Stories of tragedy, survival surface as Tennessee flood waters recede

(News Today) - As historically high flood waters receded in Tennessee on Wednesday, dramatic stories of tragedy and survival emerged, including that of a woman who saw her husband and daughter swept away.

Sherry Qualls watched in horror as chest-deep water washed away her husband and daughter as he tried to save the girl from a rushing creek roaring through their backyard in Linden, Tennessee, on Sunday, according to CNN Nashville affiliate WSMV.

"From his neck up, he was staring at me," Qualls said of her husband Bobby. "He didn't say anything, just staring at me. She was screaming for her daddy to help her, and then by the time the rescue squad got her, I didn't see them any more."

Their bodies were found the next day, washed almost a mile away, the affiliate reported.

"He was a hero," Qualls said Wednesday of her husband, who earlier had rescued the couple's son from floodwaters. "He sacrificed himself for his kids, that's what I think."

Surveying the property where her home once stood, Qualls said it's hard to believe her husband and daughter are gone.

"Every time I drive in the driveway, I see my daughter standing at the door smiling, and him, too, and I expect them to call me and ask where I'm at," she said.

Linden is located between Nashville and Memphis in western Tennessee.

CNN iReporter Nathan Clark went to his father's house in Dickson, Tennessee -- west of Nashville -- on Saturday to help him salvage possessions as waters from a flooded creek rose on his dad's property. Clark says they got out just in time.

"The water was at the top of his truck's hood." Clark said. "If we had stayed any longer, we wouldn't have gotten out of there."

With waters receding on Wednesday, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean announced that most city government offices would reopen Thursday and that city bus service would be restored.

Nashville students will have another day off Thursday, though teachers and other staff will return to work.

"The news is largely good," Dean said at a Wednesday evening press conference. "We're making progress and we'll continue to make progress in the days ahead."

The weekend deluge in the Mid-South has swelled many rivers to historic levels, turned roads to lakes and caused at least 28 deaths. The rains were especially cruel to Tennessee, killing 19 and immersing landmarks like the Grand Ole Opry. Two Nashville residents are still missing, Dean's office said Wednesday night.

President Obama has declared six Tennessee counties major disaster areas, which makes federal funding available to affected residents.

Many area waterways remained well past flood level on Wednesday. The Cumberland River, which cuts through Nashville, stood at just over 48 feet on Wednesday evening -- about 13 feet above flood stage -- said Jim Moser, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.

On Wednesday afternoon, more more than 100 Nashville firefighters and police officers were going door-to-door on foot in flood-ravaged neighborhoods, checking on residents and providing assistance. Search and rescue teams visited more than 700 homes Wednesday and will visit more Thursday, Dean's office said.

One Nashville neighborhood, Metro Center, remained closed to residents and workers Wednesday because of standing water. The city allowed some business owners and managers to survey their businesses for a few hours in the afternoon but limited access to people in trucks and SUVS and made clear that they entered the area at their own risk.

With one of Nashville's main water treatment plants still closed from flooding, the city asked residents Wednesday to use water only when absolutely necessary, telling them to put off washing dishes and to limit toilet flushing.

"Citizens are using water at a greater rate than we can treat it and pump it out to the community," said Sonia Harvat, a spokesman for Nashville's water department, in an e-mail message. City officials said Wednesday that the city would be forced to rely on bottled water unless more people started conserving.

Still, flood waters should recede significantly in the next couple of days, the National Weather Service's Moser said.

"We're not expecting a significant amount of rain through Monday," he said. "It might amount to a quarter or half inch but not enough to affect things."

After an aerial tour of central Tennessee Wednesday, Gov. Phil Bredesen warned residents to beware of con artists looking to capitalize on the flood response.

"There are always people who come in and do these scams of charging people -- and they seem to prey on elderly people an awful lot -- just charging people an awful lot to do something," Bredesen said. "(They say) 'I'm going to fix your house, you have to do it or the state's going to tear it down, and it's like $20,000. Write me a check or give me cash.' "

Source : CNN

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Anne Frank's tree, now dying, still inspires hope and new life

(News Terupdate) - This is a story about a girl and her tree -- a tree that helped keep hope alive, even as the world closed in on her.

Three times in Anne Frank's widely read diary, the young Holocaust victim wrote about a tree. She could see it from the attic window of the secret annex where her family hid for two years, before being betrayed.

"From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind," she wrote on February 23, 1944. "As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be."

The tree that reminded Frank of the promise of life still looms high above the courtyard behind the Anne Frank House, now a museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, that just marked its 50th anniversary. But at about 170 years of age, Anne Frank's tree is dying.

The spring before her family and the others hiding with them were captured, the girl focused on the tree's budding life -- and her own.

"Our chestnut tree is already quite greenish and you can even see little blooms here and there," she wrote on April 18, 1944. Two days earlier, she'd recorded her first kiss.

Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just weeks before the Nazi concentration camp was liberated in 1945. But her name, story and message live on through her diary and, also, through her ailing tree.

The tree that keeps giving

The tree has been sick for 10 years; a fungus has left two-thirds of it hollow, said Anne Frank House spokeswoman Annemarie Bekker.

A battle began in late 2007 between city officials who wanted to chop it down and activists who insisted it stay. But a court injunction, a second-opinion analysis and a committee mobilization later, it still stands, barely alive and supported by steel.

About five years ago, the museum began collecting chestnuts from the tree to grow seedlings, so that pieces of the original tree could take root and flourish elsewhere. The tree is a horse chestnut, which is often called a buckeye tree in the United States and a conker tree in the United Kingdom.

Its saplings have been distributed to international parks and schools named for Anne Frank. One will be planted later this year at Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Through a project and contest launched last year by the Anne Frank Center USA, a New York-based educational nonprofit working with the museum in Amsterdam, 11 sites in the United States will see Frank's tree blossom. They range from the White House and various museums and memorials to a high school that changed U.S. history.

A handful of winning applications were driven by youth inspired by Frank, who would be 80 if she'd survived, and her diary.

One girl in Boston, Massachusetts,12-year-old Aliyah Finkel, felt an immediate connection to the writer, so much so that she chose to have her bat mitzvah -- the coming of age ceremony for Jewish girls -- in the synagogue Frank's family attended in Amsterdam before they went into hiding.

"It wasn't just a diary written by some person, it was written by a 13-year-old girl," Finkel said. "I was interested in the story of her life. She had so much hope. There are some parts [of the diary] that are really sad, but it's more inspiring."

With the help of her family, and contacts they have with local officials, Finkel's inspired push will bring a tree to Boston Common and lessons about tolerance to the city's public schools.

Down South, a public school in Arkansas, the only in the nation to become a national historic site, will also see an Anne Frank tree bloom.

Little Rock Central High School senior John Allen Riggins, 17, heard about the contest last summer while listening to National Public Radio.

His school was racially integrated in 1957 by the "Little Rock Nine," a development that proved a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement. An avid follower of history and politics, Riggins saw parallels between Anne Frank's legacy and that of the Arkansas students.

"From all across the world, in different time periods and different social struggles, young people have been caught up in history and these social tensions have come down upon them," Riggins said. "Anne Frank was 14 when she was hiding, and the youngest of the nine was 14."

For Elaine Leeder, it was in many ways her father's youth, and by extension her own, that made her reach out for a part of the tree.

The dean of social sciences at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, Leeder is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her father lost his mother, sister and brother when they were taken to a pit outside their Lithuanian village and gunned down with about 2,000 other Jews.

"The shades were always drawn in my house. We were afraid of neighbors," she said, describing the legacy she carried. "I became a genocide scholar over the years because of my personal story."

The sapling she competed for will be nurtured in the university's Holocaust & Genocide Memorial Grove, where genocides across time are remembered. Beside it will be a sign quoting Frank: "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Much of what his daughter wrote came as a surprise to Otto Frank, the family's sole survivor. He retrieved the diary and eventually published it after World War II. More than 30 million copies have been sold.

In a speech he gave in 1968, according to the Anne Frank House, he spoke of the reactions he had upon first reading his daughter's words.

"How could I have suspected that it meant so much to Anne to see a patch of blue sky, to observe the gulls during their flight and how important the chestnut tree was to her, as I recall that she never took an interest in nature," he said. "But she longed for it during that time when she felt like a caged bird."

It turns out the saplings selected for sites in the United States are caged themselves. When they arrived in the country in December, the young trees were seized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Because of sicknesses ravaging horse chestnuts in Europe, the trees will remain in quarantine for three years.

The tree Frank secretly admired through an attic window will be gone in five to 15 years, Anne Frank House officials say. But by the time it disappears, pieces of it will be growing strong, reaching for blue skies and welcoming birds across the globe -- a living legacy to a girl who understood what life could promise.

Source : CNN

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Parents using smartphones to entertain bored kids

(News Terupdate) - When Julie Sidder's daughters were younger, her diaper bag was filled with coloring books, crayons, storybooks and little games in case one of them became restless.

Now that Sidder's kids are 4 and 7, the diaper bag is gone, but the need for entertainment -- especially in restaurants -- is not, which is why two-thirds of the apps on Sidder's iPhone are for her children.

"People have always brought toys, or something to entertain their child, into restaurants and stores," says the mom, who lives in West Bloomfield, Michigan. "Now we just have better technology."

Harried parents for years have relied on glowing electronic screens -- TVs, video games, computers -- to entertain children in the home. Now more and more parents are discovering smartphones' similar ability to engage squirmy kids at restaurants, in the car and anywhere else where youngsters grow bored.

Almost half of the top 100-selling apps in the iTunes App Store were for preschool or elementary-aged children in November 2009, according to a content analysis by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which promotes digital media technologies to advance children's learning.

Expert Carly Shuler says the reason for this -- assuming the majority of 3- to 10-year-olds don't own their own phones -- is because adults are taking advantage of the smartphone's ability to act as a mobile learning or entertainment device for their children.

Shuler, a fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (part of the Sesame Workshop) calls this phenomenon the "pass-back" effect -- as in parents passing their phones back to their bored kids.

Shortly after the iPhone came out, Shuler said she noticed children as young as 3 years old playing with the shiny devices.

"I saw it on the subway, at the grocery store -- anywhere you'd see a parent and child interacting, really," she said.

Even AT&T acknowledged this trend in the current commercial where Luke Wilson "passes back" a smartphone to a crying child in a restaurant, Shuler said.

App developers have noticed and are creating kids' games for phones, even though they don't think toddlers are buying smartphones, she said.

Almost all children in the U.S. have access to a mobile device, according to the Sesame Workshop. A 2007 study found that 93 percent of 6 to 9-year-olds had access to a cell phone in the home and more than 30 percent owned their own phone. Shuler said these number have only increased since the study was conducted.

So how do such young children come to understand this new touchscreen technology?

"A child is not as afraid that they're going to break something or do something wrong [as adults are]," Shuler said. "They're more likely to pick [the phone] up and just play with it, which is the best way to learn."

Toddler Teasers is one of the apps Sidder downloaded for her 4-year-old daughter, Ava. Sidder said the educational app, which asks Ava to pick out certain shapes, is a fun learning tool the pair can play together.

But Sidder says even the less educational apps on her iPhone, such as Disney Cover Styler, Red Carpet Dress Up and 7-year-old Ella's favorite, Shrek Cart, are teaching her kids hand-eye coordination and to be comfortable with technology.

"I don't use [the iPhone] to parent my child," she said. "I use it to entertain them ... if they're on it an hour a week, that's a lot. When we're sitting at home, they're not playing on my phone. It's just something that they do when we're out."

Sidder acknowledges that some people think letting young children play with your phone is a bad thing. But those are usually the same people who complain about children running around a restaurant kicking and screaming, she said.

The app market for kids has continued to grow at a rapid rate since the iLearn analysis was published six months ago, said Shuler.

Shuler said her research has found that children's educational apps tend to cost less than apps for older children or adults. But the kids' games and other apps are only one reason iPhones and other smartphones are a hit with children, she said.

"When you look at the design of the iPhone ... the interface is very tactile and well suited to what a child naturally does," Shuler said. "They think with their fingers. If they see something they like, they'll jab at it and touch it. And children love flipping things. If you flip the iPhone, something will happen. If you shake the iPhone, something will happen."

Take a look at some of the best-selling toys throughout the years, she said. Kids have always loved to play with toy telephones, toy lawn mowers, toy ovens and toy vacuum cleaners.

"They like to play with things their parents have," she said. "Considering how much time parents spend on [their phones], it makes sense that kids would want them, too."

And it's not just smartphones -- kids enjoy playing and learning on any mobile electronic gadget, Shuler said.

"Take pictures with your kids," she said. "Or pull out the calculator and ask your kid to help add up what the groceries are going to cost. These are really powerful devices."

Robin Orman of Waterford, Michigan, says her 1 year old entertains himself just by holding on to her cell phone, which is not a smartphone. Orman's 2-year-old daughter, on the other hand, already prefers a touchscreen device.

Orman said her older daughter enjoys playing educational flashcard games and listening to music on her mother-in-law's iPhone. She likes to slide the pictures around, she added.

"I'd love an iPhone," Orman said. But, for now, "it's just another one of those things [the kids] get to do at grandma's house."

Source : CNN

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