Apartment Choice

December 31, 1994 | By LAURA UNGAR; Courant Staff Writer COVENTRY — Three-year-old Jared Brelsford's tiny black bicycle stood outside the charred, icicle- covered apartment building where he and his mother, Lisa, died late Thursday . The two were killed in a three-alarm blaze that left 11 adults and nine children homeless. The fire destroyed their apartment and heavily damaged two of the seven others in the 100-year-old former St. Mary's Church at 62 School St. The Brelsfords -- whose names were confirmed by neighbors and co-workers but not fire or police officials -- were the third and fourth victims of fatal fires in Connecticut this week. Brelsford, 27, lived with her son in an upstairs apartment at 62-D Church Hill Apartments , where the blaze is believed to have started about 10:30 p.m. State and local emergency officials have yet to determine the cause. Neighbors and co-workers who knew the Brelsfords remembered Jared as a friendly, rambunctious preschooler who liked ...

Utility worker jumps onto subway tracks, saves man just before train’s arrival Last week there was a news account of a woman crashing her car in New England as she swerved off of the road into a tree with an approximate three foot girth and with such force that it broke its top off twenty feet above her car from the impact of her collision. The car, then, caught fire. Driving by at the time was a man in his eighties with EMT ( Emergency Medical Technicians ) training. He stopped his car and ran down the hill to her vehicle while knowing fully well that at any moment the gas tank could blow up and kill him. He went forward anyway. The smoke was so thick that he nearly passed out from lack of oxygen and he couldn’t see the car’s occupant. So he felt around for her with his hands through the smoke and dragged her out of the car by the shoulders. My father undertook a similar action. He was near Albany, NY, USA. He saw a farmer’s truck carrying hay burst into flames on a bridge with the d...

A decade after the crash, Shannon Valley housing estate , on the outskirts of Ballaghaderreen, in Co Roscommon, remains unfinished and partly in ruins. Although the number of “ unfinished housing developments ” has fallen sharply since 2010, Shannon Valley is one of hundreds that still dot the country. The Guls: ‘Every day I put rats in the bin’ Fatima Gul says her little brother, Yousaf, doesn’t like the rats. He jumps up on the sofa or the table in the living room when they come into the house. Their parents don’t allow Fatimar, who is 10, or her nine-year-old sister, Maryam, or Yousaf and his twin, Zohra, who are five, to play near the houses on the other side of their green. It’s too close to the rats and the rubble. Shannon Valley “ ghost estate ” outside Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon. Photograph: Simon Carswell" height="349" src="https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3181475!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg" width="620...

When American doctor Stephen Yoon thinks of North Korea, he does not think of ballistic missile tests or the threat of nuclear war. He remembers instead a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, who suffered from spastic quadriplegia that made her unable to stand or sit. Five years ago, she went to Yoon's developmental-disability program at Pyongyang Medical University Hospital , where she received treatments from Yoon and his team of local doctors. After almost a year of exercise therapy and some surgeries, she walked out of the hospital on her own. The event was heralded in North Korean state media as a national victory, but it received no notice in the U.S., where few people even know about the roughly 200 Americans like Yoon who work and live under the rule of Kim Jong Un. Carefully monitored by the regime, they have come and gone for years, doing educational, medical or infrastructural work, and sometimes raising families in a nation that has been officially at war with the ...