The teenage suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, whose flight from the police after a furious gunfight overnight prompted an intense manhunt that virtually shut down the Boston area all day, was taken into custody Friday night after the police found him in nearby Watertown, Mass., officials said.
The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, was found hiding in a boat just outside the area where the police had been conducting door-to-door searches all day, the Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, said at a news conference Friday night.
“A man had gone out of his house after being inside the house all day, abiding by our request to stay inside,” Mr. Davis said, referring to the advice officials gave to residents to remain behind locked doors. “He walked outside and saw blood on a boat in the backyard. He then opened the tarp on the top of the boat, and he looked in and saw a man covered with blood. He retreated and called us.”
“Over the course of the next hour or so we exchanged gunfire with the suspect, who was inside the boat, and ultimately the hostage rescue team of the F.B.I. made an entry into the boat and removed the suspect, who was still alive,” Mr. Davis said. He said the suspect was in “serious condition” and had apparently been wounded in the gunfight that left his brother dead.
A federal law enforcement official said he would not be read his Miranda rights, because the authorities would be invoking the public safety exception in order to question him extensively about other potential explosive devices or accomplices and to try to gain intelligence.
The Boston Police Department announced on Twitter: “Suspect in custody. Officers sweeping the area,” and Mayor Thomas M. Menino posted: “We got him.”
President Obama praised the law enforcement officials who took the suspect into custody in a statement from the White House shortly after 10 p.m., saying, “We’ve closed an important chapter in this tragedy.”
The president said that he had directed federal law enforcement officials to continue to investigate, and he urged people not to rush to judgment about the motivations behind the attacks.
The discovery of Mr. Tsarnaev came just over 26 hours after the F.B.I. circulated pictures of him and his brother and called them suspects in Monday’s bombings, which killed three people and wounded more than 170. Events unfolded quickly — and lethally — after that. Law enforcement officials said that within hours of the pictures’ release, the two shot and killed a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, carjacked a sport utility vehicle, and led police on a chase, tossing several pipe bombs from their vehicle.
Then the men got into a pitched gun battle with the police in Watertown in which more than 200 rounds were fired and a transit police officer was critically wounded. When the shootout ended, one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, a former boxer, had been shot and fatally wounded. He was wearing explosives, several law enforcement officials said. But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joe-HARR tsar-NAH-yev) managed to escape — running over his older brother as he sped away, the officials said.
His disappearance, and fears that he could be armed with more explosives, set off an intense manhunt. SWAT teams and Humvees rolled through residential streets. Military helicopters hovered overhead. Bomb squads were called to several locations. And Boston, New England’s largest city, was essentially shut down.
Transit service was suspended all day. Classes at Harvard, M.I.T., Boston University and other area colleges were canceled. Amtrak halted service into Boston. The Red Sox game at Fenway Park was postponed, as was a concert at Symphony Hall. Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts urged residents to stay behind locked doors all day — not lifting the request until shortly after 6 p.m., when transit service in the shaken, seemingly deserted region was finally restored.
As the hundreds of police officers fanned out across New England looking for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, investigators tried to piece together a fuller picture of the two brothers, to determine more about the bombing at the Boston Marathon.
The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, (tam-arr-lawn tsar-NAH-yev) was interviewed by the F.B.I. in 2011 when a foreign government asked the bureau to determine if he had extremist ties, according to a senior law enforcement official. The government knew that he was planning to travel there and feared that he might be a risk, the official said.
The official would not say which government made the request, but Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s father said that he traveled to Russia in 2012.
“They had something on him and were concerned about him and him traveling to their region,” the official said. The F.B.I. conducted a review, examining Web sites that he had visited, trying to determine whether he was spending time with extremists and ultimately interviewing him. The F.B.I. concluded that he was not a threat. “We didn’t find anything on him that was derogatory,” the official said. The F.B.I. released a statement late Friday confirming it had scrutinized Mr. Tsarnaev but “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.” It had requested more information from the foreign government, it said, but had not received it.
Now officials are scrutinizing that trip, to see if he might have met with extremists while abroad.
The brothers were born in Kyrgyzstan, an official said, and were of Chechen heritage. Chechnya, a long-disputed Muslim territory in southern Russia, sought independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then fought two bloody wars with the authorities in Moscow. Russian assaults on Chechnya were brutal, killing tens of thousands of civilians as terrorist groups from the region staged attacks in central Russia.
The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, traveled to Russia from the United States early last year and returned six months later, on July 17, a law enforcement official said. His father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said his son had mostly stayed with him at his home in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region, but that the two men had also visited Chechnya.
“We went to Chechnya to visit relatives,” Mr. Tsarnaev said in an interview in Russia.
The trip will come under intense scrutiny to determine whether he met with extremist groups or received training, current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials said. Kevin R. Brock, a former senior F.B.I. and counterterrorism official, said, “It’s a key thread for investigators and the intelligence community to pull on.”
Anzor Tsarnaev, who maintained that his sons were innocent and had been framed, said that during the trip to Chechnya his son had “only communicated with me and his cousins.”
The hunt for the bombing suspects took a violent turn Thursday night when the two men are believed to have fatally shot an M.I.T. police officer, Sean A. Collier, 26, in his patrol car, the Middlesex County district attorney’s office said. After that, a man was carjacked nearby by two armed men, who drove off with him in his Mercedes S.U.V.
At one point, the suspects told the man “to get out of the car or they would kill him,” according to a law enforcement official. But then they apparently changed their plans, and forced the man to drive, the official said. At one point, the older brother took the wheel.
“They revealed to him that they were the two who did the marathon bombings,” the official said, adding that the suspects also made some mention to the man of wanting to head to New York. At one point they drove to another vehicle, which the authorities believe was parked and unoccupied. There, the suspects got out and transferred materials, which the authorities believe included explosives and firearms, from the parked car to the sport utility vehicle.
The victim was released, uninjured, at a gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, law enforcement officials said.
After he called the police, they went off in search of his car, and a frenzied chase began.
The police and the suspects traded gunfire, and “explosive devices were reportedly thrown” from their car, law enforcement officials said. A transit police officer, Richard H. Donohue, was shot in the right leg and critically wounded.
Officer Donohue had nearly bled to death from his wound when he arrived at the hospital, said a person familiar with his treatment. The hospital’s trauma team gave him a transfusion and CPR, and got his blood pressure back up, but he was still on a ventilator, the person said.
Finally, the brothers faced off against the police on a Watertown street in what officials and witnesses described as a furious firefight.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he looked out his third-floor window to see two young men of slight build engaged in “constant gunfire” with police officers. A police vehicle “drove towards the shooters,” he said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway. The gunmen, he said, had a large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked “like a pressure cooker.”
“They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it,” he said. “But it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one man ran toward the gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot, Mr. Kitzenberg said.
The explosions “lit up the whole house,” another resident, Loretta Kehayias, 65, said. “I screamed. I’ve never seen anything like this, never, never, never.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Kitzenberg said, the other man got back into the sport utility vehicle he had been driving, turned it toward officers and “put the pedal to the metal.” The car “went right through the cops, broke right through and continued west.”
He left behind his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who had been gravely wounded, and who was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Dr. David Schoenfeld, who was catching up on paperwork at his home in Watertown after midnight on Friday, had heard the sirens, and then the gunfire, and the explosions. So he called Beth Israel Deaconess, where he works in the emergency room, and told them to prepare for trauma patients for the second time this week.
He said that he arrived about 1:10 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, an ambulance carrying Tamerlan Tsarnaev pulled up. He was handcuffed, unconscious, and in cardiac arrest, Dr. Schoenfeld said.
As a throng of police officers looked on, Dr. Schoenfeld and a team of other trauma doctors and nurses began to perform CPR.
“There was talk before the patient arrived about whether or not it was a suspect,” Dr. Schoenfeld said. “But ultimately it doesn’t matter who it is, because we’re going to work as hard as we can for any patient who comes through our door and then sort it out after. Because you’re never going to know until the dust settles who it is.”
The trauma team put a breathing tube in the patient’s throat, Dr. Schoenfeld said, then cut open his chest to see if blood or other fluid was collecting around his heart. His handcuffs were removed at some point during the resuscitation attempt, he said, because “when the patient is in cardiac arrest and we’re doing all these procedures, we need to be able to move their arms around.”
The team was unable to resuscitate him, and pronounced him dead at 1:35 a.m. Only as they prepared to turn the body over to the police did Dr. Schoenfeld look closely at the patient’s face and see that he resembled one of the suspects whose pictures had been released by the F.B.I. hours earlier. “We all obviously had some suspicion given the really large police presence,” he said, “but we didn’t have a clear identification from the police.”
Dr. Schoenfeld, whose emergency room treated a number of people injured in the bombings on Monday, said he had not had time to process what he had been through early Friday.
“I can’t say what I’ll be feeling as I reflect on this later on,” he said in an interview before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured. “But right now I’m more concerned with everybody who’s still out there and still in harm’s way.”
He added, “I worry about everybody in the city, that everyone’s going to be O.K.”
* NYT, April 20, 2013
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Boston, and William K. Rashbaum and Michael Cooper from New York. Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and John Eligon from Cambridge, Mass.; Jess Bidgood from Watertown, Mass.; Serge F. Kovaleski and Timothy Rohan from Boston; Ravi Somaiya from New York; Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington; Andrew Siddons from Montgomery Village, Md.; Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul; Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; and Andrew E. Kramer from Asbest, Russia.
Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been arretsed following an extensive manhunt that ended in the Boston suburb, Watertown. Law enforcement units from around the country were involved in the search.
The crowd around the standoff scene in Watertown burst into cheers as it became clear that Tsarnaev had been taken into custody following reports that a negotiator was on site.
He will be transported to Mount Auburn Hospital, the same facility where a police officer shot in a standoff with the Tsarnaevs is recovering, the Boston Globe reports. Tsarnaev is listed in “serious, if not critical condition” after suffering gunshot wounds to the neck and leg, according to CBS News.
Women cheer police as they exit Franklin Street after 19-year-old bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev was apprehended on April 19, 2013 in Watertown, Massachusetts. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP)
Despite earlier reports to the contrary, arresting officers will not read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights, citing a so-called “public safety exception.” The Department of Justice has listed Tsarnaev as a “high value detainee” on their website.
Tsarnaev’s father, Anzor, is confirmed to be en route to the United States, according to ABC News. In an interview with Russian media prior to his son’s arrest, Anzor Tsarnaev was adamant about both his sons’ innocence. “Somebody might have set them up. I don’t know who and because of their cowardice they killed the boy,” he said.
Tsarnaev, 19, and his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are suspected of detonating two improvised explosives during the Boston Marathon on Monday, after which a manhunt began that lead to a shootout with law enforcement agents, a stolen car and finally Dzhokhar’s hideout in a boat parked on a lawn in suburban Watertown.
The older Tsarnaev brother was pronounced dead by law enforcement early Friday, shortly after both men were named as suspects in Monday’s blast. Police believe the brothers reportedly shot and killed a police officer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), later identified as 26-year-old Sean Collier.
Local and national law enforcement agencies in the United States — including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — descended on New England this week to help the Boston Police Department in their probe of the marathon tragedy, which US President Barack Obama declared in the aftermath as an act of terrorism. But despite receiving assistance from multiple branches of the Justice Department and agencies as far away as the NYPD and Israeli police, the FBI did not go public with any leads until Thursday afternoon.
At around 5pm Thursday, FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers presented the media with surveillance camera footage of two men — originally identified as only “Suspect One” and “Suspect Two” — and said they were believed responsible for Monday’s blast and should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.
Law enforcement approach an area reportedly where a suspect is hiding on Franklin St., on April 19, 2013 in Watertown, Massachusetts. (Darren McCollester/Getty Images/AFP)
As afternoon turned to evening, new photos taken by marathon witnesses quickly circulated of the suspects, and by sundown authorities connected the Tsarnaev brothers to a series of criminal activity committed in the Boston area, including the terrorist attack.
Across the world, eyes were focused on the greater Boston region into Friday morning as local news stations followed-up feverishly on what became an increasingly chaotic manhunt for both men. Police responded by shutting down much of the vicinity, ordering residents to stay inside with locked doors and urged to avoid interacting with anyone other than law enforcement. Transportation company Amtrak suspended rail service going in and out of both Boston and nearby Providence, Rhode Island, and local public services including rail, bus and taxi all stopped servicing the area.
In all, roughly one million residents in New England were told to stay indoors until the lockdown was lifted on Friday evening.
Police SWAT team members run towards the scene of gunfire as police assault a house on Franklin Street during the search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, in Watertown, Massachusetts April 19, 2013. (Reuters/Jim Bourg)
Authorities said that the brothers fired dozens of rounds at police, critically injuring another officer, during which Tamerlan Tsarnaev was injured. He was reportedly apprehended by police and later pronounced dead. According to some sources, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fled the scene in a vehicle, riding over his brother’s body in the process.
As the police escalated their manhunt for the surviving Tsarnaev, authorities warned of multiple explosives on the scene across Watertown and called in a bomb squad to assist in the investigation.
Grief-stricken neighbors gathered in small clumps today outside the Dorchester home of Martin Richard, the eight-year-old boy who was killed when two bombs detonated at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday.
Richard was fatally injured and his mother and sister seriously wounded as they waited for their father and husband, Bill Richard, at the finish line on Boylston Street, friends said. Bill Richard was active in the Ashmont community issues.
Neighbor Dan Aguilar said the Richard family was close-knit, and that on most days — regardless of the weather – Martin Richard and his brother were in the family’s backyard, playing soccer, hockey or baseball.
“They are just your average little boys,’’ Aguilar told reporters gathered near the family’s home on Carruth Street. “They are a good family. They are always together.’’
Aguilar said he last spoke with the family on Easter Sunday when they were gathered outside, enjoying the day.
He said, he is still wrestling with the idea that a child he knows has died.
“That little boy will never come home again,’’ Aguilar said. “It’s still unreal. I have no words. I have no words.’’
Richard is one of three people killed in the bomb explosion, and so far is the only victim to have been publicly identified by friends and colleagues.
This morning, no one was at home at the Richard house, which was watched over by a Boston police officer parked in a cruiser nearby.
At the end of the driveway, someone had written the word, “Peace.’’
Text by Evan Allen and John R. Ellement, Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff (Boston Globe, 4-16-2013)
European Union embassies in the North Korea will remain open for business, despite a proposal from Pyongyang for them to evacuate staff over mounting tensions on the Korean Peninsula, the UK’s Foreign Office said on Wednesday.
“The EU does not share the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) views on the current situation and does not recognize the nature of threat as described,” the EU statement read.
North Korea proposed on Tuesday that foreign embassies evacuate, saying it could not guarantee their safety after April 10.
There have been no evacuations, however.
The North Korean proposal came shortly after the isolated north-east Asian country threatened to launch nuclear attacks on both the US mainland and American military bases in the region.
South Korea’s foreign minister said on Wednesday Pyongyang could carry out a test firing of an intermediate-range ballistic missile at any time.
The North Korean threats came as US and South Korean forces carried out annual joint military exercises, some of them near the maritime border between the two Koreas. The United States responded by deploying F-22 Raptor stealth fighters and B-2 and B-52 bombers to the region.
Analysts say North Korea is unlikely to launch a full-scale attack on either US forces or South Korea, but concerns persist that rising tensions could spark hostilities.
It’s easy to appreciate the seasonality of winter blues, but web searches show that other disorders may ebb and flow with the weather as well.
Google searches are becoming an intriguing source of health-related information, exposing everything from the first signs of an infectious disease outbreak to previously undocumented side effects of medications. So researchers led by John Ayers of the University of Southern California decided to comb through queries about mental illnesses to look for potentially helpful patterns related to these conditions. Given well known connections between depression and winter weather, they investigated possible connections between mental illnesses and seasons.
Using all of Google’s search data from 2006 to 2010, they studied searches for terms like “schizophrenia” “attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),” “bulimia” and “bipolar” in both the United States and Australia. Since winter and summer are reversed in the two countries finding opposing patterns in the two countries’ data would strongly suggest that season, rather than other things that might vary with time of year, was important in some way in the prevalence of the disorders.
“All mental health queries followed seasonal patterns with winter peaks and summer troughs,” the researchers write in their study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. They found that mental health queries in general were 14% higher in the winter in the U.S. and 11% higher in the Australian winter.
The seasonal timing of queries regarding each disorder was also similar in the two countries. In both countries, for example, searches about eating disorders (including anorexia and bulimia) and schizophrenia surged during winter months; those in the U.S. were 37% more likely and Australians were 42% more likely to seek information about these disorders during colder weather than during the summer. And compared to summer searches, schizophrenia queries were 37% more common in the American winter and 36% more frequent during the Australian winter. ADHD queries were also highly seasonal, with 31% more winter searches in the U.S. and 28% more in Australia compared to summer months.
Searches for depression and bipolar disorder, which might seem to be among the more common mental illnesses to strike during the cold winter months, didn’t solicit as many queries: there were 19% more winter searches for depression in the U.S. and 22% more in Australia for depression. For bipolar, 16% more American searches for the term occurred in the winter than in the summer, and 18% more searches occurred during the Australian winter. The least seasonal disorder was anxiety, which varied by just 7% in the U.S. and 15% in Australia between summer and winter months.
Understanding how the prevalence of mental illnesses change with the seasons could lead to more effective preventive measures that alert people to symptoms and guide them toward treatments that could help, say experts. Previous research suggests that shorter daylight hours and the social isolation that accompanies harsh weather conditions might explain some of these seasonal differences in mental illnesses, for example, so improving social interactions during the winter months might be one way to alleviate some symptoms. Drops in vitamin D levels, which rise with exposure to sunlight, may also play a role, so supplementation for some people affected by mood disorders could also be effective.
The researchers emphasize that searches for disorders are only queries for more information, and don’t necessarily reflect a desire to learn more about a mental illness after a new diagnosis. For example, while the study found that searches for ‘suicide’ were 29% more common in winter in America and 24% more common during the colder season in Australia, other investigations showed that completed suicides tend to peak in spring and early summer. Whether winter queries have any relationship at all to spring or summer suicides isn’t clear yet, but the results suggest a new way of analyzing data that could lead to better understanding of a potential connection.
And that’s the promise of data on web searches, says the scientists. Studies on mental illnesses typically rely on telephone or in-person surveys in which participants are asked about symptoms of mental illness or any history with psychological disorders, and people may not always answer truthfully in these situations. Searches, on the other hand, have the advantage of reflecting people’s desire to learn more about symptoms they may be experiencing or to improve their knowledge about a condition for which they were recently diagnosed. So such queries could become a useful resource for spotting previously undetected patterns in complex psychiatric disorders. “The current results suggest that monitoring queries can provide insight into national trends on seeking information regarding mental health, such as seasonality…If additional studies can validate the current approach by linking clinical symptoms with patterns of search queries,” the authors conclude, “This method may prove essential in promoting population mental health.”
A 17-year-old Canadian girl died Sunday, days after she attempted suicide following two years of what her mother described as near-constant bullying by classmates.
In November 2011, when Rehtaeh Parsons was just 15, the Nova Scotia girl got extremely drunk after consuming vodka at a party. According to the girl’s mother, she was raped by four teenage boys, one of whom snapped a picture of Rehtaeh being assaulted, CBC News reported.
Ultimately, police said, there was not enough evidence to bring charges in connection with the girl’s alleged rape. This image was taken from a Facebook page created by Parsons’ mother called “Angel Rehtaeh.”
That photo quickly circulated among Parsons’ classmates, sealing a fate as cruel as the crime her mother says she endured at the party. Many at her school branded her “a slut,” her mother said.
“She was never left alone. She had to leave the community. Her friends turned against her. People harassed her. Boys she didn’t know started texting her and Facebooking her asking her to have sex with them. It just never stopped,” Leah Parsons told the CBC.
An image of Rehtaeh Parsons and her mother posted on Facebook. Parsons hung herself after being gang-raped and repeatedly bullied, her family said.
Ashamed and distraught, Parsons let a week pass before she told her mother what had happened. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were eventually called, and although an investigation was launched into the incident, Parsons and her mother were told that there was not enough evidence to charge the boys.
“[The police] said that they would go talk to them and that [the boys] realized what they did was wrong, but [there was] nothing they could do, criminally,” Leah Parsons told the CBC radio program “Maritime Noon.” “It was a slap in the face.”
Meanwhile, at school and online, the taunting didn’t stop, and eventually the family moved from Cole Harbour to Halifax.
A photo of Parsons being assaulted spread among her classmates, prompting taunting, her family says.
The trauma of what happened followed the girl, however, and Parsons was shadowed by what her mother called “depression and anger” over her being ostracized and bullied. Plagued by thoughts of suicide, Parsons checked herself into the hospital in March.
Just days after being released, Parsons tried hanging herself in the bathroom of her home last Thursday.
“By the time I broke into the bathroom it was too late,” Leah Parsons wrote on a Facebook page she started in tribute to her daughter. “My beautiful girl had hung herself and was rushed to the hospital where she remained on life support until last night.”
In a final wrenching decision, Rehtaeh’s mother removed her from life support on Sunday.
“She made my life complete,” Leah Parsons wrote. “When Rehtaeh was born I dedicated everything to her and promised her the world. Others in this world took that away from her.”
A predatory sixth-grade teacher used cellphone code names to keep his wife in the dark about an affair with his 14-year-old former student, whom he bedded at least a dozen times in his family home, Queens prosecutors said yesterday.
Daniel Reilly, 36, was arraigned on statutory-rape charges yesterday for allegedly preying on the teenager, to whom he once taught English at IS 237.
His humiliated lawyer wife, Annemarie, and her mom showed up to court to pay his $30,000 bail.
Reilly, an ex-Marine with an 11-month-old girl, initiated the relationship last year by texting “sexually graphic” messages, but she “just wanted to be friends,” law-enforcement sources told The Post.
He refused to take no for an answer, and continued to pursue her — eventually roping her into a sexual affair starting in August, prosecutors said.
He allegedly used a code name to conceal her identity on his cellphone so his wife wouldn’t find out.
The girl also used a code name for the teacher to keep it from her family and friends, authorities said.
Investigators would not release the code names because they believed it would reveal the young victim’s identity.
For their first encounter, Reilly waited until his wife and baby were away from their Forest Hills home and had the girl come over, according to the sources.
He then repeatedly asked her back to his place, where they had intercourse at least 10 times and oral sex at least twice, authorities said. They most recently hooked up on Monday, just hours before he was arrested, the sources said.
The victim’s sister allegedly discovered their secret relationship when she saw several text messages on the girl’s cellphone.
The girl — who no longer attends the school — came clean and admitted to the affair with Reilly, prosecutors said.
Her panicked mother called the school on Monday, and Reilly was yanked from his classroom until cops showed up to haul him away.
“The defendant planned to keep the relationship a secret,” a prosecutor in Queens Criminal Court charged yesterday.
Reilly is charged with second-degree rape, criminal sexual acts and endangering the welfare of a child. Prosecutors issued an order of protection for the teen.
“This case is particularly disturbing,” Queens DA Richard Brown said. “Schools should be safe havens for children. Instead, this defendant is accused of sexually preying upon one of his former students and rendezvousing with her at his residence.”
Defense attorney Eric Franz said Reilly’s family is “just happy he’s back home.”
Reilly joined the city Department of Education in 2007, when he was hired to teach English at IS 237. He earns $61,000 per year.
The teacher, who has a clean employment record, has been reassigned from the classroom while the case is investigated.
Reilly was honorably discharged in 2000 from the Marines, his lawyer said. He served in the Aircraft Maintenance Administration for five years.
He was stationed in Japan and Cherry Point, NC — and was discharged with multiple awards in 2000, a Marine spokeswoman said.
By JAMIE SCHRAM , CHRISTINA CARREGA and LARRY CELONA, New York Post, April 10, 2013
Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History has obtained 234 pieces of the meteorite that slammed into Russia’s Urals region in February from a donation by meteorite collector Terry Boudreaux, the museum has said on its website.
More than a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of space stones are on public display at the Field Museum starting from Wednesday afternoon. The fragments will join the museum’s collection of more than 6,500 pieces of meteorites.
Boudreaux, one of the world’s greatest meteorite collectors, sent a team to Russia the day after the huge meteorite hit the Urals city of Chelyabinsk on February 15, in order to buy parts of it.
The meteorite entered the atmosphere undetected by existing space-monitoring systems and fragmented into many hundred pieces which were recovered quickly from deep snow.
“The local villagers actually went out in three feet of snow on their snow skis and looked for holes in the snow. They would dig down with plastic shovels and find these little pieces and throw them in their pockets,” abclocal.go.com quoted Boudreaux as saying.
Field Museum scientist and assistant curator of meteorite studies Philipp Heck said: “I expected we would get a piece like this. But we got more than a kilogram of pieces there laid out on the table there.”
NASA estimates the meteorite was roughly 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter when it struck Earth’s atmosphere, travelling faster than the speed of sound, and exploded in a fireball brighter than the morning sun.
Earlier this week, in our annual April Fool’s Day newsletter, we told you about a miracle plant from the Amazon that helped you to easily shed unwanted pounds. Well, for everyone who didn’t pick up on it, the article was an April Fool’s Day joke.
As a “thank you” for being loyal readers with a sense of humor, let’s look at some true miracle plants, fruits and vegetables found in Peru.
Let’s start with maca, which is a root that belongs to the radish family. It is grown in the mountains of Peru and sometimes-called “Peruvian ginseng” because of the root’s long valued use and numerous applications.
Maca is rich in vitamins B12 and protein, which can be helpful for vegans. It also keeps you healthy by providing plenty of calcium, zinc, iron, magnesium, phosphorous, and amino acids.
But where maca gets interesting is it’s use for improved sexual function in both men and women. It serves to boost your libido and increase endurance. At the same time it balances hormones and increases fertility.
For women, maca relieves menstrual issues and menopause. It alleviates cramps, body pain, hot flashes, anxiety, mood swings and depression.
Many athletes use maca for peak performance. It keeps your bones and teeth healthy and allows you to heal from wounds more quickly.
This miracle root is also ideal for those who wish to boost their mental energy and focus.
Maca root is commonly used as a powder to help boost mental energy and focus. (photo: Wikimedia)
Kiwicha, known in English speaking countries as amaranth, is the next Peruvian miracle gluten-free whole grain. Just like quinoa, its seeds contain impressive amounts of proteins as well as amino acids. This plant may be instrumental in helping lower cholesterol, reducing the risk of hypertension, and heart disease.
Kiwicha contains many vitamins A, B-6, K, C, folate, and riboflavin.
There are many miracle uses for kiwicha, especially because eating it has been known to prevent grey hair. The word “amaranth” in Greek means “everlasting,” and the Aztecs called it “food of immortality.” In india, where it has been eaten since the 1500s, it’s know as “rajgeera” which translates as “king’s grain.”
The grain has earned a reputation for it’s high nutritional value and was selected for astronaut’s diet. Kiwicha was even grown in space travel by NASA in 1985.
Chia seeds are rich in antioxidants that help protect the body from free radicals. (photo: Wikimedia)
The next item on our list of actual miracle foods is the chia seed. Ancient civilizations like the Incans, Mayans, and Aztecs used chia seeds to bring strength to hunters and warriors on long expeditions.
Chia seeds are rich in polyunsaturated fats, especially omega-3 fatty acids. Chia seeds’ lipid profile is composed of 60 percent omega-3s, making them one of the richest plant-based sources of these fatty acids.
The seeds also have a ton of fiber, which is known for lowering cholesterol and regulating bowel function. On top of that, Chia seeds are rich in antioxidants that help protect the body from free radicals, aging and cancer.
But they are also a dieter’s best friend because they have a gelling action that when eaten absorb a lot of liquid and give the eater the feeling of being full, known as satiety.
This feeling of being full and satisfied helps lower food cravings between meals. The combination of protein, fiber and the gelling action of chia seeds when mixed with liquids all contribute to their satiating effects and less snacking through out the day.
Golden berries or Incan berries help prevent asthma and fight optic nerve disorders. (photo: Wikimedia/ Steven Depolo) Orange- colored golden berries, also known as Incan berries, have been cultivated in the America for centuries. They have also been revered for their health benefits and mouth puckering sweet and sour flavor. They are commonly eaten raw like blueberry or raspberry and are often dried and sold in “dehydrated formats that resemble raisins in shape and texture.
Golden berries pack a punch of vitamin A, which is great for eye health. But they are also believed to help maintain a healthy weight, ward off disease, and improve organ function.
Traditionally, the golden berry has been used to help a variety of ailments including asthma, edema, optic nerve disorders, throat afflictions, intestinal parasites, and a variety of skin conditions.
So maybe the sweat vine wasn’t exactly what you would call “real, ” but nonetheless there are a number of miracle plants that can be found within Peru. Who knows, if we keep looking we just might find the real sweat vine.
President Obama came here on Monday before a roaring, enthusiastic crowd to remember the tragedy of 20 children and 6 educators slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School and put new pressure on a recalcitrant Congress to honor them with gun-control legislation.
In an impassioned speech that at times took on the tone of a campaign rally, Mr. Obama told an audience of 3,100 at the University of Hartford that he came to Connecticut to ensure that the deaths in the school in Newtown would not recede and to remind Americans how important their voice is as the gun debates unfold.
“If you’re an American who wants to do something to prevent more families from knowing the immeasurable anguish that these families here have known, then we have to act,” Mr. Obama said. “Now’s the time to get engaged. Now’s the time to get involved. Now’s the time to push back on fear and frustration and misinformation. Now’s the time for everybody to make their voices heard, from every statehouse to the corridors of Congress.”
But as Mr. Obama spoke, Republicans on Capitol Hill were threatening to prevent a gun-control measure from even coming up for debate.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, announced Monday that he would join at least 13 other Republicans who have vowed to block consideration of gun legislation passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee and assembled by the Democratic leadership. That effectively made the threatened filibuster a test of Republican unity.
Mr. McConnell made his announcement as the Senate returned from recess and the legislative struggle over new gun safety legislation entered a critical phase. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, took steps to force a vote to start a broad review of gun-control proposals and accused those threatening a filibuster of “blatant obstruction,” even as they showed no signs of backing down.
“Shame on them,” said Mr. Reid, a Democrat.
Mr. Obama spoke in Hartford less than a week after the Connecticut General Assembly passed a sweeping package of gun and mental health legislation with bipartisan support.
The president was introduced by Nicole Hockley, whose first-grade son, Dylan, was killed at Sandy Hook. She recalled her life with her two sons before the tragedy and said she no longer had the option of turning away from the effects of gun violence. She said she was convinced that she and others had approached Connecticut lawmakers with the “love and logic” that persuaded them to pass the bill. She believed that approach could work with Congress, she said.
“If you want to protect your children, if you want to avoid this loss, you will not turn away either,” Ms. Hockley said. “Do something before our tragedy becomes your tragedy.”
Mr. Obama, who last visited Connecticut for a raw and emotional memorial shortly after the Dec. 14 shootings in Newtown, met again with the victims’ relatives before his speech. Afterward about a dozen family members left with him from Connecticut on Air Force One to make their case in Washington to members of Congress this week.
Mr. Obama, who was wearing a green Newtown bracelet, made reference in his speech to the brutal cases of recent mass violence from Aurora, Colo., to Virginia Tech. He pushed for a broad agenda that would include universal background checks for gun buyers, restraints on gun trafficking and a ban on assault weapons. But he focused on the background checks, which he said were supported by 90 percent of Americans. “There’s only one thing that can stand in the way of change that just about everybody agrees on, and that’s politics in Washington,” he said.
Mr. Obama, who included remarks respectful of gun owners, said “common-sense” gun measures could be enacted that would acknowledge the rights of gun owners and the Second Amendment. But he said that at the very least, Newtown and similar tragedies demanded a vote in Congress on gun control issues.
“If our democracy’s working the way it’s supposed to and 90 percent of the American people agree on something, in the wake of a tragedy, you’d think this would not be a heavy lift,” Mr. Obama said. “And yet some folks back in Washington are already floating the idea that they may use political stunts to prevent votes on any of these reforms. Think about that.
“They’re not just saying they’ll vote no on ideas that almost all Americans support,” he said. “They’re saying they’ll do everything they can to even prevent any votes on these provisions. They’re saying your opinion doesn’t matter, and that’s not right.”
Still, Democrats said they were encouraged that senior Republicans, including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, had indicated that a filibuster of gun legislation would be a mistake.
Connecticut has enormous symbolism in almost every way in the gun debate. Beyond the tragedy, the state legislature last week passed a major package of new gun laws, joining states — including Colorado, Maryland and New York — that have moved to enact strong gun legislation as efforts have largely stalled in Washington. But bipartisan talks on Capitol Hill were continuing in an attempt to reach a compromise on background checks that could lead to a breakthrough.
The bills before Congress would make penalties for buying guns illegally more onerous, address trafficking, and greatly expand the number of sales covered by background checks, which gun control advocates see as an essential component. The fight over background checks has been about the balance between how far to expand the current checks at licensed dealers and conservatives’ fears over a paper trail that they insist could lead to a de facto national gun registry.
Mr. Obama said, as he has in the past, that the day of the Newtown massacre was the toughest of his presidency. He said that a failure to respond on gun issues would be tough, too, but that he believed the nation was not as divided as its political culture could seem.
“We have to believe that every once in a while we set politics aside, and just do what’s right,” Mr. Obama said.
After the speech, as the Newtown family members boarded Air Force One, one mother wiped away tears and another held up a notebook. On it were written two words: “Love Wins.”
When the president’s plane landed at Joint Base Andrews near Washington, Mr. Obama could be seen through its windows gathered with the families. A White House official said he was telling them where matters stood in Congress ahead of their lobbying this week.
Then they exited together, the president standing at the portal as each passed to descend the Air Force One stairs. He returned to the White House by helicopter; they were driven in government vans to Washington.
Peter Applebome reported from Hartford, and Jonathan Weisman from Washington. Jackie Calmes contributed reporting from Hartford, and Jennifer Steinhauer from Washington.
Family and friends said Anne Smedinghoff had chafed at the restrictions that American diplomats can face in Afghanistan, where the excitement and passion for foreign service are often dampened by lives circumscribed by blast walls and checkpoints and fortified compounds.
(Anne Smedinghoff, 25, died in a bomb attack Saturday while delivering donated books to a new school in Zabul Province.)
Ms. Smedinghoff joined the Foreign Service three years ago, straight out of Johns Hopkins University, and moved to Kabul in July. Being locked in the embassy compound, though it kept her largely safe from suicide bombers and rocket attacks, was not for her, her family and friends said. She longed to be out among Afghans, helping to ease the tumult of their lives.
On Saturday, Ms. Smedinghoff, 25, got her chance. She joined a delegation accompanying the governor of Zabul Province to inaugurate a new school in Qalat, the provincial capital. She was to help deliver donated books.
At 11 a.m., a suicide car bomber detonated explosives that ripped into the convoy, killing Ms. Smedinghoff and four other Americans — a civilian and three soldiers — in the deadliest day for Americans in Afghanistan this year. The names of the other four victims had not been released Sunday night.
The attack reverberated from Afghanistan to Ms. Smedinghoff’s family home in the Chicago suburb of River Forest, Ill. In her honor, friends and relatives this weekend replaced their profile photos on Facebook with a picture of a black ribbon embossed with the State Department seal.
For Ms. Smedinghoff, the Foreign Service was a calling, her parents, Tom and Mary Beth Smedinghoff, said in a statement. Afghanistan was her second deployment, an assignment for which she had volunteered after a tour in Caracas, Venezuela. She died, her parents said, doing a job she thought must be done.
“She particularly enjoyed the opportunity to work directly with the Afghan people and was always looking for opportunities to reach out and help to make a difference in the lives of those living in a country ravaged by war,” they said. “We are consoled knowing that she was doing what she loved, and that she was serving her country by helping to make a positive difference in the world.”
Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois issued a statement on Sunday praising Ms. Smedinghoff for having lived a “purposeful life.”
“Only 25 years old, this brave young woman knew social justice was her calling, and selflessly lost her life while serving others in a war-torn country,” the governor said. “She was devoted to protecting America and improving the lives of others.”
Ms. Smedinghoff was the first American diplomat to be killed on the job since Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others were killed last Sept. 11 in an attack on a United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
Sam Hopkins, a lawyer and a friend of Ms. Smedinghoff’s from her college days, described her as a “very focused very disciplined and very calm” woman who had breezed through a panoply of examinations to enter the Foreign Service at an unusually young age. On her first posting to Caracas, he said, she expressed strong desire to leave the embassy compound and plunge into the city’s gritty, often dangerous streets.
“She said she wanted to get a car and drive around,” Mr. Hopkins said. “She had no fear.”
As a public diplomacy officer, Ms. Smedinghoff was on the front lines of an effort to move Afghanistan beyond its decades-long struggle with war and oppression to a place where women might walk openly in the streets and where children, including young girls, might go to school.
It is a job fraught with dangers and frustrations that have been compounded as the United States, along with its NATO allies, has shrunk its military footprint. Bases have been scaled back and ground and air transports reduced, meaning less security for development work.
With most American and NATO troops preparing to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the prospects for continued civilian aid of the kind Ms. Smedinghoff was helping to provide are now in doubt.
Yet in an emotional homage on Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry held up Ms. Smedinghoff’s work as an example of the importance of the continued American effort in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the face of “cowardice” and “nihilism.”
“A brave American was determined to brighten the light of learning through books written in the native tongue of the students that she had never met, but whom she felt compelled to help,” Mr. Kerry said in Istanbul, where he is on a diplomatic trip. “And she was met by cowardly terrorists determined to bring darkness and death to total strangers.”
An article on Monday about the death of Anne Smedinghoff, a young American diplomat in Afghanistan, misstated the number of diplomats killed along with Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens during the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Three others died, not four.
If we do not make the difference between people who earn more than those who earn less, be reasonable. Then the economic world, businesses or jobs will be chaos, for most people, where injustice, selfishness, greed and arrogance is something considered normal executive.
There should be a limit on earnings regardless one has several professional degrees or doctorates at Harvard.
We pay fair wages to all workers, without exception, according to the cost of living in the country, where human dignity is quantified.
In this way we will have a better world, a more just and where justice, peace and social solidarity is normal.
Also make sure that the domestic market is positive. Be Sure that most people will have some money left over to use it to make purchases of various products or services. Otherwise only a small group will do it and many companies or businesses will have to close its doors.
There’s a lot of debate about the job and economic prospects for the current generation of college graduates. The fact that student debt has ballooned so much only exacerbates the tension of whether graduates will be able to find good jobs in a timely manner.
Despite all this, the latest jobs report confirms that folks with a college degree (red line) have an unemployment rate far lower than those who don’t have one (blue line).
That being said, it is nice to see that the unemployment rate for those without a college degree took a nice leg down in March, dropping from 7.9 percent to 7.6 percent. In this chart, we zoom in on the blue line above, and we made it a bar chart so you can clearly see the change each month.
As you can see, it’s been a good several months for the population that didn’t go to college, though the job prospects for this group lag significantly behind those of people who did graduate.
By Joe Weisenthal, Apr. 7, 2013, “Business Insider”
The Korean Peninsula is on a knife’s edge, one fateful step from war. While Koreans are accustomed to periodic spikes in tensions, the risk of renewed hostilities appears higher than at any time in the past 60 years, when American, North Korean, and Chinese generals signed an armistice agreement. Far more than 1 million people died in the Korean War, with at least that many troops and civilians injured over the course of the three-year campaign.
The exact leadership dynamics at play in Pyongyang remain mysterious, but the domestic survival of the Kim family dynasty appears to hinge on maintaining a credible nuclear and missile threat — backed up by a local great power, China. To achieve the former, Kim Jong Un appears willing to risk the latter. His regime’s unrelenting verbal threats are intended to rally domestic support, and its reckless brinksmanship is aimed at forcing the outside world to back down and back off. In the past days and weeks — adding to the tension created by its recent nuclear and missile tests — Pyongyang has severed a hotline with Seoul, renounced the 1953 armistice, conducted cyberattacks, and, against its own financial interests, closed down the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which is the only economic thread holding together relations with the South.
There is no single red line that, when crossed, would trigger war, but the potential for miscalculation and escalation is high. North Korea has a penchant for causing international incidents — in 2010 alone it used a mini-submarine to sink the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan and shelled South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island. The brazen and unprovoked killing of military personnel and civilians shocked many South Koreans, some of whom faulted then-President Lee Myung Bak for a tepid response. The new president, Park Geun Hye (South Korea’s “Iron Lady”) is determined not to echo that weakness and has vowed a strong response to any direct provocation. Meanwhile, the United States, via the annual Foal Eagle and Key Resolve exercises, has many troops, ships, and planes on maneuvers in the region and, as an additional show of resolve, flew long-range B-2 stealth bombers from Missouri to Korea and dispatched F-22 fighter jets as well.
The desire to show strength, the fear of looking weak, and the presence of tons of hardware provides more than enough tinder that a spark could start a peninsula-wide conflagration. An accident — such as a straying missile, an incident at sea or in the air, a shooting near the Northern Limit Line or the Demilitarized Zone — could trigger an action-reaction cycle that could spiral out of control if Pyongyang, running out of threats or low-level provocations, were to gamble on a more daring move. It might calculate that a bold gesture would sow doubt and dissent in South Korea, drive a risk-averse United States to back down and restrain its eager ally, and hand China a fait accompli in which Beijing has no alternative to protecting its upstart neighbor. It might be very wrong.
Let’s say that the North decides to fire its new mobile KN-08 intermediate-range ballistic missile, capable of reaching U.S. bases in Guam. An X-band radar based in Japan detects the launch, cueing missile defenses aboard Japanese and U.S. ships. The U.S.S. Stetham, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer equipped with Aegis phased-array radars, fires its SM-3 missiles, which hit and shatter the KN-08 warhead as it begins its final descent. The successful intercept is immediately touted internationally as a victory, but, now desperate for tactical advantage that will allow it to preserve its nuclear and missile programs, the North Korean leadership orders an assault on South Korean patrol vessels and military fortifications built after the 2010 shelling incident.
The regime feels safe in striking out along the maritime boundary because the two sides have repeatedly skirmished in the area in the past 15 years. But President Park, determined to show backbone, dispatches on-alert F-15K fighter aircraft armed with AGM-84E SLAM-Expanded Response air-to-ground missiles to destroy the North Korean installations responsible for the latest assault. For good measure, they also bomb a North Korean mini-submarine pier as belated payback for the sinking of Cheonan. North Korean soldiers and military officers are killed in the attack. Pyongyang vows a merciless response and launches a risky salvo of rockets into downtown Seoul, in hope of shocking the Blue House into seeking an immediate cessation of fighting. But far from ending the tit-for-tat attacks, North Korean actions have now triggered the Second Korean War.
U.S. and ROK Combined Forces Command implements a pre-arranged plan — perhaps using submarine-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs dropped from a B-2 — to eliminate North Korea’s two major missile launch facilities: Tonghae in the northeast and Sohae in the northwest, both of which are fairly close to the Chinese border. North Korea responds with more rockets and Scud missiles, accompanied by North Korean Central News announcements suggesting that they could be armed with biological agents. China, seeking to restrain all sides, pours troops and materiel across the border to protect its interests and instigates a secret plan to replace Kim Jong Un with a senior general who understands the North’s total dependence on its only ally. The resulting confusion leads to a belief that North Korea, and not just the Kim regime, is collapsing. Meanwhile, the United States quietly embarks on a secret mission to secure North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
Even now, however, the Second Korean War has only just begun because, as conflict breaks out, all participants expand their strategic goals. South Korea — which initially had hoped only to force North Korea to calm down enough to re-enter negotiations on nuclear weapons, expanded inter-Korean economic ties, and human rights — now believes North Korea is going to collapse and starts to implement an assertive reunification policy. The U.S. policy of deterrence and strategic patience has failed, so Washington decides to pursue active denuclearization and regime change. It joins with Seoul in planning postwar reconstruction in which the peninsula is reunified.
China, which was slow to curb its ally’s proliferation and never had a good handle on Kim Jong Un, seeks to ensure that the new leader of North Korea can restore stability. China also wants a new leader in Pyongyang to adopt a pro-China policy — one which includes continued preferential access to North Korean mineral deposits for its state-owned enterprises. Russia supports China, and it is promised unfettered access to the warm-water port in the Rason Special Economic Zone in northeastern North Korea.
It is easier to start a war than to stop one, but in the best case the Second Korean War might end with an international conference — perhaps in Jakarta under the auspices of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations — in which the United States and South Korea come to a modus vivendi with China and a greatly weakened North Korea over the country’s future, addressing succession and confederation with the South, as well as the verified destrcution of nuclear weapons. In the worst case…well, an awful lot more people would die.
The Korean War began in June 1950 as a result of a conscious policy choice on the part of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. With the Chinese civil war successfully concluded and authoritarianism on the rise, Kim concluded the time was ripe to deliver a knock-out blow and bring a long Korean civil war to a similar conclusion. He spent 10 days amassing 900,000 soldiers near the 38th Parallel, and in the pre-dawn hours on June 25, he ordered the invasion of the South. Hiding in plain sight, the troops nonetheless surprised the Republic of Korea Army, because the presumption was that Kim would never launch a full-scale war that could embroil a war-weary region in another major conflagration.
The presumption, as we know now, was dead wrong. The United States mobilized a formidable international coalition under U.N. auspices and, together with the ROK Army, regrouped and launched their own counteroffensive. American leadership, too, was susceptible to overtly optimistic appraisals. By October, General Douglas MacArthur was so confident of rapid victory that he assured President Harry S Truman that the war would be over by Christmas. But the ferocity of inter-Korean tensions, mixed with Cold War superpower aims, assured the war slogged on until 1953.
The war’s renewal would be more likely to result from miscalculation than from deliberate choice. Kim Jong Un may not want war, but amid heightened tensions there are many ways one could start — and it could well be that it is the United States that miscalculates. There is no sound empirical method for identifying the particular catalyst that would trigger war, but should war begin again in earnest, its intensity and its duration could prove a nasty surprise, as it did the first time. And the consequences could affect Northeast Asia for the rest of the century.
KABUL, Afghanistan — As the shadows lengthened around her family’s hut here in one of Kabul’s sprawling refugee camps, a slight 6-year-old girl ran in to where her father huddled with a group of elders near a rusty wood stove. Her father, Taj Mohammad, looked away, his face glum.
“She does not know what is going to happen,” he said softly.
If, as seems likely, Mr. Mohammad cannot repay his debt to a fellow camp resident a year from now, his daughter Naghma, a smiling, slender child with a tiny gold stud in her nose, will be forced to leave her family’s home forever to be married to the lender’s 17-year-old son.
The arrangement effectively values her life at $2,500. That is the amount Mr. Mohammad borrowed over the course of a year to pay for hospital treatment for his wife and medical care for some of his nine children — including Janan, 3, who later froze to death in bitter winter weather because the family could not afford enough firewood to stay warm.
“They said, ‘Pay back our money,’ and I didn’t have any money, so I had to give my girl,” Mr. Mohammad said. “I was thankful to them at the time, so it was my decision, but the elders also demanded that I do this.”
The story of how Mr. Mohammad, a refugee from the fighting in Helmand Province who in better days made a living as a singer and a musician, came to trade his daughter is in part a saga of terrible choices faced by some of the poorest Afghan families. But it is also a story of the way the war has eroded the social bonds and community safety nets that underpinned hundreds of thousands of rural Afghans’ lives.
Women and girls have been among the chief victims — not least because the Afghan government makes little attempt in the camps to enforce laws protecting women and children, said advocates for the camp residents.
Aid groups have been able to provide a few programs for women and children in the ever-growing camps, including schooling that for many girls here is a first. But those programs are being cut as international aid has dwindled here ahead of the Western military withdrawal. And the Afghan government has not offered much support, in part because most officials hope the refugees will leave Kabul and return home.
Most of the refugees in this camp are from rural southern Afghanistan, and they remain bound by the tribal codes and elder councils, known as jirgas, that resolved disputes in their home villages.
Few, however, still have the support of a broader network of kinsmen to fall back on in hard times as they would have at home. Out of context, the already rigid Pashtun codes have become something even harsher.
“This kind of thing never happened at home in Helmand,” said Mr. Mohammad’s mother as she sat in the back of the smoky room. Watching her granddaughter, as she laughed and smiled with her teacher, Najibullah, who also acts as a camp social worker and was visiting the family, she added, “I never remember a girl being given away to pay for a loan.”
From the point of view of those who participated in the jirga, the resolution was a good one, said Tawous Khan, an elder who led it and is one of the two main camp representatives. “You see, Taj Mohammad had to give his daughter. There was no other way,” he said. “And, it solved the problem.”
Some Afghan women’s advocates who heard about the little girl’s plight from news media reports were outraged and said they had asked the Interior Ministry to intervene, since child marriage is a violation of Afghan law and it is also unlawful to sell a woman. But nothing happened, said Wazhma Frogh, the executive director of the Research Institute for Women, Peace and Security.
“There has to be some sort of intervention,” Ms. Frogh said, “otherwise others will think this behavior is all right and it will increase.”
The Camps
The dark, cramped room where Mr. Mohammad lives with his wife and his eight children is typical of the shelters in the Charahi Qambar camp, which houses 900 refugee families from war-torn areas, mostly in southern Afghanistan.
Abjectly poor, the people in the camps came with little more than a handful of household belongings. Seeking safety and aid, they instead found themselves unwelcome in a city already overcrowded with returning refugees from Pakistan and Iran.
For years Charahi Qambar did not even have wells for water because the government was reluctant to let aid groups dig them, said Mohammad Yousef, an engineer and the director of Aschiana, an Afghan aid group that works in nine camps around the country as well as with street children.
The refugees’ skills as farmers and small village workmen were of little use here since they had neither land nor houses. Penniless, they gravitated to others from the same area, and the camps grew up.
Mr. Mohammad, like most men in the camps, looks for work almost every morning as an unskilled laborer, which pays about $6 a day — not even enough to buy the staples that his family subsists on: green tea, bread and, when they can afford them, potatoes. Meat and sugar are the rarest of luxuries.
Many days, no one hires the camp men at all, put off by their tattered clothes, blanketlike wraps and full beards. “People know where we are from and think we are Taliban,” Mr. Mohammad said.
After four years in the camp, he is thinking now of going back to Helmand as a migrant laborer for the opium poppy harvest so that he can earn enough to feed his family and save a little for next winter’s firewood.
“It is too cold, and we wish we had more to eat,” said Rahmatullah, one of 18 deputy camp representatives and one of the few who spoke against the jirga’s decision to have Mr. Mohammad give his daughter to pay off the debt.
Rahmatullah, who uses just one name, did note a positive difference in camp life, however, adding, “We do have one thing here — we have education.”
Education was unheard-of for most camp residents at home in Helmand, and Rahmatullah, like many camp residents, said that at first he was suspicious of it. Shortly after arriving in the camp four years ago, he was shocked to see young girls walking on the street.
He was even more amazed when another camp resident explained that the girls were going to school.
“I did not know that girls could go to school, because in my village only a very few girls were taught anything and it was always at home,” he said. “I thought, ‘Maybe these are the daughters of a general,’ because where I come from women do not leave their homes, not even to bring water.”
“I talked to my wife, and we allowed our girls to go to the camp school, and now they are in the regular Kabul school,” he said.
His daughters were lucky. The schools in the camp were run by Aschiana, which gives a healthful lunch to every child enrolled — 800 in the Charahi Qambar camp alone. They try to bring the children up to a level where they can keep up in the regular Kabul schools.
However, that program has just ended because the European Union, amid financial woes, is not renewing its programs for social protection. Instead, it is focusing its aid spending on the Afghan government’s priorities, ratified at last year’s international aid meeting in Tokyo, which do not include child protection, Alfred Grannas, the European Union’s chargé d’affaires in Afghanistan, said in an e-mail.
The World of Women
Like most dwellings in the camp, Mr. Mohammad’s hut has a tarpaulin roof, lightly reinforced with wood, an unheated entry room, and an inner room with a stove. A small, grimy window lets in a faint patch of light, and piled around the room’s edges are the family’s few possessions: blankets, old clothes, a few battered pots and pans, and 10 bird cages for the quails he trains to sing in hopes of selling them for extra money.
For his wife, a beautiful young woman who sat huddled in the shadows, a black veil drawn across her face as her husband discussed their daughter’s fate, there is little to look forward to day to day. Back in their village in Helmand, even poor families have walled compounds and sometimes land where a woman can go outdoors.
In the camps, though, the huts are crammed together, with narrow mud pathways barely more than foot wide between them.
“There’s no privacy in the camps, and for women it is like they are in a prison,” said Mr. Yousef, the Aschiana director. “They are constantly under emotional stress.”
Like many Afghan women, Mr. Mohammad’s wife, Guldasta, let her husband speak for her — at first. He explained that she was too upset about what was happening to her daughter to talk about the situation.
But then in a quiet moment, she turned, lifting her veil to reveal part of her face and said clearly: “I am not happy with this decision; it was not what I wanted for her.”
“I would have been happy to let her grow up with us,” she said.
The family’s case is a kind of dark distortion of the Afghan tradition of the groom’s family paying a “bride price” to the family of the wife-to-be. The practice is common particularly in Pashtun areas, but it exists among other ethnic groups as well and can involve thousands of dollars. In this case, the boy who is receiving Naghma as a wife, instead of paying for her, will get her in exchange for the debt’s forgiveness.
Because Naghma, whose name means melody, was not chosen by the groom, she will most likely be treated more like a family servant than a spouse — and at worst as a captive slave. Her presence may help the groom attract a more desirable second wife because the family, although poor, will have someone working for it, insulating the chosen wife from some of the hardest tasks.
Anthropologists say this kind of use of women as property intensified after the fall of the Taliban, said Deniz Kandiyoti, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
The most recent anthropological studies of the phenomenon were of indebted drug traffickers who sold their daughters or sisters to settle debts, she said. These are essentially distress sales. And unlike the norm for marriage exchanges before the past three decades of war, the women in some cases have become salable property — stripped of the traditional forms of status and respect, she said.
Regrets
Almost from the moment he agreed to the deal, Mr. Mohammad began to regret it and think about all that could go wrong. “If, God forbid, they mistreat my daughter, then I would have to kill someone in their family,” he said as he stood at the edge of the camp in a muddy lot in the cold winter dusk.
“You know she is very little, we call her ‘Peshaka,’ ” he said, using the Pashto word for kitten. “She is a very lovely girl. Everybody in our family loves her, and even if she fights with her older brothers, we don’t say anything, we give her all possible happiness.”
He added: “I believe that when she goes to that house, she will die soon. She will not receive all the love she receives from us, and I am afraid she will lose her life. A 6-year-old girl doesn’t know about having a mother-in-law, a father-in-law, or having a husband or being a wife,” he said.
Adding to their fears, the mother of the boy that Naghma will marry came to Mr. Mohammad’s home to ask his wife to stop sending the girl to school, he said.
“You know, my daughter loves going to school, and she wants to study more and more. But the boy she is marrying, he sent his mother yesterday to tell my wife, ‘Look, this is dishonoring us to have my son’s future wife go to school,’ ” he said.
“I cannot tell them what to do,” he added, looking down at his boots. “This is their wife, their property.”
Editors’ Note: April 2, 2013
A front-page article on Monday described the painful decision of an Afghan man, Taj Mohammad, to give his 6-year-old daughter in marriage to pay off his debt to another man. After the article was published, Mr. Mohammad called The New York Times on Monday and said the debt had been paid nearly a month ago, by an anonymous donor. In an interview on Friday, when asked if there had been any developments in the case — which The Times first learned about several months ago — Mr. Mohammad did not mention the payment. Asked on Monday why he had not said anything about it, he gave no direct answer.
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Be a nice person, be a good person.
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If you contribute to other people's happiness you will find the true meaning of life. The key point is to have a genuine sense of universal responsibility.
THAT THE LOVE TRANSCEND THE RELIGIONS OR IDEOLOGIES THAT EVERYBODY HAVE IT AND ONLY A DESIRE OF LOVE, PEACE, JUSTICE, SOLIDARITY AND TOLERANCE, LEAD OUR LIVES TODAY, TOMORROW AND ALWAYS.
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Use differences in a positive way. Try to get energy from different opinions. Make dialogue, that is the proper way to solve problems.
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Compassion can heal not only inner anger, but the world's violence.
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A COMPASSIONATE STATE OF MIND BRINGS INNER PEACE, AND THEREFORE A HEALTHIER BODY.
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INDEX
If there is light in the soul…
If there is light in the soul, There will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person, There will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house, There will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation, There will be peace in the world.
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AS LONG AS WE ARE ON THIS SMALL PLANET TOGETHER, WE NEED HUMAN GENTLENESS, HUMAN AFFECTION.
If you cannot do great things do small things in a great way.
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Never Lose faith in the truth.
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IF YOU CAN, HELP OTHERS. IF NOT, THEN AT LEAST REFRAIN FROM HURTING OTHERS.
Dalai Lama:
IT IS IMPORTANT TO USE MONEY PROPERLY TO HELP OTHERS, OTHERWISE YOU STILL WANT MORE AND FEEL POOR.
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Genuine peace between nations will come from mutual respect, not from weapons or force.
Look to this Day! For it is Life, the very Life of Life. In its brief course lie all the Verities and Realities of your existence. The Bliss of Growth, The Glory of Action, The splendor of Beauty; For yesterday is but a Dream, and Tomorrow a vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day! Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!
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The hundred billion galaxies of our visible, each with a hundred billion stars, is but a grain of sand on the Sahara that exists beyond our horizon, grown out of that single, original bubble of false vacuum.
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If you contribute to other people's happiness you will find the true meaning of life. The key point is to have a genuine sense of universal responsibility.
CARLOS Tiger without Time 