppress them.

But the past week’s exodus of civilians caught in the middle, which the United Nations said had reached nearly 76,000 on Saturday, dwarfs previous outflows of refugees to Bangladesh in such a short time period. Friday’s influx alone was the single largest movement of Rohingya here in more than a generation, according to the United Nations office in Dhaka.

The dying is not yet done. Some of the Rohingya militants have persuaded or coerced men and boys to stay behind and keep up the fight. And civilians who have stayed on the trail are running toward conditions so grim that they constitute a second humanitarian catastrophe.

They face another round of gunfire from Myanmar’s border guards, and miles of treacherous hill trails and flood-swollen streams and mud fields ahead before they reach crowded camps without enough food or medical help. Dozens were killed when their boats overturned, leaving the bodies of women and children washed up on river banks.

Tens of thousands more Rohingya are waiting for the Bangladeshi border force to allow them to enter. Still more are moving north from the Rohingya-dominated districts of Rakhine State. And the violence there continues.

“It breaks all records of inhumanity,” said a member of the Border Guard Bangladesh named Anamul, stationed at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp. “I have never seen anything like this.”

Here, in the forests of Rezu Amtali near the border with Myanmar, dozens of Rohingya told stories that were horrifying in their content and consistency.

After militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked police posts and an army base on Aug. 25, killing more than a dozen, the Myanmar military began torching entire villages with helicopters and petrol bombs, aided by Buddhist vigilantes from the ethnic Rakhine group, those fleeing the violence said.

Person after person along the trail into Bangladesh told of how the security forces cordoned off Rohingya villages as the fire rained down, and then shot and stabbed civilians. Children were not exempt.

Mizanur Rahman recalled how on Aug. 25 he had been working in a rice paddy in his village, known in Rohingya as Ton Bazar, in Buthidaung Township in Myanmar, when helicopters roared into the sky above him.

“Immediately, I had fear in my heart,” he said. His wife came running out of their house with their son, less than a month old.

They escaped to a nearby forest and watched as the choppers’ weapons engulfed the village in flames. Myanmar security forces descended, and the sound of gunfire reached the forest.

Mr. Rahman’s extended family fled the next day, but not before seeing his brother’s body lying on the ground, along with seven others. Three days later, as they climbed a hill near the border with Bangladesh, Mr. Rahman’s mother was shot dead by a Myanmar border guard.

“Now we are supposed to be safe in Bangladesh, but I do not feel safe,” Mr. Rahman said, as he wandered through a market in the Kutupalong refugee camp, with no money in his pocket.

His wife’s postpartum bleeding has increased so much that she can no longer walk or produce milk for their infant son. The baby, cradled in Mr. Rahman’s arms, looked skeletal, parched skin pinched at his joints. Other refugees took turns gently touching the baby’s feet to check if he was still alive.

The Myanmar military said on Friday that nearly 400 people had been killed in the violence that has swept across northern Rakhine since Aug. 25. Of that death toll, 370 people were identified as Rohingya fighters. Fourteen civilians, including four ethnic Rakhine and seven Hindus, were also reported killed. Myanmar officials, however, have given no specific accounting of civilian Rohingya deaths.

Dozens of people I spoke to on the refugee trail said they had seen multiple people shot dead in at least 15 different villages. Others spoke of families burned alive in their homes.

Human Rights Watch, the New York-based watchdog, documented 17 sites where satellite imagery showed extensive fire damage, including one village where 700 buildings had burned.

The Myanmar government claims Rohingya militants have torched their own homes in a bid for international sympathy. And the military maintains its current operations in Rakhine are designed at rooting out “extremist terrorists.”

There are, clearly, combatants on the Rohingya side. The state news media have reported that more than 50 clashes have broken out between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, known by the acronym ARSA, and Myanmar security forces over the past week.

That has further complicated life for civilians trying to flee.

Fortify Rights, a human-rights group based in Bangkok, interviewed villagers remaining in Maungdaw township who said that ARSA was forcing men and boys to stay and fight. The refugees flowing into Bangladesh have been predominantly women and children, leading to speculation as to where the men are.

Mr. Ahmed, the farmer, said that he was too old to fight, but that 20 others from his village, Renuaz, had remained. “They have nothing to lose,” he said. “The Myanmar government wants to eradicate an entire ethnic group.”

What the survivors are fleeing into is no haven. Bangladesh is itself poor, overcrowded and waterlogged, and has been reluctant to take on more displaced Rohingya. Around 400,000 already lived here before the exodus, according to government figures.

An urgent humanitarian disaster is brewing here in a country hard-pressed to feed itself, much less a new influx of refugees that one Bangladeshi official estimated could soon surpass 100,000 people.

For now, the Border Guard Bangladesh is mostly turning a blind eye and allowing the Rohingya to stream across the border.

But there is little help for them here, as they push on in hopes of reaching some of the grim refugee camps further in.

The luckiest of the Rohingya leaving the violence by trekking through the Chittagong Hills hefted bamboo poles laden with their most treasured belongings: sacks of rice, umbrellas, solar panels, water pots and grass mats.

Others, though, carried nothing at all because they had no time to organize anything before their flight. Toddlers marched naked. Not a single person wore shoes, which would have been ripped off by the sucking mud.

An international response to the crisis has started. On Wednesday, Britain arranged for a closed-door meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the Rohingya emergency. The civilian government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has faced mounting global criticism for refusing to acknowledge the magnitude of the military offensive on civilian Rohingya populations.

In an open letter to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, nearly a dozen of her fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates labeled last October’s military offensive “a human tragedy amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

#Myanmar #Burma #Rohingya #Rohingya refugees

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stovelift5-blog · 5 years ago

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The James Bailey House - 10 St. Nicholas Place

When 9-year old James Anthony McGinnis found himself orphaned in 1856 in Detroit, he learned to fend for himself. Five years later he was working in a circus. McGinnis took the name of the circus manager who had taken the boy under his wing, thereafter being known as James Bailey. By the 1870's Bailey was a major player in the circus field; his show aggressively competing with Phineas T. Barnum's as the nation’s premier circus. That competition was eliminated in 1880 when the two managers joined forces, creating Barnum & Bailey's Circus, "The Greatest Show on Earth." Bailey, who was a genius at marketing and public relations, preferred to work in the background, allowing Barnum to take credit for many of his innovations. The business made Bailey a millionaire and in 1886 he began planning a new residence. As wealthy New York families moved ever northward, he anticipated that the developing Hamilton Heights in Harlem would become the next exclusive residential district. The New York Times described the area as “particularly desirable and all the houses that have been put up in this neighborhood are handsome, well-built, elegant structures, and the locality is free from many objectionable features.” Bailey purchased the lot at the northeast corner of 150th Street and St. Nicholas Place and hired New Jersey-based architect Samuel Burrage Reed to design the building. Reed had just published his House-Plans for Everybody – For Village and Country Residences, Costing from $250 to $8,000. Bailey's home could cost far more. On July 31, 1886 The Record & Guide reported on the plans, saying that it "will be built of limestone and in the early English style." (Today we call it Romanesque Revival; although Reed would splash the design with Renaissance Revival and Queen Anne elements.) The article noted "a turret 69 feet high, also of stone, will be built on the southwest corner" and said "The porches will be tiled."

The date 1887, the year Bailey anticipated the project to be completed, is carved into the chimney back. Startlingly, the beautiful (and expensive) Henry F. Belcher oculus windows in each of the gables, are above the interior ceiling line, which makes them invisible from the interior, and because of the lack of light inside, cannot be appreciated from outside.

"It will be finished in hardwoods and will be furnished with steam head and all the latest improvements. The work throughout will be thoroughly first-class." Bailey had given the contractor a one-year deadline; but that did not happen. Finished in 1888 the mansion was fit for a showman--a 62-by-100-foot fantasy of limestone spires and arches, Flemish Renaissance gables and eclectic dormers, a corner tower with a conical cap, and a "boxed" porch supporting a spacious balcony, Even more striking than the castle-like façade were the interiors, designed by Joseph Burr Tiffany, cousin of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Each of the 29 rooms in the 8,250 square foot home was intended to awe. The Architectural Era described the conservatory as being "of iron and glass" and noted the numerous woods used throughout the residence– quartered oak in the two-story entrance hall where the polished floors held complex mahogany inlaid designs; black walnut in the office; hazel wood in the parlor and sycamore in the library. Intricate carpenter’s lace framed the archways between rooms on the main floor. Hand painted wallpaper and frescoed ceilings, art glass chandeliers and carved wooden fireplace surrounds filled the home.

Hall & Garrison executed the intricate woodwork found throughout the house.

The Architectural Era announced, "The windows are of plate glass, cylindrical in the tower, with art glass transoms and each window has inside blinds [shutters]." Those transoms and stained glass windows--upwards of 100--were executed by Henry F. Belcher. He held at least 22 patents for his process, by which thousands of glass pieces, often triangular, were laid out then sandwiched tightly between layers of asbestos. A molten lead alloy was poured in to fill the gaps. When the exterior surfaces were removed the complete, intact panels emerged. (Belcher's company was in business only from 1884 to 1890, most likely owing to the high cost of the windows.)

This window, unfortunately washed out in this photo because of the bright sunlight, is deeply inset within the parlor overmantel.

The sub-basement held the necessary if not glamorous areas--"fuel, steam furnace, refrigerator, etc.," said The Architectural Age. In the basement level, directly above, were the kitchen, laundry and servants' quarters, "together with store-lockers, bath-room, dumb waiter, etc., all thoroughly fitted and finished." The family's bedrooms were on the second floor, and the third was divided into "billiard and art rooms and two chambers, together with an observatory above."

Cast iron gas lamps sprout from the gate posts in this undated photograph, and the stone urn on the porch balcony holds an exotic plant. The female figure on the porch is presumably Ruth McCadden Bailey. from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

Millionaires like Bailey required private stables to house their several vehicles, horses and, most often, living accommodations for at least a coachman and one or two stable hands. On August 29, 1886 the Record & Guide had reported "James A. Bailey is going to build a model brick two-story stable, with terra cotta trimmings" on the north side of 150th Street between St. Nicholas Place and 10th Avenue. Samuel B. Reed, understandably, received this commission too. Later Bailey would place the overall cost of construction for his entire property at $160,000--or around $5 million today.

The magnificent "Bailey window," on the landing of the grand staircase included Bailey's monogram. The letters were executed in reverse to be read from the outside.

The Baileys country estate The Knolls, was in Mount Vernon, New York. Only eleven years after the Harlem mansion was completed, the family moved there permanently. While some historians feel that Bailey had become disenchanted with the neighborhood which was not developing as he anticipated, the sale advertisement explained "Owing to his absence in Europe, will be sold at a great sacrifice."

The sale advertisement included a sketch. New-York Tribune, May 21, 1899

The advertisement, in May 1899, touted "The interior finish is in rare and costly woods; elegant mantels, open fire-places, steam heat, electric lights, open plumbing, beautifully decorated throughout." A quick succession of owners followed. The mansion and stable were purchased by Henry Acker. In 1904 he sold the property to Max Marx, who almost immediately resold it to millionaire contractor John C. Rodgers. With Rodgers and his wife in the house were their son, John, Jr. and his wife.

The original chandelier in the dining room survives.

The Rodgers' stable no longer housed horses and carriages, but motorcars. It was a situation that resulted in a horrific tragedy on April 1, 1906. The New-York Tribune reported "Two women were run down by a speeding automobile in New Rochelle yesterday and injured so seriously that one of them died a few hours later...and the other is not expected to recover." The deceased victim was 73-year old Alvina Stein, and the other was her 70-year-old sister, Betty Kuchler. They had just left church services. The article said "After the accident, the automobile, which contained two well dressed women and two men, ran on at even greater speed, the occupants not even stopping to see whether the women were injured." There was no doubt that police would be determinedly looking for the culprits--Betty Kuchler was not only the mother of the Charles W. Kuchler, president of the New Rochelle Board of Aldermen, but of Police Commissioner Henry Kuchler. Witnesses had jotted down the license number of the car. It was registered to J. C. Rodgers, Jr. Investigators arrived at the St. Nicholas Place mansion that evening. The younger Mrs. Rodgers expressed surprise. "We have had the machine about two months, and as far as I know it was not out today." Betty Kuchler lingered in the hospital for two days before dying. But even before then, the widespread press coverage had not escaped the notice of John C. Rodgers, Sr., who did his own investigating. On April 2 he walked into the New Rochelle courthouse with his chauffeur, 20-year-old John Johnston. On April 3 The Sun wrote "When young Rodgers's father, John C. Rodgers, the subway contractor, was told of the accident he blamed his son for running away and insisted that Johnston should give himself up." John, Jr. refused to talk to reporters, but his father issued a statement: According to my son's story, and I think he has told me everything, the party were returning from Larchmont for dinner and going at a moderate rate of speed when the accident happened. As they approached a bridge over the road a four horse milk wagon came from the opposite direction. When our party was almost upon the team the leaders swung sharply across the road directly in the machine's way. It was so sudden that Johnston had no time to shut off and to avoid running into the team. He ran the machine up on the bank until it began to go over. He further explained that in order to keep the car from overturning, he "wrenched around the front wheels" and tore down the bank toward the elderly women. He called the group's speeding away from the scene "a clear case of stage fright in its worst form." Johnston was held on a staggering $10,000 bail and held for trial. Rodgers Sr. paid his legal expenses. In a surprising turn of events, both Johnston and John C. Rodgers, Jr. were indicted for manslaughter in the second degree on April 16.

The "Bailey window" on the staircase as it appears from outside. The small opening below is a stained glass window inset into the overmantel of an excruciatingly charming inglenook.

In April 1910 Rodgers sold the mansion to Dr. Louis Schaefer. The German-born chemist had founded the Schaefer Alkaloid Works in Maywood, New Jersey and owned other chemicals plants both in New York and New Jersey. Schaefer and his wife, Olga, had four children. Two of their daughters were married and living in Germany. Moving into the mansion with their parents were the unmarried Bertha and Ludwig, who, like his father, was a doctor. Things were not going well between Louis and Olga and on May 10, 1911 they separated. The following year, on November 26, Schaefer died in the house. His estate, estimated at $1,555,844 (or about $22.6 million today) was divided primarily among the four children. Newspapers were impressed that his will provided Olga an annuity of $10,000 per year--a comfortable $273,000 in today's money. It also contained an unusual clause regarding the mansion. The Sun reported that it "provided that the contents of his Manhattan home, including his books and paintings, were to go outright 'to those of my children that have not married at the time of my death,'" and that those children had "the right to lease the residence as a home until 1931 at a rental of $1,000 a year, and could buy it for $60,000."

The widow's watch provided breathtaking views.

That clause triggered a battle between Bertha and Ludwig. Before too long Bertha was married to Dr. Franz Koempel. She gave notice to her uncle, the executor of the estate, that she wanted to buy the mansion. Ludwig countered, saying he wanted to buy it and contended that his sister's marriage "deprived her of her right to occupy the house." A law suit was initiated, and because the sisters in Germany had children, they were involved and their fathers had to be served papers. The problem was that the men were in the German army and with Germany engaged in war both were on the battlefront.

Restoration of the "iron and glass" conservatory at the back of the house has not yet begun. The extensive limestone and bluestone retaining wall was listing badly and collapsing at the rear of the property. It was deconstructed and rebuilt by English stone mason, Colin Peters, with some of the work done hands-on by Jenny Spollen and her cousin, Haihua Xu.

Settling the estate became even more complicated when England entered World War I. The Sun explained that a "large deposit" of funds was held in the London branch of the Deutsches Bank of Berlin. The money "was seized by the British Government immediately following the declaration of war." It took years for the Schaefer heirs to receive their inheritance. In the meantime Ludwig and Bertha came to terms and January 1916 she and Dr. Koempel purchased the mansion from the estate. Dr. Franz Koempel's medical office was on East 86th Street. His practice was tagged as "German" in directories for decades. The couple would remain in the former Bailey mansion until 1950.

Apartment buildings were closing in when this photo was taken on September 1, 1935 from the collection of the New York Public Library.

By now James Bailey's high-end residential neighborhood had noticeably changed. The arrival of the Lenox Avenue subway in 1904 and the collapse of Harlem real estate prices around the same time resulted in the district's becoming the center of Manhattan's Black population. Rather than mansions, it was apartment buildings that were being built.

A pretty room leading to a private porch admits light into the main house through a set of stunning etched glass panels.

For years when passing the home while walking to Wadleigh High School on West 114th Street, one teen-aged girl had dreamed of living in the castle on 150th Street. In 1951 the grown-up girl, now married to an NYPD detective, got her wish. Marguerite and Warren Blake purchased the nine-bedroom Bailey house from which Marguerite ran the M. Marshall Blake Funeral Home for decades.

A small fire on the upper floors in 2000 prompted firefighters to break out several of the upper windows. The Blakes, by now, had retired and replacing the windows or repairing the increasingly leaky slate roof of the landmark structure was impossible for the elderly pair. Not yet willing to sell, they moved out. The now empty property continued to deteriorate.

Finally, at the age of 87, Marguerite Blake put her dream house on the market in 2008 for $10 million. The Blakes's inability to maintain the hulking property was apparent. Water had continued to seep in through roof. Plaster had fallen from some of the ceilings. A stifling odor, the result of years of dog urine, defiled the grand spaces. Despite it all, much of the architectural fabric of the Bailey house remained remarkably intact. The exquisite cabinetry, the fixtures like doorknobs and chased hinges, and (other than those lost in the fire) the etched and stained glass windows had survived. There were no takers. A writer for New York Magazine toured the forsaken mansion, calling it “a modern Grey Gardens.” Deliverance came on August 9, 2009 when physical therapist Martin Spollen and his wife, Jenny, purchased the the mother of all fixer-uppers for $1.4 million. The couple embarked on a daunting project, one that would be considered inconceivable for most. Priority was given to the roof--the source of the ongoing water damage. The roof was repaired and slate singles replaced to the precise specifications of the original--down to the pattern of the tiles. Several of the Belcher windows were in danger of being lost as their own weight caused them to sag and threaten to collapse. Expert glass conservators Tricia Somers and Victor Rothman restored the scores of transoms and windows, at times meticulously recreating tiny missing mosaic pieces. The Spollens set up a work-working shop in the basement where Jenny's cousin, skilled carpenter Haihua Xu, reproduces missing or damaged wooden elements. While Martin Spollen carries on his physical therapy practice, Jenny dedicates her full time to the restoration of the mansion--a hands-on labor of devotion. Their astonishing house has always been a private home. Historian Michael Henry Adams remarked that the house “could have been lost 100 times” by being divided into apartments, the interior detailing lost in a conversion to a school or business, or being razed for a modern apartment building.

The end of the restoration project is years away. But the Bailey mansion is safely in good hands. Without the passion of the Spollens for the house and its historic importance it would most likely have continued to decay despite its landmark status. photographs by the author

Source: http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-james-bailey-house-10-st-nicholas.html

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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sophrosynity · 8 years ago

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FJM is a fucking legend.

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74:17 of pure enlightenment... although “I love you, honeybear” is still my favorite vinyl... :)

1- PURE COMEDY (6:23)

The comedy of man starts like this ... Our brains are way too big for our mothers' hips ... And so Nature, she divines this alternative ... We emerged half-formed and hope that whoever greets us on the other end Is kind enough to fill us in ... And, babies, that's pretty much how it's been ever since ... Now the miracle of birth leaves a few issues to address ... Like, say, that half of us are periodically iron deficient ... So somebody's got to go kill something while I look after the kids ... I'd do it myself, but what, are you going to get this thing its milk? He says as soon as he gets back from the hunt, we can switch ... It's hard not to fall in love with something so helpless ... Ladies, I hope we don't end up regretting this ... Comedy, now that's what I call pure comedy ... Just waiting until the part where they start to believe ... They're at the center of everything ... And some all powerful being endowed this horror show with meaning ... Oh, their religions are the best ... They worship themselves yet they're totally obsessed ... With risen zombies, celestial virgins, magic tricks, these unbelievable outfits ... And they get terribly upset ... When you question their sacred texts ... Written by woman-hating epileptics ... Their languages just serve to confuse them ... Their confusion somehow makes them more sure ... They build fortunes poisoning their offspring ... And hand out prizes when someone patents the cure ... Where did they find these goons they elected to rule them? What makes these clowns they idolize so remarkable? These mammals are hell-bent on fashioning new gods ... So they can go on being godless animals ... Oh comedy, their illusions they have no choice but to believe ... Their horizons that just forever recede ... And how's this for irony, their idea of being free is a prison of beliefs ... That they never ever have to leave ... Oh comedy, oh it's like something that a madman would conceive! ... The only thing that seems to make them feel alive is the struggle to survive ... But the only thing that they request is something to numb the pain with ... Until there's nothing human left ... Just random matter suspended in the dark ... I hate to say it, but each other's all we got ...

2 - Total Entertainment Forever (2:53) Bedding Taylor Swift ... Every night inside the Oculus Rift ... After mister and the missus finish dinner and the dishes ... And now the future's definition is so much higher than it was last year ... It's like the images have all become real ... And someone's living my life for me out in the mirror ... No, can you believe how far we've come ... In the New Age? Freedom to have what you want ... In the New Age we'll all be entertained ... Rich or poor, the channels are all the same ... You're a star now, baby, so dry your tears ... You're just like them ... Wake on up from the nightmare ... Come on ... Oh ho oh Oh Oh ho oh No gods to rule us ... No drugs to soothe us ... No myths to prove stuff ... No love to confuse us ... Not bad for a race of demented monkeys ... From a cave to a city to a permanent party ... Come on ... Oh ho oh Oh Oh ho oh When the historians find us we'll be in our homes ... Plugged into our hubs ... Skin and bones ... A frozen smile on every face ... As the stories replay ... This must have been a wonderful place ...

3 - Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution (4:18)

It got too hot and so we overthrew the system ... 'Cause there's no place for human existence like right here ... On this bright blue marble orbited by trash ... Man, there's no beating that ... It was no big thing to give up the way of life we had ... Oh ho oh ... My social life is now quite a bit less hectic ... The nightlife and the protests are pretty scarce ... Now I mostly spend the long days walking through the city ... Empty as a tomb ... Sometimes I miss the top of the food chain ... But what a perfect afternoon ... Industry and commerce toppled to their knees ... The gears of progress halted ... The underclass set free ... The super-ego shatters with our ideologies ... The obscene injunction to enjoy life ... Disappears as in a dream ... And as we return to out native state ... To our primal scene ... The temperature, it started dropping ... The ice floes began to freeze ... From time to time we all get a bit restless ... With no one advertising to us constantly ... But the tribe at the former airport ... Some nights has meat and dancing ... If you don't mind gathering and hunting ... We're all still pretty good at eating on the run ... Things it would have been helpful to know before the revolution ... Though I'll admit some degree of resentment ... For the sudden lack of convenience around here ... But there are some visionaries among us developing some products ... To aid us in our struggle to survive ... On this godless rock that refuses to die ...

4 - Ballad Of The Dying Man (4:50)

Naturally the dying man wonders to himself: Has commentary been more elusive than anybody else? And had he successfully beaten back the rising tide ... Of idiots, dilettantes, and fools ... On his watch while he was alive ... Lord, just a little more time ... Oh, in no time at all ... This'll be the distant past ... Ooh ... So says the dying man once I'm in the box Just think of all the overrated hacks running amok And all of the pretentious, ignorant voices that will go unchecked The homophobes, hipsters, and 1% The false feminists he'd managed to detect Oh, who will critique them once he's left? Oh, in no time at all This'll be the distant past What he'd give for one more day to rate and analyze ... The world made in his image as of yet ... To realize what a mess to leave behind ... Eventually the dying man takes his final breath ... But first checks his news feed to see what he's 'bout to miss ... And it occurs to him a little late in the game ... We leave as clueless as we came ... For the rented heavens to the shadows in the cave We'll all be wrong someday ... Oh ... Oh ... Oh ...

5 - Birdie (5:19)

Take off, little winged creature ... It's nothing but teens in ravines ... And antics on concrete down here ... And are you really as free as all the great songs would have me believe? Let me tell you why some day, Birdie, you're gonna envy me ... Some dream of a world written in lines of code ... Well, I hope they engineer out politics, romance, and edifice ... Two outta three ain't bad ... Some envision a state governed by laws of business ... Merger and acquisition instead of violence or nations ... Where do I sign up? Take off, little winged creature ... It's nothing but falling debris, strollers, and babies down here ... And you may be up in the sky but our paradigms are just as deep and just as wide ... What with all our best attempts at transcendence ... Something's bound to take ... Soon, we'll live in a global culture devoid of gender or race ... There's just one tiny line: You're either born behind ... Or you're free to peek inside ... Life as just narrative, metadata in aggregate ... Where the enigma of humanity's wrapped up finally ... That as they say is that ... Oh, that day can't come soon enough ... It'll be so glorious ... When they finally find out what's bugging us. ...

6 - Leaving LA (13:11) I was living on the hill ... By the water tower and hiking trails ... And when the big one hit I’d have a seat ... To watch masters abandon their dogs and dogs run free ... Oh baby, it’s time to leave ... Take the van and the hearse down to New Orleans ... Leave under the gaze of the billboard queens ... Five-foot chicks with parted lips selling sweatshop jeans ... These L.A. phonies and their bullshit bands ... That sound like dollar signs and Amy Grant ... So reads the pulled quote from my last cover piece ... Entitled "The Oldest Man in Folk Rock Speaks” ... You can hear it all over the airwaves ... The manufactured gasp of the final days ... Someone should tell them ‘bout the time that they don’t have ... To praise the glorious future and the hopeless past ... A few things the songwriter needs ... Arrows of Love, a mask of Tragedy ... But if you want ecstasy or birth control ... Just run the tap until the water’s cold ... Anything else you can get online ... A creation myth or a .45 ... You're going to need one or the other to survive ... Where only the armed or the funny make it out alive ... Mara taunts me 'neath the tree ... She's like, "Oh great, that's just what we all need ... Another white guy in 2017 ... Who takes himself so goddamn seriously." She's not far off, the strange thing is ... That's pretty much what I thought when I started this ... It took me my whole life to learn to the play the G ... But the role of Oedipus was a total breeze ... Still I dreamt of garnering all rave reviews ... Just believably a little north of God's own truth ... He's a national treasure now, and here's the proof ... In the form of his major label debut ... A little less human with each release ... Closing the gap between the mask and me ... I swear I'll never do this, but is it okay? Don't want to be that guy but it's my birthday ... If everything ends with the photo then I'm on my way ... Ohhh-ho-o-oh oh-ho-ho-ho-oh I watched my old gods all collapse ... Were way more violent than my cartoon past ... It's like my father said before he croaked ... "Son, you're killing me, and that's all folks." So why is it I'm so distraught ... That what I'm selling is getting bought ... At some point you just can't control ... What people use your fake name for ... So I never learned to play the lead guitar ... I always more preferred the speaking parts ... Besides there's always someone willing to ... Fill up the spaces that I couldn't use ... Nonetheless, I've been practicing my whole life ... Washing dishes, playing drums, and getting by ... Until I figured, if I'm here then I just might ... Conceal my lack of skill here in the spotlights ... Maya, the mother of illusions, a beard, and I ... 2000 years or so since Ovid taught ... Night-blooming, teenage rosebuds, dirty talk ... And I'm merely a minor fascination to ... Manic virginal lust and college dudes ... I'm beginning to begin to see the end ... Of how it all goes down between me and them ... Some 10-verse chorus-less diatribe ... Plays as they all jump ship, "I used to like this guy ... This new shit really kinda makes me wanna die" ... Ohhh-ho-oh-oh oh-ho-ho-ho-oh Ohhh-ho-oh-oh oh-ho-ho-ho-oh My first memory of music's from ... The time at JCPenney's with my mom ... The watermelon candy I was choking on ... Barbara screaming, "Someone help my son!" ... I relive it most times the radio's on ... That "tell me lies, sweet little white lies" song ... That's when I first saw the comedy won't stop for ... Even little boys dying in the department store ... So we leave town in total silence ... New Year's Day, it's 6 o'clock AM ... I've never seen Sunset this abandoned ... Reminds me predictably of the world's end ... It'll be good to get more space ... God knows what all these suckers paid ... I can stop drinking and you can write your script ... But what we both think now is.

7 - A Bigger Paper Bag (4:41) Dance like a butterfly and drink like a fish ... If you're bent on taking demons down with only your fist ... And I've never known anyone who could lose himself in a bigger paper bag ... The weaker the signal, the sweeter the noise ... Hunching over an instrument that you now employ ... Like the Starvation Army needs a marching piano in the band ... Are you feeling used? ... I do ... Oh, I was pissing on the flame ... Like a child with cash or a king on cocaine ... I've got the world by the balls ... Am I supposed to behave? ... What a fraud ... What a con ... You're the only ... One I love ... It's easy to assume that you've built some rapport ... With a someone who only likes you for what you like yourself for ... Okay, you be my mirror but remember the only a few angles I tend to prefer ... I'm only here to serve ... Oh, I was pissing on the flame ... Like a child with cash or a king on cocaine ... I've got the world by the balls ... Am I supposed to behave? ... Oh, I was dancing 'round the flame ... Like a high-wire act with a "who, me?" face ... I was living on nothing but water and cake ... What a fraud ... What a con ... You're the only ... One I love ... One I love ... One I love ...

8 - When The God Of Love Returns There'll Be Hell To Pay (4:04) When the god of love returns ... There'll be hell to pay ... Though the world may be out of excuse ... I know just what I would say ... That the seven trumpets sound ... As a locust sky grows dark ... But first let's take you on a quick tour of your creation's handiwork ... Billy got through the prisons and stores ... And the pale horse looks a little sick ... Says, "Jesus, you didn't leave a whole lot for me ... If this isn't hell already then tell me what the hell is?" ... And we say it's just human, human nature ... This is place is savage and unjust ... We crawled out of the darkness ... And endured your impatience ... We're more than willing to adjust ... And now you've got the gall to judge us ... The spider spins his web ... The tiger stalks his prey ... And we steal fire from the heavens to try to keep the night at bay ... Every monster has a code ... One that steadies the shaking hand ... And he's determined to accrue more capital by whatever means he can ... Oh, it's just human, human nature ... We've got these appetites to serve ... You must not know the first thing about human beings ... We're the earth's most soulful predator ... Try something less ambitious the next time you get bored ... Oh, my Lord ... We just want light in the dark ... Some warmth in the cold ... And to make something out of nothing sounds like someone else I know ...

9 - Smoochie (3:45) When my personal demons are screaming ... And when my door of madness is half-open ... You stand alongside ... And say something to the effect that everything'll be ... Alright ... Soon ... Smoochie ... Chaos attends to creation ... And when the shadows inside me vie for attention ... You stand alongside ... And say something perfect like "concealment feeds the fear." And hand me a sea peach ... And say, "Come, come over here ... Smoochie."

10 - Two Wildly Different Perspectives (3:12) One side says ... “Y'all go to hell.” The other says ... “If I believed in God, I'd send you there.” But either way we make some space ... In the hell that we create ... On both sides ... One side says ... “Kill 'em all.” The other says ... “Line those killers up against the wall.” But either way some blood is shed ... Thanks to our cooperation ... On both sides ... On both sides ... One side says ... “Man, take what's yours!” The other says ... “Live on no more than you can afford.” But either way we just possess ... And everyone ends up with less ... On both sides ... On both sides ...

11 - The Memo (5:16) I'm gonna steal some bedsheets ... From an amputee ... I'm gonna mount em on a canvas ... In the middle of the gallery ... I'm gonna tell everybody ... It was painted by a chimpanzee ... Just between you and me ... Here at the cultural low watermark ... If it's fraud or art ... They'll pay you to believe ... I'm gonna take five young dudes ... From white families ... I'm gonna mount 'em on a billboard ... In the middle of the country ... I'm gonna tell everybody ... They sing like angels with whiter teeth ... But just between you and me ... They're just like the ones before ... With their standards lower ... Another concert-goer will pay you to believe ... Oh, caffeine in the morning, alcohol at night ... Cameras to record you and mirrors to recognize ... And as the world is getting smaller, small things take up all your time ... Narcissus would have had a field day if he could have got online ... And friends it's not self-love that kills you ... It's when those who hate you are allowed ... To sell you that you're a glorious shit ... The entire world revolves around ... And that you're the eater, no not the eaten ... But that your hunger will only cease ... If you come binge on radiant blandness ... At the disposable feast ... (You're enjoying the chill winter playlist) Just quickly how would you rate yourself ... [?] In terms of sex appeal and cultural significance? (Irony, irony Blo blo blo blo blo blo blo) Do you usually listen to music like this? (Just one more mile, you can do it again) Can we recommend some similar artists? (This is totally the song of my summer) Are you feeling depressed? (This guy just gets me) But your feedback's important ... To us ... (Music is my life) Gonna buy myself a sports team ... And put 'em in a pit ... I'm gonna wage the old crusade ... Against consciousness ... All I need's a couple winners ... To get every loser to fight in it ... Keep the golden calf ... Just need the bullshit ... And they won't just sell themselves into slavery ... They'll get on their knees and pay you to believe ...

12 - So I'm Growing Old On Magic Mountain (9:58) That was the last New Year I'll ever see ... And I wanna stay on that magic mountain ... With lost souls and beautiful women ... I drank some of Farmer's potion ... And we were moving in slow motion ... The slower, the better ... The slower, the better ... 'Cause there's no one old on magic mountain ... There's no one old, old on magic mountain ... And that was the very last barn I'm burning ... So for now everyone is dancing ... As if it's any time but the present ... So for now every young thing in my path ... I'll hold their face so long inside my hands ... The longer, the better ... The longer, the better ... 'Cause there's no one old on magic mountain ... There's no one old, old on magic mountain ... The wine has all been emptied... And smoke has cleared... As people file back to the valley... On the last night of life's party... These days the years thin till I can't remember... Just what it feels like to be young forever... So the longer I stay here... The longer there's no future... So I'm growing old on magic mountain... I'm growing old, old on magic mountain...

13 - In Twenty Years Or So (6:27 What's there to lose? For a ghost in a cheap rental suit? Clinging to a rock that is hurtling through space? And what's to regret? For a speck on a speck on a speck...? Made more ridiculous the more serious he gets? Oh, it's easy to forget. Oh, I read somewhere, That in twenty years, More or less... This human experiment will reach its violent end... But I look at you... As our second drinks arrive... The piano player's playing "This Must Be the Place"... And it's a miracle to be alive... One more time... There's nothing to fear... There's nothing to fear.... There's nothing to fear...

BUY THIS ALBUM. BUY THIS FOR YOUR TRUMP SUPPORTING FRIENDS BUY THIS FOR YOUR TRUMP SUPPORTING FRIENDS

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deniscollins · 5 years ago

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Years of Safety Disputes: Inside the Company that Flew Kobe Bryant

Federal regulations allow helicopter flights in relatively low visibility, given their ability to fly very slowly when necessary, but they are urge charter operators to consider the risks of doing so and advise them in such cases to land the aircraft and wait for the weather to clear. However, companies have to balance safety with the need to complete the jobs they were hired to do, and those that did not deliver their customers on time might find their clients going to another operator. If you were a Charter executive and foggy conditions led to poor visibility that was like “jumping into a pool filled with milk, and opening your eyes,” what would you do: (1) fly the chartered helicopter so customers will not be late or (2) wait an unknown amount of time for the weather to clear? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

In the years before the helicopter crash that killed the basketball legend Kobe Bryant and eight other people, the company operating the aircraft, Island Express Helicopters, had a series of disputes over its safety practices, according to federal accident reports and a former federal safety inspector.

The tensions first came to the attention of federal investigators in 2008, when a fatal accident involving an Island Express helicopter revealed disagreements that had been playing out for years behind the scenes. A Federal Aviation Administration operations inspector assigned to oversee the company, then under a previous owner, had been pushing for more stringent safety practices, according to federal records. The company’s president at the time pushed back, asking the F.A.A. to assign a different inspector.

The inspector, Gary Lackey, who agreed to step aside, said he was concerned that the company seemed unwilling to spend the money necessary to improve safety beyond what was minimally required.

“Everything that involves safety usually involves money also,” Mr. Lackey, who is now retired, said in an interview. “I think they were trying to cut corners.”

Before the tragedy involving Mr. Bryant, Island Express had four crashes since 1985 that damaged or destroyed helicopters, all under the company’s previous management, according to records.

Tensions over the company’s safety culture simmered even after the 2008 crash as the company came under new management several years later, according to people involved in the discussions.

The F.A.A. recorded an additional “incident” in the summer of 2018, when two Island Express helicopters were started up too close to one another, causing significant damage to the blades on both aircraft.

As recently as 2017, Kurt Deetz, a pilot and former safety manager at Island Express, resigned from his safety responsibilities, he said, over “differences of opinion” about how the company’s safety management system should be run.

It is not known what caused last month’s crash. Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board said they are looking at a range of potential issues, ranging from weather to mechanical problems. A key question is whether the Island Express pilot attempted to fly into thickening clouds and fog; N.T.S.B. investigators have asked for the public’s help in gathering photographs of weather conditions near the scene of the crash.

Island Express’s general counsel, Teri Elizabeth Neville, declined to comment in detail until after investigators release their findings on the crash. In a telephone interview this week, Ms. Neville said she was not aware of disputes with safety officials and noted that the company’s four crashes happened before the current management took over. She declined to say when that was, but state records and the company’s website suggest it was in 2012 or 2013.

Mr. Lackey, who was the F.A.A.’s point person for Island Express off and on during his 17 years at the agency, said the tensions between him and the company’s management began sometime around 2005, and N.T.S.B. records show that he issued warning letters to the company.

The records also show that the company’s former owner, John Moore, pushed back against Mr. Lackey’s efforts — in particular, his recommendations to tighten safety procedures on refueling, operating rotors when passengers were boarding, and operations at a helipad in San Pedro, Calif., that Mr. Lackey felt were unsafe. The company also protested when Mr. Lackey failed a pilot on a proficiency check.

Discussions over flying in bad weather came up with all helicopter companies, Mr. Lackey said. Though federal regulations allow helicopter flights in relatively low visibility, given their ability to fly very slowly when necessary, Mr. Lackey said he urged charter operators to consider the risks of doing so and advised them in such cases to land the aircraft and wait for the weather to clear.

He was aware that companies had to balance safety with the need to complete the jobs they were hired to do, he said, and those that did not deliver their customers on time might find their clients going to another operator.

Island Express was one of the few companies to go to Mr. Lackey’s managers to challenge his oversight, he said. After a series of clashes, the F.A.A. in 2008 assigned a new principal operations inspector for the company, records show.

“When John came in and said he wanted a new P.O.I., I said, ‘Fine, you can have somebody else,’” Mr. Lackey said, referring to Mr. Moore. Mr. Lackey said he felt the new person would also be vigilant about safety and that it was an opportunity to reset what had become a contentious relationship.

In a statement, the F.A.A. said it could not comment on an individual case, but that it was not uncommon to periodically rotate inspectors to new assignments. “All aviation safety inspectors are qualified to perform the oversight work they are assigned,” the statement said.

Mr. Lackey said he was assigned once again to oversee Island Express in subsequent years and found that Mr. Moore seemed more willing to accept F.A.A. safety requests. The relationship improved, Mr. Lackey said, until new owners and managers took over at Island Express.

After that, Mr. Lackey said, some of the old conflicts began to re-emerge. Once again, the company argued for a different inspector, but this time, Mr. Lackey said, he did not recall a change taking place in response to the request.

Accident and aviation experts said that tensions between aircraft companies and local F.A.A. inspectors are not uncommon. But short of gross incompetence on the part of the inspector, they said, it is highly unusual for an inspector to be replaced at the suggestion of a regulated company. In his interview with N.T.S.B. investigators after the 2008 crash, Mr. Moore did not raise any issues about Mr. Lackey’s competence, acknowledging that the inspector “knows his stuff.”

Jeff Guzzetti, a former N.T.S.B. and F.A.A. accident investigator, said that “a personality clash between an operator and an inspector” is not uncommon.

“It’s less frequent that an operator would hold sway over the F.A.A.,” he said. “It would have to be something that rises to the level of getting the attention of upper F.A.A. management to say, ‘Let’s get this inspector off and get another inspector.’”

Mr. Moore did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Mr. Deetz, the former safety manager who also flew Mr. Bryant as a pilot for Island Express, said that proactively managing safety within the company had been part of his job.

He said he established safety protocols for the company and convened a quarterly meeting with pilots and maintenance employees to discuss safety issues. But he said it was the company’s owners who usually dealt directly with the F.A.A., and he was unaware of any disputes with federal regulators during his time at the company.

Mr. Deetz declined to elaborate on the specific dispute with company management that prompted him to resign from his position as safety manager sometime in 2017. “It all goes back to culture,” he said. “There is window-dressing safety, and there is real, actual, get-your-hands-dirty safety culture.”

He later left the company altogether to take a pilot position with a competitor and now flies air ambulances in Arizona.

Most of the company’s previous crashes — a total of four since it was founded in 1982 — involved mechanical failures, federal records show.

In the 2008 accident, a turbine engine blade failed during an approach to Catalina Island near Los Angeles, leading to a rapid plunge and a crash into the ground that killed three people and injured three others.

In 1999, in the same area, a helicopter with seven people on board crashed and slid down a hill, striking some trees and rolling over after an engine failure caused by a loose pneumatic fitting. The crash resulted in mostly minor injuries.

In 1989, another incident with minor injuries occurred when an engine failed over the ocean because of a worn fuel pump assembly. The pilot was able to set the craft down with the help of emergency floats.

In 1985, an Island Express helicopter collided with another helicopter, an accident that investigators found was probably a result of “the inadequate visual lookout of both pilots.” One person was killed and 11 others were injured.

In the most recent incident, in 2018, two of the company’s Sikorsky S-76 helicopters were parked next to each other at Long Beach Airport for a photo shoot. When pilots started the engines, the drooping rotors straightened, and their blades began colliding. All six blades were damaged, an F.A.A. report says, “and Island Express Helicopters altered their parking plan to no longer park two S-76 aircraft next to each other.��

Mr. Guzzetti, the former federal accident investigator, said the 2018 incident was of more concern than it might initially appear. “This one is recent and it’s operational,” he said. “It’s an indicator of inadequate safety culture.”

But John Cox, an accident investigator and the head of Safety Operating Systems, an aviation consulting firm, said it was hard to determine any pattern in the company’s overall record. The previous crashes, he said, occurred over a long time period and many of them involved equipment failures, not operational ones.

“It could be construed as a red flag to have this many accidents for the same operator,” Mr. Cox said. “But you have to look more deeply as to when those accidents happened, over what period of time.”

#Safety

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olaluwe · 5 years ago

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In a world afflicted with wars, natural disasters, diseases, and widening inequalities; neither can the call for men and women with a large heart too loud nor their supply too surplus to requirement. If anything, they can only be inadequate.

We all know that Nigeria’s North-east has been ravaged by war of terror hatched by the lawless group called Boko Haram, fighting with impunity for a theocratic or what may be called an Islamic state.

Among other atrocities committed by the ISIS backed group, schools in their numbers have been destroyed. Girl-child in their hundreds have been abducted from their various schools many of whom were married off as child-brides, sexually abused and impregnated, murdered, and brainwashed as suicide bombers.

The lucky ones were either ransomed with undisclosed sums of money or swapped with Boko Haram prisoners in the custody of the Nigerian government.

Even as we speak Leah Sharibu, one of the last set of girls to be abducted by the terror group is still being held purportedly on the ground that she refused to deny her Christian faith. No one can tell for sure if she’s still alive.

Women have been raped, tortured, and killed right before their husbands and children; and men likewise.

Proportionately, Mosques and Churches have been razed and worshippers killed. Farmers have been displaced from their farms. Artisans callously killed.

Indeed, victims of their dastardly acts cut across the boundaries of the two dominant religions in Nigeria and across all ethnic nationalities.

In conclusion, it would be an economical truth to say social and economic activities have nearly halted in that region, especially in Bornu State.

The entire landscape of the country’s north is today littered with IDP’s camps teeming with unschooled, unclothed, unshod, diseased and malnourished children and mothers, jobless able-bodied men and women and traumatized directly or indirectly drawn from the activities of the insurgents or their fleeing members who have mutated into other criminal activities for survival.

Profile image: Otedola in all-white attire at the ball.

So much that an urgent intervention is needed to arrest the situation and bring succor to the sick, stressed, distressed, and a helping hand to weak.

In a clear response to the urgent call to affect these ones and other lives and show the milk of human kindness Nigeria business mogul, Femi Otedola doled out what’s arguably the single largest donation in the history of philanthropy in the country. He gave out N5billion for the North-east intervention.

This he did through his daughter at a ball organized by the Cuppy Foundation. The Cuppy Foundation is a Non-for-profit organization founded by Florence Ifeoluwa Otedola popularly known as DJ Cuppy.

The well-attended event took place at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja on the 10th of November, 1999. In attendance were the Vice president Yemi Osinbajo, Aliko Dangote, Lagos State Governor Babajide San-Olu and his Ogun State counterpart, Dapo Abiodun to mention a few.

Specifically, the donation was made to the Save The Children charity which a 100-year-old United Kingdom-based charity.

It might interest you to know that the charity organization is the biggest children-focused organization after UNICEF.

Its focus is to improve the lives of children through better education, health care, and economic opportunities as well as providing emergency aid in natural disasters, war, and other conflicts.

Of course, the donor’s daughter who’s also the facilitator is a Board Ambassador for the Save The Children and a Member of the organization’s Africa Advisory Board.

While Otedola may not be the richest man in Nigeria, he has, however, demonstrated so far an uncommon commitment to philanthropy, helping the underprivileged.

He rubbed shoulders with some of the towering names in this regard. To be sure, names like Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, Odoole Odua of Yoruba land, Chief Adebutu Kessington readily comes to mind; not forgetting also late Chief Moshood Kashimawo Abiola. There are numerous others too whom space will not permit their roll call.

Permit me, however, to run through a number of good causes to which Otedola has identified with financially in the course of time which undoubtedly had underlined his true status as a philanthropist per excellence.

In 2005, he instituted an N200 million scholarship for Lagos state undergraduates. In the same year, he donated N300 million for the completion of the National Ecumenical Centre in Abuja.

He at various time donated N100 million to the Lagos state College of Primary Education, N100 million to the Central Mosque, Ilorin (Kwara State), and N100 million to the University of Port Harcourt (River State).

He has committed to building and donating a faculty of engineering valued at N2 billion to the Augustine University in his hometown, Epe in Lagos State.

Recently, his intervention proved life-saving for the sick Christian Chukwu, former captain and coach of Super Eagles; and Peter Fregene, former international goalkeeper; Malek Fashek, celebrated Reggae artiste; Sadiq Daba and Victor Olaitan.

Philanthropy is a way of showing gratitude to God who blesses whom he chooses to bless. And for those who have found it in their heart to commit to it for the rest of their life like Otedola openly declared during the ball, they’re worthy of celebration and encouragement with the prudent application of these ginormous figures.

It would be a tragedy of monumental proportion to hear much later that those interventions are frittered away for personal purposes or diverted to other unrelated purposes. With Save The Children charity, we can only hope based on their track record that the fund would be judiciously used for the purpose it is intended.

And by the time account of stewardship is rendered if indeed it would, the life of Internally Displaced People in the North-east of Nigeria would’ve been positively affected to the glory of God and the donors.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Can famine be checked as Africa faces its worst crisis since the 1980s?

Peter Ford, Scott Peterson, Ryan Lenora Brown, CS Monitor, JULY 30, 2017

SIHANAMARO, MADAGASCAR--For as long as she can remember, Vaha Saajinuru, a wiry middle-aged woman with an expressive face, spent much of each day in exhausting drudgery, fetching water. Living on the parched, drought-stricken south coast of Madagascar, she had to make the journey four or five times a day: out of her village, down a cactus-lined dirt road, and across thorny grassland to a muddy water pit more than a mile from her home.

Then she’d walk back again, slowly, so that the water did not spill, a plastic bucket balanced on her head, a jerrycan in one hand and a granddaughter clinging to the other. Sometimes, when things were really bad, she and her family would drink what they call “chocolate water”--whatever they could scoop from potholes in the rust red clay roadway.

“We knew it wasn’t good for our health but we had no choice,” says Ms. Saajinuru.

Now she and her neighbors in Sihanamaro do have a choice as they gird themselves, like millions of others in Africa’s arid zones, to cope better with drought and the threat of famine. With help from UNICEF, they have installed seven community faucets around the village, each set in a cement trough and protected by a picket fence, to provide clean water pumped from a nearby well. “This has changed our lives,” Saajinuru says.

Madagascar’s brush with widespread starvation last year drew little attention from the rest of the world. But over the past 50 years other African countries have come to epitomize the dangers of drought and the tragedy of famine. Today, battered by global warming and civil wars, wide swaths of the continent again face an unprecedented crisis: In Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia, and across the Red Sea in Yemen, 20 million people face starvation, “barely surviving in the space between malnutrition and death,” in the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Yet the threat many of these people face today may be less grave than it would have been for their parents and grandparents. Over the past two decades, African nations have learned valuable lessons about how to predict, if not prevent, droughts, and how to ward off famine by strengthening the defenses of the most vulnerable.

From Madagascar to Ethiopia to Somalia and beyond, governments, international aid agencies, and the villagers they help are building up “community resilience.” That’s the new buzzword in humanitarian circles: It is seen as key to ensuring that farmers and herders have something to hold onto when drought strikes, rather than cycling endlessly in and out of disaster.

Resilience is a big concept that works in little ways. It could be a water project such as Sihanamaro’s, ensuring that already malnourished children do not get sicker by drinking polluted water. It could be a public works venture in Ethiopia that pays villagers cash or gives them food to build roads or dig wells. Or it could be an experimental farm in Somaliland encouraging goatherds to diversify into growing food crops.

These initiatives won’t prevent drought, nor will they eliminate famine overnight. But by helping people withstand sudden shocks and contributing to longer-term development goals, they are saving lives.

In the meantime, there is a life in urgent need of saving at an emergency health center in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, a self-governing breakaway region of Somalia in the Horn of Africa. Nabhan Ismail, his eyes sunken and a feeding tube taped to his cheek, turns restlessly on his bed as family members take turns stroking his tiny body. The family made the journey to this center, run by UNICEF and the Somaliland Red Crescent, after waiting seven days to find a ride from their remote area 100 miles away.

“I am thinking about Nabhan’s health and praying to God that he will get better,” says Ismail Ibrahim, the boy’s teary-eyed young father. “I have never heard of a drought that claimed the lives of the livestock and the lives of people.”

He says “countless” children have died recently of hunger and disease in his remote home district 100 miles away. His herd of 100 sheep and goats has been reduced to just six animals.

Mr. Ibrahim is by no means alone. The United Nations warned recently that 6.7 million people are in urgent need of assistance in Somalia; 6 million people are in the same predicament in South Sudan; in Yemen, 7 million people are on the brink of famine.

“We stand at a critical point in history,” UN humanitarian affairs chief Stephen O’Brien told the UN Security Council in March. “Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.” Four months later, the outlook is no less grim.

The crises in South Sudan and Yemen are almost entirely human-caused. They are the result of civil wars in which all sides destroy crops or steal livestock in punitive raids, forcibly confiscate food aid for soldiers’ use, and make it too dangerous for humanitarian workers to go to many areas.

But Ethiopia, Somalia, and Madagascar face a different problem: They are at the sharp end of climate change, which is disrupting rainfall and other weather patterns. The current drought in southeastern Ethiopia follows a dry period in the north, which in turn struck only a few years after the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa that brought famine to Somalia. It’s a succession of extreme weather events that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.

“No rain, no water, no pasture, no milk, no food,” laments Halima Gawsole, a thin and muscular herder with hard eyes, listing the chain of misfortunes she has endured since the rains stopped coming in southern Ethiopia a year ago.

Now she and 30 members of her extended family are on the move, trudging down the road through a parched landscape, their last remaining possessions piled on the back of their sole surviving animal, a weary donkey. They had heard the government was handing out water and sacks of grain nearby and had come to see if it was true. “We have lost everything now,” says Ms. Gawsole.

Next door, Somalia is living through a drought that, residents say, is even worse than the one that killed 250,000 in 2011. It has forced hundreds of thousands of people from their grazing lands into makeshift camps with no sanitation, such as one on the outskirts of Burco, a desert town 110 miles east of Hargeisa.

A straggly collection of sticks and rags, the settlement--which residents ironically call “prosperity camp”--offers little protection from the oppressive heat and wind-whipped sand. The only relief is brought by a water truck that comes daily.

“Water is life, but what about food and something to cook it with?” asks Farah Robleh, whose veins stand out on his forehead above his gaunt, gray-stubbled cheeks. He once herded 200 goats and sheep and 20 camels. He has just 20 goats left. “I don’t think anyone can live here anymore,” he sighs. “We have no options. We are only waiting for help.”

In Madagascar, the large island off the southeast coast of Africa, the situation is less grim, but droughts that used to come in cycles are now semipermanent. In 2016 El Niño made the rains even more irregular, “and last year was the worst that I’ve experienced,” says Audin Rabemiandriso, the doctor who runs the health clinic in the dusty, ramshackle coastal town of Ambovombe.

Desperate to buy food, locals first sold their goats. Then they sold their prized humpback cattle. Finally, they sold their kitchen pots. There was nothing to cook, anyway, besides leaves and bitter cactus fruit.

Droughts are inevitable, and likely to strike more often and more harshly because of global warming. But famines are avoidable. It’s a question of doing the right thing. And, critically, of doing the right thing at the right time.

That’s why the UN and aid groups are increasingly unleashing a new weapon in their quest to prevent famine--warning the world early and often. In 2011, when a quarter of a million Somalis died of starvation, half of them had already perished by the time famine was officially declared. It was that tragedy that prompted the UN to sound the alarm in advance, last February, about the current impending disasters.

It worked, sort of. International donors stepped up quickly, and the famine that had been declared in two districts of South Sudan has been beaten back. Elsewhere in the country, though, the situation is worsening and a million more people need immediate aid now than in February.

In Madagascar the world reacted quickly to the creeping food crisis last year because international aid workers had long been present in the country, one of the poorest and least developed places in the world. UNICEF saw that food was growing alarmingly scarce as early as 2015, when government doctors and nutritionists carrying out routine health checks began reporting skyrocketing levels of child malnutrition.

Quickly, the agency expanded its nutrition programs to all 193 town and village health centers in the south, screening every child under age 5 and making sure the most malnourished were given high-nutrition peanut-based food supplements. By and large, they succeeded; few children died.

International agencies “were here, ready to go,” says Elke Wisch, UNICEF director in Madagascar, “and we switched gears into emergency mode in a timely fashion.”

To cope with hunger, aid groups are increasingly trying a novel tactic--handing out cash instead of food. In Yirowe, a drought-stricken village in Somaliland, cash transfers have been instrumental in giving locals the ability to hold out.

The goal is to keep people from leaving their homes and joining the flood of 740,000 internally displaced people who are straining international relief efforts. And it’s working. Not only have all of Yirowe’s 655 families stayed put, but they have welcomed 150 families from the nearby countryside.

Concern Worldwide, an Irish nongovernmental aid group, gave the village’s poorest families $65 a month for three months and double that in April. Cash handouts are an increasingly common way of giving aid in many parts of the world. “Cash allows the flexibility for beneficiaries to make empowered choices about what they need most,” says Erin Wolgamuth, Concern’s regional manager in Somaliland.

“Without this help ... we would not even be at a basic level,” notes Abdirizak Ayah Awad, the head of the village committee that chose the recipient families.

Patricia Soavenira has benefited from cash payments, too. She lives in a cramped, low-roofed thatched hut in Ankilimanara, a tiny village on Madagascar’s parched south coast. Ms. Soavenira is one of 55,000 mothers whose malnourished children make them eligible for a $10 monthly handout from a local nongovernmental organization.

Before the payments, Soavenira had sold everything her family owned except one pot and a spoon. Now she has bought five more spoons and another saucepan. She takes weekly trips to a market an hour’s walk away, where she buys rice, corn, and beans.

“Without the cash, we’d just be eating cassava leaves and wild cactus like last year,” she says.

In some cases, local villagers are appealing directly to individuals. Jamal Abdi Sarman, a senior UNICEF staffer in Hargeisa, is a member of a private WhatsApp group using mobile phones to spirit aid money to hungry Somalis.

“From Australia, from South Africa, from Istanbul and California the money goes into the same [bank] account in Burco,” a town in the heart of drought country, where it is used to buy food for the neediest families, Mr. Sarman says.

A handful of herders first sent out an SOS six months ago when their livestock began to die off. Since then, their WhatsApp group--christened Daryeel, which means “caring”--has gathered $255,000 from fellow clan members and other donors on five continents. It has paid for water trucks and packages of rice, dates, sugar, milk, and oil for nearly 1,000 families in 39 villages. But the benefits have spread much further.

Ununley is a tiny desert community of corrugated tin-roofed homes and rustic stick-frame shelters covered with sheets and blankets in Somalia. A handful of modest shops cling to the paved road that bisects the settlement and disappears into the unforgiving Somali moonscape. Ten families here received a share of the bounty that came in and have, in turn, shared it with their neighbors.

“Almost 100 families did not move because of the help for 10 families,” says Safiya Hassan Ibrahim, who distributes the aid with no-nonsense efficiency.

“The assistance came when we most needed it,” adds one recipient, Mohamed Farah. “It changed our lives--we would have died without it, just like our livestock.”

As much as these initiatives help, relief experts say that more “sustained resilience” programs are needed to prevent people from drifting into despair to begin with. Such efforts can take different forms. In Andahive, a village in southern Madagascar, resilience comes in the shape of a new sweet potato.

Prinu Rakutunirina, a leather-faced local farmer, has always grown sweet potatoes, but the traditional local variety was not ideal: It grew poorly in drought and the tubers went bad within weeks of harvest.

Last year he planted a new, more drought-resistant strain, introduced by agronomists with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). But it was no match for the dry weather: Starved of water, the plants withered, twice.

Maybe it was faith or maybe it was desperation, but Mr. Rakutunirina stuck with his experimental variety: He finally brought in a harvest last February.

And what a harvest it was. Yields were double what they used to be, he says, and the new sweet potatoes last for nearly a year. That means he can decide when he wants to sell them. He can also carry his family through the lean season, between harvests, when there is normally nothing to eat.

Rakutunirina was part of a pilot group using the new variety. “Now everyone wants to plant this type,” he says, though it will be a year until the 100,000 farmers using the improved shoots will have harvested enough to spread the variety across the dry south.

“If there is no rain for three months it does not matter how many high-yield seeds you plant,” cautions Jean-Etienne Blanc, an FAO fieldworker. “You’ll get a poor harvest. But farmers are learning about good-quality seeds and how to use them, and next year they will be seeking them out.”

Rural residents across northeastern Africa are also learning how better to conserve water. Consider the case of Mohamed Abdi Madar, a camel herder who roams the scrubland west of Hargeisa. He doesn’t live near a well, but he does now have access to an underground water tank that catches and stores rainwater. It was dug by locals and paid for by Concern.

“Leaving aside the livestock, even the people would start to die without this water,” says Mr. Madar as he pulls up a full bucket to give his two camels.

The concrete-lined tank, 40 feet long by 20 feet across and 10 feet deep, gathers rainwater channeled to it from higher ground and stores it under a sheet of corrugated iron to slow evaporation.

Without the tank, protected from animals by a thick ring of thorn bushes, herders would have been forced to head to a riverbed six miles away. “But we would have gone there only with hope,” says Madar: The riverbed is dry and “we do not have the power or the resources to dig out the water.”

Dependent on the supplies in the tank, Madar and his fellow herders are turning away from their ancestral nomadic lifestyle and taking up agriculture as a new source of sustenance. “It’s not optional, it’s mandatory,” says Mohamed Abdi Yusuf, an elder at another water catchment tank nearby. “Whenever people lose their livestock they start farming.”

Mr. Yusuf has identified a deeper shift that may have to occur if Somalis are to survive recurring droughts--a cultural one. Once upon a time, the camel was “as vital to life as the tendons in one’s back,” as an ancient Somali poet put it, “a living boulder placed by God in the wilderness.”

Today nomadism “is no longer tenable,” says Saad Ali Shire, Somaliland’s foreign minister. Since the 1950s his country’s population has risen sixfold and livestock numbers fourfold, burdening the land beyond what it can bear even when the rains come.

“If we want to keep camels and sheep and goats, then we must change the way we raise them,” Mr. Shire says.

That will mean staying in one place and growing animal feed alongside other crops, such as the vegetables that trainees are about to harvest at the Free Farmer School, 40 miles outside Hargeisa. Young citrus trees, sunflowers, onion, and garlic wave in the breeze. Local elders offer corn and watermelons as gifts to a visitor and emblems of their desire to learn a new lifestyle.

“We gave them seeds and tools to increase their resilience,” says Khaled Taib, a water expert with Concern, which set up the farm. “Now they need some knowledge.”

Modernization and development can help stem starvation as well. This has certainly been the case in Ethiopia, once a poster child for catastrophic famines such as the one that killed more than 400,000 people in 1984. Today, thanks to more than a decade of breathless economic growth, the country’s image is closer to matching that of its capital, Addis Ababa--gleaming, cosmopolitan, and boldly aspirational.

Indeed, Ethiopia has become a regional model for early famine warning and nimble response. This year the country has been plagued by the same drought as next-door South Sudan and Somalia but is experiencing nowhere near the suffering.

The 2015-16 drought in the north of the country “was at least as bad” as the 1984 drought, says Stein Holden, an Ethiopia expert at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in As, Norway. “But because the country is economically much stronger and more stable now, it has been able to provide a lot of the aid itself, without outside intervention.”

Contributing to Ethiopia’s success: a natural disaster management office that amasses stacks of early warning weather data, and a public works program in the lean season that pays poor Ethiopians in cash or food to build the kind of infrastructure that the country needs--water storage tanks, paved roads, and health posts.

“The system Ethiopia has is spectacular,” says Kelly Johnson, a World Bank social protection expert advising Addis Ababa. “It is beginning to serve as a model for other programs in Africa and around the world.”

Ethiopia’s success story is not a simple one. The country’s one-party government has instituted and maintains a firm grip on journalists and political opponents. Foreign aid workers are careful not to offend their hosts by speaking too openly of problems they find.

But, significantly, drought no longer necessarily means death in Ethiopia.

For other parts of Africa, that is, unfortunately, not the case. Despite the lessons learned about alleviating famine over the past quarter century, droughts still occur. For every relief effort that works, another falls short. Hunger still stalks villages.

But aid workers and local residents are getting better at blunting the effects of drought, saving lives as they do. Amid all the hardship, there are individual moments of triumph, too. Back in the emergency health center in Hargeisa, staffers have been working assiduously to save little Nabhan, the infant with the feeding tube. A week after being admitted to the center, nurses say he is on his way to recovery.

“We think he will survive,” says his joyful grandmother, Ardo Mohamoud. “We are so happy!”

#famine #climate change #African famine #Madagascar #Ethiopia #Somalia

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