Se llama Jorge. Perdió a sus tres hijos, su exesposa y sus nietos en el terremoto.
Antes de orar por él, nos pidió algo que nos dejó en silencio: no quería provisiones ni ayuda material, solo un abrazo fuerte, un gesto de consuelo.
También nos dijo que valoráramos a nuestra familia mientras están en vida, que son lo más importante. Nos pidió repetirles cada día, en todo momento, cuánto los amamos.
Historias como la suya se repiten por miles en La Guaira.
Hoy, con el corazón apretado, elevo una oración al Dios del cielo para que fortalezca a este hombre y a todos los que atraviesan pérdidas tan profundas.
Confiamos en Él
Se logró...SFC JORGE OTERO-BARRTO llego a la Parada Puertorriqueña! Por aqui solo una nota para agradecerle al Alcalde de todo corazón su amabilidad con la familia Otero-Barreto y conmigo. Dios te cuide Bendiciones y con un gran respeto...Col Arnaldo Claudio USARMY RET
Today is the Pedo-in-Chief @realDonaldTrump birthday, and to celebrate, I just wanted to remind him of what a REAL AMERICAN PRESIDENT looks like and acts like.
Today is President Obama appreciation day.
👇👇👇👇
Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day – the Allied landings in Normandy, which significantly hastened the countdown to the Nazis' collapse in World War II. It is one of the most important moments of unity among the defenders of life in human history, and it was less than a year until the peoples’ aspiration for freedom and the hope of peace prevailed in May 1945. It happened then. We are working to make it happen again today.
And although yesterday in Petersburg another cynical order to continue killing was issued for the army trying to destroy our freedom, history has seen this before. The Nazis also had their own hopes after D-Day. But freedom still wins. And even in the darkest circumstances, people find ways to come together to protect life.
I thank all those who are now helping to protect the values that prevailed in World War II. I thank everyone who is defending life. Glory to Ukraine!
When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.
He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.
In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.
For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.
He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.
He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.
Too on point not to share. This is great, but too bad the Orange Felon’s enablers won’t let him see it.
This Australian's reply to #Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."
- Tony Locke
CALL OUT!
98 year old WWII Navy veteran is being buried with no known family.
His name is John Arnold III.
He deserves a proper goodbye.
Boston area: Show up Monday May 18h. Hanson, Massachusetts.
10am visitation. 11am Mass.
Can't be there? Share this.
Confirmado: la cepa se transmite entre humanos. Es hora de que el Departamento de Salud oriente a los ciudadanos. Esta isla recibe miles y miles de turistas de cruceros y aéreos también. VSJ es un semillero de visitantes. El Covid llego a PR por turista de crucero.
🇺🇬 | Estafadores en Uganda utilizan perros heridos, en ocasiones lastimándolos a propósito, para engañar a donantes extranjeros según una investigación de la BBC.
Los delincuentes simulan rescates y tratamientos médicos falsos en refugios ficticios para recaudar miles de dólares que luego usan en beneficio personal.
I skipped the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year.
Instead, I went to the memorial of my friend, Virginia Giuffre.
Covering Jeffrey Epstein changed my career. Knowing Virginia changed me.
She carried so much—and still found a way to be light.
I won’t forget her.
🚨AMAZON DRIVER RUNS OVER FAMILY DOG AND LEAVES HER TO DIE
On April 21st at 4:56PM, an Amazon delivery driver in Benson, NC ignored clear instructions, entered a private driveway, and ran over Sadie, a beloved dog owned by Marshall and Valerie Chavis. The driver did not stop, did not check on her, and did not notify the family.
Within minutes, Sadie was rushed to the vet with catastrophic injuries, including severe brain trauma and fractures to her C1 and C2 vertebrae. She is alive, but barely, and now fighting for her life.
In Valerie’s words:
“Immediately upon impact Sadie ran to the front porch as a dog does when they have been hit. She was urinating uncontrollably, trying to stand and repeatedly falling over, her left eye bulging out of her head, both of her eyes bouncing back and forth rapidly, both pupils dilated, and visible bruising and abrasions on the left side of her body from impact. I immediately knew her injuries were severe.”
The Chavis family had done everything right. A clearly marked package drop box at the road. Posted signage. No Trespassing notices. Explicit delivery instructions. Carriers like FedEx and UPS follow these directions without issue. Amazon drivers have repeatedly ignored them.
Now, instead of taking responsibility, Amazon is refusing to step up. The company is demanding the family pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for emergency, life saving care, with only the possibility of partial reimbursement later.
This is negligence. This is unacceptable. And it cannot be ignored.
AMAZON NEEDS TO #SaveSadie.
Share this and demand that Amazon take responsibility and change its practices before another family suffers the same devastation. @amazon
Claro, porque proteger a los niños significa castigar decisiones personales con lo más extremo, mientras los que realmente les hacen daño siguen por ahí.
Politicos, no se molesten por que les hagan una crítica costructiva, recuerde que quien paga su sueldo es el pueblo, ustedes son nuestros empleados y deben tener consenso con el pueblo, tomar consejos ideas y críticas constructivas. El estado es el Pueblo Recuérdelo!