Talk Bronx New York

Maxi Phalone (right) reacts after her sister was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in Port-au-Prince on Monday, January 18. Bronx residents have responded to Haiti’s earthquake with donations but more help is needed. Photo by Julie Jacobson

In two decades as a clergyman, Rev. Nathanael Saint-Pierre has never worked so many hours, consoled so many congregants, seen so many tears. Saint-Pierre heads the Haitian Congregation of the Good Samaritan Episcopal Church on E. 219th Street in the Bronx and has led the borough’s response to the earthquake that devastated Haiti on Tuesday, January 12.

“We Haitians in New York City are sad and frustrated,” he said. “I have never had to face such hard issues.”

Saint-Pierre was fortunate not to lose any family members in the disaster but many of his congregants did. More have struggled to contact family members and friends in hastily constructed shelters amid the ruble. Good Samaritan has gathered food and donations for those trapped on the impoverished Caribbean island and Haitians trapped here in New York City as well.

“One of my [congregant’s] families lost six people,” Saint-Pierre said. “One man who lost his sister was unable to find a funeral home in Port-au-Prince and there are no commercial flights to Haiti. He had to have someone there transfer the body to the Dominican Republic [to be cremated]. When commercial flights start again he’ll get the ashes. He needs to grieve but to grieve is not easy.”

The daughter of one congregant brought her daughter to the United States for Christmas. Her home in Haiti has been destroyed and she has no way to return but no job or legal status here. Saint-Pierre hopes to raise money and help the woman gain legal status.

“Unfortunately, we cannot only focus on those in Haiti,” Saint-Pierre said. “There are also crises here.”

Although the Bronx boasts hundreds of thousands of Caribbean immigrants, many from the Dominican Republic, which borders Haiti, the borough is home to only 4,196 people of Haitian heritage and 2,455 Haitian immigrants, census records reveal. In comparison, the Bronx is home to some 143,000 Dominicans and nearly 49,000 Jamaicans. Read more..

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Clara Tolentino was terrified when her 43-year-old sister died last year after getting liquid silicone injections to add a bit more shape to her buttocks.

The 35-year-old Tolentino had good reason to be. In 2006, she paid $2,000 to get liquid silicone injections, too.

“I didn’t do it as many times as my sister … But I was afraid,” said the Dominican woman who lives in the Bronx. “I was afraid that something was going to happen to me.”

Her sister, Fiordaliza Pichardo, died in March. According to an autopsy, about 1,400 milligrams of silicone were in her lungs. Fresh injection sites dotted her thighs and buttocks. The New York City medical examiner’s office said the cause of death was silicone pulmonary embolism.

In the United States, liquid silicone is not approved for cosmetic injections. It can kill, disfigure and cause long-term health problems. Still, it is avidly sought on the black market by untrained providers for those women who desire rounder breasts, buttocks and more shapely thighs.

Especially notorious are “pump-up parties,” where people, often members of the male-to-female transgender community, gather for liquid silicone injections in hopes of feminizing their appearance.

According to a study reported at the 2006 meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, 11 women or transsexuals suffered silicone pulmonary embolism and died after getting liquid silicone injections. The study included 44 people over a 15-year period.

“Every single complication we found was associated with this illegal type of use,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. C. Santiago Restrepo, a professor of radiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio “Unfortunately, since this is an illegal practice, it’s very difficult to know how widespread or what the numbers are.”

Both the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration do not keep data on injuries or deaths caused by illicit cosmetic injections.

“There are regulatory gaps and issues that we need to start working on from a public health perspective,” said the CDC’s Dr. Priti Patel. She was among investigators sent to North Carolina in 2007 after three women suffered kidney failure following cosmetic injections of possible liquid silicone. Read more..

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“It is beyond anybody’s imagination when I started that a Puerto Rican could ascend to that position, to the Supreme Court,” said Edwin Torres, who in 1959 was hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York

In the summer of 1959, Edwin Torres landed a $60-a-week job and wound up on the front page of El Diario. He had just been hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York — and probably, he thinks, the entire United States.

He still recalls the headline: “Exemplary Son of El Barrio Becomes Prosecutor.”

“You would’ve thought I had been named attorney general,” he said. “That’s how big it was.” Read more..

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Dismiss them as a vestige of an analog era, but few neighborhood institutions inspire protective pride in New Yorkers like their post offices.

As news trickled out this week that some as-yet-unknown number of the city’s roughly 250 post offices are to be closed — after reports that 53 might be shuttered, officials reached by phone amended the list on Tuesday to a more modest 14 — confused and angry residents and politicians from around the city have been rallying in defense of their local branches. Read more..

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James Cromitie, one of the men arrested in an alleged terrorism plot, was escorted by federal agents from 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan

Four men were arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.

The men, all of whom live in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City, were arrested around 9 p.m. after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center, officials said. But the men did not know the bombs, obtained with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were fake.

The arrests capped what officials described as a “painstaking investigation” that began in June 2008 involving an F.B.I. agent who had been told by a federal informant of the men’s desire to attack targets in America. As part of the plot, the men intended to fire Stinger missiles at military aircraft at the base, which is at Stewart International Airport, officials said.

“This latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real and underscores why we must remain vigilant in our efforts to prevent terrorism,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a statement. The mayor was expected to appear at 6:45 a.m. Thursday at the Riverdale Jewish Center morning services, joined by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. Read more..

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