Two sisters, age 8 and 5, spent 44 hours lost in the woods in Humboldt County, California before they were rescued on Sunday. They had simply gone on a walk from their Northern California house Friday afternoon, but soon realized they couldn't find their way back home. They were found at 10:30am Sunday morning less than two miles from their house, according to CNN. This is their first interview, in which the smart, resourceful girls talk about how they survived.
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Everyone raised in my hometown learned to recite In Flanders Fields in school. Every year, as November 11th, Remembrance Day, drew near, we were taught about the First World War. We made poppies. We prepared for a concert to honor our veterans. Elderly men with often vacant, watery eyes would visit our classrooms and talk to us about their time overseas. Sometimes they cried. Other times, they laughed as they talked about long absent friends and their lost youth. As I grew older, I marched in my town's annual Remembrance Day parade: first as an cadet and later in a different uniform. Each year as we gathered at the armory after the parade had ended, there were fewer survivors of the First and Second World War there to greet us. Decades have passed since those days. The men and women who served their fellows and the future generations that would become of them have largely passed on.
No matter where I am in the world, I take pause on November 11th, as many others do, to remember those that gave up their lives in the name of democracy and decency. I try to hold the millions that died from hate, xenophobia and greed. I give thanks that I am now too old and too broken to fight. I fear for those in uniform today that will see things that will never leave them and for those who deployed who will never come home.Amidst these meditations, I wonder over who will carry the torch of remembrance of wars and atrocities past, once those who survived them are no more. Read the rest
Kay Longstaff said she sang songs to stay awake while floating and treading water 60 miles off the coast of Croatia. The 46-year-old British woman says she fell from the deck of Norwegian Star cruise ship on Saturday night. She was rescued 10 hours later by the Croatian coast guard. On Facebook, a Norwegian crew member wrote that Longstaff had "jumped" and had been "arguing with her fella the whole time."
Image: Pjotr Mahhonin/Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported) Read the rest
