April 11, 2010

Reporting from Mexico City

A 4-year-old girl goes missing from her bedroom, and her well-to-do parents and two nannies fall under suspicion. Then, nine days later, the girl's decomposing body is discovered in her own bed, even though the home supposedly has been sealed off by police.

The state prosecutor first declares the death a homicide, but stokes confusion by saying that the child, who suffered developmental disabilities, may have asphyxiated by accident. After he releases the suspects, political opponents clamor for his ouster.

Never mind Mexico's raging drug war, last weekend's powerful earthquake on the U.S. border or an economy that continues to sputter. The mystery of what happened to little Paulette Gebara Farah, reported missing March 22 and found dead in her family's apartment more than a week later, is the tale that has thoroughly captivated Mexicans.

The drama is both whodunit and who-screwed-it-up-so-badly, with all the suspenseful elements of a TV crime show and Mexico's troubled criminal-justice system smack in the bull's-eye of the controversy.

The parents, businessman Mauricio Gebara and attorney Lisette Farah, received lots of support when they appeared on television to report that Paulette had disappeared after she was put to bed in their apartment in Interlomas, a suburb of Mexico City, on March 21. Supporters publicized the case through Twitter and Facebook and on billboards along some of Mexico City's biggest avenues.

The parents and the two nannies were subsequently placed under a kind of house arrest in a hotel outside Mexico City while police investigated.

Then came a most startling twist: On March 31, as investigators reconstructed events in the high-rise apartment, they found Paulette's body under blankets at the foot of the bed, where a wooden base extended beyond the mattress.

The discovery ignited a flurry of water-cooler speculation and Internet chatter: How could the girl's body have gone undetected by the parents, nannies, investigators and countless others who traipsed through the home? Was it planted there? If so, by whom?

Moreover, will anybody believe authorities if they claim to have solved the mystery?

For more than two weeks, the case has dominated television, radio and the newspapers, reduced by revved-up Mexican media to one word: Paulette. It is hard to remember a recent case that has so caught the public attention.

Each day's news brings new salacious tidbits, even if they're not always confirmed. Suggestions of marital infidelity. Armchair analyses about the apparent lack of emotion from the mother, Farah (including speculation that she may have grown tired of caring for Paulette, who could not walk well or speak).

There have been reports of jaw-dropping investigative lapses, and details of the not-so-happy lives of some of Mexico's privileged citizens.

Adding to the spectacle, pretty much everyone involved in the case, including the two nannies, has gone on-air with accounts that don't always match.

Paulette's parents have publicly set upon each other in dueling broadcast interviews with conflicting versions of the circumstances when they reportedly last saw the girl. Farah has even accused her husband of "hiding something." Gebara's family, meanwhile, has taken custody of the couple's other daughter, Lisette, who is 7.

The messier the case has gotten, the more Mexico is enthralled.

"There is nothing that compares in ratings, readership, hits on the Web and social networks that compares with the Paulette story," columnist Ciro Gomez Leyva wrote Thursday in the daily Milenio newspaper. "What has made it such a box-office success?"

Gomez suggested that Mexicans are no longer shocked by the nation's rising violence, which has left more than 18,000 people dead in a 3-year-old drug war that features beheadings and frequent gun battles between troops and cartel men.

"That is the daily landscape," Gomez wrote. "The 4-year-old girl is, instead, extraordinary."

Whatever the reason, the case has fed talk shows and Internet chatter with theorizing, amateur psychoanalysis and, inevitably, talk of conspiracy.

Commentators have dissected the conduct of the parents, with some straining to find ties between Gebara and the attorney general of Mexico state, Alberto Bazbaz, that might offer possible protection from prosecution.

The case has also taken on political meaning. Politicians with Mexico state's two opposition parties, the conservative National Action Party and left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party, are taking aim at Bazbaz's handling of the case and, by extension, the competence of the state's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Bazbaz's boss, Gov. Enrique Pena Nieto, is widely considered the front-runner for president in 2012 and the case could prove an embarrassment for his administration. Mindful of growing public dismay, Mexico state authorities invited FBI agents to help them Friday as they examined the apartment once more.

On Saturday, Mexican news websites reported that Farah was being questioned anew by state investigators.

Though Mexican news media, and many viewers and readers, continue to hang on every new wrinkle in the case, there are signs that some people have had quite enough, thank you.

One Twitter user wrote of the saturation coverage: "Turn the page already."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-mexico-paulette11-2010apr11,0,1339596,print.story

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EDITORIAL

Confederate History Month: Slavery should be more than an afterthought

Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell erred when he left out a critical -- perhaps the most critical -- element of the Civil War.

April 10, 2010

What was Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell thinking when he declared April to be Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery? None of the possibilities are encouraging: Maybe he wanted to pander to Virginians who, even now, romanticize what used to be called the War of Northern Aggression. Perhaps he thought mentioning slavery, the overarching if not the only issue in the war, would be bad for tourism and economic development. Or he simply lacked what is sometimes called moral imagination.

Whatever the explanation, the proclamation, pegged to the fact that Virginia joined the Confederacy in April 1861, has been hastily revised after a public protest. It still commemorates the sacrifices of the war dead and salutes Confederate soldiers who pledged allegiance to the United States after being "overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army." But now it also contains a paragraph -- one that easily could have been included in the original -- that "the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice." (Though inserted in the middle of the proclamation, it still reads like an afterthought.)

Politicians put their feet in their mouths all the time -- and just as often have to extract them -- so why is the furor over McDonnell's proclamation important? Is it really necessary to condemn slavery as evil and inhumane in this day and age? Was McDonnell really so wrong to suggest that Confederate war dead deserve to be honored by their descendants? Was the protest against the declaration just political correctness run amok?

Not as we see it. Anyone familiar with the Civil War knows that the preservation of slavery was not the only motive for secession and that Confederate soldiers saw themselves as defending hearth and home. Nor did every Union soldier feel called to battle by a commitment to emancipation.

Still, slavery was at the heart of the War Between the States, an irreducibly brutal reality that generations of revisionists have attempted unconvincingly to efface. Consider this description of the war by the commander of the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans: "Our Confederate ancestors fought to save our homeland from invading troops and it is our duty to see that their memory is not tarnished but given the respect and honor due them for the sacrifice they gave."

Like the flying of the Confederate flag, a sanitized portrayal of the Confederacy inspires anger and uneasiness that once would have been regarded -- and not just in the South -- as oversensitivity. We know better now, and so, we hope, does Robert McDonnell.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-confederate10-2010apr10,0,3074603,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Small Bomb Is Thrown at U.S. Post in Mexico

By MARC LACEY

MEXICO CITY — An explosive device hurled over a wall at the United States Consulate in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo on Friday night has renewed fears that Mexico’s violent drug trafficking organizations may be focusing their wrath on the American government, which has backed President Felipe Calderón’s antidrug offensive.

American officials said Saturday that the consulate in Nuevo Laredo and a consular office in nearby Piedras Negras were to be closed indefinitely beginning Monday. The attack, which occurred around 11 p.m. Friday, shattered windows but injured no one, American officials said in a statement on the consulate’s Web site.

In Mexico City, federal prosecutors said in a statement on Saturday that they were reviewing video from security cameras at the consulate, along with other evidence from the scene. A federal official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told news services that the explosive appeared to have been homemade.

The episode follows the shooting deaths last month of three people linked to the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juárez, a border city that has been wracked by drug-related violence recently.

In 2008, suspected traffickers threw a grenade at a consulate in Monterrey. The device, which did not explode, was later traced to a drug gang.

Because of threats against American interests in northern Mexico, the State Department last month allowed consular workers along the border to move their families to the United States from Mexico.

The latest attack came at a delicate time as Michelle Obama, the first lady, is due to arrive in Mexico City on Tuesday in what the White House has billed as her first solo international trip of her husband’s presidency. The Obama administration recently vowed to continue backing Mr. Calderón’s efforts to crush Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/americas/11mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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In Tenn., Reminders of a Boy Returned to Russia

By DAMIEN CAVE

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. — The toys in the backyard suggest generous parenting: a swing set, its green paint shiny and new; a red tetherball covered in cherry-red glitter; even a trampoline.

They sit quiet now behind the simple home where 7-year-old Justin Hansen used to live before being sent back to his native Russia alone, with a note from his adoptive parents describing him as troubled. They are the tiniest of clues in an odd family mystery that has turned into an international dispute, with accusations of abuse tossed across thousands of miles.

No one here seems to have expected such a thing. Shelbyville, an hour south of Nashville, is a quiet, horse-loving town of 20,000 where nearly everyone seems to know a family from church that adopted a little boy or girl from somewhere. Now, an adoptive family not many people knew — Torry Ann Hansen, 33, a registered nurse, and her mother Nancy Hansen — is being visited by the police and Russian reporters in red loafers.

“I didn’t realize it would get to this magnitude,” said Harry Bailey, 64, as he trimmed a damaged tree outside his home two doors down from the Hansens on Saturday. “I guess the Russian people are angry.”

The Russian people are indeed angry — the education ministry has suspended the license of the group involved in the Hansens’ adoption and some officials have called for a halt to all adoptions of Russian children by Americans. The Hansens, meanwhile have also portrayed themselves as victims. In the note sent back to Russia with the boy, Torry Hansen wrote that he “is violent and has severe psychopathic issues.”

On Friday, Nancy Hansen, in an interview with The Associated Press, said that Justin’s problems included hitting, screaming and spitting at his mother and threatening to kill family members. The family said it was told the boy was healthy in September when he was brought to Tennessee from the town of Partizansk in Russia’s Far East. They say they have been lied to and misled.

On Saturday, Torry and Nancy Hansen remained silent. They live side by side here, in modular homes with vinyl siding, connected by a wide white fence. Each had a car in front on Saturday, but neither answered the doors when reporters began knocking at 8:30 a.m. In the late afternoon, the shades were still drawn.

On the stoop of Torry’s home, muddy sandals sat beside a toy missile — perhaps a favorite plaything suddenly left behind.

Messages left for the Hansens’ lawyer were not returned, and the county sheriff’s office said it would have nothing to say until next week.

Their neighbors’ sympathies seemed to be with the boy. Mr. Bailey said he used to see him playing outside, riding a bicycle, running around with another boy around the same age. “It was typical kid stuff,” he said. He added that a wave and a quick hello were as close as he got to knowing the family.

Several other neighbors said the Hansens seemed somewhat disconnected from the community. The boy appeared to be home-schooled and the family did not go to the churches close by. It was hard to relate when so few details were known, they said, but even if Justin threatened violence, as the Hansens claimed, residents said he should have been dealt with here, not shipped home like a faulty product.

Some here said they were glad the Hansens seemed to be outsiders, or at least newer arrivals — it helped some of the longtime residents disconnect from the satellite trucks and reporters, many of them representing foreign media, that had descended on their neighborhood.

It was the details of the boy’s return trip to Russia that sparked the most outrage. According to American and Russian officials, Nancy Hansen said she had accompanied the boy on a flight to Washington and then put him on a direct flight alone to Moscow on Wednesday. She reportedly had found a guide over the Internet whom she paid $200 to pick up the child at the airport in Moscow and to deliver him to the Education Ministry with her note. But for residents here, that was hardly enough.

“It’s shocking the community that he went all alone,” said Cheryl Clark, the owner of a small store walking distance from the Hansens’ home. “The adoption agency didn’t just throw him on a plane. They had someone with him. He’s still a baby.”

Adoption experts generally agreed that an abrupt return was cause for concern. The adoption agency that worked with the Hansens, Wacap, the main office of which is in Renton, Wash., released a statement on Friday that said in the 1 percent of adoptions that do not work out, the agency focused on moving the child to a new family, not returning the child. It was unclear whether the Hansens had asked Wacap for assistance.

But, Adam Pertman, executive director of Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, said the Hansens had a responsibility to seek help. He acknowledged that adoptive parents often have incomplete histories for the children they bring into their homes. And he said that for children like Justin, born Artyom Savelyev and raised in a Russian orphanage for much of his early life, the challenges can be immense.

Institutionalized children in particular tend to act out, he said, with the worst cases involving verbal abuse or children striking parents with heavy objects. “Kids who are beaten and neglected in foster care; kids whose parents drank heavily when they were pregnant; kids with severe disorders — they can cause real disruptions in a family,” Mr. Pertman said.

“You need help if you’re having problems,” he said. “There is this weird lingering myth that love will conquer all. Guess what, it doesn’t in biological families and it doesn’t in adopted families.”

Parents here made a similar connection.

Calvin Cannon, 44, the owner of Torso Shirts for Men in town, said that when he was a foster parent to a teenager a few years back, the two clashed but stuck it out with the help of a social worker. He said the Hansens could have done the same.

“I wish the boy was still here,” Mr. Cannon said, standing outside his store. “It’s bad for the kid, that’s what’s hurtful to me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/us/11adopt.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Consumers in U.S. Face the End of an Era of Cheap Credit

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Even as prospects for the American economy brighten, consumers are about to face a new financial burden: a sustained period of rising interest rates.

That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession.

The shift is sure to come as a shock to consumers whose spending habits were shaped by a historic 30-year decline in the cost of borrowing.

“Americans have assumed the roller coaster goes one way,” said Bill Gross, whose investment firm, Pimco, has taken part in a broad sell-off of government debt, which has pushed up interest rates. “It’s been a great thrill as rates descended, but now we face an extended climb.”

The impact of higher rates is likely to be felt first in the housing market, which has only recently begun to rebound from a deep slump. The rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage has risen half a point since December, hitting 5.31 last week, the highest level since last summer.

Along with the sell-off in bonds, the Federal Reserve has halted its emergency $1.25 trillion program to buy mortgage debt, placing even more upward pressure on rates.

“Mortgage rates are unlikely to go lower than they are now, and if they go higher, we’re likely to see a reversal of the gains in the housing market,” said Christopher J. Mayer, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School. “It’s a really big risk.”

Each increase of 1 percentage point in rates adds as much as 19 percent to the total cost of a home, according to Mr. Mayer.

The Mortgage Bankers Association expects the rise to continue, with the 30-year mortgage rate going to 5.5 percent by late summer and as high as 6 percent by the end of the year.

Another area in which higher rates are likely to affect consumers is credit card use. And last week, the Federal Reserve reported that the average interest rate on credit cards reached 14.26 percent in February, the highest since 2001. That is up from 12.03 percent when rates bottomed in the fourth quarter of 2008 — a jump that amounts to about $200 a year in additional interest payments for the typical American household.

With losses from credit card defaults rising and with capital to back credit cards harder to come by, issuers are likely to increase rates to 16 or 17 percent by the fall, according to Dennis Moroney, a research director at the TowerGroup, a financial research company.

“The banks don’t have a lot of pricing options,” Mr. Moroney said. “They’re targeting people who carry a balance from month to month.”

Similarly, many car loans have already become significantly more expensive, with rates at auto finance companies rising to 4.72 percent in February from 3.26 percent in December, according to the Federal Reserve.

Washington, too, is expecting to have to pay more to borrow the money it needs for programs. The Office of Management and Budget expects the rate on the benchmark 10-year United States Treasury note to remain close to 3.9 percent for the rest of the year, but then rise to 4.5 percent in 2011 and 5 percent in 2012.

The run-up in rates is quickening as investors steer more of their money away from bonds and as Washington unplugs the economic life support programs that kept rates low through the financial crisis. Mortgage rates and car loans are linked to the yield on long-term bonds.

Besides the inflation fears set off by the strengthening economy, Mr. Gross said he was also wary of Treasury bonds because he feared the burgeoning supply of new debt issued to finance the government’s huge budget deficits would overwhelm demand, driving interest rates higher.

Nine months ago, United States government debt accounted for half of the assets in Mr. Gross’s flagship fund, Pimco Total Return. That has shrunk to 30 percent now — the lowest ever in the fund’s 23-year history — as Mr. Gross has sold American bonds in favor of debt from Europe, particularly Germany, as well as from developing countries like Brazil.

Last week, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note briefly crossed the psychologically important threshold of 4 percent, as the Treasury auctioned off $82 billion in new debt. That is nearly twice as much as the government paid in the fall of 2008, when investors sought out ultrasafe assets like Treasury securities after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the credit crisis.

Though still very low by historical standards, the rise of bond yields since then is reversing a decline that began in 1981, when 10-year note yields reached nearly 16 percent.

From that peak, steadily dropping interest rates have fed a three-decade lending boom, during which American consumers borrowed more and more but managed to hold down the portion of their income devoted to paying off loans.

Indeed, total household debt is now nine times what it was in 1981 — rising twice as fast as disposable income over the same period — yet the portion of disposable income that goes toward covering that debt has budged only slightly, increasing to 12.6 percent from 10.7 percent.

Household debt has been dropping for the last two years as recession-battered consumers cut back on borrowing, but at $13.5 trillion, it still exceeds disposable income by $2.5 trillion.

The long decline in rates also helped prop up the stock market; lower rates for investments like bonds make stocks more attractive.

That tailwind, which prevented even worse economic pain during the recession, has ceased, according to interviews with economists, analysts and money managers.

“We’ve had almost a 30-year rally,” said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s. “That’s come to an end.”

Just as significant as the bottom-line impact will be the psychological fallout from not being able to buy more while paying less — an unusual state of affairs that made consumer spending the most important measure of economic health.

“We’ve gotten spoiled by the idea that interest rates will stay in the low single-digits forever,” said Jim Caron, an interest rate strategist with Morgan Stanley. “We’ve also had a generation of consumers and investors get used to low rates.”

For young home buyers today considering 30-year mortgages with a rate of just over 5 percent, it might be hard to conceive of a time like October 1981, when mortgage rates peaked at 18.2 percent. That meant monthly payments of $1,523 then compared with $556 now for a $100,000 loan.

No one expects rates to return to anything resembling 1981 levels. Still, for much of Wall Street, the question is not whether rates will go up, but rather by how much.

Some firms, like Morgan Stanley, are predicting that rates could rise by a percentage point and a half by the end of the year. Others, like JPMorgan Chase are forecasting a more modest half-point jump.

But the consensus is clear, according to Terrence M. Belton, global head of fixed-income strategy for J. P. Morgan Securities. “Everyone knows that rates will eventually go higher,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/business/economy/11rates.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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1 Killed in Shooting at Oklahoma Mall

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MUSKOGEE, Okla. (AP) -- Gunfire broke out inside a crowded Oklahoma shopping mall Saturday, leaving a teenager dead and several injured in what witnesses described as a gunfight, police said.

Five people were taken to a hospital as authorities cordoned off the Arrowhead Mall in downtown Muskogee, an area crowded with visitors attending the city's annual Azalea Festival, police spokesman Pedro Zardeneta said.

It was unclear whether the person killed, 17-year-old Jarrod Reed of Muskogee, was among several people involved in the shooting or a bystander, he said. Details about the other victims, including their conditions, haven't been released, hospital spokesman Chad Wetz said.

Shoppers were told to leave quickly by a public-address announcement around 4:15 p.m., and they gathered outside. Several said they'd heard four or five shots inside the mall.

Tonya Pierce said her daughter and two friends were waiting for a ride home when shots rang out. Her daughter told her that ''people started screaming'' and a group of men started shooting, Pierce said.

Witnesses told police they thought it was a gunfight, Zardeneta said. Gunfire was reported but not confirmed elsewhere in the city after the mall shooting, he said.

Screams grew to a crescendo as shoppers fled the shopping center, said Hope Bridges, manager of Kat Daddy's Bar and Grill in the mall. She called 911 and was told to evacuate her nearly full restaurant.

Merchants had looked forward to Saturday's festival drawing more business, she said.

''It was a great business day for the mall. Everyone was happy, everybody was in town,'' Bridges said. ''It was something the mall had been looking forward to.''

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/10/us/AP-US-Mall-Shooting-Oklahoma.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Fox News

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US Navy holds 6 suspected pirates after battle

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A U.S. warship captured six suspected pirates Saturday after a battle off the Horn of Africa — the Navy's third direct encounter with seafaring bandits in less than two weeks.

The Navy has taken at least 21 suspected pirates since March 31 in the violence-plagued waters off Somalia and nearby regions, where U.S. warships are part of an international anti-piracy flotilla.

A statement by the U.S. Navy said the suspected pirates began shooting at the amphibious dock landing ship USS Ashland just before dawn about 380 miles (610 kilometers) off Djibouti, a small nation facing Yemen across the mouth of the Red Sea.

The Navy said the Ashland returned fire and the suspected pirate skiff was destroyed. All six people on board were rescued and taken aboard the Ashland.

The Ashland suffered no injuries or damage in the second recent attack on a U.S. warship by suspected pirates.

On March 31, the frigate USS Nicholas exchanged fire with a suspected pirate vessel west of the Seychelles, sinking their skiff and confiscating a mother ship. Five suspected pirates were captured.

On Monday, the destroyer USS McFaul responded to the distress call from a merchant vessel and captured 10 other suspected pirates.

The Navy said it was reviewing "multiple options" on the suspects' fates.

Some suspected pirates have been turned over to Kenya for trial, but there has been some reluctance by African nations to become a center for prosecutions. In December, the Dutch government released 13 suspected Somali pirates after the European Union failed to find a country willing to prosecute them.

One of the suspected pirates accused of attacking the U.S.-flagged merchant ship Maersk Alabama last year is facing trial in the United States.

At the United Nations, Russia has introduced a draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council that calls for strengthening the international legal system to ensure captured Somali pirates do not escape punishment.

In Turkey, a news agency reported Saturday that Somali pirates have abandoned a commandeered Turkish ship.

The Dogan agency quoted Fatih Kabal, an official of Bergen Shipping based in Istanbul, as saying the pirates left the MV Yasin C, which was seized Wednesday 250 miles (400 kilometers) off the Kenyan coast.

Kabal said the crew had locked themselves in the engine room and realized that the pirates had left the ship on Friday. He said crew members, who were unharmed, took the damaged ship to the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

Somali pirates have been known to give up on ships they believe have no ransom value, such as vessels owned or hired by Somali traders.

Meanwhile, the owner of a hijacked supertanker has begun negotiations for the ship's release, a South Korean Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks. Repeated calls to the vessel operator, South Korea-based Samho Shipping, seeking comment went unanswered on Saturday night. The vessel is owned by a Singaporean company.

A South Korean naval destroyer that had been monitoring the ship began sailing away from the pirates Saturday and heading back toward the Gulf of Aden after the pirates warned the sailors not to come any closer.

Authorities say Somali pirates hijacked the 300,000-ton Samho Dream in the Indian Ocean on April 4. The ship was transporting crude oil worth about $160 million from Iraq to the U.S. with a crew of 24 South Koreans and Filipinos.

More than a dozen ships and their crew are believed to be currently held by pirates off the lawless coast of Somalia.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/ci.US+Navy+holds+6+suspected+pirates+after+battle.opinionPrint

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For mentally ill survivors, Holocaust lives on

Associate Press

Some patients refuse to shower because it reminds them of the gas chambers. Others hoard meat in pillow cases because they fear going hungry.

PARDES HANNA, Israel (AP) — Some patients refuse to shower because it reminds them of the gas chambers. Others hoard meat in pillow cases because they fear going hungry.

At the Shaar Menashe Mental Health Center in northern Israel, it's as though the Holocaust never ended.

As Israel on Sunday night begins its annual 24 hours of remembrance of the Nazi genocide, the focus is on the 6 million Jews murdered and on the survivors who built new lives in the Jewish state.

Much less is ever said about the survivors for whom mental illness is part of the Holocaust's legacy.

At Shaar Menashe, patients remain frozen in time. Even today, 65 years after the end of World War II, there are sometimes screams of "The Nazis are coming!"

"These are the forgotten people. These are the ones who have been left behind, the people who have fallen between the cracks," said Rachel Tiram, the facility's longtime social worker.

Even among survivors with sanity intact, it can take decades to open up about their experiences. Here, most of the patients still won't speak. They are introverted and unresponsive. They mumble and shake uncontrollably, slump in front of blank TV screens and look aimlessly into the distance while sucking hard on cigarettes.

The details of their haunted pasts are sketchy and emerge only from hints in their behavior.

Meir Moskowitz, 81, endured pogroms and days inside a cramped cattle car in his native Romania. His body still quivers. During five hours in the company of visitors, he spoke just one word: "Germania."

Arieh Bleier, a gentle, 87-year-old Hungarian with deep, sullen eyes, survived the Mauthausen concentration camp. His parents and brother perished in Auschwitz. When asked about World War II, he looked away and shook his head.

For most of these survivors, reminiscing is impossible.

"It's hard to talk about it, very hard," said Devora Amiel, 78 and toothless, her speech slurred by a tongue puffed up from medication. She escaped a Polish ghetto, was taken in by a Christian family, and later grew up in an orphanage. She never found out what happened to her family.

"After you go through it, it's hard to tell," she said. "You can only scream about it."

Most survivors in Israel went on to live productive lives, and their ranks include politicians, authors and Nobel Prize laureates. But for decades after becoming a state, Israel tended to look for role models among the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising rather than Jews meekly filing into cattle cars and gas chambers.

Survivors driven insane by their experiences ended up in ordinary institutions which were not always a good fit; for instance, they had to wear pajamas, which reminded them of concentration camp inmates' uniforms. Sometimes the children and grandchildren of patients were simply told they had died in the Holocaust.

Only in 1998 did Israel build three homes for survivors, starting with Shaar Menashe.

Today about 220,000 survivors are still alive in Israel. About 200 are in Shaar Menashe and the other two homes.

Some have lived in mental institutions since their liberation, while others developed mental illness late in life.

Alexander Grinshpoon, director of Shaar Menashe, said all survivors have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. But the roughly 80 in his care are men and women who could not overcome their wartime traumas, perhaps because their suffering was so profound, or because they were predisposed to mental illness — or maybe because their minds simply crashed under the weight of their experiences.

Grinshpoon said research has shown that those who have experienced emotional trauma are five times more likely to develop serious mental illnesses. Holocaust survivors, he said, have a higher rate of suicide.

Eighty percent have trouble sleeping and two-thirds suffer from emotional distress, according to a survey commissioned by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel.

The foundation's chairman, Zeev Factor, is an Auschwitz survivor. He says he has been able to maintain his sanity by focusing on the present but still suffers in his dreams. "I sometimes wake up from them covered in sweat from head to toe," he said.

It's not uncommon for mental patients anywhere to believe the world is coming to an end. But for these patients whose world really did come apart, paranoia is well-founded.

Tiram, the social worker, spoke of an elderly woman in Shaar Menashe who constantly fears the police are coming for her.

"This is something that really happened to her. It's not something that she is making up," Tiram said. "Each time they go to sleep, they go back to the Holocaust, to reliving their childhood."

Grinshpoon said most patients have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and their stories are often unreliable. One man says he was a fighter pilot during World War II, another says he's a ninja. A third is convinced he's an Arab and says he hates Jews. One thinks she is still in Europe and is shocked to see an elderly woman in the mirror.

At Shaar Menashe, patients are not required to wear pajamas. They have lawns, arts and crafts lessons and a workshops with pets. Some have developed hobbies, cultivated friendships and even reconnected with children and grandchildren. Many of the volunteers working here are survivors themselves.

Still, the shadow of death camps, crematoria, deportations and gas chambers is never far away.

Said Factor, of the benefit foundation: "They live in this world and in that world at the same time."

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/11/mentally-ill-survivors-holocaust-lives/

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Police ID 21 women in serial killer's photos

Associated Press

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Huntington Beach police have identified 21 women who appear in photos found in a convicted serial killer's storage locker.

But detectives are still seeking the identity of more than 100 other females — and at least two young men — who posed for Rodney Alcala during the 1970s.

Police say none of the 21 women matched up to a missing persons case or an unsolved homicide.

Detectives were inundated with more than 500 phone calls and hundreds of e-mails after the photos were posted on the Orange County Register's Web site. Huntington Beach police released the photos to the newspaper last month after Alcala was sentenced to death for the murders of four women and a 12-year-old girl.

The photos were found in Alcala's Seattle storage locker in 1979.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/04/10/police-id-women-serial-killers-photos/

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Men called to action in NJ after alleged gang rape

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Dozens of men joined Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons in an impromptu march on Saturday through the neighborhood where police say a 7-year-old girl was gang-raped.

The march followed an afternoon rally organized to spur discussion about violence committed against and by young people in urban communities.

Near the end of the rally, the founder of an organization that uses men to help keep youth out of trouble recruited men to march. Dennis Muhammad also challenged the men to create a community policing program similar to the Peace Keepers organization he founded. The group has chapters in New York City, Jersey City, N.J., and Wilmington, Del.

Simmons said Peace Keepers has had some success in his hometown of Queens, N.Y.

"We sit back sometimes and allow just a few bad eggs in our community to scare us off our own corners," Simmons told a standing-room only crowd at a church auditorium before the march. "I stood on (the) corner. I sold drugs. But I went back and saw what it felt like when we launched our Queens peacekeepers movement."

The crowd also was stirred by speeches from local dignitaries and hip-hop gospel songs sang by a choir.
Palmer, who initially said he did not plan to attend the rally, arrived shortly after the event began.

"I think it's a good beginning," Palmer said as he, Simmons and dozens of Trenton men marched through the neighborhood exciting residents watching from their porches. "The proof will be if we can get more men together in this and other sustaining activities."

Several hundred people cheered as the men marched back to the church as newly committed peacekeepers. Muhammad said he hopes the men will serve as auxiliary police for a neighborhood that at times finds itself at odds with local law enforcement.

"You can't go into a community that loves itself and brutalize it," Muhammad said. "I believe it has always been the duty of men to protect his community, to protect the women."

The gathering was a welcomed sight for Trenton resident Dolores Davis, 46, who lives in the heart of the neighborhood that has caught the nation's attention.

"(People) need someone to tell them what is what," Davis said of the rally. "They need to see how the real world is and how we need to make a change."

Police say a 15-year-old girl took her 7-year-old stepsister to a party at crime-infested apartment tower two weeks ago and had sex with men for money. She then took money to let the men touch the younger girl, and the touching turned to forcible sex, according to police.

Although neighborhood residents say they have grown used to violence, reports of the gang-rape marked a turn for the worse.

The 15-year-old has been charged and is being held in a juvenile detention center. Two adults and three minors have been charged with the sexually assaulting the younger girl. One man had his first court appearance on Thursday, the other on Friday. The stepfather of the youngest girl said Thursday that the two men tried to help the child get out of the apartment, but did not dispute that someone had assaulted her.

Palmer met with the 7-year-old girl and her family and offered counseling and possible assistance if they wanted to relocate to another city.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/04/10/men-called-action-nj-alleged-gang-rape/?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a4:g4:r3:c0.000000:b0:z5

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From AOL News

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Stacy McCall, left, Sherrill Levitt, center, and Suzie Streeter

Sleuth Won't Give Up on Women Missing for 17 Years by David Lohr (April 10) -- Two teens and a mother disappeared in Springfield, Mo., almost 18 years ago. Their bodies have not been found, the case has not been solved. Police say there is no evidence to determine what happened to Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall, the "Springfield Three," as the case has been called. But the former lead investigator and a local journalist refuse to let it go. They believe that finding the answers has been hindered by a mismanaged investigation and the refusal to follow leads provided by new technologies that indicate where the remains of the women might be buried. Stacy McCall, left, Sherrill Levitt, center, and Suzie Streeter disappeared from Levitt's home on June 7, 1992. Levitt and Streeter are mother and daughter. "I had never worked a case like it before then and have not worked one like it since," former Springfield police Sgt. Mark Webb told AOL News.

NEW YORK - A French tourist who rescued a toddler who fell into New York's East River says he didn't think twice about diving in to save the girl.

Two-year-old Bridget Sheridan fell off a gangplank at the South Street Seaport museum Saturday. Her father, David Anderson, says she slipped through guardrails when he averted his eyes to adjust his camera.

Julien Duret, of Lyon, France, jumped into the water. Anderson followed closely behind. Duret scooped up the girl and gave her to her father.

"The emotion took over," Duret told the Daily News Tuesday from his hometown of Lyon, France. "I didn't think at all. It happened very fast. I reacted very fast. ... I've never done anything like that before."

The New York Daily News says the 29-year-old tourist got in a cab after the rescue. Duret says he doesn't think he's a hero and that anyone would do the same thing.

"I was just happy that I was able to help her, and I am just happy that the family has been reunited," he told the Daily News.

Anderson says his daughter was unhurt. He says he feels guilty about momentarily taking his eyes off her.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/36218043/ns/today-today_people/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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