Latest news with #SylviaRivera
CBS News
3 days ago
- General
- CBS News
Man burned in Fort Lauderdale boat fire on Memorial Day weekend has died, loved ones say
A man who was severely burned in a boat explosion over the Memorial Day weekend in Fort Lauderdale has died, according to loved ones. Joshua Fifi, 28, suffered third-degree burns over 70% of his body. The father of four spent four days in the hospital before his death. The announcement was made in a "GoFundMe" fundraiser. Fifi was one of 14 people onboard the aboard a 39-foot Sea Ray boat that caught fire after Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue said fuel vapors somehow ignited. The source of the vapors has not yet been determined. Eleven were hospitalized, including two children. Ten patients, including the boys, were taken to the burn unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Grandmother worried for her grandsons Sylvia Rivera spoke with CBS News Miami about her 5-year-old and 7-year-old grandsons, who remain in serious condition. Rivera said the 7-year-old has burns over 80% of his body, while the 5-year-old has burns over 40%. The boys' mother, Cassandra Rivera, posted a message on Facebook thanking people for their prayers. She said there is a "long road of recovery" ahead and she is facing multiple surgeries.
CBS News
29-05-2025
- General
- CBS News
Boys seriously burned in Memorial Day Fort Lauderdale boat explosion, grandmother says
The grandmother of two boys who survived a fiery boat explosion on the Intracoastal Waterway on Memorial Day said the children have extensive burns and may remain hospitalized for up to five months. CBS News Miami is learning new details about the victims of the explosion aboard a 39-foot Sea Ray boat that caught fire after Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue said fuel vapors somehow ignited. The source of the vapors has not yet been determined. Fifteen people were on board when the flash fire erupted. Eleven were hospitalized, including two children. Ten patients, including the boys, were taken to the burn unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Grandmother: "They are the world to me" Outside Jackson Memorial, Sylvia Rivera spoke with CBS News Miami about her 5-year-old and 7-year-old grandsons, who remain in serious condition. "Right now they are in serious condition and doctors are working on them. Their vitals are stable right now. They are doing well and they are reacting really well to the treatments and have not had complications so far," she said. Rivera said the 7-year-old has burns over 80% of his body, while the 5-year-old has burns over 40%. "I was very, very worried," she said. "I am also very unhappy. I just hope everything works out and investigators are able to do their job and come to a resolution. They will be here for a few months — three to four to five months, they estimate so far." "We are just glad we have a great support system and a lot of friends. Everyone is praying for these babies. They are the world to me. I would be nothing without these babies," she added. Family faces long recovery, financial strain Rivera said the family has turned to a fundraising website to help cover medical and other expenses, as has the family of 28-year-old Joshua Fifi, a father of four who was also burned in the explosion. "The mother and father are not able to work right now and they will not be able to work for a while. We are insured, but there are a number of medical expenses and other expenses," she said. Rivera said the tragedy has shifted her perspective. "This makes you appreciate a lot of things in life. It makes you not worry about the smaller things. Those things don't matter anymore. What matters is that they are well and are going to be OK." The boys' mother, Cassandra Rivera, posted a message on Facebook thanking people for their prayers. She said there is a "long road of recovery" ahead and she is facing multiple surgeries. "We will get through this and we will recover as fast as possible," she wrote.
Vox
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Vox
How Trump is rewriting American history
The National Park Service eliminated references to transgender people from its Stonewall National Monument website and now only refers to those who are lesbian, gay and has been disappearing from government websites. First, it was Stonewall. The word 'transgender' was removed from the National Park Service page commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, at which trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played a central role. The acronym LGBTQ was also changed to just 'LGB.' Then, Harriet Tubman was erased from a page about the Underground Railroad, and the language changed to highlight 'Black/white cooperation.' A page about Jackie Robinson's Army service was taken down from the Pentagon's website. (Both pages were later restored after public criticism.) A Washington Post investigation also found that at least half a dozen pages referencing the Little Rock Nine, the Black students who integrated an Arkansas high school in the 1950s, previously said the students had 'opened doors' for those seeking 'equality and education.' Now, the pages say the students were just seeking 'education.' The edits come amid the Trump administration's push to end DEI and 'restore truth and sanity' to American history, an effort causing alarm among historians like Yale professor David W. Blight. In an interview with Noel King on Today, Explained, Blight says the changes amount to a brazen attempt to rewrite our past — but that America is no stranger to revisionist history. The country has rewritten and re-saved and re-pushed its narrative of events so many times that it might as well look like the filename of a high schooler's final project. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Reporters will often say, 'Donald Trump is unprecedented. The things that he does are unprecedented.' But I imagine you would tell me that the United States has tried to rewrite its own history, at certain points. Many times, yes. Give me some examples of the times we've tried to do this. During World War II, the United States created a massive propaganda machine called the Office of War Information. That's what governments do during wartime. That organization did indeed engage in a lot of propaganda, selling stories to keep Americans patriotic. Moving ahead from that to McCarthyism: Anti-communism was a very deep phenomenon in America — and not without some reason in the '30s and '40s. But McCarthyism caused a wave of attempts of trying to control what writers wrote, what historians could teach, who could teach anything. Let's take the Civil War. In 1865 to 1870, there was an organization in the South called the Southern Historical Society. That was originally made up mostly of former Confederate officers who were determined to try to control the story of what the war had been about, what they had actually fought for, what their crusade meant, what the Confederacy actually was. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. What was the story they were trying to sell? They told a story that we've come to know as the 'Confederate Lost Cause.' Namely, they were arguing early on that they did not really lose the war on the battlefield, they only lost to superior numbers and resources. They said they lost only to 'the leviathan of northern industrialization.' There's some truth in that, but that's not the full explanation. They also argued that the war was not really about slavery. It was really about state sovereignty and states' rights. It was really about resisting the federal interference with their lives and their civilization and their morays and folkways… Can I jump in and tell you something? Sure. I'm from central New York. I went to public school. That was what I learned. Wow. Why did I learn something that wasn't true in public school? Because over time, in culture, schooling, politics, and rituals from the 1870s and '80s well on into the 20th century — and still surviving in a textbook you were learning from in the 1990s, I am sorry to hear — was this idea that the United States divided had this all-out horrific war. But it had to put itself back together again. How do you put back together something so horrifically divided? You're going to have to find mutuality. You're going to have to find some kind of unified narrative. Well, one of the unified narratives they did develop in the 19th century — and there's reality to this — is that you unify around the valor of soldiers. But if we admire valor without ever looking at the cause for which they fought, it's of course limited. 'Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power.' Now, the typical and powerful belief was that everybody in that war fought for the cause they believed in. And if you fought for the cause you believed in with great valor, you fought for the right [reasons]. Everybody was equal in valor. The causes had to be muted, put aside. Well, you know, that's a part of human relations as well: How do you keep a family together? Well, there's some things you don't talk about. But for nations and whole peoples and cultures, the danger in this is that the stories you take on, the stories that you develop that define the identity of your nation — the identity of your past and now your future — is going to leave somebody out. In fact, it may end up allowing you to reconcile on the backs of those who most suffered from the conflict you are trying to reconcile. Obviously, in America, that meant Black Americans. It meant their civil and political rights, which were created and then slowly but surely abandoned and then crushed in the Jim Crow system of the South. Now, the point of all of this is that the Confederate Lost Cause, which said the South fought for noble ends, they fought for their homes, they fought for their sovereignty, they fought for their integrity. … It eventually becomes, though, not a story of loss at all. It becomes, by the 1890s and into the 20th century, a victory narrative. This was an age of a lot of sentimental literature. Americans came to love stories of the Old South. Of course, it's there in Gone With the Wind, still, maybe the most famous movie ever made. So the Lost Cause was both a political movement and it was a literary movement. But it was at its core a racial ideology, and it lasted a very long time. Let's compare to what we're seeing today. What you're talking about with these popular books and Gone With the Wind, that seems to me more subtle than the president saying, 'You delete that information about Jackie Robinson's military service from the website.' Will what Trump is doing succeed because it is so unsubtle? That's a very good question and my instinctive answer — and it's partly my wishful answer — is that no he won't. It is not subtle, you're right: They're wiping out websites. They are explicitly saying, 'Professional history, whether it's in our greatest museums or our greatest university, has been teaching us all the wrong ways. They've been dividing us.' This is the word they love to use: The history we write has been divisive, divisive, divisive. Well, no, it's not. It's simply informative. Sometimes it gets people riled up and sometimes it gets them arguing and sometimes fighting. But what the Trumpists are doing is telling us that they know better — policy people at the Heritage Foundation or pseudo-historians who think that studying all this stuff about race, gender, all the ethnicities that make us up, all this pluralism, is just taking away from 'American greatness.' They use that term a lot: 'We're no longer teaching our youth about American greatness.' Yes we are! We're teaching our youth that our greatness is in the pluralism. Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power. What will you know about World War I if you try to find nothing but greatness? What will you know about the history of imperialism and expansion if all you wanna know is about greatness? What will you actually know about Native American history if all you look for is greatness? It defies the intelligence of anyone with an education, and a whole lot of people who don't have a lot of formal education. I'm not very optimistic right now about what's going on, but I do have a certain faith that people just aren't going to buy this.
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
National Park Service tries to erase trans people from the Stonewall Riots
The National Parks Service (NPS) removed all references to transgender people on its website about the Stonewall Inn National Monument this week, prompting intense backlash from LGBTQ rights activists. 'Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal,' the NPS web page now reads. 'The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.' Trans activists like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played a central role in the 1969 Stonewall Riots in Manhattan, New York, which marked a major turning point in the fight for LGBTQ rights. Both women were honored with a monument outside the bar in 2019. The Stonewall Inn and its surrounding area became a national monument in 2016. An archived version of the NPS website referenced trans and queer people, and used the acronym LGBTQ+ throughout. In a joint statement on Thursday, the Stonewall Inn and the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, an LGBTQ rights advocacy nonprofit, called it a 'blatant act of erasure' that 'dishonors the immense contributions of transgender individuals — especially transgender women of color — who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots and the broader fight for LGBTQ+ rights.' Protesters also gathered outside the Stonewall Inn on Friday to rally against the Trump administration and its attacks on trans people. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has signed multiple executive orders targeting the trans community. An executive order proclaiming that there are only two biological sexes likely prompted the change on the government's Stonewall Inn web page. It and other anti-trans directives have impacted agencies across the federal government. On Friday, the U.S. Army announced a ban on trans people joining the military and said it would no longer provide gender-affirming care for service members. Critical public health information on government websites have also been cleared of references to trans and nonbinary people, with a note at the top of the pages railing against so-called 'gender ideology,' a term used to promote the false idea that transgender people are pushing an ideology rather than simply embracing their identity. This article was originally published on
USA Today
14-02-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
National Park Service removes 'transgender' from Stonewall National Monument website
National Park Service removes 'transgender' from Stonewall National Monument website Show Caption Hide Caption Transgender references removed from Stonewall website References to transgender people have been removed from a National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument. Fox - 5 NY The National Park Service has removed mentions of "transgender" from its website for the Stonewall National Monument in New York, a small park dedicated to an LGBTQ+ uprising that helped advance civil rights for the community. "Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal," the website now reads. "The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights and provided momentum for a movement." The internet archive service Wayback Machine shows that up until Thursday, the website included "transgender, or queer" in the LGBTQ+ acronym. 'Page not found': Trump administration scrubs webpages of gender reference President Donald Trump and his administration have targeted the transgender community with several executive actions that include banning transgender women in sports, banning transgender troops in the military, and limiting federal recognition to two genders, biologically female and biologically male. But transgender activists were central to the 1969 uprising at Stonewall, and the move to remove them from the park's website has drawn criticism from the community. Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera were key trans activists at Stonewall The Stonewall Uprising was a series of protests against police raids in gay bars in Manhattan's Greenwich Village of Manhattan, but it centered on the most popular one, the Stonewall Inn. According to the Library of Congress, homosexuality was considered a criminal offense at the time and raids were common. But this series of events built off years of activism and marked a shift in perceptions of LGBTQ+ activism in the U.S. The first Pride march took place on the anniversary of the raids, kicking off an enduring tradition that occurs in June in cities around the country. Many activists involved in the uprising were transgender and gender-nonconforming, including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Together they founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and the first LGBTQ+ youth shelter in North America, according to an article still available as of Friday on the NPS website. Rivera still has an active NPS web page dedicated to her. Johnson had an NPS page that now shows an error message. According to their bios, Johnson was known for her joy, creativity and generosity, and Rivera remained a fierce advocate for trans rights through the following decades, creating the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Marsha P. Johnson Transgender hero of Stonewall riots finally gets her due LGBTQ+ community groups speak out about Stonewall park website edits Stonewall Inn today is a historical landmark and operating bar. In a statement released by GLAAD, Stonewall Inn and The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, an associated nonprofit organization, demanded the website language be reverted back. "Let us be clear: Stonewall is transgender history. Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and countless other trans and gender-nonconforming individuals fought bravely, and often at great personal risk, to push back against oppressive systems," the statement reads. "We will not stand by while the legacies of our transgender siblings are erased from the history books." New York Gov. Kathy Hochul condemned the move in a post on X calling it "cruel and petty." Kinsey Crowley is a trending news reporter at USA TODAY. Reach her at kcrowley@ and follow her on X and TikTok @kinseycrowley.
