Friday 15 March 2013

Morbid tradition of ‘ghost marriages’ persists in rural China


It’s a strange and morbid tradition, all but abandoned by modern China. But ghost marriages, the pairing of a deceased bachelor and bride to keep each other company in the afterlife, are quite the moneymaker for those willing to get their hands dirty.

Four men in China’s central Shanxi province were recently sentenced to more than two years in prison each for digging up the bodies of 10 female corpses, cleaning them, tampering with medical records to make them appear newly deceased and selling them on the black market for a sum of $39,000.

The ancient custom, which dates back to the 17th century BCE, rests on the belief that burying an unmarried young man with a “bride” can prevent his soul from becoming restless and lonely. It was outlawed in 1949 when Communist revolutionary Mao Zedong came to power, but is still practised in rural parts of several provinces, including Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan and Guangdong. In Shaanxi, where coal money has resulted in an affluent but stubbornly superstitious population, families are willing to pay top dollar for suitable dead spouses, sometimes employing a matchmaker or even purchasing remains straight from the hospital morgue. Younger and more attractive bodies tend to cost more.

Demand has led to a spike in illegal activity in recent years: last February, a female was twice exhumed after being married off postmortem by her family, only to be sold again by graverobbers days later. A man from the northern Hebei province murdered six women in 2006 and sold them as corpse brides.

Qingming Festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day, coming up in early April, is thought to be a lucky occasion for celebrating ghost marriages. For the wealthy, ceremonies are accompanied by dowries and a feast with a slaughtered pig or sheep.

But poorer families who also want to offer their sons a companion have few options. Some might purchase an old, cheaper corpse, dress it and reinforce its bones with wire, while others settle for a doll made of straw or a doughy figure with black beans for eyes.

Friday 15 March 2013

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/03/14/morbid-tradition-of-ghost-marriages-persists-in-rural-china/

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Digital tombstones: Life, death and Facebook



On Facebook, a billion users around the world document their relationships and share their children’s first steps, growing and aging in plain view. But what happens when they die?

Preserved forever in stark blue and white pixels, comments, photos, observations, and interests don’t disappear when bodies do. Whichever afterlife you believe in, Facebook could be the path to immortality.

An increasing number of mourners struggle with grief stemming from the leftover profiles of lost loved ones. Facebook developers have even created features that attempt to handle this new phenomenon. Physical death and digital death are two very different things.

As I perused vacation photos, drunken Instagram snapshots, and disoriented status updates last summer, my half-asleep eyes landed on a photo. A boy I’d gone to school with and had vaguely known since middle school was pictured on a hospital bed attached to innumerable tubes. Sober, familiar faces surrounded him.

Nap Cantwell died when he was 18 years old, after an accident in which his bike collided with a van. Andrew Imanaka, one of my best friends and one of Nap’s, took the photo.

“I figured it was the last picture anyone would take of him alive, to be honest,” Imanaka said. “How else are they (acquaintances, far away friends) going to find out [about Nap] in this day and age?”

Posts cover Nap’s Facebook wall, with new ones added often. Childhood photos, pictures of tattoos and tags memorializing him, and simple R.I.P.s and thinking-of-yous fill the digitized profile left by a very real human being.

According to UC Irvine Ph.D. candidate Jed Brubaker, who spent the last three and a half years studying the phenomenon of death in social media, 30 million Facebook profiles belong to the deceased, making up a significant proportion of the Facebook population.

“Social media, broadly, does a really bad job of accounting for the fact that people might die,” Brubaker said. “But when I originally began research, people were confused about what I was even talking about. I had to stop and explain myself.”

People don’t think about how they will be survived online when creating their Facebook profiles, but people have attempted to preserve their presence and that of others since the early days of the Internet.

Online memorials began around 15 years ago with personal webpages and cyber obituaries coming from as early as 1996. Early memorials like this were impossible to find unless friends or relatives were looking for them — unlike deceased Facebook members, who can show up on your “people you may know” sidebar.

“A funeral used to be a moment where specific individuals at a specific time and space meet to grieve an individual,” Brubaker said. “Facebook breaks this wide open.”

Liz Litts, a Shoreline, Wash., native, died suddenly in 2010 at the age of 18. She had more than 500 Facebook friends, and within 24 hours of her death at least 100 posts from various people who knew her expressed their sympathy, according to her friend Mackenzie Fenton Conlan.

Empathy, disagreements, and relationships from real life can manifest themselves on Facebook in ways more serious and real than one would expect.

“We had a falling out due to pointless high school drama, and now I regret it more than anything,” said Melanie Yordanova, who was best friends with Litts at one point. “I saw her 24 hours exactly before it happened, and she hugged me and said she loved me. The thing I regret most is not saying I love her back and also deleting her from Facebook and not accepting her friend request when she added me back.”

But dealing with loss over social networks is not for everyone; sometimes comments on a website seem distant, and constant reminders of a lost loved one are overwhelming.

“It took me a while to write on her page, because I didn’t think that people should resort to Facebook to grieve,” Conlan said. “However, it ended up being somewhat therapeutic.”

People who aren’t comfortable with Facebook aren’t really in a position to do anything about it, Brubaker said. In the same way that showing disapproval of the way a funeral is conducted is seen as disrespectful to the deceased, there’s no real way to disagree with the legitimacy of a Facebook memorial. This phenomenon is well-established. The moral and ethical questions it raises aren’t going anywhere.

“What is the proper way to grieve that guy from 20 years ago?” Brubaker asked. “It puts individuals in a tenuous place; they want to be respectful.”

Facebook death is often most uncomfortable for people distantly related to or vaguely associated with the deceased, because there is no social norm for responding to the situation. Before Facebook, these individuals probably would not still be connected to the deceased. Today, not only are they connected, but they have the opportunity to respond to the tragedy no matter where they are.

Facebook has provided the option to “memorialize” a page since 2009, in an attempt to end this problem. Family members must contact Facebook with proof of death for the process to be completed. From there, the page of the deceased will transform into a place to post memories about the person who will no longer show up in “suggested friends” or public searches.

“I have only talked to two individuals that have actually gone through this process, and it takes a long time,” Brubaker said. “It seems, in practice, there’s a lot of ambiguity about who has the right to memorialize an account.”

Various problems come from this ambiguity. Parents can delete friends they didn’t approve of after the death of a child, and new Facebook users cannot be friends with the deceased after the account has been memorialized. Future relatives cannot access it, and friends cannot modify it. There are no real guidelines about how ethical it is to gain access to someone else’s profile or who is allowed to do this.

Even people who don’t communicate with their parents usually have their accounts inherited by them regardless, Brubaker said. There are also questions about inheritance by domestic partners in states that have not legalized same-sex marriage.

“I’m a little suspicious. Should we be relying on these old, traditional values, or are there a broader set of people that should be included in input in an account?” Brubaker said. “These profiles have very rich afterlives; to lock these accounts down can really limit the opportunity for people to connect and remember each other and, in some scenarios, can be downright traumatic.”

Litts’ page has just such a rich afterlife.

“Since she has passed, her page is filled with people sharing memories that they had with Liz,” Conlan said. “I go back from time to time and post on there memories, songs, quotes, whatever. It’s kind of like a little remembrance page.”

Conlan and Yordanova mentioned the way Facebook helped to organize meetings and remembrances in honor of Litts. It also allowed for long-distance relatives and friends away at school to connect and share what they would have said at her funeral, had they been able to make it.

“Losing someone close to you can be one of the most difficult things, especially since you don’t have control, but the support of everyone was a huge help,” Yordanova said. “I got to see everyone express their sorrows in different ways, and in the end I felt less alone.”

Facebook already handles our day-to-day lives. Logically, it should also handle our deaths. Unfortunately, the legal framework governing these memorials is behind the times.

The Stored Communications Act, a federal law enacted in 1986, and the voluntary terms of service agreement used by sites like Facebook prohibit companies from sharing the personal information of users. This includes providing passwords to mourning relatives, and the law prevents estate managers from attempting to access Facebook accounts because of the possibility of being charged with cyber crimes.

Various state legislatures have taken up the cause, including Oregon and Nebraska. Yet it may not reach Congress for some time, as a bill aimed at modernizing the Act failed in the House Judiciary Committee last year.

The mourning process is one of the most intimate and personal of human experiences. Now this process has shifted dramatically into the public sphere, raising a slew of new legal questions.

The more pressing questions, however, have to do with the morality these interactive epitaphs. The line between what should and shouldn’t be online is becoming harder to see.

Friday 15 March 2013

http://dailyuw.com/archive/2013/03/14/arts-leisure/digital-tombstones-life-death-and-facebook#.UUM66UfVWCA

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Family holds memorial at deadly minivan crash site


News article demonstrating the importance of religious ceremonies at the scene:

The family of three of the seven people killed in a horrific minivan crash earlier this month held religious services at the Highway 36 crash site and the van operator’s garage before as they waited for officials to release the bodies for cremation.

About a dozen relatives of Sukhsan Bunthum, 54; his wife Siriwan, 51; and granddaughter Pinchat Thumcharoen, 7, invited four monks from Rayong’s Natakhwan Temple to the spot near the Bira Circuit race track to perform Buddhist ceremonies aimed inviting the victims’ spirits to pass on. The group then continued to the van operator’s base on Soi Mabyailia 24 in Nongprue where they lit incense and chanted stanzas.

Relatives of the deceased bring monks to the site of the horrific accident to begin the long, painful process of healing their hearts.



Umaporn Bunthum, the 27-year-old daughter of Sukhsan and Siriwan and mother of Pinchat, said her relatives had gone to Bangkok to purchase 200,000 baht in lottery tickets and show their granddaughter around the capital. When they didn’t return on time, Bunthum found out about the accident and checked locals hospitals, only to receive the tragic news.

She said funeral services are planned at Pa Pradu Temple in Rayong. After the three-day service, she plans to meet with the van driver, who was arrested after the crash, and the operator’s insurance company to negotiate a settlement. She said, however, she wants driver Chuchart Photchai, 50, to stand up, take responsibility and explain what happened.

Umporn’s family, plus Jamnien Singhkhet, 51, daughter Suphakorn Singkhet, 38; and son Theeraphat Mingmit, 9 months, died with another unidentified male after the Bangkok-Rayong liquid petroleum gas-powered van hit a “no U-turn” sign and burst into flames May 2. The driver and two others were injured and treated at Queen Sirikit Hospital.

Police said Chuchart cut across lanes and slammed into the post, possibly because he was distracted by conversation or fell asleep. Investigators He was charged with reckless driving resulting in death.

Relatives, naturally, remained traumatized, with several claiming ghosts of the deceased could be heard crying or were causing dogs to bark.

Once relatives departed the crash site, students from Ranjamangala University of Technology Phra Nakhorn arrived to collect information and capture images of the van and the accident for inspection and research to increase preventions and solutions to traffic deaths.

Friday 15 March 2013

http://www.pattayamail.com/localnews/family-holds-memorial-at-deadly-minivan-crash-site-23312?ref=pmci

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South African bus crash kills 22, toll could rise


At least 22 people were killed in South Africa on Friday when a double-decker bus crashed into the side of a mountain while navigating the dangerous Hex River Pass 140 km (80 miles) northeast of Cape Town, police said.

"It appears as if the brakes failed and the driver lost control," said Kenny Africa, the police traffic spokesman for the Western Cape province. Two children were among the dead and 44 passengers were injured.

"We are recovering more bodies and the death toll may rise," Africa told Reuters from the accident scene, adding it was unclear how many people were on board the bus.

The pass, situated in the picturesque Hex River Valley, is notorious for accidents because its straight and long descent allows vehicles to gather momentum before it leads suddenly into a dangerously sharp left turn.

Road use is the primary means of travel in Africa's largest economy, and the government has introduced tough laws to clamp down on reckless driving and poorly-maintained vehicles as it tries to curb an annual toll of some 14,000 deaths.

Friday 15 March 2013

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/15/us-safrica-accident-idUSBRE92E0JV20130315

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Vizag chopper crash: two bodies recovered


Almost four days after a Naval helicopter, with four crew members on board, crashed into the sea off Vizag coast in Andhra Pradesh, the rescue teams on Saturday retrieved bodies of a Lieutenant Commander and a sailor from the wreckage landed at the depth of 60 metres.

The deceased were identified as Lieutenant Commander Pranav Likithi and sailor G S Sen, according to a release by the Eastern Naval Command.

Two other crew members had been rescued earlier and are recuperating at Naval hospital INHS Kalyani.

The Chetak 440 helicopter crashed into the sea about 10 nautical miles off Visakhapatnam coast on Tuesday afternoon, soon after it took off from INS Dega at about 2 p.M. On a routine mission.

The rescue teams last night spotted the debris, strewn at a depth of 60 metres, along with the two bodies, at a distance of 8 miles south of Dolphin Light House, the release said.

The bodies were retrieved in the early hours today by the joint rescue teams.

Soon after the crash, an extensive search and rescue operation was launched from the sea and air by the Navy, along with the Coast Guard, Port authorities and Marine Police.

The Navy had already ordered a Board of Inquiry to establish the cause of the accident.

A multi-purpose offshore chartered vessel 'Olympic Canyon' was also roped in with its Remote Operating Vehicle for the salvaging operations.

Meanwhile, bodies of Likithi and Sen were sent for postmortem at state-run King George Hospital, the release said.

Friday 15 March 2013

http://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india/vizag-chopper-crash-two-bodies-recovered-20651.html

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Pakistani made items found on killed terrorists: Shinde



Interesting news article about the use of personal effects for identification purposes:

Making identical statements in both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said some items bearing markings of Pakistan have been recovered from the terrorists who were killed in the encounter after attack on a CRPF camp.

He made the statement after sharp criticism by members from various parties, who said the government has repeatedly failed in preventing terror incidents as well in dealing with Pakistan from where it originates.

"The killed terrorists are suspected to be of foreign origin," he said about the incident in which five CRPF jawans lost their lives while battling the attackers.

When pressed in the Rajya Sabha for clarifications, Shinde said he did not say that the terrorists were Pakistanis and only mentioned them as foreigners.

"From the bodies of terrorists killed, two diaries, one each containing numbers suspected to be of Pakistanis, tube of Betnovate, a skin ointment were recovered.

"Further investigations reveal that this tube was manufactured in Glaxo Smithkline Pak Ltd, at 35 Dockyard, Karachi. The name of the tube mentioned in Urdu and the numbers mentioned in the diaries appear to be of Pakistani origin," he said.

He insisted that the government was dealing with terror strongly. "Yahan koi chudiyan nahin pahna hai. Sabke haath me taakat hai (Nobody is wearing bangles in their hands. Everybody is strong)," he said, responding to members' criticism of being soft.

At the same time, he said, the government "knew there will be such attempts" after the execution of Mumbai terror attack convict Ajmal Kasab and Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.

The Home Minister said the bodies of the terrorists killed in the encounter were shaven, which confirms them to be fidayeens. "The killed terrorists are suspected to be of foreign origin...Although the responsibility for the incident was owned by an agent of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the authenticity of the claim is yet to be ascertained," Shinde said.

He disagreed with contentions that the situation on the terror front in the Valley has turned from bad to worse saying there has been decline in the number of terror incidents as well as infiltration incidents in Jammu and Kashmir in the last few years.

"We are focusing on PoK and we are keeping a watch on the camps there. We are very vigilant. Our intelligence agencies are very serious," the Home Minister said.

He said many an incident is also prevented due to better intelligence coordination but that is not something to be highlighted on a daily basis.

Responding to criticism that the forces were not adequately armed in the Valley and that half of the CRPF jawans do not have guns, the Home Minister said peace process is on in Jammu and Kashmir and the government does not want to do it "by pointing out a gun" all the time and the problem is sometimes also contained with 'lathi' (cane) in hand.

"We want to bring peace in Kashmir by giving a special package there...We, too, do not want to keep the military there for long," he said.

Asserting that "condolence for the dead and compensation for the survived" cannot be the government policy after every such attack, M Venkaiah Naidu (BJP) asked the government to understand the seriousness and go into the core of the issue.

Friday 15 March 2013

http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=13732

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13 most bizarre stories of famous corpses


In 1658, English writer Thomas Browne knew what he was taking about when he wrote, "But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?" That's the unofficial tagline for Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses. Like a morbid magpie, I've collected stories of the dead from across the centuries and continents, focusing on how famous corpses were treated by the living. The bodies and parts in Rest in Pieces have become mementos, means of accessing God, scientific specimens, and political footballs. They've been used to found cities, churches, and empires. And while historical and cultural remove can make some of the stories seem more strange than they would have to their participants, other tales in the book truly are bizarre. Below are 13 that strike me as the strangest.

Abraham Lincoln, RIP: April 14, 1865 (age 56)

A decade after Lincoln’s death, a gang of counterfeiters tried to kidnap his corpse. They were hoping to get their top engraver out of prison, plus a pile of cash. The plot failed, thanks to the Secret Service, but in the following years Lincoln’s body was moved at least sixteen times to foil would-be thieves. It spent several years disguised beneath piles of lumber in the tomb’s basement. And Lincoln isn’t the only president to suffer an attempted corpse-napping: in 1830, a disgruntled gardener fired by one of George Washington’s heirs tried to steal his skull. (He accidentally stole the skull of a distant relative.)

Joseph Haydn, RIP: May 31, 1809 (age 77)

Haydn’s head fell victim to the phrenologists, quack scientists who “read” heads the way some people read palms. One of them (who also happened to be one of Haydn’s good friends) dug up his body and made off with his skull, much to the chagrin of his employer Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, who tried unsuccessfully for years to get it back. Haydn’s skull was only reunited with the rest of his body in the twentieth century. Today the composer’s tomb in Eisenstadt, Austria, is said to have two skulls inside.

Voltaire, RIP: May 30, 1778 (age 83)

The French author was terrified of having his bones end up in the trash, a not-infrequent fate for those who criticized the Church in the eighteenth century. To prevent that from happening, Voltaire’s nephew disguised his uncle’s corpse as if it was still alive, propped it up in his carriage, and drove it to his run-down monastery in the countryside. Voltaire stayed buried there until the French Revolution, when the rebels interred him in their secular temple in Paris, the Panthรฉon. Most believe he’s still there today, although there’s a rumor that royalists snuck into the Panthรฉon and threw his bones in the garbage after all. To put a stop to those tales, officials opened the tomb in 1897, and discovered the remains more or less intact.

Laurence Sterne, RIP: March 18, 1768 (age 54)

English writer Laurence Stern (Tristram Shandy) was probably the most famous victim of the “Resurrection Men,” thieves who dug up freshly dead corpses for medical schools. His corpse was delivered to an anatomy professor at Cambridge—coincidentally Sterne’s alma mater. Supposedly, someone recognized Sterne during the dissection, and promptly fainted. It’s not clear whether the dissection was ever finished, but Sterne’s body did make his way back to the cemetery.

Albert Einstein, RIP: April 18, 1955 (age 76)

Einstein told his biographer Abraham Pais, “I want to be cremated so people don’t come to worship at my bones." He got his wish--mostly. The pathologist who conducted Einstein’s autopsy, Thomas Harvey, removed the scientist’s brain in an attempt to find out what had made him so brilliant. But during the ensuing decades, Harvey mostly kept the brain to himself, ferrying it around the country when he switched jobs and storing it in the closet underneath his socks. Only in the late twentieth century did scientists find some intriguing differences in Einstein’s brain, and slides of his grey matter are now on display at Philadelphia’s Mรผtter Museum. Meanwhile, Einstein’s eyes are in a safety deposit box in New Jersey.

Lee Harvey Oswald, RIP: November 24, 1963 (age 24)

In the 1970s a wealthy British author and restaurateur, Michael Eddowes, became convinced that there had been two Oswalds—and that the one who killed JFK was a Soviet plant. Eddowes sponsored a 1981 exhumation of Oswald’s body, which found clear signs of childhood scars, thus disproving Eddowes’s theory. But some assassination researchers think the exhumation proved nothing, because the Soviets had been meddling in the cemetery, putting the real Oswald’s head on the fake Oswald’s body.

John Milton, RIP: November 8, 1674 (age 65)

A century after Milton’s death, his grave at St. Giles Cripplegate was desecrated during church repairs. Friends of the churchwarden exhumed the body, then snatched out hair and teeth. Church repairmen showed visitors the skeleton for the price of a “pot of beer.” There’s still controversy over whether or not the body really belonged to Milton, but to this day, no one’s sure precisely where in St. Giles Cripplegate he’s buried.

Benito Mussolini, RIP: April 28, 1945 (age 61)

After Mussolini was captured and executed at the end of WWII, his corpse took a beating (and a spitting, kicking, and shooting) in the middle of a public square in Milan. It was then buried in a secret grave, after which it was briefly stolen by neo-Fascists, recovered, and kept in a series of secret locations for 11 years. “Il Duce” only received a proper burial in 1957, when his body arrived at his widow’s house in a box marked “church documents.”

Eva Perรณn, RIP: July 26, 1952 (age 33)

Argentine first lady Eva Perรณn was embalmed to last for eternity, although things didn’t go quite as planned. When her husband Juan Perรณn was deposed in a coup, the new regime had no idea what to do with her body, which was said to look like a wax doll. The general put in charge of the corpse ended up hiding it in an attic and going insane, or so it’s said. The body was later secretly buried in Italy under an assumed name, and only returned to Buenos Aires over two decades after Evita’s death. Her embalmed corpse now rests in a steel vault said to be able to withstand a nuclear bomb.

Napoleon Bonaparte, RIP: May 5, 1821 (age 51)

Napoleon’s will called for his body to be buried on the banks of the Seine, but he was instead laid to rest in a valley on St. Helena, the desolate island where he died. Most of his remains were repatriated to Paris in 1840, although some body parts made less dignified journeys. According to several accounts, Napoleon’s penis—stolen by his doctor—passed among collectors for decades, while being gracefully described by auctioneers as a “mummified tendon." At last check it was in New Jersey, where its owner kept it in a suitcase under his bed.

Jim Thorpe, RIP: March 28, 1953 (age 65)

Jim Thorpe, one of the best all-around athletes America has produced, died in poverty and obscurity. His wife sold his body to two struggling Pennsylvania coal towns, who united and named themselves Jim Thorpe, even though he never set foot there. The move was designed to bring the town tourist attention, although they ended up revitalizing themselves in ways that had nothing to do with a corpse. Now, Jim Thorpe’s children are fighting in court to bring his body back to Oklahoma.

Jeremy Bentham, RIP: June 6, 1832 (age 85)

In his will, the philosopher and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham ordered a public dissection of his own corpse. He also ordered that his body be stripped down to its skeleton and stuffed inside his Sunday suit, and his head preserved in the “style of the New Zealanders.” That part didn’t work out so well, but the rest of Bentham’s preserved body is still on display (with a wax head) at the University College London.

Dorothy Parker, RIP: June 7, 1967 (age 73)

Dorothy Parker left her entire estate to Martin Luther King, a man she’s never met. But she failed to leave any instructions regarding her remains. Her ashes stayed at the crematorium until 1973, and then in a filing cabinet at her lawyer’s office until 1988. That year the NAACP finally gave the ashes a permanent home at their Baltimore headquarters, where Parker lies beneath her suggested epitaph, “Eat my dust."

Friday 15 March 2013

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bess-lovejoy/13-most-bizarre-stories-o_b_2876961.html#slide=2222489

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