Wings of a Bird

Siberian Prison Camps photos - the Globalist
... It is there you will find a 15-year-old boy who is serving three and a half years for stealing two hamsters from a Moscow pet shop. Or the mother of four who stole 12 cabbages — and was sentenced to four years in Siberia.
So the lunacy still exists, but it is now officially apolitical. But, clearly, it does not pay to be a poor thief in Russia, since you will not have the resources to avoid the interminable train ride to the East when you are caught. ...

Photos: Darfur Refugees - exile images
[See additional exhibits, including photos of the shattering effects of landmines on civilians in Cambodia and the work of Mother Teresa in Calcutta, at exile images exhibitions]

Galleries of War & Peace: Caucasus and Afghanistan - Institute for War & Peace Reporting
[Notes about the Caucasus gallery: High-speed connection recommended; use the scrollbar at the very bottom to view the photos.
Notes about the Afghanistan gallery: Click a photo to see a larger version, then click the word "Diary" to the bottom right of the photo to see the accompaying caption. Highly recommended.]

Iraq Log: Accounts of Daily Life in Iraq by People Who Are There - BBC News
Posted by Yasmin Abdulaziz Baghdad, 29 November
I'm working as part of a national inoculation programme. My team consists of a driver and a male nurse and me. We've been working in health centres to the south of Baghdad, in places like Latifiya, Mahmoudiya, Yousifiya. We've also been working in an area between Zafaraniya and Ramadi to the south west of Baghdad. This is an area in which former regime figures such Saddam's son Uday and others had their farms.
On arrival at our destination, I felt like elements of the Saddam regime were still present there. While in that region, we suffered insults and threats, especially from the leaders of the main tribes there. They accused us of working for a "lackey regime". They said our drugs were made in Israel and would harm children!
The state of housing was miserable. Even drinking water was not available. I found many children suffering from diseases such as typhoid. These conditions, left untreated, could lead to death. I also came across victims of missiles that have missed their target and saw a number of people disabled by war injuries. ...
[Note that there are many more entries in this series]

Billy's Journey: Crossing the Sahara - BBC News
...In Timbuktu the 15 of us got into the back of a lorry. We travelled by night before reaching Gao, the last stop before the desert.
Our driver stopped and showed us the graves of seven people, including a 21-year-old woman from Nigeria. There, we met thousands of other migrants waiting for transport across the Sahara.
We bought bread and tinned sardines for the journey. We poured water into the inner tubes of car tyres, which hold more than bottles. Normally we only travelled at night.
That first afternoon, our driver stopped and showed us the graves of seven people, including a 21-year-old woman from Nigeria.
He said he had found their bodies - their lorry had broken down in the middle of the desert and they had waited in vain for help, before dying of thirst. ...
[See the sidebar of that article for more stories in this "African migrants' elusive dream" series]

Israel Shocked by Image of Soldiers Forcing Violinist to Play at Roadblock - Guardian U.K.
Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.
The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.
Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man's head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.
But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.
The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to "play something sad" while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass. ...

For 1,000 Troops, There Is No Going Home
...Eric S. McKinley was a baker and a part-time soldier. He dyed his hair strange colors and pierced his body in places his mother sometimes wished he had not. His six-year stint in the Oregon National Guard was supposed to end in April, but it was extended, and Specialist McKinley died June 13 when a bomb blew up near his Humvee near Baghdad. Specialist McKinley's father, Tom, said he was left with a haunting conviction: that guardsmen and reservists are now being asked in record numbers to fight the same lethal wars as full-time soldiers, but without the same level of training, equipment or respect. ...
During special training at a base in Texas before he left for Iraq, Specialist McKinley told his father that his Guard unit was getting only two meals a day, while regular units ate three. And in Iraq, on the day of his death, Specialist McKinley's fellow guardsmen said he was in a Humvee reinforced with plywood and sandbags, not real armor.
...
To Shelton, Corporal Codner was the son of Dixie and Wain Codner. He was one of 19 graduates of Shelton High in 2003, and one of two to go off to the military. He was the basketball player with the blond girlfriend, each of them usually on the king and queen court. He was the clerk at J. R.'s Mini Mart. He was the kid who got his photograph taken in front of the old military tank that sits at the town's entrance, and the student named in the yearbook as "Most Likely to Kick Some Terrorist Butt." ...
In the moments when other thoughts crowd out those memories, Ms. Codner said, something always brings him back. On Friday, it was the mail. Four packages that had been sent to her son in Iraq were returned to her, unopened. A yellow form on the front of the boxes gave a curt explanation in the form of a checked box: "Deceased." ...

Northern Uganda: the Insight Story of a Life that Conquers Disability
He never experienced the beauty of walking without a crutch. Polio ate away his left leg just two weeks after he began to stand on his own. He had not been vaccinated, because those days the vaccine was not available.
...
When I was seven years old, my brothers learnt to ride the bicycle. I also wanted to ride but my parents refused, fearing that I would harm the normal leg. I did not accept their refusal. Whenever I remained home alone, I would tie a broom behind my father’s bicycle to sweep away the trucks as learned how to ride in the compound.
One Sunday after returning from prayers, I picked the bicycle and made three whole loops in the compound. The following day, my father disappeared without saying a word and when he returned at sunset, he was carrying a bicycle for me. ...

Storm-tossed Dog, Family Reunited
The animal lay crumpled on the side of the road, hurt and alone amid the chaos of Central Florida's first hurricane of the season .... No one knows exactly what happened to her, but the full-blooded German shepherd's badly injured hip and torn Achilles tendon immobilized her there, where tree limbs and debris littered the hurricane-ravaged area.
The rescued dog, now reunited with her owner, bade farewell to her saviors, a group of impassioned veterinary students...
Brigit McVay had a lot on her mind as Charley swept through, taking her mobile home on Squirrel Run in Wauchula off its blocks and peeling off the siding, leaving the home pretty well ruined. Lady, her 4-year-old German shepherd, broke free during the storm, and McVay was devastated by the loss. Her year already had been tough. Divorce loomed. Her kids were small, ages 1 and 4. She would soon be leaving her job at a school cafeteria. She hopes to get into college and work toward a career in law enforcement. ...

In Delivery Room, Baby and Doctor at Risk
The obstetrician arrived to find an 18-year-old woman, well into labor and buckling under the weight of a 42-week pregnancy. She begged for a Caesarean section. Kearney drew on his decade as an obstetrician, gently counseling her, "Have it on your own." Cascading from that decision was a marathon delivery marred by complications: The baby became so tightly wedged in the birth canal that Kearney was forced to launch a desperate struggle to dislodge him. The delivery would leave permanent injuries.
...
Kearney is a father of four whose soothing brogue betrays his Irish roots. He landed in the United States by way of Johns Hopkins, where his grandfather, an obstetrician, was a visiting professor, and he set out to practice one of the most rewarding branches of medicine, where most patients are overjoyed with the outcome -- a healthy baby.
...
The pediatrician's diagnosis was Erb's palsy. Her son had "virtually no independent use of his right arm or hand," the chart said. "His arm is held at an awkward angle, close to his body, and his elbow and wrist are flexed. . . . The arm is wasted along its entire length and it is clear that this will become more noticeable." ...

A Girl's Chilling Death in Gaza: Israeli Army Concedes Failure in Initial Probe of Shooting
On the morning of Oct. 5, Iman Hams, a slight girl of 13 wearing a school uniform and toting a backpack crammed with books, wandered past an Israeli military outpost on the Gaza Strip's southern border with Egypt. ...
It's a little girl," a soldier watching from a nearby Israeli observation post cautioned over the military radio. "She's running defensively eastward. . . . A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."
Four minutes later, Israeli troops opened fire on the girl with machine guns and rifles, the radio transmissions indicated. The captain walked to the spot where the girl "was lying down" and fired two bullets from his M-16 assault rifle into her head, according to an indictment against the officer. He started to walk away, but pivoted, set his rifle on automatic and emptied his magazine into the girl's prone body, the indictment alleged. ...

The Dark Side of the Mountain: When a doctor reached the peak of Everest, he celebrated with his guide and crew. So why was he left to die?
...
He was an immigrant who had received his medical training in Bolivia and then, although he spoke limited English, passed a U.S. exam to win his medical license in his new country in 1963. During his off hours, Antezana provided free treatment to patients in many of Washington's impoverished neighborhoods. Eventually, he brought his volunteer work into his home, where he set up an auxiliary office to treat the sore throats and flus of the poor, and examine economically squeezed cancer patients looking for a free second opinion, sometimes spending 30 hours a week treating the needy, apart from his normal job. He was indefatigable. ...While continuing his charity work, he learned to scuba dive. He windsurfed and did some hang gliding. He got in a harness once with a sky diving instructor and jumped out of a plane at 14,000 feet. But nothing absorbed him as much as his new passion for scaling mountains ...
[He told his wife] With you, I am very happy. But I seem to be missing something." He told her that he needed the mountains.
...

Another Mass Suicide Suspected in Japan
Four men were found dead Sunday in a sealed Tokyo apartment littered with charcoal stoves, a scene police said appeared to be Japan's latest suicide pact. ... Last week in two separate incidents, six people were discovered dead in deserted cars -- also strewn with charcoal stoves. In October, seven people killed themselves in what police said was Japan's largest-ever mass suicide. Japan has recently suffered a rash of suicides pacts, with many involving people who met over the Internet. ...

A Wife's Struggle for Freedom in Afghanistan
[I'd recommend reading the whole article; here's the beginning.]
Dusk crosses into night, and still Pekay isn't free. After a long day walking from office to office, pleading with stubborn judges, her quest has failed: She's still married to her abusive husband.
Once again, the memories resurface. Her father selling her in marriage to a man five times her age to pay the rent; the beatings and sodomy that followed. She was 9 years old.
Her mind drifts toward suicide. She has tried twice — first with a knife, then with kerosene and a match. ...

Bhopal 20 Years on
... Some believe numbers of Bhopal's victims now exceed 20,000, while tens of thousands continue to suffer from chronic illnesses. The city's miscarriage rate is seven times the national Indian average, and rates of skin, lung and gastro-intestinal cancers have soared. Every day 4,000 people queue at the city's gas relief hospitals with ailments ranging from damaged lungs and severe heart problems to wrecked immune systems and diseases such as tuberculosis. ...
[More info at http://www.bhopal.net/, including a survior's story at http://www.bhopal.org/aziza.html]

Hut by Hut, AIDS Steals Life in a Southern Africa Town [registration required; free for 7 days]
[I'd recommend reading the whole thing - here's an introductory excerpt]
... one hut-to-hut survey in 2003, one in four households on the town's poorer side lost someone to AIDS in the preceding year. One in three had a visibly ill member.
That is just the dead and the dying. There is also the world they leave behind. AIDS has turned one in 10 Lavumisans into an orphan. It has spawned street children, prostitutes and dropouts. It has thrust grandparents and sisters and aunts into the unwanted roles of substitutes for dead fathers and mothers. It has bred destitution, hunger and desperation among the living.
It has the appearance of a biblical cataclysm, a thousand-year flood of misery and death. In fact, it is all too ordinary. Tiny Lavumisa, population 2,000, is the template for a demographic plunge taking place in every corner of southern Africa. ...

Follow-up to "Wisconsin Struggles to Make Sense of Shootings":
A Hunt Turns Tragic, and Two Cultures Collide [registration required; free for 7 days]
...For all their differences, the native Wisconsin residents and the Asian immigrants from St. Paul share a love of hunting. For generations of Wisconsin families, the deer season has come to mean a time to bond with friends, to wander the woods and to pass along life's secrets to the next generation. For the Hmong, hunting is one of the rare realms in which America's fast-paced culture meshes neatly with their old ways from Laos, and Hmong elders have come to use it as a chance to share at least one rural cultural tradition with the youngest among them, some of whom never saw the hills of Laos.
In the November deer season, the two groups have often met in the woods and sometimes clashed, but mostly quietly until last Sunday. ...

The Fear Born of a Much Too Personal Look at Jihad [free for 7 days; registration required]
[A German woman wrote a book] "I Was Married to a Holy Warrior," in which she described how she fell in love with an Egyptian, married him and then watched, appalled, as he became progressively more militant and, finally, fully engaged in jihad.
...
IN their first seven years of marriage, she said, "my husband drank liquor, he had no beard, he didn't go to the mosque." But in 1994, the same year he became a German citizen, he broke his arm in a bicycle accident. With time on his hands, he started going to a mosque in Heidelberg, ... and before his wife knew it, he had committed himself to the Islamic cause.
...
During their time in Bosnia, ... she went with her husband and others to the place near a mountain where three Serbs were executed, an incident that her husband filmed. ... "Then there was a second man, a Serb, on his knees," Ms. Glück said. "I saw a big knife and then I saw his head cut off. I sleep with this memory every night. Afterwards, the mujahedeen played football with the head. Then a third Serb was shot by the men ...
....
She does not deny that she was deeply in love with her husband, and like many people in a marriage that is no longer tenable, she clung to it far longer than she should have. "For me," she said, "Islam is a wonderful religion, but I didn't want to live in a sack." ...

The Ayatollah and the Transsexual
That Maryam Khatoon Molkara can live a normal life is due to a compassionate decision by one man: the leader of the Islamic revolution himself.
Maryam Khatoon Molkara is the first to admit that she has had a complicated life. A plump, good-looking, middle-aged woman with strong features, she is ladylike and not a little flirtatious. "Marry me," she said. "Take me away and we'll live in Italy."
Keen not to complicate matters further, your correspondent declined the offer. Ms Molkara used to be called Fereydoon - Mr Fereydoon Molkara. And now she is a transsexual living in the Islamic Republic of Iran: someone who has volunteered to go under the veil. During the past 54 years, she has seen seismic shifts in both her body and her homeland.
Recently dozens of transsexuals - including a former Republican Guard - have been able to openly seek treatment to switch sexes. And it is largely thanks to Ms Molkara and a personal campaign that saw her twice appeal directly to the very man who charted Iran's shift to theocracy - the Ayatollah Khomeini. ...

Indian Princess Leaves Half Her Estate to Peanut Sellers
... [Her will] left half her estate, including cash, gems, jewellery, a car, Persian carpets and antique artefacts, to her servants. It left the other half to a trust of the Himachal Pradesh state government to fund an old people’s home. ..

Signs of Compromise Emerge in Ukraine Conflict
[Look at the photo that accompanies this caption] Ukrainian woman places carnations into the shields of anti-riot policemen standing outside the presidential office in Kiev

The Olive Tree and Its Shadow of Hope
... smaller stories of peace and justice are also played out every day, and never more so than during the season of the Palestinian olive harvest from mid-October to the end of November.
For days, busloads of Israelis have been pouring into the fields and villages of occupied Palestine to join other activists from around the world in protecting families from Israeli soldiers and settlers so they can pick the glossy blue-black fruit. ...
For generations of Palestinians, the olive tree and its products have been many things - from basic food and economic mainstay to health and beauty aid.
The olive harvest accounts for about 15-to-20 percent of the total agricultural output in Palestine. Every part of the tree is used - the olives are crushed to produce oil for eating and cooking as well as for soap; the branches are carved; and the pits are used for fuel.
Olive trees hold an almost sacred place in the farmers' world. The trees take years to bear fruit, but then nourish families for generations. ...
The olive harvest is a communal affair. Families and friends turn out in force, working from early morning until the sun goes down. It is this community the Israeli peace activists are joining. ...

Unbearable Sadness of Others' Pain
Iris Chang, the 36-year-old author of "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," immersed herself a decade ago in the stories of those who had survived the period in 1937 when Japanese soldiers invaded a city in China and slaughtered 300,000 people. More recently, Chang interviewed survivors of the Bataan Death March. After listening to the stories of American survivors in Kentucky, she suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized for three days. She returned home to the Bay Area, where, despite therapy and medication, she committed suicide Nov. 9. ...

Violence Taints Religion's Solace for China's Poor
Kuang Yuexia and her husband, Cai Defu, considered themselves good Christians. They read the Bible every night before bed. When their children misbehaved, they dealt with them calmly. They did not curse or tell lies.
But when Zhang Chengli, a neighbor, began hounding them last year to leave their underground religious sect and join his, it seemed like a test of satanic intensity. He scaled the wall of their garden, ambushed them in the fields and roused them after midnight with frantic calls to convert before Jesus arrived for his Second Coming and sent them to hell.
Ms. Kuang poured dirty water on Mr. Zhang's head. Mr. Cai punched him. Yet Mr. Zhang persisted for months until the couple's sect intervened and stopped his proselytizing for good.
Mr. Zhang's body - eyes, ears and nose ripped from his face - was found by a roadside 300 miles from this rural town in Jilin Province, in northeastern China. The police arrested Mr. Cai and fellow sect members. One of them died in police custody during what fellow inmates described as a torture session.
China's growing material wealth has eluded the countryside, home to two-thirds of its population. But there is a bull market in sects and cults competing for souls. ...

A Look Back: Father Mychal Judge, FDNY Chaplain Who Died on 9/11
... The trip from the firehouse to the friars' residence is maybe two dozen steps. It was a trip that Father Mike--as he was known among both the homeless and the famous--made many times since becoming FDNY chaplain in 1992. ... "Mayor Giuliani recalls that they were both down there very early in the event and the mayor saw him run by with the firemen," says Father Michael Duffy. "Giuliani says he grabbed his arm and stopped the friar, saying, 'Mychal, please pray for us.' And Mychal just looked at him with a big grin and said, 'I always do!' And then he turned and ran off with his firefighters, right to the tower, and that's where he died."
...
There were conflicting early reports of the exact circumstances of Father Judge's death. [A church official] confirmed ... that Mychal indeed was anointing a firefighter and the woman who had fallen on the firefighter. ... [He was] the first official casualty of the World Trade Center.
...
A friend of his quotes Father Mike as saying, "And if you REALLY want to make God laugh... tell Him what you are planning to do tomorrow." ...

Grandmothers on Guard
At checkpoints in the West Bank, Israeli women are monitoring how the soldiers treat Palestinians. ... Founded in 2001 by three veteran women peace activists, the group’s volunteer monitors now number more than 400, and their meticulously detailed reports of checkpoint abuses ... have become required reading for both the media and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). ... Machsom Watch has exposed a pattern of abuses at the checkpoints that the group says feeds the rage that leads to the terrorism they’re supposed to prevent. In late July, for example, a 26-year-old university student named Muhammad Cana’an was kicked, beaten, and shot in the arm by an Israeli soldier, apparently without provocation, at a checkpoint near Nablus. After Machsom Watch witnesses reported the incident to the media and the IDF, the soldier was taken into custody -- one of the few times since the start of the Al Aqsa Intifada, in September 2000, that the army has taken action against one of its own. ...
[See also their Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch Web site, which has reports and photos.]

Wisconsin Struggles to Make Sense of Shootings
Twenty-four years ago, a youth named Chai Soua Vang was part of the first wave of immigrants from Laos who came to the United States after the Indochina war. He later married, worked as a truck driver, fathered six children, learned to speak English fluently and became a U.S. citizen. On Sunday, according to the police, he shot eight hunters in a bloody spree that has left the region dumbfounded. ... a couple of the hunters had discovered Vang in their private hunting platform and asked him to leave. He did so, but after walking 120 feet, or about 35 meters, he suddenly stopped. "For some apparent reason, he turned around and opened fire," Meier said. "The action makes no sense." Vang told the police that he had opened fire after the hunters had cursed him with racial epithets and that one of them had shot at him. ...

Soldier of Misfortune
Jeremy Hinzman joined the military, and then realized he had made the wrong career decision. But getting out of the army is easier said than done. ...
But during basic training, he began to have doubts. "There is a strong, innate predisposition against killing," Hinzman says, "and the military breaks that down." In target practice, he recalls, we "started out with black circle targets. Then the circles grew shoulders and then the shoulders turned into torsos. Pretty soon they were human beings."
Hinzman can pinpoint the moment he realized he "made the wrong career decision."
"About five weeks into basic training, we were on our way to the chow hall shouting 'trained to kill, kill we will.' We were threatened with push-ups because we were not showing enough enthusiasm.
"I found myself hoarse yelling this and, when I looked around me, I saw that most of my colleagues were red in the face, but totally engrossed." Then he understood that the military was not just training him to kill, but "to kill with a smile on my face." He had to get out. ...

Family of Electrocuted Woman Get $6.2m in Landmark Award
... the 30-year-old doctoral student died in the East Village after falling onto an electrified metal plate while walking her dogs.
The dogs started fighting and as she tried to separate them she slipped on the icy ground and landed on the manhole cover.
The plate had become electrified because of a poorly insulated wire in a utility box and carried the charge above ground with the help of salt that had been used to grit the roads. ...

Mob Kills Two Policemen Mistaken for Kidnappers
... two undercover police officers were attacked and their bodies burned by a crowd who mistook them for kidnappers thought to be preying on a local school. ... The lynching, which was filmed and broadcast on national TV, is the latest example of vigilante assaults by Mexicans frustrated by soaring crime rates and corruption among police.
Several hundred people were involved in the attack. ...

Storage Unit As Shelter Not Unique, Workers Say
Girls Found in Md. Shed Spotlight Housing Woes
In 20 years working in commercial storage, years when she has also had to work nights waitressing at the Golden Corral to help support her children, Robin Lawrence has seen lots of people living in storage sheds.
"Sometimes they can fix them up really nice," said Lawrence, who works at Economy Storage in Waldorf. They might add insulation, carpet on the floor, a bed, a rack for their clothes, a television, a hot plate, maybe even a little grill out back. "It's just like a little efficiency, but without running water." The arrest of a 33-year-old woman last week for allegedly locking her 4- and 5-year-old daughters in a commercial storage shed for three nights has exposed a hidden corner of life. ...
Although the allegations shocked many people, advocates for the homeless in Southern Maryland and other parts of the region said that, increasingly, families have been driven to find makeshift shelter -- in sheds, cars, unheated trailers and the woods. ...

Medics Testify to Fallujah's Horrors
The first time Jose Ramirez saw a human body ripped apart by a rocket, it took hours for him to regain his composure. Nothing in his training as a Navy medical corpsman had prepared him for the sight of the dead Marine brought in September to the military field hospital outside Fallujah. ... "It doesn't hit me when I'm working on a patient. But after we're cleaning up, and I see the blood on the floor or I see someone bagging a piece of arm or leg, I know it's going to be in my mind for the rest of my life," Ramirez said.
...
"You're seeing your brothers come in, but you can't see them. You're almost like a machine," he said. "The history we've gone through here will forever make us family. If we see each other 10 years from now, not a word will have to be spoken."
During a recent break, Ramirez imagined facing his mother and what he would say to her. He joined the Navy 8 1/2 years ago to become a medical corpsman after her breast cancer was diagnosed. A single parent, his mother raised him to be the best at what he did, no matter what path he chose, Ramirez said.
"I would honestly be afraid to go back home and tell my family I didn't perform the best I could," he said. "I couldn't look my mother in the eye."...

A Mother Deported, and a Child Left Behind [free for 7 days; registration required]
... But because an old deportation order had resurfaced, she was quickly clapped into handcuffs, and within hours placed on a plane to her native Honduras, unable to say goodbye to her husband and little girl. ...
No one keeps track of exactly how many American children were left behind by the record 186,000 noncitizens expelled from the United States last year, or the 887,000 others required to make a "voluntary departure." But immigration experts say there are tens of thousands of children every year who lose a parent to deportation. ...
By all reports Virginia Feliz had been a happy 6-year-old before her mother's expulsion. Two months later, doctors at the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Program of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center found that she had a major depressive disorder marked by hyperactivity, nightmares, bed-wetting, frequent crying and fights at school. Now, medical records show, she takes antidepressant drugs and sees a therapist, but the problems persist.
...
In a telephone interview from Honduras, Mrs. Feliz acknowledged entering the United States illegally in 1994. She said she made the dangerous journey through Mexico because she could no longer afford to buy clothes, food and school supplies for her son, then 13.
Caught within hours of crossing the border, she was soon released on bond and fled to New York. When she failed to show up in a Texas immigration court, she was ordered deported in absentia. But like the great majority of such orders, it was not pursued for years, and Mrs. Feliz went to work, first as a live-in housekeeper, then in low-wage factory jobs.
After her 1996 marriage, when she applied for a green card, federal immigration officials not only issued her an official work authorization several times, but also allowed her husband, as an American citizen and new stepfather, to sponsor the teenage son she had left in Honduras.
Now that son, Cesar, is 24 and a lawful permanent resident with his own American child, while his mother is back where she began, without a job or her children.
...
In Brooklyn, similar cases cause concern for Birdette Gardiner-Parkinson, the clinical director at the Caribbean Community Mental Health program at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center. In one, she said, an outgoing, academically gifted 12-year-old began failing classes, mutilating herself and having suicidal thoughts after her Colombian father disappeared into removal proceedings. In another case, nightmares and school failure plague the youngest of six children whose father, a cabdriver with 20 years' residence in the United States, was deported to Nigeria six hours after he reported for a green card interview, seemingly for unpaid traffic fines ...
...
When the visitor remarked that she was pretty, Virginia, a doe-eyed child with a caramel complexion, loudly disagreed. "I'm ugly!" she insisted. "I want to be white, white, white." ...

Freed UN Hostages Tell of Joy
Ms Flanigan [of Northern Ireland], Mr Nayan, from the Philippines, and Ms Habibi, from Kosovo, all of whom had been helping to organise the presidential election on 9 October, were seized at gunpoint from a Kabul street on 28 October. ...
"Since we were released we have learned of the many statements of support and expressions of solidarity by Afghan personalities and ordinary men and women, some of whom even offered to take our place as hostages.
"We are humbled and very, very grateful for this." ...

Clues to Killings -- but no Answers
Nobody Saw Warnings of Father's Murder-suicide
Along the road of divorce and a bitter custody battle, Kelsey and Hayley Byrne became part of their father's twisted end game -- a plan of murder-suicide carried out early Monday afternoon in a quiet Edmonds neighborhood.
...
While there were never any allegations of physical abuse, concerns about Byrne's temper were raised years ago during the difficult divorce from Dawson.
"He was unwilling to examine the effect his outbursts had (or would have) on his children," Terry Douglass, a marital counselor who saw the couple in 1998, wrote in a declaration filed as part of the divorce proceedings.
Douglass, who suggested Byrne consider an anger management program, said he sometimes directed his angry outbursts at his wife and sometimes at her.
...
As a neighbor, she watched as he taught his children how to ride bikes, pushed them on a swing or played ball with them. ...
"He was distraught over not being able to live with his children," [his neighbor] said. "As far as we could see, he was a good father. He played with his children often and they all seemed to enjoy each other so much."

Professor Fighting Discrimination Step by Step
Fresh out of college, packing a sparkling resume, Paul Steven Miller drew the attention of dozens of prestigious law firms. But every one of the firms ruled out the 4-foot-5-inch candidate as soon as they laid eyes on him. ...
He couldn't use the lectern, couldn't use the sprawling whiteboard, either. But he knew how to work a room. He'd spent a lifetime doing that.
...
"He found a way to get involved in everything he could, despite his physical constraints," recalled his older sister, Margie Piqueira.
At his suburban Long Island high school, he didn't shy away from the hulking football players. He found a way to join them -- as the team statistician. ...
Miller was born with achondroplasia, the most common genetic condition that results in dwarfism. There are more than 200 types of dwarfism, causing some form of disability in 1 out of 40,000 children in the United States.
His parents told him he could achieve anything he wanted.
"They gave me a tremendous amount of self-confidence," he said. "Those are great things to have -- to be able to believe in yourself and have others believe in you."
...
Stung by the discrimination he'd experienced, he was a man on a mission. "I felt compelled to do something more meaningful with my career that would have an impact," he said.
That work would lead him to a post with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- and a chance encounter with his future wife. ...
Shortly after they married, in 1997, the couple left their apartment in a taxi. Miller was dropped off first. Moments later, the driver turned to Mechem and began quizzing her: "Why do you like short man? Does he have a lot of money? Does he treat you good?"
"It was just flabbergasting," Mechem recalled. "When I told Paul about it later, he just laughed about it. He said it was absurd you should have to justify your relationship to a cab driver."
They now have a 4-year-old daughter, Naomi, who is beginning to realize that her father is different. ...
"I'm an oddity. They've never seen anyone like me," he said. "Is he an adult or a kid? A daddy or a boy?"
Naomi already knows the answer. "That's my daddy," she said. "He's small." ...

New Tools to Help Patients Reclaim Damaged Senses
Erik Weihenmayer, who has been blind since he was 13 [and is] a 35-year-old adventurer who climbed to the summit of Mount Everest two years ago, recently tried another version of the BrainPort, a hard hat carrying a small video camera. Visual information from the camera was translated into pulses that reached his tongue.
He found doorways, caught balls rolling toward him and with his small daughter played a game of rock, paper and scissors for the first time in more than 20 years. Mr. Weihenmayer said that, with practice, the substituted sense gets better, "as if the brain were rewiring itself."
Ms. Schiltz, too, whose vestibular system was damaged by ... an antibiotic ... said that the first few times she used the BrainPort she felt tiny impulses on her tongue but still could not maintain her balance. But one day, after a full 20-minute session with the BrainPort, Ms. Schiltz opened her eyes and felt that something was different. She tilted her head back. The room did not move. "I went running out the door," she recalled. "I danced in the parking lot. I was completely normal. For a whole hour." Then, she said, the problem returned.
She tried more sessions. Soon her balance was restored for three hours, then half a day. ...
Mr. Weihenmayer said that on several occasions he was able to find his wife, who was standing still in an outdoor park, but he admitted that he also once confused her with a tree. Another time, he walked down a sidewalk and almost went off a bridge.
Nevertheless, he is enthusiastic about the future of the device. Mr. Weihenmayer likes to paraglide, and he sees the BrainPort as a way to deliver sonar information to his tongue about how far he is from the ground.
Dr. Ptito is scanning the brains of congenitally blind people who, wearing the BrainPort, have learned to make out the shapes, learned from Braille, of capital letters like T, B or E. The first few times they wore the device, he said, their visual areas remained dark and inactive - not surprising since they had been blind since birth. But after training, he said, their visual areas lighted up when they used the tongue device....
In one experiment, a leprosy patient who had lost the ability to experience touch with his fingers was outfitted with a glove containing contact sensors. These were coupled to skin on his forehead. Soon he experienced the data coming from the glove on his forehead, as if the feelings originated in his fingertips. He said he cried when he could touch and feel his wife's face. ...

Migrants No More
Mexicans used to come to California's San Joaquin Valley to work the harvest and go home. But now the migrants are settling in -- and so is a stark, new kind of poverty.
It is night when the day begins.
At 4:30 a.m. in a dusty farming town in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the lights are on in a one-room house no bigger than a garage. Inside, Isabel makes tortillas and beans for the workday ahead, while her husband, Vicente, puts on his farmworker’s uniform of long pants, long-sleeved shirt, work boots, and a baseball cap. Much of the town of Arvin is awake by now: The local panaderias -- Mexican bakeries -- open at 5 a.m., as do the small markets where farmworkers buy gas and pick up coffee before heading to the fields.
...
Vicente will spend the day on a 12-foot ladder, pulling bunches of cherries from the tops of the trees, while Isabel twists the fruit off the branches below. Over the next seven hours, with one 15-minute break, Vicente will pick more than 100 pounds of cherries, dumping them into deep trays harnessed to his shoulders. His pay will depend on how quickly he can fill the trays. No matter how fast he works, it’s often less than minimum wage.
...
Vicente is 30 years old, short and strong, with a small mustache, a straight-ahead gaze, and a kind, slightly reserved manner; like the other farmworkers interviewed for this story, he didn’t want his last name used. For 14 years, he has worked blueberries, cherries, grapes, oranges, watermelons, and onions. A scar wraps around his left index finger from the time he cut it to the bone with pruning shears. His ankle bears another scar, from the day he stepped on a blade in the onion fields. One summer he slept atop a flattened cardboard box in a vineyard. Another year, he lived in a two-room house near Santa Barbara with about 50 other men -- “lined up like pigs,” he says with a small smile.
...
Vicente paid a coyote $1,200 and filled a backpack with gallon jugs of water, tortillas, canned beans, and two changes of clothes for himself and Isabel, who was 14 years old and five months pregnant. They left behind photos and mementos. (“If they catch you,” Vicente says of the Border Patrol, “they’ll take anything from you, even pennies.”) Along with about 30 other migrants, Vicente and Isabel hiked across Arizona’s Sonoran Desert for three nights, sleeping and hiding out during the day, when temperatures can reach 110 degrees. ...

Teen Experiences in War: Transcripts of audio stories by refugees originally from Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq
These stories tell of loss, hope, fear, strength and despair—and most of all, resilience.
...
My mom’s side of the family, most of them were killed, seven people at once, including my grandfather…. I don’t know how many of them are left. My mom’s sister lives in Portland now. My mom didn’t know where her sister was for 14 years. (pause) After hearing that you’ve lost a certain amount of people, it’s just like, you get used to it. Oh! A few more to go probably and you’re probably going to hear bad news every other week. So, you have hope for peace. You hope that one day this is going to change, but it just every year by after year. Oh, still, peace has not come. Nothing is resolved. Makes you wanna just stand up and curse for no reason.
...

Hard Work, Gardening and Pollen - the Recipe for Long Life
Fred Hale, the world's oldest man, has died in New York state just short of his 114th birthday ...
He had honey on his cereal and a teaspoon of pollen. But his outlook on life was that he liked to work. He worked in his garden until he was 107, and he did a lot of walking.
There was something else - what his son described as an "easy temperament".
"He had a good personality, and lots of friends. He had a big garden and he would feed the neighbourhood with apples, strawberries and raspberries." [said his son Fred Jr.] ...
[Fred Sr. held the] record as the world's oldest ever driver. He was still behind the wheel in 1995, at the age of 107, and complaining when he got stuck behind slow vehicles.
By the time he died, he had outlived three of his five children. He had nine grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and 11 great-great-grandchildren.
The view from the local sports pages is that Mr Hale hung on long enough to witness New England's age-old dream, the Boston Red Sox winning baseball's World Series last month. ... "He was happy when they won, but it wasn't essential to his life," [said Fred Jr.] ...
For all his love of habit, he was not afraid of trying new things. When he was 95, he flew to Japan to visit his grandson Chris, who was serving in the navy there. He stopped off in Hawaii, donned some tropical print shorts and attempted to boogie-board (surfing on a small board).
... He was keen for things." [said grandson, Fred Hale III] ...

In a Land Torn by Violence, Too Many Troubling Deaths [free for 7 days; registration required]
photos: Suicides Shake Colombian Tribes
At 15, Leida Salazar had just learned to ride a bike, eagerly watched after her smaller siblings and was among the extroverts in a throng of giddy indigenous girls. But a year ago, she fashioned a noose out of a wraparound skirt, hoisted it over the wood-beam rafter of her home and hanged herself.
A note she left for her father voiced anguished fears that Colombia's drug-fueled guerrilla war would engulf her family, refugees to this poverty-stricken village along with dozens of others. But the death of the outwardly happy girl continues to confound her parents and the leaders of a once-sheltered indigenous tribe, the Embera, who never before knew suicide.
...
Colombia's 40-year conflict, pitting rebels against right-wing death squads and state security forces, is an easy culprit. But it is not the only one. Encroaching modernity, from logging to settlements, threaten the Emberas, who worry that their whipsawed young are losing the indigenous identity at the root of the tribe's existence.
...
Settlers have depleted the jungles of animals, like the tapir, that the Embera once hunted, forcing the once-nomadic tribe to form permanent communities. They turned to farming, which they have yet to master.
Guerrillas and paramilitaries have brought more disorder, recruiting young members of the tribe. The vast river ways that the Embera and other tribes fish have become transit zones for cocaine and arms smuggling. Hundreds of Indians have been displaced by war, and 30 Embera have been killed since 1996.
The army, to shut off supplies to guerrillas, limits the amount of food that can be moved into regions where the Embera live, leading to shortages. ...

Life on the Waiting List
Jack Slater, a Seattle high-school teacher and former actor, received a liver transplant exactly two months ago at University of Washington Medical Center. Or, as Slater would say, he was "gifted" with a liver. He and his wife, Deborah Swets, know nothing of the donor. They only know that without a transplant, Slater, 58, would have died. He was diagnosed in 1997 with end-stage liver disease, the result of hepatitis C, and had spent almost two years on the transplant waiting list. Slater wrote of his battle with illness in "Life on the Waiting List," a series of intimate and often irreverent essays for The Seattle Times.

If you're a caregiver, I'd highly recommend reading We'll Get Through This ... Together, which has advice for caregivers and the chronically sick. It begins like this:
As a sometimes irritable and sometimes pleasant but chronically ill man, allow me to suggest to you, the caregiver, some things to say to us, the infirm, along with the countless bowls of soup you prepare and insurance forms you fill out.
It may be a good idea to rehearse this in front of your dog or houseplants. Here we go:
From the caregiver to the sick ...
"Please tell me immediately if there is a new symptom or pain. Bravery is helpful, but a little goes a long way. Let's not wait until ambulances have to get involved."
"I also need to know when you feel good. I can't always tell. If we happen to be in separate rooms please shout it out loud."
From the sick to the caregiver
"What always feels incredibly good is when you stroke my face. Our faces do not get enough attention. Kissing is wonderful, but soft attention to my pale face is not only a spirit lift, it's a face-lift."
"I am trying to be positive. But who in the world can be positive all the time? It's not only impossible, it's boring. I like people with a little salt to 'em. It's tough enough that I am on a low-salt diet."
...

"A Gentle Giant" Finds Way Back, Now Helps Others
... he stares up at the Salvation Army shelter worker who asked him to leave. Perched above the room at a desk on a loading dock is 6-foot-5, 270-pound Haywood McRae, whose bright yellow sweat shirt, with a black stripe down each sleeve, seems only to emphasize his impressive size.
Polite but firm, McRae — a man whose boss calls him a gentle giant — repeats himself. "C'mon, sir, you know you can't stay here drunk like that. You know the rules."
...
This minimum-wage job, watching over a 52-bed shelter in the parking garage of the King County Administration Building four nights a week, is a first step back toward a productive life for McRae, a first step back from a tangle of lost jobs, lost hope and lost opportunities.
A Navy veteran of the first Persian Gulf War, McRae said his life was a wash of alcohol and crack cocaine from the time he left the service in 1992 until last summer, when he entered a program for veterans ...
"I'm clean and sober now, so it's time for me to reach back and see who else I can help," McRae said. "Then they'll reach back and help someone else. It's all about somebody reaching back to help someone else."
...
For McRae, home since August has been a metal-framed, lower-level bunk marked K-16, and a nearby narrow locker bearing the same designation. On top of the locker rests his small library of books, including his Life Application Study Bible, with 3-by-5 file cards of notes tucked inside, and Barron's Firefighter Exams, which he's studying with the hope of testing to apply for work as a Seattle firefighter.
He goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings regularly.
...
At 9 p.m., a security guard opens a gate along Jefferson Street and a small crew begins the process of turning the loading-dock area into a bare-bones shelter: no food, no TV, no services — just a grid of 52 green foam mats arrayed on large canvas tarps on the concrete floor, and access to a restroom, past the watchful eyes of the security guard. ...
Each man, as he is checked in, receives a gray wool blanket to use for the night, and then finds his own way to an open mat.
...

For Fallujah Family, a Daring Escape: After Hiding for Days, 10 Relatives Flee U.S. Assault Across Euphrates River
With his 4-year-old son hitched to his back and his wife clinging to his neck, Abid Mishal plunged into the Euphrates River. The muddy water was moving fast, too fast, and he lost control when a mortar shell landed in the river five yards from where he was swimming. His son slipped into the water.
Mishal let go of his wife and ducked underwater to look for his son. By the time he reached the little boy and pulled him up, he was almost dead. "He hardly breathed," Mishal said.
The family had hidden in their home in central Fallujah for four days last week while U.S. artillery and aircraft pounded the buildings around them. Water stopped running from the pipes, so Mishal dug a well in the backyard. The orange and peach trees in the backyard provided enough fruit for the family to survive on for a few days.
When Iraqi security forces began searching house to house for insurgents and weapons, the family grew more afraid. Then shrapnel from a rocket hit their house, damaging the ceiling, and Mishal said he knew it was time to go. ...
So last Friday, Mishal, a grocer, gathered his family and told them that they would leave Fallujah the next day. The only way out, he said, was to cross the river.
Mishal, 46, his wife, their seven children and a daughter-in-law went to the river Saturday but found no boats. They did not want to return to their house, so Mishal decided they would swim.
...
the situation in Baghdad was not much better than in Fallujah. "There we got rockets," she said, "and here we get sickness." Her children suffer stomach and skin problems because of unclean water and food, she said.
The family sleeps in a tent that is about six yards wide. There are three mattresses, three blankets and three pillows that the 10 family members share.
...

Boy Who's Endured Tragedy Could Use Our Help
Seattle police officer Michael McDonald had no choice but to shoot down a convicted rapist and level three sex offender named Lawrence Owens outside a temporary Red Cross homeless shelter last March.
The guy had just murdered Dori Cordova with three shotgun blasts before the horrified eyes of a family support worker and other shelter residents displaced by a fire.
Even as the spent shells still rolled on the pavement near Cordova's body, Owens was trying to reload. ...
Capable and personable but broke and out of work, [Dori Cordova] had been forced to settle for transitional housing for herself and her 10-year-old son at the Jensonia Hotel -- more a snake pit than a haven when it comes to a place to raise kids.
That's where she met Owens, not knowing that he was a man who hid a horrific record of abusing, raping and threatening to kill other women. Cordova was desperately trying to get away from the guy when a fire forced Jensonia dwellers to camp at the Miller Community Center, where Owens tracked her down.
... The YWCA, which unwittingly employed Owens as a custodian at another shelter for vulnerable women...
By all accounts [Dori Cordova's son Troy is] a special kid -- smart and studious, kind, a chess club standout, and a real leader in his fifth-grade class ...
Somehow he's managed to be all that despite living in a situation of uncertainty and fear. "He's a very sensitive kid. He and his mom were very close and he was worried about her (long before the shooting)," [school counselor Jamshid] Khajavi said.
"He's doing a fantastic job in school," Khajavi said. "He cries sometimes when he talks about his mom. But I wish a lot of adults could handle trauma as well as he does."

Street Battles Test Young Marines
Eight days after the Americans entered the city on foot, a pair of Marines wound their way up the darkened innards of a minaret, shot through with holes by an American tank.
As the Marines inched their way along, a burst of gunfire rang down, fired by an insurgent hiding in the top of the tower. The bullets hit the first Marine in the face, his blood spattering the Marine behind him. Lance Cpl. William Miller, age 22, lay in silence halfway up, mortally wounded. ...
So went eight days of combat for this Iraqi city, the most sustained period of street-to-street fighting that Americans have encountered since the Vietnam War. The proximity gave the fighting a hellish intensity, with soldiers often close enough to look their enemies in the eyes.
...
The 150 Marines with whom I traveled, Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 8th Regiment, had it as tough as any unit in the fight. They moved through the city almost entirely on foot, into the heart of the resistance, rarely protected by tanks or troop carriers, working their way through Fallujah's narrow streets with 75-pound packs on their backs.
In eight days of fighting, Bravo Company took 36 casualties, including six dead, meaning that the unit's men had about a 1-in-4 chance of being either wounded or killed in little more than a week. ...
More than once, death crept up and snatched a member of Bravo Company ...
For hours at a stretch, Ziolkowski would sit on a rooftop, looking through the scope on his bolt-action M-40 rifle, waiting for guerrillas to step into his sights. The scope was big and wide, and Ziolkowski often took off his helmet to get a better look.
Tall, good-looking and gregarious, Ziolkowski was one of Bravo Company's most popular soldiers. Unlike most snipers, who learn to shoot growing up in the countryside, Ziolkowski grew up in the city, near Baltimore, and was never familiar with guns until he joined the Marines. Though Baltimore boasts no beachfront, Ziolkowski's passion was surfing; at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Bravo Company's base, he often organized his entire day around the tides. ...
The bullet knocked Ziolkowski backward and onto his back. He had been sitting on a rooftop on the outskirts of the Shuhada neighborhood, an area controlled by insurgents, peering through his wide scope. After he took his helmet off to get a better view, the bullet hit him in the head.
The bullet knocked Ziolkowski backward and onto his back. He had been sitting on a rooftop on the outskirts of the Shuhada neighborhood, an area controlled by insurgents, peering through his wide scope. After he took his helmet off to get a better view, the bullet hit him in the head.
...

Permanent Scars of Iraq
[I'd recommend reading the whole thing. Here's the very beginning.]
Robert Shrode can't sleep.
At night, in the fly-speck town of Guthrie, Ky., in the rented farmhouse he shares with his 20-year-old wife, Debra, he surfs the Internet, roams the house. He lies down and gets up again. He drinks a beer and stares out the window at the black fields beyond. Hours pass. He can't sleep. Before the war, he could have six beers and sleep like a baby, but now that works against him. Drinking may help get his head to the pillow, but it also ratchets up the nightmares. For a while, he sweated out his bad dreams on the living-room couch, and it drove Debra crazy. ...

Fleeing Falluja: Families Speak Out
Three families who left the city to seek shelter ... spoke of the terror they felt as violence escalated, but also of the kindness of relatives and friends who aided them despite the risks. ...
Our host, a woman called Um Ali, says she is willing to let us live with them for one year and that if the house was big enough she would host all our family together, despite her poverty.
She had to borrow money so she could pay for all the people who are living in the house - including our family. ...
We left everything there to save ourselves and took only some bags of clothes with us. ...
We left heavy-heartedly as we simply didn't know where we were going.
All we knew was that we had to leave as fast as possible if we wanted to stay alive.
We decided not to leave together as we are a big family of 30 people.
We split into three groups to not attract attention. ...
We used to own two taxi cars, but one of them got stolen, depriving us of a much-needed source of income.
Fortunately our new neighbours stood by us. Without their help, we couldn't have made it.
When they knew about our plight, they started sending us food everyday.

Psyched Out
[I'd recommend reading the whole thing; here are a few excerpts]
He was in the hospital the day he learned he had been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Rodney Plamondon looked for a while at the letter that told him this. He was pleased. He was the 22-year-old son of a long-haul truck driver. Rodney's future wouldn't involve driving a Kenworth. ... He was, on this July 1984 day, in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Boise, Idaho, his hometown. He was newly diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. It happened to me that way, too— a psychotic break out of the blue during a twentysomething life that had been shaping up quite nicely. It was difficult to build a new life out of that. There were many, many setbacks. That's the absurd deal of mental illness: You get taken most commonly in your youth, when life is just beginning to gel. You get an illness that, in many cases, is so disabling that it strips you of the psychological and practical goods essential to a decent existence. Often you get kicked right out of the mainstream, no matter how solid a citizen you were before it all went bad.
What are you going to do about that?
You have three choices: kill yourself, lead a featureless existence, or fight back and extract some measure of revenge on that which laid you low. Rodney and I rejected options one and two. Option three is no cakewalk. It takes years of determined effort before you see light at the end of the tunnel, and as you feel your way along, you've got to do it all on blind faith that something good might happen. After 15 years, I'm finally beginning to see a faint glow.

We Just Did the Things That Needed Doing: Surgery in War-Torn Ivory Coast
... Even more checkpoints awaited them in Bouake, almost every hundred yards, as the group drove through trash-strewn streets to the 350-bed teaching hospital where Frank would be the only general surgeon for the next month.
In times of peace, Bouake is a city of half a million people. But since civil war turned it into a front line in September, nearly two thirds of the people fled, including a good portion of the staff for the city's only hospital - a void in emergency medical care that [Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)] is trying to fill.
"The city was half-deserted," Frank said. "You could tell something had happened there." ...
After an hour of fitful sleep, he woke to the sound of gunfire. He stumbled out of bed and asked the guard what was going on.
"He said, 'It's nothing. Either target practice or they're celebrating New Year's.'"
In such a hospital setting, a fine line separates those who live and those who die. There were several post-operative deaths Frank is sure would have been prevented had the hospital been functioning properly ...
"That one was a tough to take," Frank said. "Because we looked like we were bringing him back from the edge of the abyss. And then a day and a half later to lose him was just sort of a major setback for everybody. We just felt deflated. You felt that Darwin was part of our triage. If you were lucky enough to get there soon enough with the right injury we could help you. But if you stepped beyond that line… You see the precariousness of existence. How lucky or unlucky you can be depends on where you are or where you happen to be at the wrong time."

When Brain Disease Changed Gran
Alzheimer's turned my own grandmother ... from an energetic woman to one lost in her own distressing world.
I remember Nan as a loving woman who could not wait to have my brother and I to stay in our school holidays. She would take us round the shops in Southampton, treating us to cream cakes, toys and magazines and unashamedly showing us off to her friends.
Nan was also a bit of a gambler and loved to bet on the horses. She once had us all in front of the television, screaming for Red Rum to do her proud again.
My mother ... recalls her mother-in-law's deteriorating health. She said: "She would be just be sitting in a chair. She became quite morose and she seemed to lose interest in absolutely everything. "The most amazing thing of all was that she became quite aggressive towards her husband, who had been the love of her life. "
...
The next few months included night time telephone calls from the police to my parents - Nan had dialled 999 in a bewildered state as she was confused who her husband was.
Grandad even went through a stage of sleeping with his driving licence under the pillow in case the police turned up and he had to prove that this really was his home. There were other worrying times. Nan went missing after visiting one of her sisters; was once driven home by a stranger and also badly burned her arm while cooking.

Refugees in Their Own Land
[Afghan refuge] Moosa Khan said he and his family had no choice but to flee south. "They were going to try to kill all our people. We were scared so that's why we left. But still we have to stay here."
Another camp resident, Asmatullah, says he was tortured after being accused of being a Taleban fighter. He shows a large scar on his leg where he says hot bricks were pressed on to his skin.
...
"There are two main problems, one with the amount of food rations they are getting, and also with the water. ...
The camp certainly has a bleak aspect - harsh barren mountains on one side and on the other, stretching to the horizon, empty desert.
There are more than 50,000 people living here and because of the drought the numbers are growing. The increase is largely due to an influx of Kuchi nomads who usually move around the region with herds of goats and sheep.
But so severe is the drought that many have had to abandon their traditional existence.
Elders like Haji Mir Ahmed Khan say they have little hope of living as nomads again.
"We want to have our life back but we have lost all our animals and there is still no water for the grass to grow so we have to stay here," he says.
With no significant rainfall this year ...the camp has to plan to accommodate even more Kuchis.

The Girl in the Mirror
Brenna's gray-blue eyes bulge beyond their bony orbits. Her nose, cheeks and upper lip look deflated. Her lower jaw juts far forward, giving her a smile like a friendly snowplow.
Her teeth don't line up to chew; she mashes the popcorn between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, her lips puckering like an old lady with her dentures out. Her nose is too constricted to draw air; her raspy mouth breathing competes with the movie soundtrack.
The sunken face is textbook Crouzon Syndrome....
A glitch in Brenna's genes stunted the growth of her skull and facial bones. Repeated skull surgeries have saved her life.
Tomorrow's radical face surgery will help her live it.
See also Part 2: Suspended in a cage and
Part 3: The shape of things to come

No Outside Review in Child Death Inquiry
The naval homicide investigator urged officials more than a year ago to consult a national child-abuse expert to help resolve whether the 1 1/2-year-old Bremerton-area boy died as a result of accidental choking or an inflicted head injury preceded by other abuse. ...
... the injuries suffered by Alijah in the weeks and hours before his September 1997 death, including a fractured leg, possible spinal fractures, bruises and a subdural hemorrhage, or bleeding on the brain, the report said. Such a pattern of injuries would mean "the possibility of this child's death being a homicide becomes a very good possibility," said the report ...
All of Alijah's injuries occurred after his mother moved in with her boyfriend, the naval review noted. The day of Alijah's death, his mother left him in the care of her boyfriend and went to work at noon, according to police records. That evening, the boyfriend said, he fed Alijah takeout chicken and mashed potatoes, then put him to bed. When he checked on him a few minutes later, he heard a "gurgling sound" and picked him up and took him down to the bathroom, where the toddler began vomiting.
Alijah's mother refused to comment. She married her boyfriend after Alijah's death, and they have a daughter. A year ago, she filed for a domestic violence protection order against him. He pleaded guilty in May to violating that order.

Bail Set at $2 Million for Mother Held in Neglect Deaths
... two of her children were found dead of malnutrition and dehydration. ...
Police found [the mother] passed out from alcohol intoxication, lying in bed with covers over her head. . . A 2-year-old boy who survived helped police get the door open. ...
Dozens of empty beer cans were lined up on the dresser, and the floor was covered with dirty clothing, garbage and empty beer cans, police said.
... Police said when [the mother] left her bed to use the bathroom, she grabbed an unopened can of beer from an 18-pack in the closet, on her way. ...
Court records show Marie Robinson had four other children with her former husband before they were divorced in 2001 and he won custody of all four. She later applied twice for protective court orders in Kitsap County, saying her boyfriend had assaulted and raped her.

Calling and Driving: Some Local Victims
Chris Stanley was bicycling on the shoulder of state Route 305 on Bainbridge Island in April when he was hit from behind by a car going more than 50 mph. The driver was reaching for her ringing cell phone and told police she never saw Stanley, who was knocked unconscious and thrown more than 80 feet.
Few thought Stanley, who teaches at the Art Institute of Seattle, would live. He was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center, where he had three surgeries. His injuries included internal bleeding, a collapsed lung, four broken ribs, a cracked skull and four breaks to his lower left leg. "I should have had brain damage. I had five bleeds on the brain," Stanley, 49, says.
...

Playboy Husband Murders Pregnant Wife
The Laci Peterson saga began nearly two years ago, when the 27-year-old substitute teacher, who was eight months pregnant, vanished around Christmas Eve 2002. Four months later, her headless body and the remains of her fetus were discovered along the shoreline about 90 miles from the couple's Modesto home -- not far from where her husband claims he was fishing alone the day of her disappearance.
...
Prosecutor Rick Distaso told the jury that Peterson could not stand the thought of being trapped in a "dull, boring, married life with kids," and either strangled or smothered his wife and dumped her weighted-down body overboard from his fishing boat."He wants to live the rich, successful, freewheeling bachelor life. He can't do that when he's paying child support, alimony and everything else," Distaso said. "He didn't want to be tied to this kid the rest of his life. He didn't want to be tied to Laci for the rest of his life. So he killed her."
...
Peterson never took the stand in the case. His lawyers argued that he was the victim of a set-up. They suggested that someone else -- perhaps homeless people, sex offenders or suspicious-looking characters spotted in the neighborhood -- abducted Laci Peterson while she walked the dog, then killed her and dumped the body in the water after learning of Peterson's fishing-trip alibi.

Girl Accidentally Run Over And Killed by Father
A 10-year-old girl was killed when her father parked his truck in a pile of leaves in which she and a friend were hiding, the family said.
Family members told the Eagle-Tribune that James Gravel, 36, didn’t know he had run over the girls until he parked the truck, got out, and heard his daughter’s voice. ...

The Things They Wrote [registration required]
... passages from letters sent this year by men and women, now dead, to their families in the United States
...
Excerpts from letters to his parents from Pfc. Moisés A. Langhorst of the Marines. Private Langhorst, 19, of Moose Lake, Minn., was killed in Al Anbar Province on April 6 by small-arms fire.
March 13
As far as my psychological health, we look out for each other pretty well on that. ... I've been praying a lot and I hope you're praying for the Dirty 3rd Platoon, because there is no doubt that we are in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
March 15
After standing in the guard tower for seven-and-a-half hours this morning, we went on our first platoon-size patrol from about 1200 to 1700. It was exhausting, but it went very well. I had to carry the patrol pack with emergency chow, a poncho and night vision goggles. That's what really wore me out.
We toured the mosques and visited the troublesome abandoned train station. The people were friendly, and flocks of children followed us everywhere.
When I called you asked me if Iraq is what I expected, and it really is. It looks just like it does on the news. It hardly feels like a war, though. Compared to the wars of the past, this is nothing. We're not standing on line in the open - facing German machine guns like the Marines at Belleau Wood or trying to wade ashore in chest-deep water at Tarawa. We're not facing hordes of screaming men at the frozen Chosun Reservoir in Korea or the clever ambushes of Vietcong. We deal with potshots and I.E.D.'s. With modern medicine my chances of dying are slim to none and my chances of going home unscathed are better than half. Fewer than 10 men in my company have fired their weapons in the 10 days we've been here.
March 24
While not always pleasant, I know this experience is good for me. It makes me appreciate every little blessing God gives me, especially the family, friends and home I left behind in Moose Lake.

Vets Return, but Not Always with Healthcare
After serving 410 days in Iraq with the 1st Armored Division, Spc. Stuart Wilf came home to Colorado on Oct. 2. He changed his clothes, borrowed his mother's car, and went out with friends to celebrate.
On the way home, he fell asleep at the wheel and had a head-on collision with a tree. He survived, but since he was newly discharged, he had no health insurance. ...

Architecture with Heart
... for people who've received a Rural Studio home, free of charge, life takes on a whole new hue. "I was glad to get my house ... The children was glad; even the chickens and the dogs was glad. I'm proud of my house."
...
One of the children improved his grades dramatically after he had a quiet place to study, says Freear. He got into college, completed a degree, and now wants to be a lawyer.
Kendra Patrick, whose family moved into their new home this summer, is also delighted to have her own room, and to finally have indoor plumbing. Before, the 19-year-old and her 6-year-old brother had to walk to their grandparents' home nearby to bathe. ...
"I like the design," she says, smiling broadly. Then, more quietly, she adds, "I like the fact that someone decided to do this for us."
...
This "recycling" has included beams salvaged from an old church, a tub from a washing machine (for a light fixture), rubber from old tires (for stair treads), even sticks from a beaver dam (for framing love seats). This saves money, which is important, since each house costs roughly $30,000 and must be paid for with grants and donations.

Pedestrian Killed When Artificial Leg Comes Unattached
An amputee whose artificial leg fell off as he crossed the street was struck and killed by a car as he crawled back to pick up the limb.
Motorists stopped to try to help Allen Coleman, 42, but could not reach him before he was run over along a dark stretch of highway Monday night, authorities said.

Finding Healing Music in the Heart
Amid a vast inventory of herbs, roots and plant extracts sits an old wooden recliner equipped with four electronic stethoscopes connected to computers displaying intricate electrocardiogram readouts. ... But after years of hard living as a jazzman, Mr. Graves began studying holistic healing, and then teaching it. He became fascinated with the effect of music on physiological functions.
...
Curious about the heartbeat as a primary source of rhythm, he bought an electronic stethoscope and began recording his and other musicians' heartbeats. ... He began composing with the sounds - both by transcribing heartbeat melodies and by using recorded fragments. He also realized he could help detect heart problems, maybe even cure them.
"A healthy heart has strong, supple walls, so the sound usually has a nice flow," he said. "You hear it and say, 'Ah, now that's hip.' But an unhealthy heart has stiff and brittle muscles. There's less compliance, and sounds can come out up to three octaves higher than normal. ...
Mr. Graves claims he can help a flawed heartbeat through biofeedback. He creates what he calls a "corrected heartbeat" using an algorhythmic formula, or by old-fashioned composing, and then feeds it back to the patient, whose heart is then trained to adopt the healthy beat. The patient can listen to a recording of the corrected heartbeat, or it can be imparted directly through a speaker that vibrates a needle stuck into acupuncture points.

Accident Took Woman's Sight, but Not Her Vision
She should be unable to talk, should be a vegetable, should be dead.
That is what some people thought would be the case after a piece of unsecured furniture flew off a vehicle, pierced the windshield of her Jeep and obliterated her face into dozens of pieces of bone.
...
She is permanently blind. The 2-by-6-foot wood board obliterated her optical nerve. Had the particleboard, which struck her across the eyes and nose, hit her any higher or lower she probably would have been killed.
Maria defied the odds from her first hours in the emergency room. Doctors told her mother to prepare to bury her even as they were readying to remove her organs for donation. In a fateful moment, Maria twitched. She just wasn't ready to go yet.
Doctors feared her injured brain would make it impossible for her to understand words or ideas. Maria quickly hurdled those expectations, murmuring "mom" and squeezing hands on command.
These days, even when she tells off-color jokes, a visitor's jaw drops at how lucid, verbose and articulate Maria is, though she still struggles with short-term memory loss.
Doctors thought Maria would be confined to the hospital for a long time. Someone forgot to tell that to Maria. ...

Living for Today, Locked in a Paralyzed Body
Ten years of living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., a progressive, paralyzing disease, have stilled nearly every muscle; he types with twitches of his cheek, detected by a sensor clipped to his glasses. But ask him how he feels about his life, and Dr. Lodish, his eyes expressing the intensity denied to his body, responds: "I still look forward to every day."
...
Many patients, Dr. Ganzini said, have deep religious beliefs that help sustain them, and they are able, "to find hope in the future, find meaning and tolerate the daily ongoing losses that they are experiencing."
...
"In fundamental ways, I feel totally unchanged," [Dr. Lodish] said. "Quintessentially, I have found that ambulation, movement, swallowing, eating, talking, breathing, and self care are not me. They are substantial physical losses; but they are not me."

Dispatches from Afghanistan: Kites Meet Helicopters
... One of Afghanistan's most popular pastimes, kite flying was banned under the Taliban but has now come back with a vengeance. Today I saw one red-cheeked and muddy child try to fly the most pitiful-looking kite you've ever seen—it was a composite of a thing: a plastic bag and some used soda straws attached to a length of greasy string. But the boy was happy, as you would be too if you managed, as he did, to get that Frankenstein of a kite off the ground for more than a minute.
Many of the kites bear the red, black and green tri-color of the Afghan flag. Some are adorned with bright pastels, others with tiny mirrors that reflect flashes of light as the kites dangle above. If you look up long enough at the kites of Kabul, you begin to think that this is any other place, that life here is just plain normal. ...

Photographs from Afghanistan
A few of my favorites:
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/afghanphotos/sec4/photos/sec4_3.jpg
Three fathers sit with their children at an MSF feeding center in Sar-I-Pul province.
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/afghanphotos/sec4/photos/sec4_2.jpg
Internally displaced Afghans gather for a funeral at the Maslakh camp in western Afghanistan’s Herat province.
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/afghanphotos/sec3/photos/sec3_1.jpg
A woman and her son walk along Kabul’s main avenue. Once a bustling thoroughfare lined with merchants, the avenue was destroyed by four years of fighting.
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/afghanphotos/sec3/photos/sec3_2.jpg
Afghan children eat a meal in an orphanage in Kabul.

The Damage Done - photo essay of American soldiers back from Iraq
Here's the story of one injured soldier:
I remember every detail about my legs. Every detail from the scars to the ingrown toenails to the birthmarks to the burn marks. I made it a habit, even before I joined the military, to cherish every part of my body, because I would always look at it like, "What if this finger was gone, would I be able to function without it?" I don't know why. Maybe it was God's way of preparing me for what was going to happen.
I've always thought about death—just growing up in Chicago and living out here in this world. I had a friend when I was six years old, his name was Charles. He was shot in the head—I think it was a stray bullet. My oldest sister was killed by a stray bullet when I was just a couple of months old, and my father was killed when I was seven. He was being robbed. So death has always been around.
I'm actually glad that I did the military the way I did—that I lived in the world for a couple of years....
I've always wanted to go into education and become a teacher but they just don't make enough to survive off of. So I figure with my disability now, and the money I'll get from the government, I can use that plus the money I'll get from being a teacher and live comfortably. So I want to go to college and study education.
I've been dealing with the military since I was a sophomore in high school. They came to the school like six times a year. They had a recruiting station like a block from our high school. It was just right there. I could have gotten any job I wanted in the military. But my idea of a solider is hard-charging, the guy with the guns. So I didn't want to go into the military and do anything else besides that -- I signed up for infantry. ...

Real-life 'Lassie' Rescue
Faith the service dog phoned 911 when her owner fell out of her wheelchair and barked urgently into the receiver until a dispatcher sent help. Then the 4-year-old Rottweiler unlocked the front door so the responding police officer could come in.
"I sensed there was a problem on the other end of the 911 call," said dispatcher Jenny Buchanan, who answered the call from Faith. "The dog was too persistent in barking directly into the phone receiver ... I knew she was trying to tell me something."
Faith is trained to summon help by pushing a speed-dial button on the phone with her nose after taking the receiver off the hook, said her owner, Leana Beasley, 45, who suffers grand mal seizures....
The dog has been trained to recognize police officers, firefighters and medical personnel as "special friends with cookies. "

The Politics of Slaughter in Sudan
One day in the summer of 2004, more than 400 armed members of the janjaweed militia attacked the western Sudanese village of Donki Dereisa. They killed 150 civilians, including six young children, aged 3 to 14, who were captured during the assault and burned alive later that day, according to the Washington-based human rights group Refugees International. A man who tried to save the children was beheaded and dismembered.
...
...journalists, relief workers and human rights monitors describe a scorched-earth operation waged jointly by the government and the janjaweed of wholesale massacres, summary executions, the razing of entire villages and the depopulation of wide swathes of farmland. "The government and its janjaweed allies have killed thousands of Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa -- often in cold blood -- raped women, and destroyed villages, food stocks and other supplies essential to the civilian population," says a recent Human Rights Watch report.

A Soldier Speaks: Denver Jones
The 35-year-old Army reservist suffered a spine-shattering injury that left him permanently disabled. But he reserves his compassion for those who need it most: Iraqi children.
... Disaster struck when a Humvee accident ruptured three disks and fractured two of the vertebrae in his spine. As he described it to Now with Bill Moyers, "My head came up, hit the ceiling, jammed my neck down, I came down and hit on my tail in the seat, and it broke some seat brackets out from under the seat, and I pretty much was, you know, pretty hurt after that."
...It's hard for Denver to perform the simplest tasks: walk, sit, sleep. As he puts it, "I feel like a 90-year-old man trapped in a 35-year-old body."
...One of the things I think about a lot and can't get out of my head is the living conditions of the majority of the children in Iraq. Some of them have no home whatsoever. Some of them had mud huts, but there was no windows, no roof, or no doors. If it would rain and they would get some water, they would let their camels and sheep drink out of it before they did. And when the water dried, they would scrape the salt up and put it in bags.
I've spoken to several people over here – about how many children are starving over there – and they come back and say, "Well, there's people starving over here too." [laughs] They have no idea of the size of the problem I'm trying to describe. ...
My hopes are that the world can communicate as people – not governments communicating for us. If we communicated as people, there wouldn't be disputes and problems and war.
The governments of countries go and speak as though they represent the people of the country. But they don't represent what the people are actually saying. I've spoken to Iraqi soldiers who at one point wanted to kill me. And once we talked, there was no reason for fighting. Their leader tells them one thing while our leader tells us another. And we go on that.
More stories in this series: http://alternet.org/asoldierspeaks/

Gang War Erupts in Haitian Slum
Brinia Max Civil and her two children sleep on scraps of cardboard in a schoolroom here in Cité-Soleil, a slum in this capital, with dozens of other families. She has been there since Sept. 30, when the gang members arrived.
"I was inside my house with my two kids when the men came with guns," she said. "They told me to put my hands up. They took my husband and made him to lie on the ground and they started chopping him with machetes. They killed him, then they threw gas on the house and burned it."...Cité-Soleil, the poorest slum in the poorest country in the hemisphere, is split in two by a gang war. Ms. Max Civil and her husband had the misfortune to live near the dividing line between two sections of gang turf ...
...three young men appear on a broken-down moped so bristling with guns it looks like a two-wheeled armored personnel carrier, replete with an AK-47, a Glock 9 millimeter and a .38 Special. Though the two visitors were identified as journalists, the men came running at them, pointing their guns at the visitors' heads and screaming, "Why are you coming from Boston? What were you doing there? Are you spying on us?" One, with a Glock, mirrored sunglasses and a Los Angeles Lakers jersey, bounced off the ground like a pogo stick while keeping his gun trained on the visitors.

Iran 'Serial Child Killers' Held
... the crime came to light after three children in a suburb of Tehran went out to play football and never returned home.
Disguising the smell
The papers said one of the two suspects, a worker in a brick kiln, showed absolutely no sign of remorse for what he had done.
He is quoted as saying he wanted to take revenge on society because as a child he was abused by his stepmother.
Newspapers said the children were beaten with a stone, abused and their bodies buried in makeshift graves with a dead animal left on top to disguise the smell of the rotting corpse.
Press reports said the two suspects have led police to the scene of their latest killing where a bulldozer dug up three burned corpses.
Newspapers have suggested the reason why the killings took so long to be uncovered was that many of the initial victims were Afghan refugees who did not want to file reports with the police because they were illegally staying in Iran.

Growing out of Foster Care
In her South Seattle neighborhood, the facts of Tamelia's life are so common they can seem a cliché. A mother battling drug addiction. A father living most of his life in jail. A child separated from her siblings and living in foster care, in a house that never became home. Sometimes Tamelia makes a joke of it, calling herself a crack baby. Sometimes she pushes her pain into poetry, trying to make it sound pretty. Most of the time, she uses the past as fuel, turning the anger to power, dead-set on being the first in her family to graduate from college. But trying so hard takes energy. And one day last spring, Tamelia got tired.
...
"Normal kids from well-functioning, upper-middle-class families aren't ready to be on their own at 18, let alone kids with this kind of baggage," says state social worker Karen Rall.
The state Department of Social and Health Services reported this summer that only half of foster-care youths had completed high school or earned a GED within a year of leaving the system. Only a quarter had started some college classes. Fewer than half were employed; of those, about 47 percent were making poverty-level wages or less.
Recent studies identify teenagers in foster care as especially vulnerable to depression, substance abuse and pregnancy. Without intensive support, advocates say, teenagers leaving foster care will simply transition from one state agency to another. About one-third of former foster youths were enrolled in at least one public-assistance program within a year, the state's study found.
...
So Tamelia took it on herself to make mentors of her teachers and coaches at Franklin High. She earned herself an MLK Jr. Scholarship, one of 25 granted to students in the Mount Baker neighborhood. She got a job at McDonald's.
And as she neared the critical age of 18, she signed up for a YMCA program that helps foster children move into housing and on to college. It took calls to three caseworkers, but she got her name on that list.
"She was the one who said, 'I'm going to be turning 18 and I need help,' " says YMCA caseworker Karlie Keller. "Kids never advocate for themselves like that — ever."
Through it all, Tamelia has stayed stable, living in the same house with relatives for more than a decade. In foster-care terms, that makes her lucky.
But a peek inside her life shows how hard it can be to help teenagers in foster care, and how tangled life can be for those children, how easy it is to trip and fall.

A Time to Live: A Boy Embraces Life as a Rare Disease Hastens His Aging
At 10, he has the wrinkled skin, aching joints and hardened arteries of an 80-year-old man. Born with progeria, a rare disease that causes premature aging, he is getting older at a rate eight to 10 times faster than the rest of us.
"Like dog years," he likes to say.
Progeria, first described in 1886, has long baffled researchers. Since its identification, there have been only about 100 documented cases in the world, making it exceedingly difficult to study.
...
Most of the time, Seth doesn't think about getting old. He has more important things on his mind, like scheming to get a dog, or earning money for new electronic gadgets. ...
But sometimes the specter of getting old intrudes on his world. He reads food labels for cholesterol content. He takes an aspirin a day for his heart.
And he can tell you the signs for stroke. He knows because his fingers went numb at school one day in the fifth grade. His speech slurred, the likely consequence of a TIA -- transient ischemic attack -- or stroke-like event caused by a blocked blood vessel.
...
Although he does what he can, weighing 27 pounds and barely coming up belt-high to his classmates dictate certain realities. He power lifts a broomstick while the other kids do weights in phys-ed class. ("I have the body of a 70-year-old and look what I can do!")
...
[His father] Kyle, a steady, soft-spoken man, most comfortable in the woods or on a river, moved quickly through his own shock to action. He took his son with him wherever he could, spending long weekend days on the river with him, teaching him a woodsman's skills.
"I try to have the most fun I can with the time we do have," he says. "It still doesn't feel like we have enough time."
...
My house in heaven has got lots of rooms for people, and some for pets. And it has a zero-gravity room," he says.
"You go hunting for gummy bears and chocolate rabbits. And when you fish, you're guaranteed three a day."