Great-grandmother leads annual Miami-Dade, Monroe toy drive




















Beginning in August, Bunchy Gertner puts aside her social life, her needs and even her great-grandchildren to head over to the “North Pole,” the place where she stores, wraps and distributes thousands of toys destined for foster care children in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.

“This is top banana,” said Gertner referring to the nonstop volunteer work she has done for the past 16 years. “Every kid will get a gift and — even if it’s just for a moment — they will know that someone cares.”

It’s Gertner who dedicates her time to planning and execution of the toy drive that will distribute 3,400 gifts to the children under Our Kids, a non-profit agency that provides foster care and related services in Miami and the Florida Keys.





“She focuses solely on the toy drive and lives to match the right toy with the right child,” said Fran Alegra, Our Kids CEO. “I don’t have staff that would be able to dedicate the time that she gives to this.”

Over the years, 78-year-old Gertner has not only given every foster child a gift, but she has made sure that everyone receives a good quality, age appropriate present.

“I think I have 3,400 children,” said Gertner. “Thank God I didn’t give birth to all of them and they’ve all left the house. But I feel like they’re all mine.”

Gertner has even made it her mission to look after the children who are aging out of foster care and are considered independent living. For these teens, she prepared a gift that includes a comforter, sheets, pillow cases, hand towels, bath towels, glass wear, pillows, dishes, pots and pans.

“They have no money when they leave foster care,” said Gertner. “I give them what a mom and dad would give a child who was going off to college or going off on their own.”

In order to raise money and collect presents, Gertner has relied on about 50 sponsors, who are responsible for collecting gifts. She distributes the first names of children with their age, gender and ethnicity to provide each child with an appropriate gift.

“I became a beggar. I got down on my hands and knees and begged everyone that I met,” said Gertner. “I write letters, I make phone calls and ask if they would want to help or if they know anyone who would want to do it.”

Once she receives the gifts from the sponsors, they are taken to her North Pole, which this year is an empty store donated by Gulfstream Park.

There, she sorts the presents that come with a specific child’s name by agency and begins wrapping the gifts that she receives with no specific name.

“I couldn’t do it alone,’’ said Gertner, who refers to her helpers as elves. “If it weren’t for the people helping me wrap and the sponsors, I wouldn’t have a toy drive.’’

On any given 10-hour work day, the volunteers, which range in numbers from a handful to two dozen, show up to wrap and sing holiday songs.

“This is better than staying at home in bed all day,” said Rivly Breus, a student at Florida Atlantic University. With a little experience under her belt from wrapping at Macy’s, Breus decided to Google a way she could volunteer her talents.

“It was hard for me growing up so it’s good to be able to shine a light on others,” Breus said.

Some come with no experience, like Gonzo Gonzalez, who often has to patch the spaces where he didn’t use sufficient paper.

“I didn’t have it easy growing up, but at least I had my parents,” said Gonzalez, who wrapped about 30 footballs on a recent Sunday. “It’s good to be able to give back. The kids who don’t have parents are not expecting anything.”

Although, Gertner does not give the presents directly to the children for privacy reasons, she is satisfied with knowing that there is a child at the end of every present. She said she will continue to do it until she can’t anymore.

“I know in my heart that what I do is enough,” said Gertner. “When I go to bed I know that I have fulfilled my mission and done my job well.”





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Mike is kickin’ class over $250M aid loss








The teachers union’s refusal to come to the negotiating table on a new rating system for its members will end up costing the city $250 million in state education aid, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

Hizzoner and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott slammed the president of the United Federation of Teachers for ditching talks on how to meaningfully evaluate the performance of teachers — just weeks shy of a strict Jan. 17 deadline for an agreement.

“I thought we were well on the way of having productive discussions, but for some reason Mr. [Michael] Mulgrew has instructed his people to walk away from the table,” Walcott said during the mayor’s weekly radio appearance. “It’s really tough to negotiate when the UFT walks away from the table.”




Bloomberg said the city is recalculating its midyear budget with the assumption that the anticipated $250 million boost is now a bust.

“It takes weeks to figure out what we’re going to have to cut if we don’t get the money,” he said. “We can still keep negotiating, but we’re going to start assuming in our budget preparations . . . that we will not have the money.”

The rules of the deadline say the city needs to not only reach a deal before that date in order to get the funds, but it also needs to have its plan approved by the state Education Department — and implemented.

That’s why Walcott had imposed an even earlier deadline for striking a deal, but his hopeful deadline expired last night.

Mulgrew said he’s open to continuing talks with the city, but he’s insisting that officials agree to discuss the implementation of the new rating system before the two sides hammer out the details of the evaluations themselves.

He said it’s because the DOE has already botched preparations for introducing the new ratings — including a lack of training for key personnel.

“[If] the implementation and training is all messed up, then the evaluation [system] will fail — and that’s too important for the schools system,” said Mulgrew.

Gov. Cuomo insisted earlier this week that he would not extend the approaching deadline.

The city is one of just 27 districts — out of 692 in the state — that have yet to submit a plan to the state.

The rating system will include a component that judges teachers based on how well their students do on state tests — something the union had been opposing for years.

yoav.gonen@nypost.com










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Investors shuffling assets ahead of fiscal cliff




















Some citizens aren’t waiting to find out if the White House and Republicans in Congress will be able to reach a last-minute deal to pull the country away from the “fiscal cliff.”

They are selling securities while capital gains tax rates are still low or transferring millions into trusts for the benefit of children and grandchildren before estate tax laws become more stringent. Others are getting out of the markets and parking money in less risky accounts.

Miami financial planner Cathy Pareta has been counseling her upper middle class clients — “the Johnsons, not the Rockefellers” — on whether to adjust investment portfolios, accelerate income or realize capital gains sooner than planned.





“Some people are going to get hit hard,” said John Bacci, a financial planner in Linthicum, Md., who has gone down his client list and run projections on what higher taxes would look like for them. He’s looking at tax-friendly alternatives for some clients, such as annuities or rental property.

At year’s end, the country will leap off the “fiscal cliff” unless politicians reach a compromise on mandated spending cuts and the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts.

For most investors, the expiring cuts will mean that the tax rate for long-term capital gains will rise from 15 percent to 20 percent. Dividends also will no longer be taxed at 15 percent but treated as ordinary income, which could mean a tax rate as high as 39.6 percent. And individuals with multimillion-dollar estates will find much more of their money subject to the federal estate tax.

Estate planning lawyers say the demand is so intense that they are putting in grueling hours to set up trusts.

“It’s very stressful. We are working day and night,” said Diana Zeydel, an estate planning lawyer with Greenberg Traurig in Miami. “Were doing three times what we normally do for end-of-the-year planning.”

Zeydel said many of her clients waited until after the elections in November to gauge how the political tide would affect their future finances. This gave them little more than a month to make major decisions about their wealth.

Most observing the political jousting in Washington expect taxes will go up even if the political leaders reach a deal — they’re just not sure how much. Many aren’t taking any chances.

Jim Ludwick, a financial planner in Odenton, Md., said one client in his late 50s cashed out stock and bond funds totaling $1.7 million not long after the election and stashed the proceeds in a money market fund.

The client, anticipating a market plunge due to the “fiscal cliff” and other issues, said he spent his entire working life building up a nest egg and wouldn’t have time to wait for his portfolio to recover, according to Ludwick. The client fears it won’t be safe to re-enter the stock market for another year.

“We have a number of clients who are taking capital gains this year, expecting that if they wait until next year, they will have to pay higher taxes on those same gains,” said Daniel McHugh, president of Lombard Securities in Baltimore. Some of those clients are realizing six-figure gains but are still willing to take the tax hit now, he said.

Of course, the downside is that the stock market could take off, and these investors will miss out on even higher gains, McHugh said. But, he added: “Given the state the economy is in, that’s a very small risk.”





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Bay of Pigs invasion veterans mark 50 years since release




















In the days before Christmas 50 years ago this weekend, 1,113 Bay of Pigs fighters captured by Fidel Castro’s forces and imprisoned for 20 months were finally released to a heroes’ welcome in Miami.

The first planeload of POWs arrived at Homestead Air Force Base on Dec. 23, 1962. Gaunt and betrayed by the John F. Kennedy administration, members of the proud Brigade 2506 were bused to Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium, where waiting relatives engulfed them with hugs at a massive reunion that made front-page news. Five days later, JFK and his wife Jackie would be at the Orange Bowl to welcome them, too.

On Saturday, the 50th anniversary of those pivotal days will be observed as surviving brigade members — now in their 70s and 80s — hold a and 11 a.m. Mass and reunion at the Bay of Pigs Museum in Little Havana.





The release of the men was the one bright spot in the disastrous April 1961 CIA-backed invasion to overthrow the two-year old Castro government. Yet the fighters’ return also sent the somber message that exiles would not reclaim Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis that October had set the course of U.S.-Cuba relations until today.

Back then, it was sinking in: The Cuban exile community was in Miami to stay.

A defeated Jose Andreu, now 76, the first brigade member to sign up for the invasion, was among those who arrived home that bittersweet day.

“My wife to-be was there to meet me, along with my sister and my father,” Andreu said. “I remember hugging and crying. After leaving the auditorium, I remember being so hungry I went to a Royal Castle and my girlfriend bought me, I think, 18 small cheeseburgers.”

Among the young people waiting at the auditorium that day in 1962 was a teen-aged Ninoska Perez Castellon, there with her family to welcome her brothers and uncle, all brigade members.

“I remember being in that packed auditorium ... I can truly say as a child I viewed those men as my first heroes. I still do,” said Perez-Castellon, who grew up to become one of Miami’s most influential radio personalities.

Perez and her family still have black-and-white snapshots of the joyful reunion, showing her late grandmother proudly hugging her son.

The behind-the-scenes negotiations that finally led to the release of the brigadistas 50 years ago this week were the stuff of Hollywood movies. They involved months of haggling with Castro by everyone from a former first lady to a high-profile diplomatic negotiator who led the group that finally succeeded — a group of the prisoners’ mothers, wives and fathers who made up the Cuban Families Committee.

Their effort resulted in a now-forgotten 7,857 exodus of Cuban refugees, many relatives of the brigadistas, who arrived in cargo ships at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale from December 1962 to July 1963.

Two women in the committee played key roles — one in Cuba, motivated by a mother’s love; the other in Miami, seeking to free her husband.

Havana socialite, Berta Barreto, whose oldest son, Alberto Oms Barreto, had been captured during the invasion, made the initial contact with Castro and promised that the ransom he had set for the men would be paid. Years later, her second son, Pablo Perez-Cisneros Barreto, wrote the definitive book on the negotiations called After the Bay of Pigs, soon to be published in Spanish. “What my mother and the others managed to do, with no experience in high-level negotiating, was extraordinary,” Perez-Cisneros Barreto said.





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Nintendo’s amazing triumph in Japan may doom the company






According to Japanese gaming bible Famitsu, Nintendo 3DS sold 333,000 units in the week ending December 16. Sony’s PS Vita limped along at 13’000 units. The new Wii U did an OK 130,000 units and PS3 managed 46,000 units.  The utter hardware domination of the 3DS is reshaping the Japanese software market. Franchises that were thought to be fading have been revitalized in their portable versions. The 3DS version of the ancient “Animal Crossing” series, famed for being the game where nothing happens, hit a staggering 1.7 million units last week in Japan. “Inazuma Eleven” sold 170,000 units in its launch week, up from 140’000 units its DS version managed in 2011.


[More from BGR: RIM, HTC and Nokia could all be headed the way of Palm]






Nintendo’s portable console 3DS had a muted start in its home market in the spring of 2011. Many thought that Sony would have a fair shot at competing with Nintendo once Playstation Vita launched at the end of 2011. But once Nintendo executed an aggressive price cut for 3DS in the summer of 2011 and then launched a large-screen version of the console in mid-2012, the gadget has grown into a godzilla in Japan, demolishing both Sony Vita and aging tabletop console competition.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 browser smokes iOS 6 and Windows Phone 8 in comparison test [video]]


3DS is doing well also in America, where its lifetime sales are moving close to the 6 million unit mark this holiday season. According to NPD, the 3DS sales in the US market topped 500,000 units in November. That’s a decent number, though far from the torrid volume the portable is racking up in its home market. The US November video game software chart was dominated by massive home console juggernauts: new installments of Call of Duty, Halo and Assassin’s Creed franchises  shifted more than 13 million units in retail. At the same time, the Japanese software chart remains in a Nineties time warp,  dominated by Nintendo’s musty masterpieces: Super Mario Brothers, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, etc.


Japanese and American tastes have always been different. But what we are witnessing now is a particularly fascinating divergence. American consumers are spending more of their time and money on smartphone and tablet games, while console game spending is increasingly focusing on massive, graphically stunning blockbuster titles on Xbox360 and PS3. The casual gamers are shifting to mobile games, while hardcore gamers remain attracted to sprawling epics on home consoles. The overall video game spending in America keeps declining month after month, as casual titles and mid-list games slide. But the Triple A whales like Call of Duty series are doing better than ever.


In Japan, Nintendo has been able to battle back iPhone and Android game invasion with a nostalgic series of portable games that basically recycle the biggest hits of Eighties and early Nineties. Mario, Pokemons and other portable heroes are slowly losing their grip on US and European consumers. But in Japan, some form of national nostalgia is keeping Nintendo on track.


The problem here is that the Japanese success of the 3DS may now be convincing Nintendo that it does not have to rethink its business strategy. The smartphone and tablet game spending continues growing explosively across the world. Unlike console games, mobile game sales in China are legal. The global gaming spending is shifting towards new hardware platforms even as console mammoths like Halo still reign in America. At this critical juncture, Nintendo has managed to cocoon its home market in a web of nostalgia, turning the 3DS console and its Eighties left-over franchises into epic bestsellers yet again.


This means that there is no sense of urgency to push Nintendo into rethinking its long-term plans. The company may continue simply ignoring the smartphone and tablet challenge, designing new portable consoles and the 28th Mario game to support it. 20 years ago, Japan’s insularity doomed its chances to succeed in the mobile phone business. Ithe idiosyncratic nature of Japan may now be leading its biggest entertainment industry success astray.


This article was originally published by BGR


Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Jennifer Lawrence Fashion Time Warp

"It" girl Jennifer Lawrence is getting a lot of attention this year, and with good reason! 

The recent Golden Globe nominee has proven herself worthy of the big-screen hype thanks to the box office success of The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook. On top of that, the beauteous bombshell has become a fashion-forward phenomenon.

Related: Five Things You Don't Know About Jennifer Lawrence

Join us as we look back at Jennifer's best and worst looks of red carpet past.

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North Korea says it has detained a US citizen








PYONGYANG, North Korea — North Korea said Friday that it has detained an American citizen who has confessed to unspecified crimes.

State media said in a short dispatch that someone named Bae Jun Ho entered North Korea on Nov. 3 as a tourist but was detained because of crimes.

The North said the crimes were "proven through evidence" but didn't elaborate.

Pyongyang has detained and eventually released several Americans in recent years. Some have been Christians accused of religious proselytizing.

Two journalists were also detained after crossing into the North from China while on a reporting trip but were later released.




South Korean activists have told local media in Seoul that Bae is a Korean American and was detained after entering North Korea to guide tourists. Bae operates a tourism company that specializes in North Korea, the reports said.

The North Korean dispatch said officials from the Swiss Embassy met Bae on Friday, but there were no other details about the meeting. The United States doesn't have diplomatic relations with Pyongyang so American citizens are given aid by the Swiss.

Bae is undergoing "legal treatment" according to North Korea's criminal law, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said.










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Cuba lashes out against U.S. fines on foreign banks




















The Cuban government Thursday denounced what it called the “unjust and illegal” multi-million dollar fines the U.S. government slapped on two foreign banks for violating Washington’s sanctions on the island.

The U.S. actions show that its “ferocious persecution of financial and commercial transactions by Cuba and those with legitimate relations … has only changed but has hardened,” a Foreign Ministry official said in a statement.

The British-based HSBC bank agreed to pay $1.9 billion to the U.S. government last week to settle accusations that it laundered drug money through its Mexican and other branches, and violated U.S. economic sanctions on Cuba.





The next day Washington announced that Japan’s Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ bank had agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle what the Cuban statement called “a supposed violation of the unilateral sanctions of the United States against various countries, including Cuba.”

Under the trade embargo, banks cannot move Cuban funds through U.S. financial institutions or handle U.S. dollar deposits for Cuban entities or citizens. Cuba is subject to other sanctions as well because it is on the U.S. list of countries that support international terrorism.

The Foreign Ministry statement noted that the sanctions came one month after the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for the 21st time to condemn the 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba.

While the HSBC settlement was reported to be one of the largest ever, the U.S. Treasury Department has hit several other foreign banks in recent years for violating sanctions on Cuba and other countries, especially Iran.

The Netherlands’ ING bank agreed to a $619 million settlement earlier this year. Credit Suisse agreed to pay $539 million in 2009. And the Swiss UBS bank was hit with a $100 million settlement in 2004.





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Slip-N-Slide’s Ted Lucas teams up with Miami Heat’s James Jones for All-Star Holiday weekend




















Record executive Ted Lucas and Miami Heat star James Jones joined forces to bring holiday cheer to Miami Gardens kids — and motivate them to achieve academically — earlier this month

The All-Star Holiday weekend started with a toy distribution at North County K-8 Center on Dec.13

Lucas and Jones, who got good grades when growing up in Miami Gardens, got some help Santa Claus and Heat mascot Burnie to distribute bicycles, iPod Nanos and gift cards to those students who did well on their FCAT scores.





Later that evening, Miami Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones and Miami Beach Commissioner Jonah Wolfson hosted a kick-off party at W Hotel Miami Beach. Lucas and Jones each received the key to the City of Miami Beach from Wolfson. Lucas is president of Slip-N-Slide Records, located on South Beach.

The weekend’s festivities also included a DREAM reception at Mercedes-Benz of Miami that highlighted talented local youth and honored teachers and included live performances by the Miami Norland High School drumline, DJ Elle and recording artist Sebastian Mikael.

The All-Star Holiday Weekend concluded with a special community fair at Buccaneer Park in Miami Gardens. Hundreds of residents from the surrounding area attended the free celebration for a day of games, activities, music, treats and giveaways.





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Hold on, Mr. Preshident!








Veteran TV newsman Sam Donaldson was arrested on DUI charges in Delaware, police said yesterday.

Donaldson (pictured), a former White House reporter for ABC, was stopped on Dec. 1 by cops in Lewes, Del., after his car was spotted swerving onto the shoulder of the road.

Lewes is a resort town on the Chesapeake Bay, across the Delaware River from Cape May, NJ.

Donaldson allegedly failed a field-sobriety test and was arrested and taken to the local police station.

The 78-year-old newsman was later released and given an unspecified date to return for a court appearance.












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