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Tuesday, May 7, 2013

In 2005, Kidnap Suspect’s Daughter Spoke of Seeing Her Friend for the Last Time

A year after 14-year-old Gina DeJesus vanished in 2004 while walking home from her middle school, America’s Most Wanted interviewed her classmate, one of the last people believed to have seen her alive. On Tuesday, the DeJesus family learned that the classmate, Arlene Castro, is also the daughter of the Cleveland man accused of kidnapping Ms. DeJesus and hiding her and two other women in his basement for years.

Ms. DeJesus and the other two women, Amanda Berry and Michele Knight, were found alive on Monday night in the home of Ms. Castro’s father, Ariel Castro, after a neighbor responded to Ms. Berry’s screams for help.

Ms. Castro, now 22, could not be reached for comment. She is not a suspect in the case that led to the arrest of her father, who is 52, and his two brothers, Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50, as my colleagues Christine Hauser and Trip Gabriel have reported.

In another twist in the case, The Lede reported earlier on Tuesday that the suspect’s son, Ariel, who goes by the name Anthony Castro, interviewed Ms. DeJesus’ mother in 2004 and wrote about the missing person case for a local newspaper while he was a journalism student at Bowling Green State University.

On the America’s Most Wanted episode, Arlene Castro said that she and Ms. DeJesus had been walking home from school and had hoped to spend the afternoon at Ms. DeJesus’ home. But Ms. Castro’s mother, who was living at a different address from her father, told her that she had to come home.

“I decided to call my mom, ask her,” Arlene Castro said in the interview. Ms. DeJesus gave her 50 cents to call her mother. “She said no, I can’t go over to her house. Well, O.K., I will talk to you later. She just walked.”

The reporter for America’s Most Wanted said Ms. DeJesus had headed home on foot because, after giving her friend 50 cents, she did not have enough money left to take a bus.

The Castros were among the first Hispanic families to settle in Cleveland, immigrating there from Puerto Rico just after World War II, The Plain Dealer reported.

They found work in steel mills and automobile plants, The Plain Dealer reported, but some family members also opened small businesses and invested in rental properties on the city’s lower West Side.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the given name of one of the suspect's arrested in the case. He is Onil Castro, not Onil.



In 2005, Kidnapper’s Daughter Spoke of Seeing Her Friend for the Last Time

A year after 14-year-old Gina DeJesus vanished in 2004 while walking home from her middle school, America’s Most Wanted interviewed her classmate, one of the last people believed to have seen her alive. On Tuesday, the DeJesus family learned that the classmate, Arlene Castro, is also the daughter of the Cleveland man accused of kidnapping Ms. DeJesus and hiding her and two other women in his basement for years.

Ms. DeJesus and the other two women, Amanda Berry and Michele Knight, were found alive on Monday night in the home of Ms. Castro’s father, Ariel Castro, after a neighbor responded to Ms. Berry’s screams for help.

Ms. Castro, now 22, could not be reached for comment. She is not a suspect in the case that led to the arrest of her father, who is 52, and his two brothers, Pedro, 54, and Oneil, 50, as my colleagues Christine Hauser and Trip Gabriel have reported.

In another twist in the case, The Lede reported earlier on Tuesday that the suspect’s son, Ariel, who goes by the name Anthony Castro, interviewed Ms. DeJesus’ mother in 2004 and wrote about the missing person case for a local newspaper while he was a journalism student at Bowling Green State University.

On the America’s Most Wanted episode, Arlene Castro said that she and Ms. DeJesus had been walking home from school and had hoped to spend the afternoon at Ms. DeJesus’ home. But Ms. Castro’s mother, who was living at a different address from her father, told her that she had to come home.

“I decided to call my mom, ask her,” Arlene Castro said in the interview. Ms. DeJesus gave her 50 cents to call her mother. “She said no, I can’t go over to her house. Well, O.K., I will talk to you later. She just walked.”

The reporter for America’s Most Wanted said Ms. DeJesus had headed home on foot because, after giving her friend 50 cents, she did not have enough money left to take a bus.

The Castros were among the first Hispanic families to settle in Cleveland, immigrating there from Puerto Rico just after World War II, The Plain Dealer reported.

They found work in steel mills and automobile plants, The Plain Dealer reported, but some family members also opened small businesses and invested in rental properties on the city’s lower West Side.



Syria Loses Access to the Internet

Syria’s access to the Internet was cut on Tuesday. The most likely culprit, security researchers said, was the Syrian government.

Syrian Internet traffic came to a halt just before 3 p.m. Eastern time. Google reported a drop in Internet traffic around that time, as did the Local Coordinating Committees, an antigovernment activist group in Syria.

Four physical cables connect Syria to the Internet â€" three under the sea, and the fourth over land through Turkey. For outsiders to cause Tuesday’s outage, security experts say, they would have had to physically cut all four cables simultaneously.

That does not appear to have happened in this case, according to security experts. Instead, someone with access to the physical connections dropped the Border Gateway Protocol, or B.G.P., routes into Syria in such a way that any information trying to enter the country was not able to find its way.

“It’s akin to someone removing all the street signs into Syria,” said Matthew Prince, the founder of CloudFlare, an Internet security firm that distributes large volumes of traffic across the Internet. The firm put together a video illustrating Syria’s outage.

The same technique was used to shut down the Internet and mobile phone service last November. Syrian government officials said terrorists, not the government, were responsible for that outage, but evidence pointed to government involvement.

Ironically, Syrian opposition groups are more immune to Internet and cellphone outages than ordinary Syrians. In Syria’s opposition-controlled territories, rebels have successfully built an alternate system of Internet and cellphone connectivity using two-way satellite devices.

But experts warn that the use of satellite devices also makes it much easier for the Syrian government to track the rebels’ location.

“Radio direction finding and signals intelligence could easily be deployed in this scenario to figure out where the opposition is communicating from,” said John Scott-Railton, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab, an organization at the University of Toronto that focuses on Internet security.



Syria Loses Access to the Internet

Syria’s access to the Internet was cut on Tuesday. The most likely culprit, security researchers said, was the Syrian government.

Syrian Internet traffic came to a halt just before 3 p.m. Eastern time. Google reported a drop in Internet traffic around that time, as did the Local Coordinating Committees, an antigovernment activist group in Syria.

Four physical cables connect Syria to the Internet â€" three under the sea, and the fourth over land through Turkey. For outsiders to cause Tuesday’s outage, security experts say, they would have had to physically cut all four cables simultaneously.

That does not appear to have happened in this case, according to security experts. Instead, someone with access to the physical connections dropped the Border Gateway Protocol, or B.G.P., routes into Syria in such a way that any information trying to enter the country was not able to find its way.

“It’s akin to someone removing all the street signs into Syria,” said Matthew Prince, the founder of CloudFlare, an Internet security firm that distributes large volumes of traffic across the Internet. The firm put together a video illustrating Syria’s outage.

The same technique was used to shut down the Internet and mobile phone service last November. Syrian government officials said terrorists, not the government, were responsible for that outage, but evidence pointed to government involvement.

Ironically, Syrian opposition groups are more immune to Internet and cellphone outages than ordinary Syrians. In Syria’s opposition-controlled territories, rebels have successfully built an alternate system of Internet and cellphone connectivity using two-way satellite devices.

But experts warn that the use of satellite devices also makes it much easier for the Syrian government to track the rebels’ location.

“Radio direction finding and signals intelligence could easily be deployed in this scenario to figure out where the opposition is communicating from,” said John Scott-Railton, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab, an organization at the University of Toronto that focuses on Internet security.



Syria Loses Access to the Internet

Syria’s access to the Internet was cut on Tuesday. The most likely culprit, security researchers said, was the Syrian government.

Syrian Internet traffic came to a halt just before 3 p.m. Eastern time. Google reported a drop in Internet traffic around that time, as did the Local Coordinating Committees, an antigovernment activist group in Syria.

Four physical cables connect Syria to the Internet â€" three under the sea, and the fourth over land through Turkey. For outsiders to cause Tuesday’s outage, security experts say, they would have had to physically cut all four cables simultaneously.

That does not appear to have happened in this case, according to security experts. Instead, someone with access to the physical connections dropped the Border Gateway Protocol, or B.G.P., routes into Syria in such a way that any information trying to enter the country was not able to find its way.

“It’s akin to someone removing all the street signs into Syria,” said Matthew Prince, the founder of CloudFlare, an Internet security firm that distributes large volumes of traffic across the Internet. The firm put together a video illustrating Syria’s outage.

The same technique was used to shut down the Internet and mobile phone service last November. Syrian government officials said terrorists, not the government, were responsible for that outage, but evidence pointed to government involvement.

Ironically, Syrian opposition groups are more immune to Internet and cellphone outages than ordinary Syrians. In Syria’s opposition-controlled territories, rebels have successfully built an alternate system of Internet and cellphone connectivity using two-way satellite devices.

But experts warn that the use of satellite devices also makes it much easier for the Syrian government to track the rebels’ location.

“Radio direction finding and signals intelligence could easily be deployed in this scenario to figure out where the opposition is communicating from,” said John Scott-Railton, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab, an organization at the University of Toronto that focuses on Internet security.



Test Run: Dots, A Simple But Addictive Game from Betaworks

A couple of years ago, the Apple iPhone’s graphics reached a point that allowed developers to make video games for mobile phones that felt as immersive and complex as those for traditional hand-held game systems. But as the games became ever more complicated, I stopped downloading them.

Now I’m back â€" and quite frankly obsessed â€" with a new game called Dots that is very similar to the board game Connect Four that you might have played as a kid.

Dots, a free app, doesn’t have any fancy graphics. It is simply a screen of 36 colored dots â€" as simple, flat and clean as you can get. Which is what makes it truly wonderful.

Dots was created by Betaworks, a technology incubator in New York. It made its debut in the Apple iTunes Store last week and has already zoomed to the top of the charts, where it is now listed as the third most downloaded free application.

To play, you simply connect the dots. Drawing your finger across the screen creates a line that can be placed through dots of the same color. The more dots you connect, the higher the score. You can also share these scores with friends on Twitter and Facebook, taunting them to compete with you.

There are a few secrets to winning at Dots. As Patrick Moberg, the game’s creator noted on Twitter, if you draw a square on the board with four dots of the same color, “it removes all dots of that color from the board.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Moberg told me he played with a lot of old traditional board games while designing Dots. “As I was building and designing, the challenge every day was what could be stripped out and still make it fun,” he said, giving a nod to physical games.

Mr. Moberg said he is exploring building an iPad version of the game and adding more social integration to the iPhone app, including one-on-one game play with friends.

As I noted in a post last month, app makers are using flatter designs to make their applications easier to navigate on mobile devices. It seems this is now applying to video games, too. Letterpress, a clever word game for the iPhone and iPad, which is also very flat and beautiful, made a big splash among iOS users when it was introduced late last year.

“We’re constantly thinking about engagement, and how can you build things that become a habit in people’s lives,” explained John Borthwick, chief executive at Betaworks. “That led us to ask if we can build a game that is a beautiful and simple experience.

“We thought about design with a big D, and it is part of the complete process, embedded in everything from the user interface to the viral aspects,” he said. “It’s design through and through.”

Whatever the designers of Dots did, it seems to be working. A company blog post Tuesday noted that Dots is expected to pass one million players by the end of the day.



Test Run: Dots, A Simple But Addictive Game from Betaworks

A couple of years ago, the Apple iPhone’s graphics reached a point that allowed developers to make video games for mobile phones that felt as immersive and complex as those for traditional hand-held game systems. But as the games became ever more complicated, I stopped downloading them.

Now I’m back â€" and quite frankly obsessed â€" with a new game called Dots that is very similar to the board game Connect Four that you might have played as a kid.

Dots, a free app, doesn’t have any fancy graphics. It is simply a screen of 36 colored dots â€" as simple, flat and clean as you can get. Which is what makes it truly wonderful.

Dots was created by Betaworks, a technology incubator in New York. It made its debut in the Apple iTunes Store last week and has already zoomed to the top of the charts, where it is now listed as the third most downloaded free application.

To play, you simply connect the dots. Drawing your finger across the screen creates a line that can be placed through dots of the same color. The more dots you connect, the higher the score. You can also share these scores with friends on Twitter and Facebook, taunting them to compete with you.

There are a few secrets to winning at Dots. As Patrick Moberg, the game’s creator noted on Twitter, if you draw a square on the board with four dots of the same color, “it removes all dots of that color from the board.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Moberg told me he played with a lot of old traditional board games while designing Dots. “As I was building and designing, the challenge every day was what could be stripped out and still make it fun,” he said, giving a nod to physical games.

Mr. Moberg said he is exploring building an iPad version of the game and adding more social integration to the iPhone app, including one-on-one game play with friends.

As I noted in a post last month, app makers are using flatter designs to make their applications easier to navigate on mobile devices. It seems this is now applying to video games, too. Letterpress, a clever word game for the iPhone and iPad, which is also very flat and beautiful, made a big splash among iOS users when it was introduced late last year.

“We’re constantly thinking about engagement, and how can you build things that become a habit in people’s lives,” explained John Borthwick, chief executive at Betaworks. “That led us to ask if we can build a game that is a beautiful and simple experience.

“We thought about design with a big D, and it is part of the complete process, embedded in everything from the user interface to the viral aspects,” he said. “It’s design through and through.”

Whatever the designers of Dots did, it seems to be working. A company blog post Tuesday noted that Dots is expected to pass one million players by the end of the day.



Test Run: Dots, A Simple But Addictive Game from Betaworks

A couple of years ago, the Apple iPhone’s graphics reached a point that allowed developers to make video games for mobile phones that felt as immersive and complex as those for traditional hand-held game systems. But as the games became ever more complicated, I stopped downloading them.

Now I’m back â€" and quite frankly obsessed â€" with a new game called Dots that is very similar to the board game Connect Four that you might have played as a kid.

Dots, a free app, doesn’t have any fancy graphics. It is simply a screen of 36 colored dots â€" as simple, flat and clean as you can get. Which is what makes it truly wonderful.

Dots was created by Betaworks, a technology incubator in New York. It made its debut in the Apple iTunes Store last week and has already zoomed to the top of the charts, where it is now listed as the third most downloaded free application.

To play, you simply connect the dots. Drawing your finger across the screen creates a line that can be placed through dots of the same color. The more dots you connect, the higher the score. You can also share these scores with friends on Twitter and Facebook, taunting them to compete with you.

There are a few secrets to winning at Dots. As Patrick Moberg, the game’s creator noted on Twitter, if you draw a square on the board with four dots of the same color, “it removes all dots of that color from the board.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Moberg told me he played with a lot of old traditional board games while designing Dots. “As I was building and designing, the challenge every day was what could be stripped out and still make it fun,” he said, giving a nod to physical games.

Mr. Moberg said he is exploring building an iPad version of the game and adding more social integration to the iPhone app, including one-on-one game play with friends.

As I noted in a post last month, app makers are using flatter designs to make their applications easier to navigate on mobile devices. It seems this is now applying to video games, too. Letterpress, a clever word game for the iPhone and iPad, which is also very flat and beautiful, made a big splash among iOS users when it was introduced late last year.

“We’re constantly thinking about engagement, and how can you build things that become a habit in people’s lives,” explained John Borthwick, chief executive at Betaworks. “That led us to ask if we can build a game that is a beautiful and simple experience.

“We thought about design with a big D, and it is part of the complete process, embedded in everything from the user interface to the viral aspects,” he said. “It’s design through and through.”

Whatever the designers of Dots did, it seems to be working. A company blog post Tuesday noted that Dots is expected to pass one million players by the end of the day.



Video of Imran Khan’s Fall at Election Rally in Pakistan

Video from Pakistan’s Express Tribune showed the former cricketer Imran Khan falling at an election rally in Lahore on Tuesday.

Imran Khan, a former cricket superstar who has been drawing huge crowds to campaign rallies in Pakistan ahead of Saturday’s election, was rushed to a hospital in Lahore on Tuesday after he was knocked off a forklift at the edge of a stage and fell head-first to the ground, nearly 15 feet below.

As video of the incident posted on Vimeo by Karachi’s Express Tribune showed, Mr. Khan was being lifted up to the stage when a security man clambered on to the forklift causing the candidate and two other men to lose their footing. According to initial reports from Pakistani journalists and bloggers, Mr. Khan was in stable condition.

Footage of the accident broadcast by Pakistan’s Geo TV also showed Mr. Khan being rushed from the scene after the fall, with blood on his face.

Video from Pakistan’s Geo News showed a bloodied Imran Khan being carried away after his fall on Tuesday.

According to updates on his condition posted on the official Twitter feed of his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the 60-year-old suffered “a minor fracture” and was “stable, alert, awake and conscious” after getting 12 stitches.

Mr. Khan’s former wife, the British writer and socialite Jemima Khan, also confirmed that he was conscious, and praying aloud, as he was rushed to the hospital, according to a family member.

Pakistani commentators â€" including Umar Cheema, Nadeem Paracha, Beena Sarwar and the blogger who writes as Raza Rumi â€" noted with relief that rival politicians, bloggers and activists mostly paused the often-fractious debate about the nation’s problems online and on the campaign trail in sympathy with Mr. Khan.

Before being taken seriously as a politician, Mr. Khan was perhaps best-known as a member of the international jet-set. His ex-wife was close friends with Princess Diana, who helped Mr. Khan raise funds for Lahore’s Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital, which he founded in memory of his late mother. On Tuesday night, Mr. Khan was being treated there.

Mr. Khan’s celebrity appeal, loud opposition to American drone strikes, and calls to engage rather than fight Taliban militants have earned him a strong following in the final days of this general election campaign. As Pankaj Mishra explained in a profile of Mr. Khan for The New York Times Magazine last year, the glamorous former cricketer initially “struggled to break into Pakistani politics,” but has successfully reworked his image:

He now casts himself as the archetypal confused sinner who has discovered the restorative certainties of religion and is outraged over the decadence of his own class. “In today’s Lahore and Karachi,” he writes, “rich women go to glitzy parties in Western clothes chauffeured by men with entirely different customs and values.” His avowals of Islam, his identification with the suffering masses and his attacks on his affluent, English-speaking peers have long been mocked in the living rooms of Lahore and Karachi as the hypocritical ravings of “Im the Dim” and “Taliban Khan” â€" the two favored monikers for him. (His villa is commonly cited as evidence of his own unalloyed elitism.)

Nevertheless, Khan’s autobiography creates a cogent picture out of his â€" and Pakistan’s â€" clashing identities. There is the proud young man of Pashtun blood born into Pakistan’s Anglicized feudal and bureaucratic elite â€" an elite that disdained their poor, Urdu-speaking compatriots. There is the student and cricketer in 1970s Britain, when racism was endemic and even Pakistanis considered themselves inferior to their former white masters. Then we meet the brilliant cricket captain who inspired a world-beating team; the D.I.Y. philanthropist who pursued his dream of building a world-class cancer hospital in Pakistan; the jaded middle-aged sybarite who found a wise Sufi mentor; the political neophyte who awakened to social and economic injustice; and finally the experienced politician, who after 15 years of having his faith tested by electoral failure is now convinced of his destiny as Pakistan’s savior.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



SAP Takes It All to the Cloud

SAP, the German software giant, is making one of the largest pushes into cloud computing yet seen from a large incumbent company. It may even be destroying its own business, in order to build for a new one.

SAP is famous for developing enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software. ERP is used to control complex manufacturing, run corporate functions like financials, or manage a company’s systems of supply. A few years ago SAP introduced HANA, a product that combines fast computing and data retrieval to better analyze how well a company is working. The product has been a big hit, and SAP has been proclaiming it the company’s future.

On Tuesday SAP said it would offer HANA as a cloud-based product, providing companies with access for the cost of a license. Prices were not disclosed. SAP has established a network of seven data centers around the globe to support the endeavor, a company official said, and will begin by deploying 30,000 computers for the network.

“We will do cloud-based ERP on a massive scale,” said Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board and one of the people who oversaw the project. Of SAP’s regular product, he said, “At some point in the future, complex implementations should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.”

SAP, along with companies that have agreed to test the product, already has 750 terabytes of data in the system, enough data to fill 750 million good-sized books. The company expects to have twice that amount in the system by the end of the year.

That probably is not all that much data, compared with the amount SAP touches the old-fashioned way, with conventional computer servers inside companies, but it is a decent start. As SAP builds the trust of big customers with its cloud, Mr. Sikka said, SAP will become a giant.

“We have single customers running projects that are bigger than the entire Salesforce.com cloud,” he said.

SAP has already been running both cloud and software as a service, or SAAS, projects, thanks to its acquisition of two companies, Ariba and SuccessFactors. With HANA in the cloud, however, SAP is moving much more into offering insight online, either directly to its customers, or as a service to end-users.

Mr. Sikka said SAP served some 220 utilities globally, who reach about 2.5 billion customers. The utilities could let the customers use HANA to model how much they were spending, and finding ways to cut their bills. “We realized we could do that for them with 2,000 servers,” he said.

Other uses of the data analysis tool might include real-time understanding of online customers, financial risk analysis or rapid insight into geologic information for energy companies, he said.

If SAP follows through on a fast build out to cloud computing, it could create some tension with Amazon Web Services, currently an SAP partner. AWS has recently made it clear that it wants to host a lot more corporate computing in its giant cloud.

And, as usual over the last couple of decades, the move will be viewed in terms of competition with Oracle, which is operating its own cloud services, but also offers a lot of servers and software for customers to buy and use inside their companies.

“Oracle - what can I say?” Mr. Sikka said. “The future is in open clouds, not proprietary hardware.”

Oracle didn’t see it that way.

“Technically speaking, neither is more or less proprietary than the other,” said an Oracle official, who was not authorized to speak for attribution. “HANA is expensive and proprietary, it must be paired with a hardware system from the factory. We use standard commodity components, and engineer the hardware and the software., so we can deliver better performance.”



Son of Cleveland Kidnapping Suspect Wrote About Missing Girl in 2004

The son of Ariel Castro, the Cleveland man suspected of abducting three women and keeping them locked and hidden in his home for years, wrote about one of the missing women while a journalism student working for a local community newspaper in June 2004.

Under the byline, Ariel Castro, the younger Mr. Castro, who now goes by the name Anthony Castro, interviewed the mother of Gina DeJesus, just months after her daughter, then 14, vanished while on her way home from middle school.

The article, posted June 2004 in the Cleveland Plain Press. a monthly newspaper, began:

Since April 2, 2004, on the last day that 14-year-old Gina DeJesus was last seen on her way home from Wilbur Wright Middle School, neighbors have been taken by an overwhelming need for caution. Parents are more strictly enforcing curfews, encouraging their children to walk in groups, or driving them to and from school when they had previously walked alone.

“You can tell the difference,” DeJesus’ mother, Nancy Ruiz said. “People are watching out for each other’s kids. It’s a shame that a tragedy had to happen for me to really know my neighbors. Bless their hearts, they’ve been great.”

On Cleveland’s west side, it is difficult to go any length of time without seeing Gina’s picture on telephone poles, in windows or on cars along the busy streets.

As my colleague, Christine Hauser reports, Ariel Castro, a 52-year-old former school bus driver, along with his two of his brothers were arrested after the dramatic discovery Monday night that the three women had been abducted and held captive for years.

They escaped after a neighbor broke down part of a door when he heard one of the women screaming and asking for help. In her 9-1-1 call to police, she said: “I’m Amanda Berry, I’ve been on the news for the last 10 years.”

Ms. Berry was 16 years old when she disappeared after her shift at a Burger King restaurant in 2003. Also found in the house were Ms. DeJesus and Michelle Knight, who was 20 when she was last seen in 2002.

Sara Shookman, a reporter for WKYC Television in Cleveland, broke the news that the suspect’s son, now 31, wrote about the missing person case for the monthly newspaper in 2004.

She interviewed the younger Mr. Castro last night. When they spoke, she said, he replied: “This is beyond comprehension … I’m truly stunned right now.”

In an interview Wednesday, Chuck Hoven, managing editor for the Cleveland Plain Press, said that the younger Mr. Castro was a journalism student at Bowling Green when he reported on the missing case of Ms. DeJesus. He said that he wrote the article for a class assignment and did not report regularly for the monthly publication.

Mr. Hoven said that the disappearance of Ms. Berry, followed a year later by Ms. DeJesus in the same area, transfixed the neighborhood for years. He said both families worked hard not to let police, the media and people in the neighborhood forget about the girls.

“You can even see posters around today in different stores for both girls,” he said.

Mr. Hoven recalled that Amanda Berry’s mother, until her death, would go out every Friday to the site, near the Burger King, where her daughter was last seen, still wearing her uniform.

He said that he had been unaware of the disappearance of Ms. Knight.

The house in which they were found is about three and a half miles away from where they were all last seen, he said.



The Tale of the Tsarnaev Brothers\' Carjacking Victim

In an interview published in The Boston Globe, a 26-year-old Chinese man describes his harrowing 90 minutes with the Tsarnaev brothers after they commandeered his car on the night they were trying to flee the police.

It is the most extensive version of events yet of how the older brother forced his way into the Mercedes-Benz of the man identified as a graduate student and entrepreneur. Then it recounts what the victim, called Danny in the story because he did not want his full name used, heard and saw before he managed to escape, alert the police and let them know they could trace the vehicle because he had left his iPhone behind.

Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz, describes how Danny was essentially at the wheel of his own kidnapping for a good part of the time; of how he controlled his fear during the “many moments in their mental chess match” and ultimately how he executed his own escape from the brothers.

The story of that night unfolds like a Tarantino movie, bursts of harrowing action laced with dark humor and dialogue absurd for its ordinariness, reminders of just how young the men in the car were. Girls, credit limits for students, the marvels of the Mercedes-Benz ML 350 and the iPhone­ 5, whether anyone still listens to CDs - all were discussed by the two 26-year-olds and the 19-year-old driving around on a Thursday night.

Danny described 90 harrowing minutes, first with the younger brother following in a second car, then with both brothers in the Mercedes, where they openly discussed driving to New York, though Danny could not make out if they were planning another attack. Throughout the ordeal, he did as they asked while silently analyzing every threatened command, every overheard snatch of dialogue for clues about where and when they might kill him.

A New Hampshire television station, WMUR-TV, also interviewed the man and published his story, earlier this week.

But The Globe's interview goes into more detail, like the use by the police of Danny's iPhone to track the car after he had escaped, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev's use of an English-to-Chinese language translation app to intercept messages to Danny from a friend wondering where he was.

There were also poignant moments of insight into the state of mind of a captive contemplating that his death might come at any moment:

“Death is so close to me,” Danny recalled thinking. His life had until that moment seemed ascendant, from a province in Central China to graduate school at Northeastern University to a Kendall Square start-up.

“I don't want to die,” he thought. “I have a lot of dreams that haven't come true yet.”

Mr. Moskowitz, The Globe reporter, spoke to CNN about the story and described him as having “the perfect combination of innocence and poise and calm.”



What Is Different About This Explosion?


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Do you notice anything peculiar about the explosion that destroys this Honda Civic?

Watch this very brief video clip of a Honda Civic hatchback being destroyed by an explosion from within. Does something seem odd about the blast? (No, the answer is not that the skin of the passenger-side door almost destroyed my camera.)

In a moment, we'll provide a clue, and then the real answer.

First, the background. Last week the staff and students in the United States military's Advanced Improvised Explosive Device Disposal course participated in a bomb-disposal drill at Northwest Florida Regional Airport, on the Florida Panhandle. An account of the drill, held just days after the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, appeared in The New York Times on Friday.

A soldier inspected a car after a detonation.Michael Spooneybarger for The New York Times A soldier inspected a car after a detonation.

That drill brought together military and civilian law enforcement and safety organizations â€" an explicit acknowledgment that in the fight to thwart makeshift bombs, the public is best served when knowledge, skills and equipment are pooled. And it is an irrefutable, if sad, fact that there is no pool of experience like the military's veterans of explosive ordnance disposal teams in Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries where improvised bombs became the primary causes of wounds to service members, and where the bombs have been used extensively against civilians.

Almost all of the Advanced Improvised Explosive Device Disposal course, which is part of the United States Navy's school for explosive ordnance disposal technicians, takes place in classrooms and training ranges on Eglin Air Force Base. The video at the top of this post was filmed at one of those ranges last week.

Look at the video again. Here's the clue: Do you notice what is missing? Watch closely, because once you notice what is not present, the game is given away.

What is missing is the flame. Clearly there is a sizable blast originating somewhere near the back seat. But there is no flash and no fire. The car is blown open by pressure.

So what is happening? This explosion was a demonstration of what bomb-disposal technicians call a disrupter charge â€" an explosive encased within another substance. The purpose of such charges is to instantly separate the components of a bomb without causing the bomb's main charge to explode.

There are many forms of disrupter charges, including off-the-shelf products like the BootBanger, an explosive paired to narrow drums of water, which can be placed under the trunk of a parked car, and will project the water and force upward when the charge is detonated.

One of the ideas behind such charges is that they can minimize property damage around a suspected car bomb. A comparatively small disrupter charge will destroy the suspected vehicle, but its effects on the surrounding area will be far less than if a car bomb were to explode.

In the case of the video above, the explosion was caused by a recently fielded form of disrupter charge known as a VMODS, the military's acronym for Vehicle Modular Overpressure Disrupter System. A photograph of one of the modules is below.

A Vehicle Modular Overpressure Disrupter System.C.J. Chivers/The New York Times A Vehicle Modular Overpressure Disrupter System.

The VMODS does not rely on water. It is a multidirectional charge of plastic explosive encased in a squat plastic cylinder of ABC fire-extinguisher powder. The modules can be fitted together, so that a disposal team can select the size of the blast they seek, depending on the size and composition of the area or the vehicle the technicians hope to disrupt. In this case, three modules were fitted together, for a total of a little less than two pounds of net explosive weight.

For the purposes of this demonstration, the charge was emplaced by a Marine technician, Gunnery Sergeant Pierre Anthony. But the VMODS was designed to be carried and emplaced by a Talon robot, which can shatter a car window with its robotic arm, then drop the charge into place. The VMODS is then detonated remotely, by an operator at a safe distance back.

Back to the quiz. On Thursday, I posted this video on my personal blog, and asked readers if they could spot what was peculiar about the explosion. In-house, one editor guessed it right â€" Greg Winter of the Foreign desk. And outside The Times, Matt Egleston, a reader, tweeted the correct answer, too. “No flame/fire?” he wrote.

That's exactly right, and by design â€" an explosive tool that can provide a safer and lighter touch when faced with one of the most treacherous problems presented by terrorism and unconventional war.



Critics of Israel\'s West Bank Occupation Say Calm Before New Violence Was an Illusion

A video report from Arutz Sheva, an Israeli settler news organization, on the funeral of Evyatar Borovsky, who was killed Tuesday near his home in the West Bank by a Palestinian attacker.

As my colleagues Isabel Kershner and Fares Akram report, the tension of daily life in the occupied West Bank exploded into deadly violence on Tuesday, when a knife-wielding Palestinian man attacked and killed an Israeli settler at a bus stop. The attacker, identified as Salam Zaghal, a 24-year-old who recently spent three years in jail for throwing stones, then seized the dead man's pistol and engaged in a shootout with police officers.

Before the victim, Evyatar Borovsky, a 31-year-old father of five, was laid to rest in an emotional ceremony, vigilantes from the Israeli settlements that dot the West Bank sought to punish their Palestinian neighbors by smashing the windows of a mosque, setting fields on fire and throwing stones at a school bus.

On social networks and in statements to the news media, representatives of Israel's military and the leadership of the settler community expressed no doubt about the nature of the attack, describing the killing as the murder of an Israeli civilian by a Palestinian terrorist.

Some supporters of the national-religious settlement project, like the editors of The Jewish Press in Brooklyn, even blamed the officers who responded to the attack for not killing the attacker on the spot. “It is not clear,” The Press reported, “why they shot the terrorist in the leg, and not the head.”

From Palestinians and Israelis who oppose the occupation, though, condemnations of the killing were mixed with calls to pay attention to the broader context - that an Arab community of 2.5 million, living under military rule for 46 years, has been forced to accommodate itself to an influx of hundreds of thousands of Israeli migrants to expanding Jewish-only settlements, which are defended by armed soldiers, officers and civilian guards.

In a statement offering “condolences to the family of the murder victim,” the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights said it was “horrified by the nationalistic murder” but also suggested that Palestinians were engaged in “a morally justified campaign against a discriminatory military regime.” The rabbis quickly added, however, that even a just cause “does not justify harm to civilians, and we harshly condemn any attack such as this.”

According to Yousef Munayyer, director of the Palestine Center in Washington, his group has documented more than 1,200 incidents of violence by settlers in the 18 months since the last killing of an Israeli civilian in the occupied territory.

In a post for the Israeli news blog +972, Mairav Zonszein argued that the 18 months since the last fatal attack on an Israeli in the West Bank had created “an illusion of calm and stability” in an unsustainable status quo. Ms. Zonszein, an Israeli-American blogger who works with Ta'ayush, an Arab-Jewish group that supports rural Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, wrote:

During this “calm” period, most Israelis continue going about their lives. They aren't affected by the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a daily basis. But days like today, when the phrase “terror attack” is back in the news, Israelis suddenly remember that we are in a violent conflict. The government, of course, does a good job of reminding us we are the victims.

But on all those days when there is no violence against Israelis in the news, on all those days when Israelis can go about their business, the situation is actually not at all stable or calm. It's definitely not calm for the Palestinian population, specifically in the West Bank, where life under occupation is anything but free of violence.

By way of explanation, Ms. Zonszein cited remarks published last year by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, on the constant pressure of life in the West Bank between outbreaks of deadly violence, in which he asked the rhetorical question: “What goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e., when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)?” His answer was:

What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians in the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration up to individual killings), all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.

“To avoid any kind of misunderstanding,” Mr. Žižek added, “taking all this into account in no way implies any ‘understanding' for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy.”

In the days before the deadly attack, Ms. Zonszein's fellow activists at Ta'ayush were working to draw attention to how very tense daily life in the occupied West Bank can be when Israeli soldiers try to keep Palestinian farmers away from land near Israeli settlements.

Over the weekend, Ta'ayush released a brief video clip showing an Israeli soldier shouting with rage at Israeli activists who had accompanied Palestinian shepherds from a West Bank village as they tried to graze their sheep on land near Othni'el, an Israeli settlement.

Video recorded by an Israeli activist in the West Bank this month showed an Israeli soldier screaming at Palestinian shepherds and their Israeli supporters.

According to Ms. Zonszein's translation, when a Ta'ayush activist named Guy interrupted the soldier as he was shouting at a shepherd, the reservist turned to Guy's camera and screamed, “Get out of here, you Israel haters!” After threatening to hit the activist, he added, “You are worse than the Arabs!” The officer then shouted at a female Israeli activist, “Shut up, Israel hater who goes to bed with Arabs!”

After the video was featured on the Web site of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli military called the officer's conduct unbecoming but suggested that the confrontation had been provoked by the “left-wing activists” who recorded it.

Activists from Ta'ayush have also documented an apparent effort by Israeli officers in the West Bank to prevent footage of ordinary aspects of the occupation from being recorded. In another video clip, released with a blog post on Saturday, soldiers can be seen repeatedly blocking the lenses of Ta'ayush activists as they attempt to film the shepherds being forced away from land near the settlement.

Video of Israeli officers using their own phones and cameras to block the lenses of Israeli activists attempting to record their work in the West Bank.

Asked about this footage, in which officers can be seen using their own phones and cameras to block the activists' lenses, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Capt. Eytan Buchman, told The Lede: “A Palestinian shepherd, accompanied by Israeli activists, tried to illegally graze a field adjacent to the town of Othni'el in a blatant attempt to create a provocation. Security forces arrived in order to distance the shepherd and activists without the use of force.”

Israeli soldiers blocked the cameras of Israeli activists who were recording their activities in the occupied West Bank this month.Guy, Ta'ayush Israeli soldiers blocked the cameras of Israeli activists who were recording their activities in the occupied West Bank this month.

Amiel Vardi, a classics professor at Hebrew University and one of the founders of Ta'ayush, was with the shepherds in South Mount Hebron when the video was recorded. He told The Lede in an e-mail that the soldiers “gave no reason” for blocking the activists' cameras. “On the contrary, they insisted that they do not restrict our filming - only filming us, too, as is their right,” he wrote. “So much for what they said. As for what they actually did, I suppose they know that they have no legal authority to drive the shepherds away from these lands, and are not too keen to be filmed doing it.”

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, Mr. Vardi “was shot in 2006 by a settler when he and friends tried to help Palestinian farmers reach their vineyards during the grape harvest.”

According to the Ta'ayush activists, the effort to prevent them from recording scenes of routine confrontations in the occupied West Bank is a concerted one. Last month, they posted a video compilation of officers blocking their cameras during several visits to the area, and at the start of this month, they were even detained for several hours by police officers investigating a complaint filed by settlers who accused the activists of “disturbing public order” by filming construction at an unauthorized settlement outpost.



Egyptian Activist Defends Anti-Israel Tweets

A video profile of Mona Seif explaining her nomination as a finalist for the 2013 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.

Last Updated, 10:12 p.m. An Egyptian rights activist issued a defiant response on Thursday to critics who argue that her anti-Israel stance should disqualify her from consideration for a major international award.

The activist, Mona Seif, was named a finalist for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders last week, based on her work to end military trials for civilians in Egypt.

Days later, U.N. Watch, an affiliate of the American Jewish Committee that monitors international organizations for bias against Israel and intolerance, called on members of the award's jury to “cancel Ms. Seif's nomination” because of a series of anti-Israel tweets that the group characterized as “public advocacy of violence against civilians, terrorism and war crimes.”

In a statement posted on Facebook, Ms. Seif - a scientist and blogger who, on her popular @Monasosh Twitter feed and in interviews from Tahrir Square, helped document and explain the protest movement that forced President Hosni Mubarak from office in 2011 - defended Twitter comments in which she praised the sabotage of an Egyptian pipeline bringing gas to Israel, cheered the burning of an Israeli flag pulled from the country's besieged embassy in Cairo and rejected criticism of armed Palestinian militants by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

“One of the rights that we, the young people of Egypt, have succeeded in seizing is the right to insult our own government and to insult anyone whose policies are bad for our people,” Ms. Seif wrote on Thursday. “We insist on this right.”

Later in the statement, Ms. Seif said that she did not mean to endorse attacks on Israeli civilians in one of the tweets singled out by U.N. Watch, an angry reply to a message posted on Twitter by Amnesty International during Israel's Gaza offensive in November:

Ms. Seif inisted on Thursday that her comment was simply a rejection of the rights group's call for Palestinian militants to cease fire. “I have never called for nor celebrated attacks on civilians,” she wrote. “My position is very clear: I support people's right to resist occupation and I resist all attempts at portraying the siege of a predominantly civilian population by the world's fourth most powerful army as one of ‘equivalence.' ”

She signed off with a pledge not to be distracted from her work by “vulgar slandering” from U.N. Watch and its supporters, and called for ill will toward Israel to continue “until there's justice for the Palestinians.”

A day earlier, Ms. Seif had responded in a similar vein on Twitter to readers of U.N. Watch who accused her of being a “radical anti-Semite” and a “Muslim terrorist.”

U.N. Watch emphasized in a news release that two less prominent Egyptian bloggers, Maikel Nabil and Amr Bakly, have also publicly opposed Ms. Seif's nomination for the award.

The two men are far less influential voices in Egypt than Ms. Seif, whose tweets are read by 182,000. Mr. Nabil has 19,000 followers on Twitter; Mr. Bakry less than 5,000.

At one point in a Twitter conversation about the controversy, Mr. Nabil and Mr. Bakry accused the international rights groups that chose Ms. Seif as a finalist for the award of being “a front for the Egyptian General Intelligence, not human rights organizations.”

As The Lede reported in 2011, when Mr. Nabil was jailed for criticizing the military on his blog, many of the Egyptian activists who supported his right to freedom of expression and demonstrated against his imprisonment were strongly critical of his pro-Israel stance.

This week, supporters of Ms. Seif reminded Mr. Nabil, whose recent lecture in Israel was sponsored by U.N. Watch, that she had campaigned hard for his release, despite their political differences.

A number of leading Egyptian bloggers came to Ms. Seif's defense. One, Wael Khalil, suggested that her adversaries had chosen someone unlikely to retreat.

Ms. Seif's extended family includes several well-known rights activists. Her father, Ahmed Seif El-Islam Hamad, is a prominent lawyer and human rights activist who worked with the Cairo-based Hisham Mubarak Law Center during the Mubarak era and was jailed for five years in the 1980s. Her mother, Laila Soueif, is an activist and a professor at Cairo University. Her brother, Alaa Abd El Fattah, is a leading blogger who was imprisoned before and after the 2011 revolution for his writing and activism.

Ms. Seif's aunt, Ahdaf Soueif, a novelist and cultural commentator, said the attack on her niece had come with “boring predictability.”

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, was one member of the award jury to receive a letter from U.N. Watch this week urging him to cancel Ms. Seif's nomination. Asked by The Lede for his response to the controversy, Mr. Roth replied in an e-mail:

H.R.W. staff nominated two human rights defenders, and one made it through as a finalist (not Mona). Voting on the finalists will take place in October in a secret ballot by the 10 human rights groups on the jury, including H.R.W. H.R.W. researchers speak on the videos about all three finalists - as do some other jury members.

H.R.W. never takes a position on whether a country or rebel group should go to war or engage in “resistance.” Our focus is on how wars are fought, and we oppose any deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians. I haven't seen anything indicating that by “resistance” Mona means attacking civilians.



Investigation Suggests American Journalist Missing in Syria Is ‘Likely\' Held by Government

James Foley, an American journalist, has been missing in Syria since November.Steven Senne/Associated Press James Foley, an American journalist, has been missing in Syria since November.

James Foley, an American journalist who has been missing in Syria for 162 days, “was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group and subsequently turned over to Syrian government forces,” the news site GlobalPost reported on Friday. Before he disappeared, Mr. Foley had contributed reports to GlobalPost and Agence-France Presse as a freelance correspondent.

The news site said that its conclusion was based on “a five-month investigation inside Syria and the wider Middle East.” Philip Balboni, the GlobalPost president, said at an event marking World Press Freedom Day in Boston:

We have obtained multiple independent reports from very credible confidential sources who have both indirect and direct access that confirm our assessment that Jim is now being held by the Syrian government in a prison or detention facility in the Damascus area. We further believe that this facility is under the control of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence service. Based on what we have learned, it is likely Jim is being held with one or more Western journalists, including most likely at least one other American.

Mr. Balboni provided no details about who those other captives may be, but another American freelance journalist, Austin Tice, went missing in Syria last August.

Although the Syrian government has not acknowledged holding Mr. Foley, representatives of the news organization met with the Syrian ambassador to Lebanon in Beirut, Mr. Balboni said.

There has been no information about Mr. Foley's condition or whereabouts since he went missing outside of Idlib in northern Syria in November. Following his disappearance, the journalist's family and supporters started an online appeal for information about his whereabouts. On Friday, they greeted the news about his possible detention by government forces with relief in messages posted on Twitter.

Until the day of his disappearance last year, Mr. Foley used Twitter to post updates from and about Syria as he reported on the conflict.

Mr. Foley was one of 21 journalists abducted in Syria last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which calls Syria the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. An additional 28 reporters were killed in Syria last year.



California Wildfire Jumps Pacific Coast Highway


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A video of the fast-moving wildfire captured from a home in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Thousands of people fled their homes as a wildfire burned more than 10,000 acres across Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, damaging more than a dozen buildings and motor homes, fire officials said.

High winds are fueling the flames of what officials are calling the Springs Fire. It started around 7 a.m. Thursday in Camarillo, south of the 101 Freeway, and jumping over the Pacific Coast Highway on Friday. Officials warned that it could threaten homes in the Deer Creek and Yerba Buena areas.

On its Facebook page, the Naval Base Ventura County Point Mugu shared updates on the fire and multiple photos of the smoke-filled skies around Laguna Peak. But officials said that it was not “currently threatening the main facility or housing areas.” There were no evacuations late Friday morning. The base's airfield remained open with mission-essential staff.



Victims in Boston Marathon Bombings Turn to Crowdfunding for Support

http://www.amazon.com/The-Networked-Nonprofit-Connecting-Social/dp/0470547979

The GiveForward fundraising page for Brittany Loring, 29, who was seriously injured in the bombings at the Boston Marathon. The GiveForward fundraising page for Brittany Loring, 29, who was seriously injured in the bombings at the Boston Marathon.

It was Brittany Loring's 29th birthday. She and a fellow graduate student at Boston College, Liza Cherney, were making their way to the finish line of the Boston Marathon to meet a runner when the two bombs exploded.

“I fell to the ground,” Ms. Loring recalled in an interview on Monday. “My thought was I had to get out of there. The moment I could stand up, I ran around the corner, onto Exeter. Then I saw myself in the reflection of a store window. I noticed I was bleeding and that I needed help.”

Ms. Loring and Ms. Cherney, both seriously injured, were separated in the chaos. Ms. Loring was rushed to Boston Medical Center in critical condition, with her skull fractured, her left leg torn open and BB pellets embedded in her head and neck. Ms. Cherney was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and is recovering from her wounds.

They are among the more than 250 people wounded in the April 15 explosions whose family and friends have turned to crowdfunding to help them cover the out-of-pocket medical expenses resulting from the attack. Three people, Krystle Campbell, 29, Lu Lingzi, 23 and Martin Richard, 8, died in the blasts.

On Monday night, Kenneth R. Feinberg held a town hall meeting for victims and their families, starting the process of divvying up the $28 million raised by One Fund Boston, which was created after the bombings.

But Mr. Feinberg, who oversaw the compensation fund for 9/11 victims, has emphasized that $28 million is not nearly enough to cover the daunting medical costs for many of the victims, as our colleague Abby Goodnough has reported.

To help close the gap, friends and families of some of the victims, including Ms. Loring and Ms. Cherney, are using social media and online charitable giving platforms as tools for both emotional and financial support.

On GiveForward, a Chicago-based start-up that helps people create personalized online pages to raise money for out-of-pocket medical expenses, more than $90,000 has been donated to Ms. Loring, and more than $50,000 to Ms. Cherney.

Ms. Loring said that the words of encouragement that accompanied the donations, from people she has known over the years and strangers from all over the world, had helped her get through the last few weeks.

“My family would read the postings to me every night,” said Ms. Loring, who was discharged from the hospital last week and is now at home in Cambridge, Mass., undergoing therapy as she looks ahead to her graduation this month with a dual degree from Boston College's law and business schools and a wedding in the fall. “I was so surprised by how many people are reaching out. There are people I've never met before. It definitely helps keep things positive, which helps with my recovery.”

More than $1.2 million has been raised for the families of about two dozen victims on GiveForward, which collects the donations through credit and debit cards and passes them on to the beneficiaries after deducting 7 percent for processing fees.

Of that $1.2 million, more than $700,000 was raised for a young couple, Patrick Downes and Jessica Kensky, who were both seriously wounded and ended up in different hospitals.

These pages have become vehicles for Ms. Loring and others to express their gratitude to the people who helped them in the crucial moments after the blasts, and to remember those who were lost that day.

Last week, Brittany Loring met with three men who came to her immediate assistance following the Boston Marathon bombing attack on April 15. Last week, Brittany Loring met with three men who came to her immediate assistance following the Boston Marathon bombing attack on April 15.
Brittany Loring met the young woman who came to her aid following the Boston Marathon attack. Brittany Loring met the young woman who came to her aid following the Boston Marathon attack.

Some of the Web sites, and accompanying Facebook and Twitter accounts, offer a window into the lives and challenges that lie ahead for many of the victims.

On a GoFundMe page for Ron, Karen and Krystara Brassard, the family has posted regular updates and photos. There are photos of the victims at the race before the explosions, followed by the horrifying images from immediately afterward, and then pictures of them on the road to recovery.

The Brassad family is documenting their recovery following the Boston Marathon attack on the GoFundMe platform, raising nearly $30,000 in donations. The Brassad family is documenting their recovery following the Boston Marathon attack on the GoFundMe platform, raising nearly $30,000 in donations.

Other sites, including a fund-raising page for the family of Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy who died in the bombings, show family members holding on to one another. Martin's mother and sister were also seriously injured.

Allison Fine, co-author of the Networked Non-Profit, said that the traditional way of giving through institutions is changing as crowdfunding platforms reflect the way that many people now want to give. “They want to be able to give to a person and now we have a mechanism to enable them to do it.”

But she said the amount raised may not begin to address the long-term needs of some of the victims. “That is the downside,” she said. “After this initial outpouring, the question is whether it can be sustained. This may not be a solution to that problem, but it is a lovely way to give.”

One of the most iconic images in the aftermath of the attacks was of Jeff Bauman, 27, a spectator, whose ashen face and bloodied legs were captured in a dramatic photograph as he was being wheeled from the scene.

As of Monday, an online fund-raiser titled “Bucks for Bauman” had brought in more than $745,000 in 19 days from more than 16,000 people.

The campaign was set up by Brooke Gibbs, who identifies herself as a longtime friend of the Baumans and whose brother, John, grew up with Jeff.

As most of you know, due to the horrific event that had taken place at the Boston Marathon this year, Jeff was severely injured. Throughout this difficult time we want to help in every which way we possibly can to get Bauman back on track as soon as possible. Medical bills are going to start rolling in, let's get a head start on helping out Bauman and his family! Every dollar counts!!

Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a dance instructor, and her husband, Adam Davis, were also severely injured in the bombing. They had gone to watch the marathon together; Mr. Davis, an Air Force captain, had just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and Ms. Haslet-Davis had a day off from teaching at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Boston. Captain Davis sustained broken bones and lacerations, and Ms. Haslet-Davis lost her left foot in the blast.

Ms. Haslet-Davis, 32, from Issaquah, Wash., has vowed to dance again, according to local news reports.

To support her efforts, her co-workers at the dance studio started a fund-raising campaign on GoFundMe.com , which is more than halfway to its $400,000 target.

In another case, Celeste Corcoran lost both legs below the knee. Her daughter, Sydney, was severely injured from shrapnel. Fund-raising efforts on their behalf have brought in more than $720,000 toward a $1 million goal.

The Corcorans' Facebook page shares triumphs of their recovery with their friends, family and online supporters. In photos posted, they are seen in rehabilitation class, walking with crutches or cuddling with the family dog at home. The page also featured a video tribute for Sydney's 18th birthday on April 23.


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A video tribute for Sydney Corcoran's 18th birthday in April.

Celeste Corcoran, 47, was cheering on her sister, Carmen Accabo, when the blast hit, she said in an interview with NPR. Sydney was nearby, but neither knew that the other was injured. They awoke side by side in hospital beds at Boston Medical Center.

Nicole Gross, her brother Michael and their sister, Erika Brannock, were at the finish line of the marathon to cheer for their mother, who had trained for months to run in the event. They, too, were athletes, and knew how much their support would mean to her, according to their fund-raising Web site. The explosions went off as they searched the crowd for her.

A local news report showed Ms. Gross, a former University of Tennessee swimmer, on the sidewalk surrounded by other victims, her legs bloodied from a compound fracture.

Then there is the White family: William and Mary Jo White and their son Kevin were seriously injured. Fund-raising for them is taking place through Lawrence Academy, the alma mater of Kevin and another son, Andrew.

For the family of Mr. Downes and Ms. Kensky, the newlywed couple who each lost a leg in the blast, the page has also become a place to give thanks.

In a statement, their parents - Katy and Herman Kensky and Deborah and Brian Downes - described the strong bond the couple had forged in an interfaith marriage of Judaism and Christianity, with roots that spanned the country: the Downes family is from Massachusetts and the Kensky family from Sacramento. Friends who set up their fund-raising page said the couple tarted dating in 2006.

Our children have asked us to extend their heartfelt condolences to the families of Krystle Campbell, Lingzi Lu, Martin Richard, Sean Collier, and to all those who suffered because of this horrible event. Just as our families have been buoyed by the goodwill of friends and strangers, we know too that this generosity of spirit and resources has been extended to others. We hope all the families hurt by this tragedy will join together in support of one another.

The Kensky and Downes families want to echo the many tributes offered to the first responders and the medical and law enforcement communities. The staffs at Boston Medical Center and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have expertly and compassionately cared for our children; we cannot heap enough praise on the doctors, nurses, aides and others who work in these fine hospitals.

We have been touched by so many good people.



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