Fogbow

Three abandoned children, two missing parents and a 40-year mystery
Elvira and her brothers, Ricard and Ramón, were left at a train station in Barcelona aged two, four and five. As an adult, when Elvira decided to look for her parents, she discovered a family history wilder than anything she had imagined

by Giles Tremlett
Tue 28 Mar 2023 06.00 BST

On 22 April 1984, a sandy-haired, ringleted two-year-old girl named Elvira was driven with her brothers, Ricard and Ramón, aged four and five, to a grand railway terminus in Barcelona. The children, dressed in designer clothes, rode in a white Mercedes-Benz driven by their father’s French friend Denis. He parked near the modernist Estación de Francia and walked them into the hangar-like hall, which had shiny, patterned marble floors and was topped by two glass domes. Once there, he told the children to wait while he bought sweets.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... -barcelona

Good News

Indigenous Nations
The San Carlos Apache Tribe develops water infrastructure on their reservation with funding from a $1.5M contract with the U.S. Interior Dept—a culmination of 40 years of activism.

National
A federal court in WA orders the FDA to make no changes restricting access to mifepristone, which has been safely used in medication abortions for 23 years.
The DOJ appeals a TX court’s decision that would block access to mifepristone nationally.
The DOJ will appeal a court decision blocking the enforcement of some preventive care provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
SCOTUS rejects WV’s request that the state be allowed to enforce a discriminatory ban against transgender student athletes.
Federal appeals court reaffirms that schools staff may not deliberately misgender trans and nonbinary students.
DACA recipients will be eligible to apply for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges, resulting in lower costs to communities and hospitals.
President Biden is poised to nominate two Latina judges to powerful federal appeals courts.
6,122 aspiring Americans are admitted into the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in March, nearly doubling February’s numbers.
President Biden issues a proclamation to begin Black Maternal Health Week, highlighting the pain, neglect, and loss so many families experience during what should be a joyous occasion.
The Environmental Protection Agency is updates standards on mercury emissions and other harmful pollutants from coal-fired power plants.
IRS and Treasury Department will use $80 billion in new funding for the tax service to collect unpaid balances from high-income earners and to boost customer service resources for middle- and low-income tax filers.
FEMA will provide extra funding for low-carbon building materials in areas that have been hit by natural disasters, like those affected by the recent Midwestern tornadoes.
Fewer people visited websites with false or misleading information prior to the 2020 election than leading up to 2016’s.
Thanks to efforts to educate media consumers, fewer Americans visited websites with false and misleading information in 2020 than in 2016.
State
CO: A trio of health care bills enshrine access to abortion and gender-affirming procedures and medications.
HI’s legislature passes a resolution affirming that the Equal Rights Amendment is the 28th Amendment.
ID: Gov. Brad Little vetoes a bill that would have allowed parents to sue libraries and interfere with young people’s access to library materials.
KY: Gov. Andy Beshear signs into law a bill to legalize marijuana, reducing the costs associated with arrests and incarceration.
FL: The natural flow of the Kissimmee River has been restored along a 44-mile portion, reversing damage to 20,000 acres of biodiverse wetlands.
MA: Gov. Maura Healey signs an executive order permitting abortion providers and patients to use mifepristone with state protection from prosecution and asks University of MA Amherst to also purchase 15,000 doses.

Ukrainian sisters lodging in Northumberland turn out to be musical prodigies
Strangers stopped to listen in the street when the windows were open and the girls from refugee family were practising

Dalya Alberge
Sat 29 Apr 2023 12.37 BST

When a Northumberland couple opened up their village home to a Ukrainian mother and her two daughters last year, they were responding to the plight of refugees escaping the Russian invasion. Having been told no more than that this was a musical family, Sheilagh Matheson and Chris Roberts offered two bedrooms and a honky-tonk piano.

Soon they found themselves arranging the loan of a Steinway upright after discovering that these children had an extraordinary musical talent – one that made passersby stop to listen at an open window.

Both girls have now received scholarships to two of the UK’s foremost music schools, less than a year after fleeing their home near Kyiv to start new lives in Corbridge, not far from Newcastle.

Khrystyna Mykhailichenko, 17, has been awarded a full bursary for four years to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her 12-year-old sister, Sasha, a violinist, has a scholarship to become a weekly boarder at the Yehudi Menuhin School near Leatherhead in Surrey.

When Khrystyna played the Chopin Ballade No 1 to me recently, it was as if she was channelling the burdens of a hard life
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Royal Academy of Music
Both feel that classical music helped them to face the trauma of abandoning their home with their mother, Nataliia. They lived in Poland for three months before arriving in Corbridge last June as part of the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

Matheson, a semi-retired broadcast journalist, lives with her husband, a national director of the Skills Funding Agency, in an end-of-terrace five-bedroomed house.

She told the Observer that they themselves are not musical, but that the Ukrainians’ music-making in their home has been “absolutely unbelievable”: “You run out of superlatives. When the windows are open, you see people walking by and they just stand there.”




https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... -prodigies

sugar magnolia wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 10:45 am My happy things this week:
A week in NOLA.
Seeing dozens of friends I haven't seen in 3 years.
Over $5000 (probably closer to 7 by the time they add the credit cards) made at the raffle to benefit the THF foundation grant program.
An indigo bunting sitting on the bird feeder when we got home!

sugar magnolia wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 10:45 am My happy things this week:
A week in NOLA.
Seeing dozens of friends I haven't seen in 3 years.
Over $5000 (probably closer to 7 by the time they add the credit cards) made at the raffle to benefit the THF foundation grant program.
An indigo bunting sitting on the bird feeder when we got home!

Foggy wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 10:50 am Oh man, I am getting jealous! I wonder if I'll ever make it to N'awlins!

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 7:38 pm Beignets......

Colombian ‘miracle’ children found alive 40 days after Amazon jungle plane crash
The Indigenous children – one of whom was just 11 months old – are thought to have eaten food dropped by rescuers and used their own ancestral knowledge

Mat Youkee in Bogotá and agencies
Sat 10 Jun 2023 04.47 BST

Malnourished and covered in insect bites, four Indigenous children were rescued alive from the Colombian Amazon on Friday afternoon, 40 days after the plane they were travelling in crashed into the jungle.

In a remarkable feat of resilience, the children survived heavy storms in one of the most inhospitable parts of the country, home to predatory animals and armed groups.

“They’ve given us an example of total survival that will go down in history,” said Colombian president Gustavo Petro, calling it “A joy for the whole country!”

The four siblings, aged 13, nine, four plus an 11-month-old baby, were from the Huitoto Indigenous community. Although malnourished, none of the children were in serious condition, even the youngest child, who spent his first birthday in the jungle.

It is thought they survived by eating food survival kits airdropped into the jungle by the search team but the education they received from their grandmother may also have been vital, said John Moreno, an Indigenous leader from nearby Vaupes.



story continues at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... lane-crash