2 children found living in abandoned school bus

SPLENDORA, Texas (AP) — The abandoned school bus had no engine and no front wheels. But there were crude curtains in the windows, an air conditioner and even bunk beds inside.

So when a postal worker repeatedly ran across two unkempt children at the scene, she grew concerned and this week contacted authorities to report that the pair had apparently been living there for months.

Now child welfare agents are trying to unravel the story of the siblings, a 5-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl, whose parents are in prison and whose home was a dilapidated vehicle at the end of a muddy, one-lane road.

The postal carrier saw the kids Wednesday near Houston, and the two were swiftly placed in foster care while authorities investigate.

"The little girl's hair was just matted, like a stray dog's," Vanessa Picazo said.

The father of the pair said he never intended for the bus to be a permanent home. He said the family had planned to build a house at the site, which was now strewn with reeking trash.

"The house is normally clean. If me or my wife were there, it would not be in that shape, I assure you," Mark Shorten said. "Our house would be completed or almost completed."

Randal McCann, a Louisiana attorney who represented the children's mother prior to her imprisonment, said the aunt had been taking care of the kids since the case against the parents was launched more than a year ago. The kids were not enrolled in school.

"It was believed by everybody involved in this case that (the aunt) was properly tending to those children. What I saw in the newspaper this morning was shocking," McCann said, referring to a report in the Houston Chronicle.

McCann said the aunt would often contact him but only to discuss the criminal case and not the children.

"But there was no indication that the living conditions were as bad as those photographs," McCann said.

It was not clear how long the children had been living in the bus and whether the aunt lived with them or simply made visits.

A spokesman for Child Protective Services said authorities were less concerned about the bus itself than with children's overall well-being.

"It's not the bus. It's the condition and supervision issues," spokesman Gwen Carter said, explaining that the agency understands that poor families often must resort to dire living arrangements.

Shorten and his wife, Sherrie, were convicted of embezzling money from victims of Hurricane Ike, which struck in 2008. The mother was arrested in December 2010, the father in March 2011.

In a phone interview with The Associated Press from an Oklahoma City federal prison, Mark Shorten said he had not slept since his children were taken Wednesday.

Shorten said an aunt who was asked to watch the kids couldn't keep up, and he blamed the garbage blanketing his property on neighbors dumping their trash there.

Sherrie Shorten is scheduled to be released next month.

"I'm coming home in 30 days to be able to take care of my kids," she said from a separate federal prison in Lake Charles, La.

An AP reporter visited the site Thursday. The bus appeared to have electricity, and outside there was a small propane tank and homemade grill.

A woman who was in the bus declined to identify herself and told the reporter to leave.

The Shortens said the bus also has hot and cold running water, including a shower and flush toilets, as well as heat and closets.

Picazo said her latest visit to the bus was not the first time she was worried about the children. Once when she needed a signature for a package, the 11-year-old girl volunteered. But when Picazo handed her the signature slip, the girl confessed she didn't know how to sign her name.

That was a "red flag that she wasn't being schooled. But she was a bright child," Picazo said.

Mark Shorten said his children were being home schooled through a Texas Tech University program. He said his daughter was highly intelligent and "can even do tax returns."

He said the family was originally from Louisiana but that the hurricane left their home under more than 8 feet of water. They brought the bus to Texas and only planned to live in it "maybe nine months" while he built a new home on the property.

Neighbors told the Houston Chronicle that the children typically looked unkempt and could often be spotted running around at night.

"They always had dirty clothes on (and) no shoes, even in the winter," said Gayla Payne.

A woman on the property told welfare agents that she worked 12-hour shifts Monday through Friday but that she stayed with the children at night.

"The aunt said that she does provide meals for them during the day," Montgomery County Constable Rowdy Hayden told Houston television station KTRK.

Looking around the bus, "we didn't see a lot of food readily available," Hayden said. "One of the neighbors had told us earlier that from time to time she will bring food over for the children."

Splendora is 35 miles northeast of Houston.

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Associated Press writers Schuyler Dixon and Nomaan Merchant in Dallas and Paul J. Weber in San Antonio contributed to this report.

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Information from: KTRK-TV, http://abclocal.go.com

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Indiana baby found in field after tornado dies

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — An Indiana toddler found in a field after violent tornadoes died Sunday after being taken off life support, ending a hopeful tale for survivors in the Midwest and South picking through the storms' devastation.

Fifteen-month-old Angel Babcock of New Pekin, Ind., was found after her family's mobile home was destroyed in Friday's storms. Her father, mother and two siblings were killed.

When Angel arrived at Kosair Children's Hospital in Louisville Friday night, she was opening her eyes — a hopeful sign, chief nursing officer Cis Gruebbel said.

Things turned on Saturday, when the swelling in her brain didn't decrease, he said. As the day went on, her eyes ceased to move and she continued to deteriorate. There was no sign of brain activity.

Medical staff told the family there wasn't anything more they could do. With extended family gathered to say goodbye, the family made the decision to end life support on Sunday.

"Angel has been reunited with her parents," her grandfather, Jack Brough, said in a statement. "We want to thank God for all of you and for your thoughts and prayers. God will bring you and all of us out of this. This is what it will take. All should look to God."

The girl's death brings the overall toll from Friday's storms to 39 across five states. Rescuers were still going door-to-door in rural areas to rule out more victims. Another round of storms earlier last week killed 13 people in the Midwest and South, the latest in a string of severe-weather episodes ravaging the American heartland in the past year.

On Sunday, people gathered to worship, comb through piles of debris and learn what happened to loved ones and friends, often without modern technology to help.

Cellphone signals were hard to find, Internet was out and electricity indefinitely interrupted. In many cases, word-of-mouth conversations replaced text messages, Facebook status updates and phone calls.

"It's horrible. It's things you take for granted that aren't there anymore," said Jack Cleveland, 50, a Census Bureau worker from Henryville, Ind.

Randy Mattingly, a 24-year-old mechanic, said he and his Henryville neighbors passed on information by word-of-mouth to make sure people were OK: "It was like, 'Hey, did you talk to this guy?'" He said state police quickly set up two gathering points for adults and children, at the church and at a nearby community center.

At Sunday's mass at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Henryville, Father Steve Schaftlein turned the church into an information exchange, asking the 100 or so in attendance to stand up and share what they knew.

Lisa Smith, who has been Henryville's postmaster for six weeks, told people that they could pick up their mail in Scottsburg, about 10 miles north. She said she was most worried about people needing medication and she had been shaking boxes to see if they had pills inside with hopes of connecting them to their recipients.

A local insurance agent, Lyn Murphy-Carter, shared another story. The founder of her agency, 84-year-old Tom Murphy, had told her always to keep paper records. That proved valuable without access to computers. She collected about 1,000 claims Saturday alone, and was gathering handwritten claims from policyholders at church.

In West Liberty, Ky., about 85 miles east of Lexington, loss of technology led to a confusing and stressful aftermath for Doris Shuck, who was cleaning her house when the storm approached. She grabbed her laptop, cellphone and iPod and put them in a tote bag to bring down to the basement. The storms took her home, leaving only the basement and front porch. Huge piles of debris and mattresses were strewn in the back yard.

"I could hear the glass and hear the wood breaking. I just thought the house is going to fall on top of me," she said. She had scrapes and bruises.

After the storm passed, she received a text message from her mother, 70 miles away in Prestonsburg, but couldn't reply.

"I was just trying to figure out what had happened and get my thoughts together and my phone beeped and I looked and it was from my mom. I couldn't answer it," Shuck said. She went to the hospital where she works, but there was no Internet access there, either.

She reunited with her husband and daughter at the hospital and left for Prestonsburg to let her mother know they were OK. But they didn't know her parents were on their way to West Liberty at the same time.

"We had no way to communicate that to each other. We're so used to our cell phones and instant messaging. We didn't have any of that."

Her parents asked a state fish and wildlife officer to go to their home. The officer eventually found Doris Shuck's name on a list at the hospital for people who were accounted for.

While it could be days before power and cell service are fully restored to the damaged areas, crews were making progress Sunday. In Indiana, about 2,800 homes were without power, down from 8,000 in the hours after the storms. But in some hard-hit areas, like Henryville, a substation and transmission lines need to be rebuilt, and that could take up to a week.

Almost 19,000 customers were without power in Kentucky, according to the state's Public Service Commission, and a few thousand more from municipal utilities and TVA, which the PSC does not track.

Cellphone companies were trying to help residents by setting up mobile charging and email stations so they could communicate while power and cell service was still difficult to find. They also brought in portable towers to boost signals, and service was improving Sunday.

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LoBianco reported from Henryville, Ind. Associated Press Writer Bruce Schreiner contributed to this report from West Liberty, Ky. Jason Keyser contributed from Marysville, Ind.

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U.S. health officials say new flu virus found in bats

A new strain of influenza A has been found in fruit bats, indicating for the first time that bats, like birds, can be carriers of the virus, though it is not believed risky to humans, according to US health authorities.

"This is the first time an influenza virus has been identified in bats, but in its current form the virus is not a human health issue," said Suxiang Tong, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's pathogen discovery program.

"The study is important because the research has identified a new animal species that may act as a source of flu viruses."

The influenza A virus was detected in a sample of three of 316 live little yellow-shouldered bats captured at two different sites in Guatemala.

That type of bat is not known to bite humans but feeds on fruit, and is native to Central and South America.

Previous flu pandemics, such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which came to the public's attention as "swine flu," have been known to originate in animals and eventually transform so that they gain the ability to infect people.

"Fortunately, initial laboratory testing suggests the new virus would need to undergo significant changes to become capable of infecting and spreading easily among humans," said Ruben Donis, chief of the Molecular Virology and Vaccines Branch in CDC's Influenza Division.

"A different animal -- such as a pig, horse or dog -- would need to be capable of being infected with both this new bat influenza virus and human influenza viruses for reassortment to occur."

More details about the findings are published in the US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

View the original article here

U.S. health officials say new flu virus found in bats

A new strain of influenza A has been found in fruit bats, indicating for the first time that bats, like birds, can be carriers of the virus, though it is not believed risky to humans, according to US health authorities.

"This is the first time an influenza virus has been identified in bats, but in its current form the virus is not a human health issue," said Suxiang Tong, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's pathogen discovery program.

"The study is important because the research has identified a new animal species that may act as a source of flu viruses."

The influenza A virus was detected in a sample of three of 316 live little yellow-shouldered bats captured at two different sites in Guatemala.

That type of bat is not known to bite humans but feeds on fruit, and is native to Central and South America.

Previous flu pandemics, such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which came to the public's attention as "swine flu," have been known to originate in animals and eventually transform so that they gain the ability to infect people.

"Fortunately, initial laboratory testing suggests the new virus would need to undergo significant changes to become capable of infecting and spreading easily among humans," said Ruben Donis, chief of the Molecular Virology and Vaccines Branch in CDC's Influenza Division.

"A different animal -- such as a pig, horse or dog -- would need to be capable of being infected with both this new bat influenza virus and human influenza viruses for reassortment to occur."

More details about the findings are published in the US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

View the original article here

Top Olympus executive found dead in India park: report

Everything you know about dieting is wrong, say US scientists who have devised a new formula for calculating calories and weight loss that they hope will revolutionize the way people tackle obesity.

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Top Olympus executive found dead in India park: report

Everything you know about dieting is wrong, say US scientists who have devised a new formula for calculating calories and weight loss that they hope will revolutionize the way people tackle obesity.

View the original article here