Latest news with #Cece
CTV News
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
CHEO Telethon: Incredible care for Cece at CHEO
Ottawa Watch CTV's Kimberley Fowler shares the story of five-year-old Cece ahead of Saturday's CHEO Telethon on CTV.
CBS News
27-05-2025
- General
- CBS News
Memorial Day events in Sacramento honor those killed in battle
SACRAMENTO — Sacramento remembered those who died while fighting for our country with Memorial Day events across the region. "I love to see more people coming out here to just honor our fallen brothers and sisters that served," said Arthur Valdez, who served in the US Navy from 1979 to 1983. "I was lucky enough to come home." Valdez was one of the dozens of veterans who were out at Mount Vernon Memorial Day Park in Sacramento on Memorial Day to pay respects to his fellow service members. "I place a flag at Danny's grave," said Stan Lee Pollinger who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. Pollinger is grateful he made it back home alive but is dedicated to now remembering all those who did not. There was also a program at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium where there was a tribute to those who died fighting in the Spanish-American and World Wars. "It's not just about hot dogs or hamburgers. It's all about paying tribute to our veterans, that's the main thing," said Jeffrey Wayne Sutherland, a John Wayne tribute artist. Sutherland paid his tribute Monday by performing "The Ragged Old Flag" at the Court of Honor. "I was in logistics," said Cece, who served in the Marine Corps. "Back in the '70s, the Marine Corps. The women's marine mission was to free a man to fight." Each veteran rose to the sound of their military branch anthems as a salute and thank you, but the focus was on not forgetting the fallen who fought for our country's freedom and paid the ultimate sacrifice. "This is why we celebrate Memorial Day," Pollinger said. "Because of this behind me."
Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
This family saga is 100 pages too long — but who cares, the writing's great
I like it when a novel surprises me. So often, it's easy to slot literary narratives into a short list of categories: will-they-won't-they romance, journey to self-knowledge, sad girl millennial lit. By page 50, I can generally tell my thinly disguised autobiographies from my cosy crimes. But Dream State, the American writer Eric Puchner's second novel, went somewhere I wasn't expecting. We begin in the summer of 2004 in a gorgeous old house on a lakeshore in Montana. It belongs to Cece's future parents-in-law, and she's there to plan her wedding to Charlie. The house is a magical place, a romantic idyll with 'raspberry bushes, magically replenishing, like something in a fairy tale'. Keeping Cece company while Charlie toils away as a cardiac anaesthetist
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dream State by Eric Puchner review – an epic tale of paradise lost
American author Eric Puchner's latest novel is a colossus: a vast, bright behemoth of a book, panoramic as the Montana skyline. Dream State opens in 2004 with the image of a young woman, a month before her wedding, diving into a perfect lake whose 'blue expanse of water' reflects the 'overlapping peaks of the Salish range'. From this Edenic outset, it traverses decades, barrelling through our present day into a projected future: dipping in and out of the lives of a tight cast of characters as they succeed and fail; love and fall out of love; change and stay the same. The young woman is Cece. She has stepped out of the lakeshore family home of Charlie Margolis, a cardiac anaesthesiologist to whom she's engaged. Route 30 traffic noise aside, the place is a bucolic idyll, marked by abundance and continuity: orchards filled with 'ancient apple trees', 'raspberry bushes, magically replenishing', mountain slopes 'bristling with pines'. Cece 'loves it more than any place on the earth'. She's come to Montana early to put the finishing touches to the wedding plans before the guests, or even Charlie, arrive. In his absence, Charlie has deputed his best friend, Garrett, to lend a hand. Garrett appears on the lakeshore as Cece is swimming – and from there, events unfold more or less as we'd expect. Cece and Garrett move rapidly through antagonism into fascination; the wedding looms; and decisions taken in the heat of the moment profoundly shape the lives of all three characters from that point on. Puchner carries off his novel's first act with aplomb, deploying the elements of the love triangle as the formula demands, but deftly, and with humour: light relief comes in the shape of a recalcitrant mountain goat, and a norovirus outbreak that topples the wedding party like dominoes. But it's in the second act – and all the acts thereafter – that Puchner really flexes his muscles. His interest, it turns out, is not in the resolution of his love triangle, but in the idea that any such resolution is a chimera. Cece, Charlie and Garrett become parents, move through careers that wax and wane, grow old. Far from being finalised in the first act, their feelings about and for one another continue to shift and complicate as the decades unfold. This absence of resolution is most visible in the lives of the trio's children, via whom Puchner presents us with a dichotomy: they're at once actors in their own right, and vessels carrying forward a queasy inheritance. The relationship between two of them, Jasper and Lana, is the subject of a perfectly formed chapter at the heart of the book, in which Puchner makes it clear that their own feelings are at once deeply personal, and at the same time inflected by their odd, slanting glimpses into the relationship between their parents. By following his characters over the course of years, Puchner shows us that we're not fixed at the point of early adulthood; that change remains not just possible but inevitable. Yet in revealing how profoundly the children's lives are shaped by the actions of their parents, he simultaneously calls the whole idea of free will into question. And free will means something different for those born in the 21st century. In its scope and plenitude, Dream State feels, at times, like a Victorian novel: an unhurried depiction of a rich, full world, in which actions have consequences that ripple across generations. But where the great novelists of the Victorian age tended to set their players' foibles and insecurities against stable, knowable landscapes, these characters' journeys take place amid a landscape that is slipping and changing, year by year, degree by terrifying degree. Puchner measures the passage of time by the disappearance of wildlife, the recession of the snowline and, most poignantly, by the retreat of the lake from the shore, leaving behind a 'dry lake bottom … bleached grey as the moon'. Lana and Jasper's summers are hotter and less bounteous than their parents', and their choices, as a result, are curtailed. As the years pass, the book itself evolves, from romantic drama into elegy: for the characters' lost youth, but more profoundly for the loss of a version of youth that is carefree and filled with potential. In his wrenching final chapter, Puchner takes us back to the beginning, and shows us the events that set his central characters' feet on the path to their endings. We feel, in an instant, both the loss of the promise their own lives contained and the collective loss of a steadily unfolding future that once we took for granted. In Dream State, Puchner seduces us with a familiar and deeply secure narrative structure, only to undermine that structure, to force it to tell a tale of profound and fatal insecurity. But he tells his tale so compellingly, so engagingly, with such warmth and humour, that it's not until you set the book down that you can appreciate the breadth and brilliance of what he's done. Dream State by Eric Puchner is published by Sceptre, £18.99. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Herald Scotland
05-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Abrego Garcia's streets defined man at center of immigration debate
This is the street where Kilmar Abrego Garcia spent his early years. And the street he fled to come to America. He was a teenager when he left to build a new life in a new country. He's 29 now and back in El Salvador, this time in prison, a father of three caught in a standoff among President Donald Trump, the courts, some members of Congress and the Salvadoran government. Abrego Garcia's deportation - and the Trump administration's refusal to return him to the United States, even though it admits he was sent back to El Salvador by mistake - has made him the most high-profile target of Trump's campaign to expel millions of migrants who entered the United States illegally. The Justice Department insists Abrego Garcia is a member of a dangerous criminal gang. Abrego Garcia, who had lived in Maryland for years before he was deported, insists he is not. Regardless of who is right, Abrego Garcia's story begins here, in Los Nogales, on Senda 3. The small terrace house he lived in with his parents and two siblings is still standing. His mother, Cecilia, referred to affectionately as "Cece" by old friends, made pupusas there with the help of her three young children every Friday, Saturday and Sunday and sold them to neighbors. A woman named Rocio, who is in her 30s and lives just two doors down, proudly showed off photos of Abrego Garcia, his sister and his older brother Cesar attending a birthday party in her home. At the time, San Salvador was the domain of violent gangs. Two rival gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, or the 18th Street gang, fought over turf block by block, running the Central American country's murder rate in 2012 up among the highest in the world at 41 per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations. Los Nogales was neutral ground. "There was never trouble with gangs here," said a man who would only give his name as Jorge. "I've lived here for 20 years and never had a problem." Jorge's sentiments were echoed by almost a dozen of Abrego Garcia's close neighbors, friends and neighborhood acquaintances interviewed by USA TODAY. The paper is identifying Jorge and other locals only by their first names because they fear reprisals from El Salvador's increasingly authoritarian government. Members of Abrego Garcia's family denied multiple USA TODAY interview requests to speak about his early years in El Salvador and his home life. But when Abrego Garcia lived on Senda 3, a five-minute walk to the calle principal would land him in gang territory. Los Nogales was surrounded on all sides by "troubled" neighborhoods where bandidos run rampant, a resident named Fredy said. The burgeoning pupuseria business run by Cece, Abrego Garcia's mother, attracted the greed of Barrio 18 members. They demanded monthly protection money from the family and threatened to enlist Abrego Garcia in the gang as payment or even to stalk, kidnap and kill him, according to court records entered by his attorneys. A short distance from where Cece once rolled out her pupusas sits the local watering hole, run by a husband and wife. On an afternoon in mid-April, beer-swilling revelers crowded inside and listened to rancheras and watched futbol. Waiters carried plates of seafood and fried potatoes from the kitchen to the simple wooden tables. Patrons covered the mouths of their beer bottles with paper napkins against the flies buzzing around, attracted by a free lunch, or drink. Like the flies, gangsters from the surrounding barrios historically swarmed around local businesses that made money in Los Nogales - even if they're tucked away and shut behind metal bars and barbed wire. Insects and extortionists always find their way in, said Edward, the bar's current owner. The bar's previous owners had to sell because the payments to Barrio 18 were too burdensome, Edward said. His wife pointed to where a cluster of popular restaurants once sat. They, too, closed because of financial pressure from the bandidos. Whether Abrego Garcia's family was the victim of Barrio 18, the neighbors hadn't heard. But they did know the family had fallen on hard times. "The bank was foreclosing on their house, that's why they had to sell up and leave," Fredy said. "They moved nearby to another house." Cece long planned for her sons to leave El Salvador and the dangers lurking there, Los Nogales residents said. Cesar, the oldest boy, went first. He left for the United States. Abrego Garcia soon followed. He was just 16. For days, he walked north, crossing the Rio Grande. He entered the United States illegally near McAllen, Texas, around March 12, 2012. His journey, however, was far from over. A Home Depot in Maryland In the suburb of Hyattsville, Maryland, Home Depot is where homeowners shop for supplies for do-it-yourself repairs and where construction crews come for materials. It's also where migrants look for day jobs. Groups of men from Latin American countries wait in the parking lot. Some help customers carry supplies in exchange for a cash tip or, if they are lucky, a day gig. A woman sells tamales out of the back of a van while a small boy plays in the back. It was here that Abrego Garcia's new life started to unravel. An 'administrative error': A Maryland dad was sent to El Salvador prison by mistake. Can his community get him back? He had made his way to Maryland. His older brother, Cesar, was living there and had become a U.S. citizen. In 2016, Abrego Garcia met the woman who would become his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a Salvadoran American. Around the same age, they connected through her coworker, Abrego Garcia's best friend. There was an instant spark. He liked that she was a strong woman. "It would amaze him that no matter what life put me through, I would face it," she said in a phone interview with USA TODAY in early April. They moved in together two years later. Vasquez Sura had two children from a previous relationship, a daughter who has epilepsy and a son with autism. The girl wanted to be a makeup artist and her brother, a soccer player. Abrego Garcia raised the two children as his own. To them, she said, he's their dad. The children's biological father, Edwin Ramos, filed a custody claim against Vasquez Sura in 2018 allegeding she lived with a gang member. The document circulated as more evidence of Abrego Garcia's MS-13 affiliation, but the case was quickly dismissed, according to court records. A year later, Ramos was charged and convicted of second-degree rape and remains incarcerated in Maryland. Abrego Garcia found work as an HVAC installer and was a member of CASA, a nonprofit that operates day worker centers in Maryland. The couple learned they were expecting a son, who they'd name Kilmar Jr. They had what seemed like a good life, until police spotted him in the Home Depot parking lot. On March 28, 2019, Abrego Garcia drove to the Hyattsville store on East-West Highway, about eight miles north of the U.S. Capitol. He was looking for construction work, his wife would later say in court documents. Records released by Hyattsville, Maryland, and Prince George's County police say he was loitering. He was standing in the parking lot with three other men, two of whom he recognized. The four were chatting to pass the time, his lawyers said. Abrego Garcia was taken in for questioning. One of the men he had been talking to, Christhyan Hernandez-Romero, had an extensive rap sheet that included assault, burglary and concealing a weapon. He was known to Hyattsville police as an MS-13 gang member. Prince George's police detective Ivan Mendez, the investigating officer, suspected Abrego Garcia was also part of the gang. He reached that conclusion, he wrote in his police report, based on three things: Abrego Garcia was sporting a Chicago Bulls hat, which authorities say is worn by active MS-13 members. He had on a dark-hooded sweatshirt, which authorities also said was associated with or consistent with an MS-13 slogan. And a confidential informant had identified him as a member of MS-13. Abrego Garcia denied he was a member of MS-13 or any gang. Days later, the police detective's credibility would come under scrutiny. The force accused him of sharing confidential information about an ongoing investigation with a sex worker. He was later fired and placed on the county district attorney's do-not-call list of unreliable sources. Hyattsville police, meanwhile, say records of their encounter with Abrego Garcia made no connection to MS-13. He had two vials of marijuana, which they seized. No charges were filed against him. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were called in because police suspected Abrego Garcia was an undocumented immigrant. He was assigned an Alien Registration Number, or A-number. The federal government could now keep tabs on him. Based on the conclusions of the now-disgraced Prince George's detective, ICE wrote in Abrego Garcia's file: "Subject has been identified as a Member/Active of M.S.13." At a hearing before an immigration judge that April, Abrego Garcia denied that he was a gang member, insisting he wasn't a risk to the community. The judge declined to issue him a bond, citing the gang report filed by Mendez and the tip from the confidential informant. Abrego Garcia remained in jail, awaiting possible deportation. That June, Abrego Garcia and a seven-months-pregnant Vasquez Sura married at the Howard Detention Center in Jessup, Maryland, where he was being held. Their son, Kilmar Jr. was born in August. The child has microtia, a congenital malformation of the ear, is intellectually disabled with a speech disorder and has been diagnosed with autism. Abrego Garcia asked the courts for a protective order preventing his deportation to El Salvador, where he feared gangs threatened his life. The judge granted the order on Oct. 10. Abrego Garcia could still be expelled from the United States - he just couldn't be returned to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was released from custody after six months in detention, but was required to check in with ICE yearly. For six years, records show, he did. No 'Maryland father': What to know on White House allegations against Kilmar Abrego Garcia A house in suburbia The tree-lined street where Abrego Gracia and his growing family settled sits in a quiet neighborhood. Pink and white blossoms fall from branches and decorate the front lawns of small, brick houses. In one yard, a Mexican flag flutters in a mild breeze. Near the bottom of a slight hill is the white-brick house that Abrego-Garcia called home. A child's scooter and a toy lawn mower rest on the grassy lawn. Parked in the driveway is a white pickup, a boat hitched to its rear. The suburb of Beltsville, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington, is where Abrego Garcia was living the American dream. He'd found work as a union sheet metal apprentice. He took worker safety training and classes at the University of Maryland. He was in the first year of a five-year apprenticeship and working toward a union "pink card" that would mean higher pay and benefits. "He was on track, really, to the middle class," said Tom Killeen, political director for the sheet metal workers Maryland-based Local 100. But home life was turbulent. Abrego Garcia had grown "more reserved" after his release from detention and now had "a sadness" about him that his wife hadn't seen prior to his time in ICE custody, she said in court records. In 2020, Vasquez Sura petitioned a court for a domestic protection order against her husband. One altercation, she said, resulted in police responding to their home after he slapped and threatened her. "Like at 3:00 in the morning, he would just wake up and, like, hit me," she told a judge in a recording obtained by USA TODAY. Then before her daughter's birthday party, "he slapped me three last week my sister called the police because he hit me in front of my sister." In 2021, Vasquez Sura petitioned for a protection order a second time, citing instances of violence in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Abrego Garcia "punched and scratched" her, ripped off her shirt and grabbed and bruised her, according to her testimony to a judge. The case was closed after a month, according to Prince George's County records. Vasquez Sura said in a statement to USA TODAY that neither she nor her husband was in a good place when she filed for the protective orders. "My husband was traumatized from the time he spent in ICE detention, and we were in the throes of COVID," she said. "Like many couples, we were caring for our children with barely enough to get by. All of those factors contributed to the actions, which caused me to seek the protective order." In an earlier statement released April 17, she also told USA TODAY she sought the 2021 order out of precaution because she had experienced domestic violence in a past relationship. Then, in March 2025, ICE re-entered their lives. Abrego Garcia was working at a job site in Baltimore, installing HVAC ducts on a new University of Maryland hospital building. He finished his shift on Wednesday afternoon, March 12, and then picked up his 5-year-old at the home of Cece, who had followed her sons to the United States. With his own son in the back seat, Abrego Garcia was on his way home when he phoned his wife to say he was being pulled over for what he thought was a routine traffic stop. It wasn't. It was ICE. Timeline: How an error led to the deportation of a legal resident of US to El Salvador Abrego Garcia wasn't confident speaking English, so Vasquez Sura told him to put her on speakerphone while he talked with the officers, she said in a court filing. She could overhear the conversation as an agent told her husband to turn off the car and get out. Abrego Garcia explained to the officer, in English, that his son with special needs was in the back seat. Vasquez Sura heard the officer take his phone and hang later, she got another call, this time from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The caller gave her 10 minutes to get to the scene and pick up her son or child protective services would be contacted. When she got there, Abrego Garcia was on the curb and in handcuffs, crying, she said. Officers said they were taking him in. His immigration status had changed, the agents informed him. "I told him he would come back home," Vasquez Sura said, "because he hadn't done anything wrong." Abrego Garcia was detained, sent to Baltimore and transferred to a Texas detention center. There, he was handcuffed, shackled and, three days later, put on a plane with other detainees. None of them had any idea where they were going. They were being sent to El Salvador, despite the protective order barring Abrego Garcia's return to his homeland. In El Salvador, he and others expelled by the Trump administration were placed in the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a notorious prison criticized for its harsh and dangerous conditions and its rough treatment of prisoners. Vasquez Sura and their 5-year-old sued the federal government, demanding that Abrego Garcia be returned home. Days later, government attorneys admitted in court records that he had been deported by mistake - an "administrative error" was the official explanation - but said they had no authority to return him because he was now in a foreign country. A federal judge in Maryland, Paula Xinis, disagreed and ruled on April 4 that the Trump administration had committed an "illegal act" by deporting him. Xinis directed the U.S. government to "facilitate" his return. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court also demanded the administration start the process of bringing Abrego Garcia back to the United States. The Trump administration, however, dug in. Trump called Abrego Garcia a foreign terrorist. A White House spokesman labeled him a "wife beater," citing Vasquez Sura's four-year-old request for a temporary protective order. Stephen Miller, one of Trump's top advisers, described him as a "human smuggler." The administration released records from a traffic stop in an effort to back up its claims. The Tennessee Highway Patrol had pulled Abrego Garcia over on Interstate 40 in December 2022. He was driving with eight passengers and no luggage. Local authorities suspected he was smuggling people north from Texas to Maryland, the Department of Homeland Security said. But the state police officer who pulled him over released him without charges or even writing a ticket. Abrego Garcia's wife said in a statement that he worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, which could explain why there were others in the vehicle. In search of Abrego Garcia El Salvador's CECOT prison is a rambling complex spread across 57 acres southeast of San Salvador. Built in 2022, the maximum-security facility is surrounded by two sets of walls. Its prisoners, who include gang members, are often called the worst of the worst. Abrego Garcia had last been seen frog-walking through the prison. Vasquez Sura, his wife, spotted him in news photos. She recognized the two scars on his now-shaved head and the tattoos on his knuckles. From the Oval Office, Trump has shown reporters a photo of the tattoos as proof that Abrego Garcia is a gang member. By now, it had been a month since he was last sighted. Questions about Abrego Garcia's location and status - including those ordered by the federal judge overseeing the case - remained unanswered. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, wanted to know if his constituent was safe, healthy and, above all, alive. So he headed to the Central American country to check on Abrego Garcia himself. The two-day trip had proved fruitless: Salvadoran Vice President Felix Ulloa had denied the senator's request to enter CECOT. Van Hollen's last-minute push to drive to the prison and demand a meeting was thwarted by a military checkpoint. Less than two miles away, armed military personnel pulled over his small convoy of vehicles. "He is totally beyond reach," Van Hollen said at the side of the road. Van Hollen and his team headed back to their hotel. In a few hours, they were to fly back to the United States. The senator still didn't know if Abrego Garcia was even breathing. Then, a phone call from the U.S. embassy: Would he be willing to meet with Abrego Garcia at his hotel that afternoon? They negotiated the optics. The Salvadoran government wanted the meeting to take place next to the pool in the hotel's lush gardens. Van Hollen said no and suggested the hotel restaurant instead. Wait there, he was instructed. Turned away: Van Hollen stopped at military checkpoint on way to Salvadoran prison Fans turned in the restaurant's cream-colored ceiling. Waiters swished from table to table, politely taking orders. Children played nearby as an afternoon breeze combed through the palm trees. Abrego Garcia emerged, escorted by at least five officials. Dressed casually in jeans, a plaid button-down shirt and a Kansas City Chiefs baseball cap, he was not handcuffed. The two men spoke alone for a few minutes, sipping coffee and water as Abrego Garcia told of his ordeal. They sat in wicker chairs at a four-top wooden table set with white china, glasses and silverware. 'Prayers have been answered': Sen. Chris Van Hollen meets with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongly deported to El Salvador "He spoke of the trauma he had experienced, both with being abducted and then, when they got to Texas, being shackled, handcuffed, and put on a plane with no way to see out of the windows," Van Hollen told USA TODAY. Abrego Garcia told the senator he had been placed into a cell with 25 people at CECOT. He said he was fearful of the prisoners in other cells who called out to him. But a few days earlier he had been moved out to a lower-security prison, Centro Industrial in Santa Ana, with better conditions. When they finished, Van Hollen escorted Abrego Garcia to the front of the hotel lobby. They walked over the highly polished marble tiles and past wooden furniture. On the walls were framed photographs of visiting heads of state, including several U.S. presidents. Van Hollen watched as officers whisked Abrego Garcia from the Sheraton Presidente. Avenida de la Revolucion was the last place he was seen. His steps receding, he vanished again. National correspondent Will Carless anchored this story from El Salvador. Eduardo Cuevas and Michael Collins reported from Maryland. Investigations reporter and records expert Nick Penzenstadler dug through court documents and police reports. Contributing: Cybele Mayes-Osterman in Washington and Julia Gavarrete in San Salvador, El Salvador. Editing: Romina Ruiz-Goiriena and Doug Caruso
