Eighteen year old Valeriya Shevchenko, was resplendent in her wedding finery at the City Clerk's Office in New York City on Tuesday. She was waiting for her fiance to arrive, when the earthquake hit. She ran through the park with her cellphone, trying to find him. They met up at a subway station nearby and returned to the City Clerk's office to be married.
One small problem: They were trying to keep their marriage a secret, because their families disapproved. As Fate would have it, the young lady fleeing in her wedding dress was just too good of a shot for an enterprising photographer to pass up.
I can just imagine their wedding vows: "Baby, when I look at you, I can feel the earth move!"
Pictures can speak so much louder than words. This is the face of the tragedy in Japan. This is why it's much too soon to make jokes.
HEARTBROKEN Yoshie Murakami cries in anguish as she holds her dead mum’s hand after her body was found in the rubble.
After five agonising days of searching, the pensioner’s corpse was discovered yesterday in the ruins of her destroyed home.
Yoshie broke down in the tsunami-hit city of Rikuzentakata as she said her goodbyes – and is now praying her missing 23-year-old daughter will be found alive.
Similar scenes took place across north eastern Japan again yesterday, with TV stations saying the total number of dead or missing stood at almost 15,000.
Police said the official death toll had reached 4,314 with a further 8,606 people missing.
You know, it's bad enough with all the crises going on around the world that could benefit from a little leadership from the Leader of the Free World, and Jughead is giving us his basketball picks. But, it gets worse! Or maybe it just reflects how seriously he takes catastrophes that don't affect him personally. At :48 in the video:
"Obviously we are going through incredible changes all around the world. Most recently...Japan..."
Change?? Uh, yeah, Barry. Some "change" goin' on over there in Japan! What an oddly inadequate word to describe thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands homeless and billions of dollars of damage. Someone get this man his teleprompter!
Now remember that, with the economic malaise the country is going through, with higher gas prices, inflation in food and consumer goods, high unemployment and no end in sight to the problems of the housing market, that Obama campaigned for "Change". "Change" apparently is Obamaspeak for "Unimaginable economic catastrophe".
Iran is arming Hamas, Japan is suffering catastrophic economic, social and disruptions, US casualties have risen in Afghanistan (despite the crickets chirping in the so called "anti-war" movement), unemployment is rampant in the US, our energy policy or lack thereof will lead to shortages, hardship and inflation, and Barry wants to share his basketball picks with the world.
Unfortunately, it looks like we're due for a lot more "change" under Obama's "leadership".
Gasoline is creeping up to $4.00 a gallon here in California, and the lines are getting longer at the pump, but I may have the following engraved and mounted on my dashboard, to remind me just how much worse things could be.
Millions of people spent a third night without water, food or heating in near-freezing temperatures along the devastated northeastern coast..."I'm giving up hope," said Hajime Watanabe, 38, a construction industry worker, who was the first in line at a closed gas station in Sendai, about 60 miles north of Soma. Just then, an emergency worker came over and told him that if the station opens at all, it would pump gasoline only to emergency teams and essential government workers.
"I never imagined we would be in such a situation" Watanabe said. "I had a good life before. Now we have nothing. No gas, no electricity, no water."
He said he was surviving with his family on 60 half-liter bottles of water his wife had stored in case of emergencies like this. He walked two hours to find a convenience store that was open and waited in line to buy dried ramen noodles.
It's hard to put into words the shock and horror in the wake of the devastating earthquakes and tsunamis around the Pacific rim, but nowhere near the destruction in Japan.
Villages wiped out, thousands of cars, trucks and ships tossed about like so much sea foam, power outages, fires burning uncontrolled and even the possibility of nuclear plant melt downs, added to the hundreds if not thousands killed outright by the catastrophes makes this the worst tragedy to hit Japanese shores in recent memory. It will take months, if not years, to clear away the devastation and debris, and rebuild for those who survived.
Our sympathy and our prayers go out to all of the victims of this catastrophe, but particularly to those hardest hit in the islands of Japan.
