China's child abductions

Thousands of Chinese children kidnapped by traffickers every year are never found because of corruption, police apathy and the complicated nature of the crime, according to a filmmaker who has made a documentary on the subject.

Charlie Custer, whose film "Living with Dead Hearts" was released last week, said most of the younger children abducted in China are boys sold for adoption to couples with daughters but no sons.

Boys are also sought by couples unable to conceive or unable to pay the fines imposed on families breaching China's one child policy. Given China's traditional preference for males, an infant boy is worth thousands of dollars on the black market, he said.

Tricked by traffickers, adoptive parents are often unaware that the children in their care have been stolen from their biological parents, Custer added.

"There's also demand for children to be involved in street begging, pickpocketing ... and of course, there's demand for slave labour and prostitution for the teenage kids that are kidnapped," Custer told Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview from the United States, where he is now based after spending several years in China.

The exact number of child abductions is unknown.

Before the Chinese government stopped releasing annual estimates of the number of kidnapped children more than a decade ago, it said around 10,000 children were kidnapped every year, Custer said.

The authorities stopped publishing numbers partly because they were embarrassed by the continuing problem, partly because of the difficulty in determining which children were snatched and which were runaways or missing for other reasons, he added.

The U.S. State Department, citing media reports, says as many as 20,000 children are kidnapped for illegal adoption each year, while Custer said independent reports put the number of children kidnapped in China yearly as high as 70,000.

HOPELESSNESS

"Like a lot of these big social issues in China, there's interest in resolving this problem at the highest levels of government," Custer said, pointing to the work of a national anti-kidnapping taskforce responsible for rescuing many children.

But there is less interest in investigating the crimes at local level.

"Some officials and some police organisations are actually bribed by traffickers, so there's this issue of corruption that is part of it. There's also just the fact that there's not a lot of motivation for a lot of local police officers to solve cases like these," Custer said.

Part of the reason is the vast distance kidnapped children are forced to travel to avoid detection, often moving several times across several jurisdictions or passed through many hands.

Investigating such cases becomes extremely time-consuming, requiring many layers of cooperation among local police departments, Custer said.

"For a lot of local police, it's not worth it. It's not a worthwhile use of their time. It doesn't bring in any extra money. It doesn't raise their conviction rates, their success rates because most of the cases aren't resolved," he added.

The pain of having no information and no lead to pursue is vividly captured in the documentary, which follows three sets of parents in their quest to find their missing children.

Aged only two, Liu Jingjun was dressed in a black and blue cotton jacket and trousers when he disappeared from an alleyway where he had been playing with other local children in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province.

His parents and grandparents have been searching for him ever since - using websites such as "Baby Come Home" which allow parents to post photos of their missing children and browse pictures of homeless children.

"No matter where you go, as long as we're alive, your mum and dad, as long as we have breath, we'll be trying to bring you home," Jingjun's father says, addressing the camera.

Lei Xiaoxia was 12 when she disappeared from school, and Yuan Xueyu, who had left home and found work on a construction site, was 15 when he went missing.

"The feeling of losing your child, it's like being hopeless. We are living with dead hearts," Xiaoxia's mother says.

UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES

In all cases the police are depicted as incompetent or uninterested - for example, failing to check video taken from surveillance cameras or not bothering to interview teachers and schoolfriends of the kidnapped children.

The kidnappings have unexpected consequences too. One man describes how the uncle of a kidnapped child is killed in a motorbike accident while searching for him. Another man whose child was kidnapped speaks of the pressure from family and neighbours to leave his wife, who they blame for not being more watchful.

Over time, the search for missing children also drains the pockets of many parents as they try single-handed to find their children. They lose income taking time off work to follow up reports of a sighting, and have to pay for flyers to be printed or to take trains to other towns and cities.

"Obviously, you know that somebody's child being kidnapped is devastating emotionally for the family, but it was surprising to see the extent to which that destroys the rest of people's lives," Custer said.

By the end of the film, not one set of parents has been successful in their search.

"The situation turned out to be even bleaker than we had expected," Custer said.

CHILD SMUGGLING RING EXPOSED

At least seven families have come forward to report their children missing after police in Shaanxi smashed a sophisticated child-smuggling operation involving an obstetrician last week, Chinese media reports.

Fan Ningning, a female villager who lived in Weinan city’s Fuping County, said that in recent years she had twice given birth at a local maternal hospital, the Beijing News reported. Fan said she had been told by a doctor to “discard” her babies because they had “congenital diseases”. She now believes her children are still alive and living with a “host family”.

Fan’s hopes of seeing her children again were sparked by the high-profile police operation which uncovered the human trafficking operation. Newspapers in China on Monday reported that Fuping police rescued a newborn boy from its host family in nearby Henan province. The infant had allegedly been abducted by an obstetrician and sold to human traffickers.

Police have also arrested Zhang Shuxia, an obstetrician working at a hospital for children. She had allegedly persuaded a couple to give up their child last month, after informing them he was infected with hepatitis and syphilis, police said. Worried the “sick baby” could be a heavy financial burden, the parents allowed Zhang to “dispose” of it.

State media reported on Tuesday that the baby boy had been reunited with his parents, mother Dong Shanshan and father Lai Guofeng. “Dong held him tightly as family members wept before the parents knelt to thank police for recovering the infant,” the China Daily said.

Police also detained two other people accused of re-selling babies, the newspaper reported citing police sources. The doctor sold the baby for around 21,000 yuan to a member of the child smuggling ring. This man then sold the child for 50,000 yuan to another criminal suspect, who handed it to the host family for 60,000 yuan, the report explained.

Yet there are other cases reported. A spokesman for Fuping police told the paper that they had received seven similar reports from other families. More reports are likely.

Elaborating on the case of Fan Ningning, the Beijing News reported that she had given birth to a girl and a boy in 2008 and 2009. When a doctor told her the children had congenital diseases, no physical examination was performed on them, nor was Fan asked to sign a letter of consent allowing them to be taken away from her.

Child trafficking is a serious problem in China. It is often blamed on the “one-child” policy which has put a premium on families having baby boys. Consequently, baby girls are sometimes sold off, abandoned, or put up for adoption.

Under the policy, which aims at controlling China’s more than 1.3 billion population, people in urban areas are generally allowed only one child, while rural families can have two - if the first is a girl.

In a much publicised case, Chinese police rescued 89 children and arrested 355 suspects last December after breaking up a series of child trafficking rings.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

http://www.trust.org/item/20130806110826-5vmtb/?source=hpeditorial

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1294624/more-parents-report-missing-children-after-baby-smuggling-ring

Investigators looking for mass grave in Medvedja

Representatives of missing persons commissions from Belgrade and Pristina started investigating the grounds in the village of Svirce.

The village is the suspected location of a mass grave containing bodies of Albanians killed in 1999, said Mayor of Medvedja Slobodan Draskovic.

He told Tanjug that so far they are just going over the grounds and trying to locate the sites where the grave might be located.

"Representatives of EULEX and the Red Cross are also in the field. They are scanning the grounds at a location known as Kapija (the Gate) along the administrative line with Kosovo, more precisely the area between Medvedja and the municipality of Kosovska Kamenica," said Draskovic.

This is the second time in the last two years that representatives of missing persons commissions and international organizations have searched Medvedja for possible mass graves.

Excavations carried out in the village of Sijarina in September 2011 did not yield any findings.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/crimes.php?yyyy=2013&mm=08&dd=06&nav_id=87195

2 dead, 6 missing after China colliery blast

Two miners have been confirmed dead, and six others remain trapped on Tuesday after a gas blast hit an illegal coal mine in Southwest China's Yunnan Province on Monday, rescuers said.

They pulled two bodies out on Monday afternoon, but said the rescue was progressing slowly due to difficulties in clearing the blockage that resulted from the blast-triggered cave-in.

Eight workers were estimated to be trapped following the accident that occurred at 3:40 pm on Monday at the mine in Qingmen Village, Zhaoyang District of Zhaotong City, according to the district government.

Police said they had detained the mine's owner.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/801974.shtml#.UgEV_nefDnE

9 bodies recovered after deadly Vietnam boat accident

Rescuers have recovered the bodies of three women and six men who died after a motorboat capsized in rough conditions off the Ho Chi Minh City coast last Friday.

Twenty one others who were rescued are reported to be in stable condition after treatment.

At around 9 p.m. on Friday the boat carrying 30 employees of the PetroVietnam Steel Pipe Joint Stock Company capsized and sunk due to strong winds and waves some 7.5 nautical miles off Can Gio District.

The vessel, which had come from the Mekong Delta province of Tien Giang, was heading for the beach city of Vung Tau for the weekend.

After receiving distress signals from the boat, the Area III Marine Rescue and Research Center in Ba Ria – Vung Tau Province rushed rescue vessels to the spot and managed to save the 21 people, who included an American couple.

By early Saturday morning rescuers had found the ill-fated boat but not the nine people, including helmsman Pham Duy Phuc, who were missing.

At 11:40 a.m. the first missing person, a woman named Nong Thi Thien, 34, was found inside the vessel.

By Monday morning all nine bodies were found.

Authorities are investigating the accident.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20130805-9-bodies-recovered-after-boat-sinks-off-vietnam-metro-coast.aspx

Moscow’s killing fields: inside a Stalinist execution site

Across from the sprawling Gazprom offices just south of Moscow, there is a forest. It is quiet, full of mushrooms and dead leaves. The only people usually there are a pair of monks, who live by a church built on the property.

The forest is part of a village known as Kommunarka, a pre-revolutionary estate turned collective farm. In the mid-30s, it became the dacha of secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, the man who would ignite Stalin's Terror.

Then, from 1937 to 1941, between 10,000 and 15,000 people are believed to have been shot there and buried in mass graves. They were diplomats, scientists and journalists. They were Russian, Chinese, Polish, Mongolian, English and many more. Their bodies have never been raised; they lie beneath the soil, the silent victims of forgotten crimes.

On a cloudy afternoon in August, a small group of foreign and Russian volunteers is working in the depths of the forest, in one of the areas thought to be a burial ground. They are clearing out old growth and throwing it onto a fire; the ashes of dead tree limbs and leaves flutter up and then down as the flames grow.

They are part of a summer camp run by a German nonprofit, the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. They range from students to pensioners. And they have chosen to spend two weeks of their summer helping to uncover some of the 20th century's darkest sins.

After pulling off Kaluzhskoye Shosse, visitors walk down a dirt path that leads to a seafoam-green wooden fence. This is the dacha's original entrance, built in the 1920s and the one the victims would have been brought through. Today, a shiny new plaque states that "on this ground lie thousands of victims of the political terror of the 1930s to the 1950s. Preserve their eternal memory!"

Visitors buzz to be let inside by the monks. On the other side, they immediately encounter a wooden cross, and three small obelisks honoring Mongolian officials, Yakutians and the first procurator of Moscow, all of whom lie here.

A dirt road leads to Yagoda's dacha, a green wooden cottage with a brick chimney. The NKVD head was famed for his love of the finer things, lavishly decorating his apartments and country home; according to Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore, he boasted that his garden held 2,000 roses and orchids. He also kept a large stash of pornography in the dacha.

Yagoda himself would become Kommunarka's first victim. After spearheading the construction of the Volga Canal, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, he orchestrated the Terror's first show trial, of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, in 1936. But Stalin didn't trust him to handle the mass terror to come, and had him arrested in April 1937. He was shot in March of the next year by his successor, Nikolai Yezhov, and buried on the property.

It was Yezhov who turned Kommunarka into one of the new Terror's killing fields, the second biggest in Moscow. According to research conducted by Memorial, around 32,000 people were shot in Moscow in 1937‑1938; of these, almost 21,000 were buried at Butovo, several hundred were cremated at Donskoi Monastery and the remainder are believed to have been buried at Kommunarka.

Kommunarka kept its secrets hidden for most of the Soviet era. It wasn't until perestroika that its role in the Terror could be discussed, let alone researched. The land remained in the hands of the KGB's successor, the FSB, until 1999, when it was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church, which established St. Catherine's Monastery there and built a church next to Yagoda's former dacha.

‘Screams in the night'

That green house is now home to a pair of monks.

Father Alexander, a Tolstoy lookalike with a trailing white beard, emerged from the house at the sound of visitors, holding a wooden staff. A white cat reclined on the dacha's front steps. The monk has lived on the property since it was given to the church.

"A lot of blood was spilled here, a lot of pain that people endured, so we had to pray for this place," he said. "You can kill a person, but their soul remains."

There is a small chapel inside the dacha now, with an altar on the spot where NKVD officials once took off their leather coats.

"When you stand here now, you don't feel anything anymore," he said, gesturing toward the trees with his staff. "But before, when the church was being built, the construction workers were afraid to leave the house to go to the toilet. They were too scared.

"We thought we heard screams in the night, groans."

If you go deeper into the trees along the edge of a barbed wire fence, the path empties out into a small clearing. A dozen or so trees are marked with photographs and makeshift plaques placed there by relatives.

A marble headstone-like plaque is dedicated to Vasily Nesmeyanov, a head scientist at the Department for Surveying and Cartography who lived in the House on the Embankment.

Others are simple photos attached to the tree trunks with scotch tape, their ink fading. Many of the photos are of the victims after they had been arrested, a few hours or days before their execution.

Konstantin Ochalis, a Greek emigre who worked at publishing house Profizdat, is one of the latter. Wearing a knitted scarf and blazer, dark hair slicked back, Ochalis stares out from his arrest photo with calm, yet knowing, eyes.

New names continue to be added to the lists of those killed that are kept by both Memorial and the church, as relatives find new information in archives or on the Internet.

Finding burial pits

A few yards ahead of the photos, Mikhail Mokeyev, 37, was attacking dead trees with a hatchet. As the lay assistant at the monastery, he has lived at Kommunarka for almost a decade. Unlike Father Alexander, he seems to embody little of the suffering that happened on its grounds, and has a ready smile.

Mokeyev was wearing a blue pair of overalls emblazoned with the Gazprom logo. A gas pipeline goes through Kommunarka, an odd reminder of the present. "They help us out," he said. "They took us to visit Butovo yesterday."

Beside him, the volunteers were collecting branches. This summer marked the Kommunarka camp's second year, which concluded on August 3.

Alexandra Lipitskaya, the local coordinator for Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, explained that the project deals with memory. Many of the organization's programs grapple with the crimes of Nazi Germany, staging summer camps ("sommerlager") to clean up former Jewish cemeteries and organizing lectures by Holocaust survivors at former concentration camps.

In Russia - where many gulags, execution sites and other places of terror are unmarked parts of the landscape - the project is unique.

"It might seem strange to have Germans come to Russia," Lipitskaya said. "But quite a few Germans are buried here."

Campers slept in an unfinished wooden house, which the monks say will one day be a museum about Kommunarka. After rising early and working in the forest for several hours, they broke for lunch at two o'clock.

The afternoons were filled with field trips to sites such as Butovo, the other mass shooting ground from the 1930s, and Sukhanovskaya Prison, where NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria is said to have personally interrogated his victims. A trip to Memorial's headquarters was their main glimpse of central Moscow.

"It's less practical work than I'm accustomed to at these camps," said Anna-Marie Grosse-Guette, a German participant in her 50s who has previously worked with programs related to the Holocaust. "But we tried our best, despite the weather."

Mokeyev was quick to point out that they were not exhuming bodies; digging requires state permission, which they lack. Rather, they were cleaning up the area to prepare for a new round of land surveying, which will use probes to determine the burial pits' size and the probable number of bodies they contain.

At Butovo, excavations have been carried out, and a small museum has been built on the spot. Kommunarka, however, remains relatively unstudied; the forest spans 20 hectares, and researchers don't know precisely where the mass graves are located.

After examining one patch of forest, researchers determined that the area contained one burial pit four meters deep and 12 meters wide. Mounds of comparable size at Butovo were found to contain around 140 bodies.

‘My mother told me not to pick mushrooms here'

There is some debate over whether the victims were executed on the site, or shot in Moscow and their bodies brought to Kommunarka. A pensioner cutting logs with a chainsaw, who did not wish to be named, said that he grew up next to the forest.

"My mother told me not to pick mushrooms here," he said. "She understood what it was." But he thinks the shootings took place elsewhere.

"We never heard shots."

Alexander Ivanov, 54, disagrees. His grandfather was Ivan Ivanov, an Old Bolshevik who served as secretary of Astrakhan's Central Executive Committee. He knew his grandfather had been repressed and rehabilitated in 1957, though his parents never discussed it.

Three years ago, however, he found his grandfather's file at the central FSB archives. It stated that Ivanov had been shot at Kommunarka in 1941. Three days after his death, on July 10, 1941 the entire leadership of Mongolia was shot and buried there. As the Germans advanced on Moscow that fall, 220 people were shot on a single day in October.

There is a small clearing off a dirt road to the side of the main entrance. "In the 10 years that the church has been here, we haven't mowed anything, we haven't chopped anything down, but still nothing grows there," Mokeyev said. This is thought to be the resting place of the victims of 1941. Probes have confirmed that it is a burial pit.

"My wife saw on TV that volunteers were working here, foreigners, and suddenly I felt ashamed," Ivanov said. "I understood that I had the opportunity to help... to try to do something so that there's some kind of remembrance."

The fight for a memorial

The church is working with Memorial to try to turn Kommunarka into a memorial to those who died, creating a museum and an official gravesite. There has also been a proposal to erect a wall with the victim's names. The plan for now is only to fix where the mass graves are located. To do more detailed research, they need government backing, which so far has failed to materialize.

But Mokeyev said that may change with Kommunarka's incorporation into New Moscow, the massive expansion of the city's official territory into its southern suburbs. The planned location for the government's gleaming new administrative buildings is right next to the forest.

As work in the forest slowly continues, relatives keep piecing together information about the people taken from them.

Ivanov has taped a small portrait of his grandfather and his arrest photo on a tree near the clearing where he might rest. At the tree's base lies a pile of red carnations.

In the clearing where relatives have attached names and photos of their loved ones to tree trunks, there is one that stands out from the rest. The name "Jonathan Marshall" is printed on a white sheet of computer paper. The paper states that he was born in 1898 and died in 1938. But beyond that, nothing is known about Marshall. His name is nowhere to be found in the monastery's records or the Memorial database; monastery representative Mikhail Mokeyev said he doesn't even know who put the marker there.

Over 60 nationalities are thought to be buried at Kommunarka, including some Englishmen. But over half of their names and stories remain unknown.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

http://themoscownews.com/arts/20130805/191824544/Moscows-killing-fields-inside-a-Stalinist-execution-site.html

After 15-year search, mom finds son in pauper's grave

In a graveyard filled with those who died with no money and sometimes no family, he died with even less.

His gravestone simply read, "John (19) Doe."

He was the 19th unidentified man buried in the Bordeaux Cemetery. He lies in plot #555, a grave overlooking the Whites Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. And around him lie 1,001 others who died penniless and, in some cases, unmourned.

They're just a few of those buried in Nashville's paupers' graves. And the city says the numbers have been growing.

Names and dates of most of the 10,000 buried in Nashville's paupers' graves in cemeteries throughout the city are most likely lost forever.

Among those who died penniless this year: a country music writer who kept Johnny Cash's number in his Rolodex, the mother of a disabled adult daughter who cannot care for herself and a man whose death was mourned only by the social workers who helped him at the end of his life.

"No telling how many stories are in those graves," said Sylvia Nolan, a lifelong Nashville resident.

One of them, she just found out in March, is her son. His story spans 15 years of heartache, loss and mystery — one in which the answers lay just 3 miles away from her home in an anonymous grave.

One where a police mistake in 1998 may have needlessly prolonged her pain.

He was a reserved boy who found release from a hard life in North Nashville in sports. He was a budding track star, nicknamed "Flagpole" because of his skinny frame, who wowed coaches at Pearl-Cohn High School with his speed. He was a young man whose mental illness may have led him to the end of his short, tragic life, in a burnt, rolled-up carpet on a dead-end street.

When his body was found, nobody knew who he was. He was just "John (19) Doe."

Today, thanks to DNA testing, we know his name was LeRyan Nicholson.

"I've been looking for him and I don't know. Honest to God, I didn't know. I just prayed. One night I just prayed, it was his birthday ... last year. And I said, 'Lord give me closure because I'm so tired of pain,' " Nolan said. "But I didn't want this kind of closure."

Mental illness takes over

Nolan struggled with being a young, single mother at the John Henry Hale public housing project. Money was tight. It wasn't the safest place in town.

As LeRyan got older, he became a fierce protector of his little sister, Ameera El, and his stepsister, Candace Williams. He was quiet but sweet.

In high school, he came out of his shell. There, he found sports.

"He was a great runner," said Billy Fellman, principal at The Academy at Hickory Hollow and a teacher and coach at Pearl-Cohn High School in the 1990s. "As a freshman, he won the city championship in the mile and half-mile, top five in the district and region as a freshman. He was just a natural talent."

And then, one day, during his sophomore year, he stopped going to school. He began to grapple with mental illness. In his late teens, he moved out of his mother's home and stayed with other relatives.

"It was like he was confused as he was talking. It didn't make a lot of sense. Jumping from one thing to another, not completing a thought," Williams said.

In what would have been his senior year, LeRyan entered Job Corps. It was a voluntary boot-camp-like training program in which he would earn his GED and get vocational training. But when he returned from it in late 1997, his mental demons were worse.

Nolan tried to get him help, taking him to Vanderbilt. He went on medication. He picked up smoking. His hair started to turn gray, even though he was only 18.

LeRyan continued bouncing from relative to relative until the spring of 1998. In April of that year, he left home and didn't come back.

Nolan filed a missing persons report on April 12, 1998, but police were not optimistic.

"They said, 'We'll look for him.' But by him being grown, they said to me … that he probably wanted to go out on his own," Nolan said.

She never heard from her son again.

'A mistake was made'

In May 1998, Metro Social Services got a new order. Invoice No. 2023 was for $235. The instructions on the invoice were straightforward.

"DROP OFF IN GRAVE 555."

A few weeks earlier, an unidentified man was found at the dead end of Mary Street, right next to the Mt. Bethel Baptist Church Christian Center. On April 13, 1998, a resident there reported finding the smoldering remains of someone.

The body had been rolled up in a carpet, dumped against a fence and set on fire. It was burned beyond recognition.

The man had been murdered.

Sgt. Gary Kemper, who now heads Metro's Cold Case Unit, said detectives worked feverishly. They developed persons of interest, even went out of state to conduct interviews.

But the case went cold in 2001. They never identified "John (19) Doe."

They never put two and two together when LeRyan Nicholson went missing April 12, 1998, only to have the burned body of a young man matching his description show up the very next day.

"They just didn't follow up correctly. A mistake was made," Kemper said. "When you look at it now, it's hard to understand why."

While police overlooked the possible connection between the missing man and the sudden appearance of an unidentified murder victim wrapped in a burned carpet, LeRyan's mother was looking everywhere for her son.

In 2012, on what would have been LeRyan's 33rd birthday, Williams stumbled upon a government website called NAMUS. The site contains nationwide databases for missing persons, unidentified remains and unclaimed bodies.

Williams searched around the time LeRyan went missing. She got an immediate hit, that of a young man whose burned remains were found at the end of Mary Street.

John Doe.

Williams called Metro police, who obtained Nolan's DNA and compared it to a sample taken in 1998 when John Doe's autopsy was performed. And then, one March day in 2013, Nolan got an answer after 15 years of waiting. It wasn't what she wanted to hear. But it was an answer.

"They told me they already buried my baby, my son, without me," Nolan said. "They said, 'We can put a name to him now.' "

Putting a name to him also breathes new life into the murder case, said Metro police detective Danny Satterfield, who is taking the lead.

"In working a homicide, there's nothing we can do for that victim," Satterfield said. "But what we can do for that family is find out what happened and who's responsible. And we don't give up."

A prayer for a son

Danny Hubble figures he has dug more than 500 graves in his career. As a team leader for some of Metro Parks' laborers, he began helping to bury Nashville's poorest when the city opened Bordeaux Cemetery in 1985.

The first person buried there also was a murder victim

On May 17, 1985, Gordon Charles Lambert was put to rest there. He had been found dead in an alley near 501 Fifth Ave. S.

Hubble dug his last grave in 2006, when the Bordeaux Cemetery filled up.

But this year, on May 30, Hubble returned to Bordeaux Cemetery to do something he had never done. A gravestone needed switching. A gravestone he probably put there, 15 years ago.

Nolan, along with Carol Wilson, head of Metro's Indigent Burial Program, and two parks employees walked through the freshly cut grass to plot #555: "John (19) Doe."

Quietly, Hubble and his colleagues pried the old gravestone from the ground. They hefted a brand-new stone — a simple square with a name and dates — out of its shipping container and lowered it with a small thud.

"LeRyan Nathaniel Nicholson, 1979 – 1998."

Tuesday 6 August 2013

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/05/mom-finds-missing-son-in-paupers-grave/2618983/

Survivors of 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis describe terrifying explosions and shark attacks during worst sea disaster in U.S. Naval history

More than a dozen men who survived the worst sea disaster in U.S. naval history - the World War II sinking of the USS Indianapolis - have gathered in the cruiser's namesake city for the final large-scale reunion of the famed ship's dwindling number of survivors.

Thirty-eight of the 317 men who survived the ship's July 1945 sinking and five days in the Pacific's shark-infested waters are still alive, but they're now in their late 80s and early 90s and many use wheelchairs.

Harold Bray, an 86-year-old from Benicia, Calif., said he and the 14 other survivors attending this year's reunion decided Friday that any future gatherings will be smaller and less frequent because so many of the survivors are in poor health.

'We decided to stay together until the last guy's standing, but the goal is to continue at a smaller scale,' said Bray, chairman of the USS Indianapolis Survivors Organization. 'Some of the guys are in wheelchairs now and travel is pretty tough for them.'

Bray said the survivors will nonetheless keep telling the story of the ship's sinking, their survival and the role they played in helping bring the war to a close.

The USS Indianapolis was halfway between Guam and the Philippines in shark-filled waters when a Japanese submarine sank it with torpedoes on July 30, 1945, in the war's closing weeks.

'Whoom. Up in the air I went,' Loel Dean Cox, who was just 19 when the ship was torpedo, told the BBC about the first explosion. 'There was water, debris, fire, everything just coming up and we were 81ft (25m) from the water line. It was a tremendous explosion. Then, about the time I got to my knees, another one hit. Whoom'

The second torpedo nearly tore the ship in half. Cox said fires raged below deck as the ship began listing onto its side.

'I turned and looked back. The ship was headed straight down. You could see the men jumping from the stern, and you could see the four propellers still turning.

'Twelve minutes. Can you imagine a ship 610ft long, that's two football fields in length, sinking in 12 minutes? It just rolled over and went under.'

Just days earlier, the Indianapolis had visited the island of Tinian in a secret mission to deliver the uranium-235 and other components for the atomic bomb later dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay, which took off from the remote island.

The Indianapolis' mission was so secret she sailed alone, unescorted by ships better equipped to detect and fight Japanese submarines. The ship's commander had even requested an escort but was denied by Navy officials.

Additionally, the Navy failed to pass on information that Japanese submarines were still active in the area.

'I never saw a life raft. I finally heard some moans and groans and yelling and swam over and got with a group of 30 men and that's where I stayed,' Cox said.

'We figured that if we could just hold out for a couple of days they'd pick us up.'

The Indianapolis sent several SOS signals before it became submerged, but the message wasn't taken seriously. Nor did Navy officials take much notice when the ship failed to arrive at its destination on time.

An estimated 900 of the ship's servicemen survived the vessel's nighttime sinking, but before rescuers arrived five days later, drowning, delirium, dehydration and shark attacks had claimed all but 317 of the men.

The Indianapolis' death toll - 880 members out of a crew of 1,197 died - is the U.S. Navy's worst single at-sea loss of life. But reports of the tragedy were buried by the news of the Japanese surrender, and interest in the ship's story was not revived until the 1975 movie "Jaws" featured a character who told of the sinking and the survivors' days of agony.

The sharks came from miles away to feast on the carnage from the wreck. They then started eating those who had survived the explosions.

'We were sunk at midnight, I saw [a shark] the first morning after daylight. They were big. Some of them I swear were 15ft long,' Cox said.

'They were continually there, mostly feeding off the dead bodies. Thank goodness, there were lots of dead people floating in the area.

'We were losing three or four each night and day,' Cox said. 'You were constantly in fear because you'd see 'em all the time. Every few minutes you'd see their fins - a dozen to two dozen fins in the water.

'They would come up and bump you. I was bumped a few times - you never know when they are going to attack you.' As the sharks continued to attack, clouds of blood in the water grew and attracted more to the area, leading to even more attacks.

'In that clear water you could see the sharks circling. Then every now and then, like lightning, one would come straight up and take a sailor and take him straight down. One came up and took the sailor next to me. It was just somebody screaming, yelling or getting bit,' Cox said.

Edgar Harrell, an 89-year-old from Clarksville, Tenn., who is one of only two ex-Marines among the remaining survivors, said the horrors he witnessed - including sharks devouring men around him - became too much for him to bear after he returned home.

While many survivors kept what they saw and heard to themselves, Harrell said the lingering trauma he'd suffered left him unable to focus on the college courses he enrolled in immediately after the war.

'I learned early on that you had to get it out, you had to tell others what happened,' he said. 'Once I did it was a relief.'

Clarence Hershberger, an 87-year-old survivor from De Leon Springs, Fla., who uses a wheelchair, hadn't planned on attending the reunion, which ends Sunday. He'd been feeling poorly but decided Monday to make the trip to Indianapolis, where a black granite memorial honors the ship and its crew.

He said that when all of the survivors are gone he hopes the survivors' relatives and others keep reminding the public about the ship and its crew's sacrifice.

'Somebody's got to keep the story alive,' Hershberger said.

Among the roughly 250 friends and relatives of the survivors attending the reunion is Hunter Scott, whose seventh-grade history project as a 12-year-old from Pensacola, Fla., helped lead to a reassessment of the court-martial of the ship's commanding officer, Rear Admiral Charles B. McVay III.

McVay was court-martialed for not sailing a zigzag course to evade submarines, but his men believed he was made a scapegoat. In 2000, 32 years after McVay committed suicide, Congress passed an act clearing his name.

Scott is now a 28-year-old Navy helicopter pilot based in California and he said the men's incredible story of survival convinced him to enlist in the Navy.

'There's 38 of them left and I really wanted to see these guys and catch up. They're like grandfathers to me, it's like seeing family,' he said. "They're heroes."

Tuesday 6 August 2013

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2384393/Survivors-1945-sinking-USS-Indianapolis-explosions-shark-attacks-worst-sea-disaster-U-S-naval-history.html

Saptakoshi boat capsize: 3 dead, 20 missing

Around 20 passengers have gone missing after a boat carrying 90 people onboard capsized in the Saptakoshi River at Chatara of Sunsari district on Monday afternoon.

Three female bodies have been recovered, said APF Inspector Chakra Thapa, who is heading the rescue operation at the incident site.

One of the deceased has been identified as Parbati Khadka of Rampur Thoksila. "There were around 90 people onboard according to the passengers though we are not certain about the exact number. Seventy people have already come in contact," said Thapa.

The ill-fated boat was heading for Sombare Ghat of Udayapur district from Chatara.

Police have suspected that the boat might have overturned as the passengers scrambled to get off the boat while it was close to the shore.

Locals, security personnel of Nepal Police and Armed Police Force have been involved in the rescue of the missing passengers.

Meanwhile, a team led by Chief District Officer of Sunsari has reached the site.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

http://ekantipur.com/2013/08/05/headlines/Saptakoshi-boat-capsize-3-dead-20-missing/375942/