Some missing persons news from other parts of the world

In faraway Krygyzstan, which I’m quite sure most Americans had never heard of until it made the news with some “civil unrest” lately, there is one story with a happy ending: an eight-year-old boy who vanished during the riots in June has been found alive. Little Kudaibergen Attokurov spent over a month hiding in abandoned buildings. He has since been reunited with his family. (And, writing this, I just learned from the Wikipedia page for Kyrgyzstan that for some reason over half of the people there are left-handed. Use that fact to impress your friends.)

Japan, amusingly, has lost track of its really really old people. Last week the authorities found the mummified body of what they thought was their nation’s oldest man. Whoops. He had been dead for thirty years and his family was stealing his pension money. Now they are looking for the oldest woman, age 113. She doesn’t live at her listed address, no one seems to know where she is and in fact the authorities haven’t been in contact with her in decades. Several other centenarians in the country cannot be accounted for.

Australian teenager Tamara Milograd will have been missing for forty years next month and her family hasn’t given up hope of finding her. Her father died in 1989 but her mom is still alive. The police think Tamara ran away and is probably living under a different name somewhere.

This is what passes for photoediting on the Charley Project

I freely admit that I have no skills whatsoever in graphic design, or in art in any form. Nor do I have any appreciation for the same. But in my capacity as sole owner-operator of Charley, I often edit the photos of missing people. Usually this consists of messing with the lighting and contrast, but sometimes I go further and paint out scratches or fix red-eye or whatever. I have noticed with some pleasure that certain law enforcement agencies have taken to using my edited photographs on their own sites.

Anyway, an example of some of my most advanced editing techniques: presenting a photo of Joseph Patrick Martin with a ghastly dark streak down the front. Now, here is my edited version of the same. And here is a closeup of the edited photo just to demonstrate how crude my techniques really are.