Friday News Brief

Buffalo police are asking for help from the public as their search continues for two missing teenagers. They say 14-year-old Istahil Ahmed was last seen on Franklin Street and 13-year-old Sincere Vines was last spotted on Bailey Avenue. Officials say there’s no connection between these two cases. They are asking anyone with information on the whereabouts of the teens to call 9-1-1 immediately. (Additional information: She is about 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs about 153 pounds. She was last seen wearing khaki pants, a navy blue long-sleeve shirt and white sneakers. And 13-year-old Sincere Vines was last spotted on Bailey Avenue. He is about 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighs about 230 pounds. He was last seen wearing black pants, a black hoodie and black and tan Adidas sneakers.)

 

The Genesee County Health Department has scheduled another anti-rabies clinic at the Genesee County Fairgrounds on Thursday, August 10th from 4:00pm to 6:30pm. There is no charge for the vaccine, but voluntary donations are accepted. Animals must be at least 3 months old. Each animal must be leashed or crated and accompanied by an adult who can control the animal at all times. Limit 4 pets per car. For more information, call 344-2580.

 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Thursday that United Food and Commercial Workers Local One, with more than 19,000 members and their families across Upstate New York, will receive a $764 million pension-fix payout from the American Rescue Plan. Employers like Tops Friendly Markets were victims of a pension system that collapsed after the 2008 economic crash. Without action, after a lifetime of hard work, many could not retire or would have paltry or zero pension benefits remaining, according to Schumer.

 

The TSA has found a loaded gun belonging to a Canandaigua man at Frederick Douglass Greater Rochester International Airport. The weapon was discovered yesterday as the man entered the security checkpoint. An investigation revealed he has a valid pistol permit, and the man also claimed that he forgot the gun was with him. This is only the second time so far this year a weapon has been spotted by airport security.

 

Governor Hochul has announced over $100 million in funding to help out schools across New York State. The money will be used to assist schools with addressing pandemic learning loss and offering additional mental health resources to students. The governor says the COVID-19 crisis had a devastating impact on kids and she believes this money will allow them to get back on a path towards success. Districts have until August 18th to request financial assistance.

 

In June Bills fans received a new license plate from the DMV and now Giants and Jets fans can get theirs. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has released redesigned New York Jets and New York Giants license plates ahead of the 2023 NFL season. Jets and Giants fans can visit the DMV website to order NFL plates for passenger and commercial vehicles. The plates feature a background of helmets from the chosen team.

 

ELSEWHERE…

Jobs numbers from July come out this morning and analysts expect them to show 200,000 non-farm positions added. That would be the smallest gain since December 2020. Unemployment is expected to hold at 3.6%.

 

 

 

The man convicted of killing eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue has been sentenced to death. A judge handed down the death sentence on Thursday to 50-year-old Robert Bowers. Bowers was convicted in June on more than 60 charges in the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.

 

 

 

 

A number of Tesla owners are suing the automaker for fraud after a Reuters investigation discovered the company has been inflating the range estimates of its electric vehicles. The suit filed Wednesday in federal court in California accuses Tesla of exaggerating the estimated distance a vehicle can go on a single charge.

 

Lottery players are hoping that luck is on their side as they try and win the fourth-largest jackpot in Mega Millions history. The top prize has risen to one-point-two-five billion dollars after no one claimed the jackpot Tuesday. There hasn’t been a jackpot winner since April when a winning ticket was bought in New York. The drawing will be streamed live tonight at megamillions.com  Please play responsibly.

 

 

Fans of the iconic HBO series The Sopranos can now own the family patriarch’s own boat. Tony Soprano’s fishing vessel, which was called the “Stugots”, has been listed for sale in Stamford, Connecticut through United Yacht Sales. The 1999 Cape Fear 47 Sportfish has since been renamed “Never Enough” by its former owner, who is listing the classic Carolina-style custom sport-fishing boat for just under $300,000. Featuring a large teak cockpit, two staterooms and two bathrooms for overnight guests, this piece of Sopranos history was the first of several owned by the infamous mob boss over the series’ lifetime.

 

Today is Friday, August 4th, the 216th day of the year.

August 4 in history…

…In 1693, Champagne was invented by French monk Dom Perignon.

 

 

 

 

…In 1892, the parents of Lizzie Borden were found murdered at their home in Massachusetts. She was later arrested, tried, and acquitted.

 

…In 1942, the first train with Jewish people leaves for Auschwitz. Teenage girls went first. Pictured are five survivors of Auschwitz.

 

 

 

 

…In 1944, 15-year-old Anne Frank and her family were discovered by Nazi police. The family had been hiding in secret quarters above her father’s factory in Amsterdam, Holland for more than two years. They were sent to a concentration camp in Holland, and in September Anne and most of the others were shipped to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In the fall of 1944, with the Soviet liberation of Poland underway, Anne was moved with her sister Margot to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Suffering under the deplorable conditions of the camp, the two sisters caught typhus and died in February 1945. The British liberated the camp less than two months later. (Scroll to the bottom of today’s News Brief page for more about the Frank family.)

 

 

…In 1982, Joel Youngblood became the first Major League Baseball player to play and get two hits for two different teams in the same day. During an afternoon game he drove in the winning run for the New York Mets. Once the game was complete, he was traded to the Montreal Expos and played in a night game in Philadelphia. He singled in the fourth inning.

 

 

 

 

…In 2004, Mary Kay Letourneau, the former Washington state schoolteacher who was convicted of raping her sixth grade student, was freed from prison on this date. Letourneau was a 34-year-old married mother of four when she began having sex with 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau. She went on to bear two of his children. Both said they were involved in a love affair. Mary Kay Letourneau later wrote in a letter to a friend that she felt ‘deep regret’ for raping her 12-year-old student and later marrying him. Letourneau was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2020 and, while dying, wrote dozens of letters to friends and family to atone for her actions. A friend said she understood that ‘she had really made a mess of her life’.

More about the Frank family:

Otto Frank escaped Nazi Germany with his wife and two daughters soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They lived a peaceful life in Amsterdam until May 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. Otto, determined to leave Europe with his family, contacted an old college friend in the United States for help.

In April 1941, Otto Frank was desperate. A decade earlier, he and his wife Edith had been happily living in Frankfurt, Germany, with their two young daughters, Margot and Anne. After experiencing the first wave of anti-Semitic attacks instigated by the new Nazi government, Otto and Edith decided in 1933 to move to the Netherlands for safety. After arriving in Amsterdam, Otto opened a company called Opekta, which manufactured products used for making jellies and jams, and his daughters started attending Dutch schools.

As the years passed, Frank watched with concern as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime grew more aggressive. He considered moving to Great Britain, but his efforts to establish a factory there failed. Frank added his family’s names to the waiting list for American immigration visas in 1938, joining 200,000 other people born in Germany who also wanted to escape to the United States.
Two years later, Otto Frank was still awaiting his turn to be interviewed by the US consulate for an immigration visa. On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Within days of the invasion, Nazi aircraft bombed Rotterdam, destroying the US consulate building—and with it, the visa waiting list. US State Department officials attempted to reconstruct the list, asking everyone who had applied for immigration to contact the consulate. For some reason, Frank does not seem to have put his family’s names back on the list.

On April 30, 1941, Otto Frank wrote to his old friend, Nathan Straus Jr. (whose friends called him “Charley”), the son of the founder of Macy’s department stores. The two men had met more than 30 years earlier, while Frank was in college in Heidelberg, and had become fast friends.
“I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see U.S.A. is the only country we could go to . . . You are the only person I know that I can ask: Would it be possible for you to give a deposit in my favor?”

FRANTIC CORRESPONDENCE

Nathan Straus Jr. worked for President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. He had plenty of political contacts and enough wealth to sponsor the Frank family, and immediately told Otto that he would help. Edith Frank’s two brothers, Julius and Walter Holländer, both of whom had been arrested by the Nazis during Kristallnacht, had already managed to immigrate from Germany to Boston, Massachusetts. Neither of them had enough money to assist the Franks directly, but they were eager to help Straus. The three men corresponded with each other, working through the National Refugee Service, a US organization that helped Jewish refugees coordinate their immigration paperwork.

“BAD LUCK”

On June 11, 1941, only six weeks after Frank first asked him, Straus signed five copies of an affidavit for the Frank family, agreeing to sponsor their immigration. Five days later, the National Refugee Service informed Straus that the US State Department was implementing new rules, mandating that all immigration applications had to be approved in Washington, DC. This would delay the Frank family’s immigration for at least several months. Newspapers announced worse news that same day: Germany had ordered US consulates in Nazi-occupied territory to close. On July 10, State Department officials in Rotterdam reported to Washington that they had destroyed their visa stamps and closed the consulate. Frank had not finished collecting the necessary paperwork before the consulate closed. Even if he managed to gather everything, the Franks would have had to travel through multiple Nazi-occupied countries to reach a US consulate for an interview. During World War II, this travel was almost impossible. When Frank realized that his family would not be able to reach the United States, he responded stoically to Straus: “It is a pity that for the present all efforts will be useless as the American Consulate at Rotterdam is leaving . . . So we have to wait. Bad luck, but cannot be helped. Let us hope that conditions will get more normal again.”

CUBA?

On September 8, 1941, Otto Frank wrote to Nathan Straus again, this time raising the possibility of obtaining a tourist visa to Cuba. The chances of escape were slim: the Cuban consulate had also closed in the Netherlands. Frank heard rumors that he might obtain a Cuban visa in Spain or in Germany if he could get there. He also needed at least $2,825 (approximately $50,000 in 2018) for the visa fees and the bank deposit the Cuban government required. “I know that it will be impossible for us all to leave, even if most of the money is refundable, but Edith urges me to leave alone or with the children,” Frank wrote. Straus agreed to provide the deposit for the Cuban visa, and Julius Holländer added, “My brother and I will pay for the boat ticket and Cuban visa for Mr. Frank. If you give the necessary deposit . . . I promise you that it will be returned to you untouched, as we will support my brother-in-law while he remains in Cuba.” By December, the Holländers and Straus had prepared the money for Otto Frank’s visa. Frank planned to see whether the Nazi authorities would permit him to leave the Netherlands if he had a Cuban visa. If Otto could emigrate safely, Straus would then try to obtain Cuban visas for Edith, Margot, and Anne Frank.

NO ESCAPE

On December 11, 1941, Julius Holländer telephoned the National Refugee Service to thank them for their assistance, but the efforts to help the Frank family immigrate had failed. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war against the United States, the Cuban government canceled Otto Frank’s visa application. It is likely that Cuban officials feared that German refugees would become stuck in Cuba indefinitely if the United States instituted even more national security screenings for new immigrants, or stopped accepting immigrants entirely.

On July 6, 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in the attic annex above the Opekta offices. They were joined by Herman and Auguste Van Pels and their son Peter, and later by dentist Fritz Pfeffer, all of whom were Jewish. Anne Frank, who had received a diary for her 13th birthday several weeks earlier, spent the next two years documenting her experiences in hiding. On August 4, 1944, Dutch police discovered and arrested the residents hiding in the annex. The Franks, Van Pels, and Pfeffer were sent first to the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, and then placed on the final train sent from Westerbork to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Otto Frank was the only annex resident to survive the Holocaust. His wife Edith was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and daughters Margot and Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early spring 1945.

When Frank returned to Amsterdam after the war, one of his former employees, Miep Gies, who had helped the annex residents while they were in hiding, gave him his daughter Anne’s diary. Frank decided to publish it as The Secret Annex in 1947. Anne Frank’s diary has since been published in at least 70 languages and has become the most famous testimony of the Holocaust.