Ivana Trump lived in our Miami condo building, the Murano at Portofino, for many years. She only spent the winter months with us. Her other home was the New York City townhouse. It’s interesting to note that she lived in Miami, not Palm Beach. We would see her all the time in the lobby, walking her dog, at our beach club, and at condo meetings. She was friendly to all and was always smiling. The staff loved her because she stopped and chatted with them every chance she got. She called them by their first names. They were all very flattered.
I just don’t believe she accidentally fell down the stairs in her townhouse and instantly died. Something doesn’t add up. The Guardian just reported that on last Thursday afternoon, emergency responders investigating a call from Ivana Trump’s home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side found her unconscious.
No one ever says who made that call. Why was she alone? Most folks of her fame and fortune have staff that live in. I know she had a personal assistant in the past. Whenever I called her New York residence for business over the years, the same woman answered. Where is she now? Why would Ivana live alone in a large, multi-level, townhouse? I find that strange.
The newspapers quoted the police who said they found her dead at the scene and noted that there did “not appear to be any criminality.” Appear to be? There should be a full investigation. I just feel that something else happened and someone close to her should keep digging for the truth.
Again, I don’t buy that Ivana died accidentally of blunt impact injuries to her torso. This sounds like jargon to me. What were the exact details that caused her to stop breathing? Someone is hiding something.
The New York City’s chief medical examiner announced that there would be no further comment on the death of Ms. Trump, 73. Why was a statement like this ever made so quickly?
The U.S. health officials consider falls to be the leading cause of injury-related death for people who are 65 years of age or older. About 64 out of 100,000 elderly people die as a result of accidental falls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
I want to know what the injury was that caused her to die. Don’t talk to me in euphemisms. Give it to me straight. Otherwise, I will just keep publicly asking.
At 73 years young, Doug Garr has jumped out of a plane more than 2000-times. Doug has been on several age-group formation world record skydives.
He’s part of the SOS Skydiving Over Sixty and JOS Jumpers Over Seventy Doug has a professional exhibition rating, which allows him to jump into stadiums. His website is douggarr.com
Doug is also a Member of the Author’s Guild since 1999 and today is mostly a retired writer and editor.
Fun Fact— Doug was New York State Governor Mario Cuomo’s speech writer from 1992-94.
Please listen to our podcast with Sky-diving Senior— Doug Garr
Lily Safra, a Brazilian-born socialite and philanthropist who led a star-filled, star-crossed life with enough jet-setting ups and tragedy-filled downs to fill a dozen Danielle Steel novels, including the bizarre death of her fourth husband, the banker Edmond J. Safra, died on July 9 at her home in Geneva. She was 87.
A spokesman for the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, which she directed, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Mrs. Safra, who was known to the press — especially the British tabloids — as “the Gilded Lily,” led what at first glance might seem to be a charmed life: As one of the richest women in the world, she owned homes in New York City, London, Paris, Geneva and Monaco; amassed a world-class art collection; and counted Prince Charles and Jacob Rothschild among her close confidants.
She used her wealth to great ends — building synagogues and schools, funding medical research, endowing hospitals and museum wings around the world. Much of her beneficence came through the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, but she also gave spontaneously, and from her own pocket: After reading articles in The New York Times about people in need, she gave $500,000 to the newspaper’s Neediest Cases Fund.
But the glamour was offset by heartbreak. Her second husband died by suicide in 1969; her son Claudio was killed in a car accident, along with her grandson, in 1989.
The worst came in 1999 when her husband, the founder of Republic National Bank, died during a fire in their penthouse apartment in Monaco. Mr. Safra had locked himself and a nurse — he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and needed care — in a bathroom that doubled as a safe room, and refused to come out.
Mrs. Safra, who was in another wing of the apartment, escaped unharmed.
As a private banker for some of the world’s richest people, and as a very private person himself, Mr. Safra was the subject of constant baseless rumors about the Russian mafia, Colombian drug dealers and other people said to be clients, and about the services he might have provided them.
The rumor mill began again after his death. British tabloids were filled with stories about two knife-wielding assailants, masked in balaclavas, who had come in through a skylight to kill him. When they failed to break through the bathroom door, it was said, they set fire to the house and escaped, stabbing Ted Maher, another of Mr. Safra’s nurses, in the stomach and thigh along the way.
But the real story was more intimate, and even more strange. A few days after the fire, Mr. Maher, a former Green Beret, admitted to setting a wastepaper basket on fire and stabbing himself. His plan, he said, had been to alert the authorities and save the day, winning his employer’s good graces. Instead, the fire raged out of control.
Despite Mr. Maher’s admission of guilt, it took almost three years for the case to go to trial. During that time, gossip swirled and was spread not just by British reporters, but also by an American, Dominick Dunne, who wrote several extensive, innuendo-filled articles about the case for Vanity Fair.
Mrs. Safra decamped for London. She bought a six-floor belle époque townhouse in Belgravia, one of London’s most exclusive neighborhoods, and began to make a name in the city’s social circles. In 2001, Vanity Fair photographed her sitting beside Prince Charles at a dinner at Buckingham Palace; a year later, she and Jacob Rothschild co-sponsored a 5,000-pounds-a-plate charity event they called “An Evening With Elton John.”
Although (or perhaps because) she was welcomed by London’s elite, she became an irresistible target for the city’s tabloid press. Some reporters dragged up unfounded hearsay about her second husband’s suicide; others recycled conspiracy theories about Mr. Safra’s death, despite Mr. Maher’s conviction in 2002.
They were especially suspicious of her charitable work. One newspaper, The Independent, blamed her for single-handedly making London’s elite social scene more like that of New York, where, quelle horreur, “social position is defined not by what you have, but by how much you can afford to give away to worthy causes.”
Mrs. Safra was not an especially litigious person, and she seemed content to let the yellow press do its job. But she came close to filing a lawsuit in 2005 when Lady Colin Campbell, a biographer, wrote a novel about a woman who murders her way to great fortune; several details from the plot mapped closely onto Mrs. Safra’s own story.
After Mrs. Safra quietly threatened legal action, the book was pulped.
Though many journalists tended to portray Mrs. Safra’s life as a rags-to-riches tale, it was nothing of the kind, except in the sense that almost everyone who ended up extremely wealthy was much less wealthy to begin with.
Lily Watkins was born on Dec. 20, 1934, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her father, Wolf Watkins, was a British engineer who had moved to Latin America in search of business opportunities and found them while servicing the region’s booming rail industry. Her mother, Annita (Noudelman) Watkins, a homemaker, had fled her native Ukraine in the face of antisemitic pogroms.
Mr. Watkins owned a rail car factory in Mesquita, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where he soon moved with his young family. He became a town elder, and even today the town’s main street, Rua Mister Watkins, bears his name.
When Lily Watkins was 19, she moved to Montevideo, Uruguay, where she married Mario Cohen, a hosiery magnate. They had three children but a rocky marriage, and they soon divorced.
She returned to Brazil, and in 1965 she married Alfredo Monteverde, a Romanian immigrant who had been born a Greenberg but Hispanicized his surname. He made a fortune owning a chain of appliance stores, but he also struggled with depression. He died by suicide in 1969, leaving her some $200 million.
Mrs. Safra’s survivors include a daughter, Adriana Cohen; a son, Eduardo Cohen; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Complete survivor information was not immediately available.
After Mr. Monteverde’s death, she moved to London. She met Mr. Safra, the scion of a Lebanese merchant family, when she asked for his help in handling her sudden wealth. They began dating, though his religious Sephardic family disliked his more secular Ashkenazic girlfriend, and they broke up.
She was briefly married to another businessman, Samuel Bendahan, but they split after just a few weeks, and she soon returned to Mr. Safra. They married in 1976 in a ceremony attended by, among others, Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the Aga Khan.
The Safras lived in Manhattan for several years and established themselves among the city’s elite through the 1980s. Mrs. Safra sat on charity boards and even managed to pull her famously withdrawn husband out of his shell long enough to attend the occasional gala.
Though they had homes across Europe, they eventually settled in Monaco and the nearby French Riviera, where they bought a villa once owned by the king of Belgium and said to be one of the continent’s most expensive properties.
The Safras were already known as generous benefactors, and Mrs. Safra continued to build on that reputation after her husband’s death. Their foundation endowed the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, the Edmond J. Safra campus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience in Brazil and the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital in Israel.
Outside the foundation, her personal beneficence was vast and eclectic. She paid for students to visit Auschwitz and to study at the Paris Opera. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the campus of Dillard University, a historically Black institution in New Orleans, she gave the university $500,000 for its recovery.
Many of her donations came through selling pieces of her vast art collection. In 2012 she sold 70 pieces of jewelry, including a 34.05-carat rectangular-cut diamond ring, to benefit 20 charities, including one that aided impoverished Rwandan children.
By then, Mrs. Safra had largely fallen out of the public eye. She had sold her townhouse in exchange for something smaller and more manageable (though still in Belgravia). Her dinners were now more likely to be low-key, intimate affairs among friends than grand galas. She was said to prefer the company of her grandchildren to that of lords and ladies.
The British papers wondered where she had gone, and why she had seemingly given up on pursuing power and fame. But it was also possible that they had misread her from the start.
I had so much fun working on getting press yesterday for Cadet Camp at the Lafayette Fire Department, Lancaster, PA. That’s my client, Jillian Crane, CEO of the First Responders Children’s Foundation in a Hazmat suit. Local ABC, CBS and FOX showed up and did extensive coverage on the two day camp introducing kids to emergency services and through STEM learning activities what it means to be a #FirstResponder. Lafayette Fire Company even had a REAL fire call during camp. Thank you to all who attended and to our partners who make this programming possible! #FirstRespondersStrong #thankyou
Four outlets, FOX 43, CBS 21, WGAL, ABC 27 came to cover the Cadet Camp at Lafayette Fire
Scientists at MIT think they may have finally found a way to reverse climate change. Or, at the least, help ease it some.
The idea revolves heavily around the creation and deployment of several thin film-like silicon bubbles. The “space bubbles” as they refer to them, would be joined together like a raft. Once expanded in space it would be around the same size as Brazil. The bubbles would then provide an extra buffer against the harmful solar radiation that comes from the Sun.
Could space bubbles reverse climate change?
The goal with these new “space bubbles” would be to ease up or even reverse climate change. The Earth has seen rising temperatures over the past several centuries. In fact, NASA previously released a gif detailing how the global temperature has changed over the years. Now, we’re seeing massive “mouths to hell” opening in the permafrost.
There’s also the fact that scientists just discovered yet another hole in the Earth’s ozone layer. As such, finding ways to ease or reverse climate change continues to be a high priority for many. This new plan is based on a concept first proposed by astronomer Roger Angel. Angel originally suggested using a “cloud” of small spacecraft to shield the Earth from the Sun’s radiation.
Researchers at MIT have taken that same basic concept and improved it, though, by changing out inflatable silicon bubbles for the spacecraft that Angel originally proposed. Being able to reverse climate change would be a huge step in the right direction. Shielding the Earth from the Sun’s radiation would only be one part of it, though. We’d still need to cut down on other things, too.
How will bubbles shield the Earth?
But how exactly what a “raft” of space bubbles shield Earth from the Sun’s radiation? Well, the basic idea requires sending the bubbles to the L1 Lagrangian Point. This is the location directly between the Earth and the Sun where gravity from both our star and our planet cancels out. As such, the space bubbles would theoretically be able to just float without much pull from either body.
The researchers say we’d probably still need to put some kind of spacecraft out there to help keep things on track. But, it could give us a good chance at reversing climate change, or at least slowing down the changes. It is important to note that MIT does not view this as an alternative solution to our current adapt and mitigate efforts. Instead, it’s a backup solution meant to help if things spin out of control.
Boy Genius Report (also referred to as BGR) is a technology-influenced website and covers topics ranging from consumer gadgets, to entertainment, gaming, and science. Founded in October 2006 by anonymous web personality Boy Genius (also referred to as BG/BGR), the site was previously based on offering the public an early look at upcoming mobile phones and devices before anyone else. On April 27, 2010, BGR was acquired by Penske Media Corporation.[1]Boy Genius Report (BGR)
Hamptons Cottages & Gardens Celebrates Its Founder, Richard Ekstract As It Turns 20 Years Old. Richard, a well respected art collector, is also the greatest publisher of consumer electronics, licensing, and real estate publications. He is 91 and lives in Palm Beach and NYC with his devoted wife Eileen. Richard and I are working on his memoirs together.
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We Need Acts Of Loving Kindness
Rabbi Marc Philippe and his wife Valerie
July 10, 2022, #3 Weekly Newsletter We Need Acts Of Loving Kindness
My Wife Will Never Again Be Able To Say She Is From Highland Park Without People Thinking: “Mass Murder”
My wife Valerie grew up in a lovely, upscale suburb of Chicago. I have visited it many times. It has a world-class summer Music festival; it also offers top quality dining and entertainment as well as one of the best High schools in the nation. My wife was always proud to say she was from Highland Park. Now everyone knows it as the place where an atrocity took place on the 4th of July.
Valerie was deeply shaken that her safe, beautiful hometown was the scene of a mass shooting. It hit home even more since she graduated in the same class as the father of the perpetrator. She could have been there. Our children could have been there. Thank G-d her family and friends are safe, but now there is an entire town that isn’t. There are thousands of people in mourning, thousands praying for the welfare of the wounded and thousands who will suffer from PTSD. How can you happily stroll in the street after witnessing such horror? My wife will never again be able to say she is from Highland Park without people thinking: “Mass Murder”.
All this because of one person. This isn’t a political rant – enough people do that. But it is beyond my understanding that a 22-year-old with emotional issues has access to a semi-automatic weapon of mass murder. One person can bring so much grief, despair, pain. What can – or what should – be our spiritual response to that?
If one person has the power to bring so much darkness into our world, then we in turn have as much power to bring Light. In a situation such as this, it isn’t enough to say that we have the potential to bring Light; we are mandated to bring Light. We absolutely must overcompensate this darkness. Even small random acts of loving-kindness have unbelievable power to bring much needed holiness. We can all spare that dollar someone is begging for in the street (I always bring dollars with me for that purpose), we can all be kind to the person at the cash register, we can all say that word that will make someone feel good. These examples seem insignificant, but don’t be fooled, their ripple effect – like the butterfly effect – creates a tsunami of Light.
Let me quote what the Dalai Lama said in a video on his birthday this week: “The best gift for me, on my birthday… please keep your own mind, your own heart more compassionate… seriously and genuinely (have a) sense of concern of other’s well-being”. Our world will be the most beautiful place in the universe when enough people put their mind into following this simple advice.
Rabbi Marc Philippe rabbimarc.org Www.kodeshhouse.org
Marc Philippe is the rabbi at Kodesh House, a grassroots Jewish organization for spirituality, healing, connection and inclusion.
He offers a new and progressive space for people to get in touch with their roots. It is a place to learn, play, grow, transform and experiment while discovering and exploring the wisdom and spirituality of Judaism.
Rabbi Marc Philippe, besides being vegetarian, is also a professional musician, hypnotist, Kabbalist and Yoga enthusiast.
Here is my Miami Life column this week in the Three Tomatoes newsletter. We are getting a second Soho House in Miami this year. See the list of everyone participating in Miami Spice so far. Daycations are becoming a great get away. And let’s not forget the exciting Duck Tour excursions.
When you own a HANDL phone case or HANDLstick, just remember these treasures were created by Allen Hirsch, the artist whose works are owned by collectors and museums all over the world.
One of his amazing pieces are his magical string paintings.
Hirsch’s art is founded on the principal that perceiving and feeling the subject automatically projects thru the hand onto the canvas. “I don’t have to look at the picture,” Hirsch says. “I just have to focus on internalizing the subject.” The string paintings emphasize this phenomenon; the felt image translates into little dabs of paint on strings which convert back into the perceived image in the viewer’s brain. “This is also a human parallel to the way computers digitalize images.”
There are metaphysical elements to these string paintings which also have inspired Hirsch. “These paintings show the transitory nature of the perceived image. One looks at, and through the image, at the same time.”
According to physicists and mystics, matter is composed of small particles and is actually mostly empty space. “These paintings mirror this idea. The image hardly exists at all, except in the mind.”
Hosted by Robert Armada (did the amazing decorations), Steve Greenberg, Eliot Hess and me. Six hours of sheer joy. Alex Godshall, soon to be daddy, next to me in group photo, Ruth Greenberg, Dana’s mom, next to her in blue, Alex’s dad and his wife (in jeans) all the way to the right. Some parties just work. This was one of them. Smiles and hugs all the way through. Having the little ones with us was icing on the cake.
Because I know you, and you know me, I can get you major discounts on client Elizabeth Sutton’s “runway showstoppers” clutches. I own four. I get stopped everywhere by woman asking me where they can buy one. They are so much fun. Elizabeth is now running her business out of her new Sutton place townhouse on East 57th Street, NYC. Sutton on Sutton. Isn’t that amazing? Email me and I will give you your special price. (Around 30 per cent off). Loisw@hwhpr.com. You are going to be hearing a lot more about Elizabeth. Go see all of her fashions, her art, her interior designs at Www.elizabethsutton.com.
DigiDame 