Water, Now Fire, and Shore Nightmare Goes On Seaside Heights and Seaside Park Reel From 2nd Blow

¶Nick Dionisio is a third generation Boardwalk guy. Having peeled shrimp as a 7-year-old in his grandfather’s clam bar, he decided to go into banking, but when the markets collapsed came back to what he knew, pulling his father out of retirement to help him start a fried-fish place, and then another a little more upscale.¶He was still trying to make up the cost of starting the businesses when Hurricane Sandy hit 10 months ago, flooding them with nine feet of water and ruining expensive equipment. His father died unexpectedly just weeks later. The electricity and gas were restored only five days before Memorial Day, the weekend when Boardwalk places typically make up much of their rent. Summer business was terrible, with so many renters and tourists staying away. Still, Mr. Dionisio kept going, because he loved it.¶The fire in the Jersey Shore towns of Seaside Park and Seaside Heights on Thursday did to his restaurants what the hurricane had not: It destroyed them.¶Flames ravaged about five blocks of boardwalk in the two towns, which had been among those hardest hit by the storm. As Mr. Dionisio and other business owners surveyed the rubble on Friday, they struggled to summon what it would take to start over so soon after starting over.

¶“It’s like someone who’s in a war,” said Mr. Dionisio, 34, the owner of the two Park Seafood stalls on the Seaside Park Boardwalk. “After a time, they’re so used to seeing destruction, they become numb to it.”¶“Everything has been a bad dream already,” he added in a phone interview. “To have this happen, it hasn’t even hit me yet. This sums up how awful this year has been. It doesn’t get any worse than what it is right now.”¶Investigators had roped off the scene with yellow police tape and declared it a crime scene, though the governor and local officials would not go so far as to speculate that the blaze was arson. They said only that the cause was unknown, and that the fire, which apparently began in an ice cream shop, had been fueled by tar roofs and unusually strong winds.

¶Officials estimated the fire had damaged between 30 and 50 businesses. “Places where decades of memories were built for families are destroyed,” Gov. Chris Christie said in a morning news conference — beloved institutions like Jack-N-Bills Bar, Maruca’s Tomato Pies, Berkeley Sweet Shop, and countless balloon and souvenir stands.¶Mr. Christie vowed to “get aggressive and rebuild,” as he did when he visited Seaside Heights in October and declared the Jersey Shore of his childhood gone. “I will not permit all the work we’ve done over the last 10 months to be diminished or destroyed by what happened last night,” he said.¶But those left said they were not sure how they could.¶“I have it in me to do it,” said Mr. Dionisio, who is married and has two children younger than 3. “Financially, I don’t know if I can make it happen. You spend all this money and then this happens, it doesn’t seem you can catch a break.”

¶Officials in the two towns said they were lucky that no one had died — on weekends, the Boardwalk adjoining their beaches can be filled with tens of thousands of people; the fire happened just weeks after families had departed for the start of school.¶And the continuing work to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy provided a small saving grace: construction equipment that had been in use nearby was moved up the beach to cut the 25-foot-wide trench that finally halted flames that had burned for nearly six hours.

¶“I’m not going to say it doesn’t get old,” said Bill Akers, the mayor of Seaside Heights. “The only good thing about it is, when we went through it the first time, we were flying by the seat of our pants because no one had been through anything like that.” This time, Mr. Akers said, the towns have engineering plans to rebuild the boardwalks, and lumber companies and builders are already engaged.¶But it would be easier, he acknowledged, to rebuild the boards than to re-create the businesses, many of which did not have fire insurance.¶“I know a lot of people who put themselves back together after Sandy went into their own resources,” he said. “That’s kind of running dry right now.”

¶

Girl’s Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies

MIAMI — The clues were buried in her bedroom. Before leaving for school on Monday morning, Rebecca Ann Sedwick had hidden her schoolbooks under a pile of clothes and left her cellphone behind, a rare lapse for a 12-year-old girl.Inside her phone’s virtual world, she had changed her user name on Kik Messenger, a cellphone application, to “That Dead Girl” and delivered a message to two friends, saying goodbye forever. Then she climbed a platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home in the Central Florida city of Lakeland and leaped to the ground, the Polk County sheriff sIn jumping, Rebecca became one of the youngest members of a growing list of children and teenagers apparently driven to suicide, at least in part, after being maligned, threatened and taunted online, mostly through a new collection of texting and photo-sharing cellphone applications. Her suicide raises new questions about the proliferation and popularity of these applications and Web sites among children and the ability of parents to keep up with their children’s online relationships.

For more than a year, Rebecca, pretty and smart, was cyberbullied by a coterie of 15 middle-school children who urged her to kill herself, her mother said. The Polk County sheriff’s office is investigating the role of cyberbullying in the suicide and considering filing charges against the middle-school students who apparently barraged Rebecca with hostile text messages. Florida passed a law this year making it easier to bring felony charges in online bullying cases.

Rebecca was “absolutely terrorized on social media,” Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County said at a news conference this week.Along with her grief, Rebecca’s mother, Tricia Norman, faces the frustration of wondering what else she could have done. She complained to school officials for several months about the bullying, and when little changed, she pulled Rebecca out of school. She closed down her daughter’s Facebook page and took her cellphone away. She changed her number. Rebecca was so distraught in December that she began to cut herself, so her mother had her hospitalized and got her counseling. As best she could, Ms. Norman said, she kept tabs on Rebecca’s social media footprint.

It all seemed to be working, she said. Rebecca appeared content at her new school as a seventh grader. She was gearing up to audition for chorus and was considering slipping into her cheerleading uniform once again. But unknown to her mother, Rebecca had recently signed on to new applications — ask.fm, and Kik and Voxer — which kick-started the messaging and bullying once again.“I had never even heard of them; I did go through her phone but didn’t even know,” said Ms. Norman, 42, who works in customer service. “I had no reason to even think that anything was going on. She was laughing and joking.”

Sheriff Judd said Rebecca had been using these messaging applications to send and receive texts and photographs. His office showed Ms. Norman the messages and photos, including one of Rebecca with razor blades on her arms and cuts on her body. The texts were full of hate, her mother said: “Why are you still alive?” “You’re ugly.”One said, “Can u die please?” To which Rebecca responded, with a flash of resilience, “Nope but I can live.” Her family said the bullying began with a dispute over a boy Rebecca dated for a while. But Rebecca had stopped seeing him, they said.

Rebecca was not nearly as resilient as she was letting on. Not long before her death, she had clicked on questions online that explored suicide. “How many Advil do you have to take to die?”

In hindsight, Ms. Norman wonders whether Rebecca kept her distress from her family because she feared her mother might take away her cellphone again.

“Maybe she thought she could handle it on her own,” Ms. Norman said.

It is impossible to be certain what role the online abuse may have played in her death. But cyberbullying experts said cellphone messaging applications are proliferating so quickly that it is increasingly difficult for parents to keep pace with their children’s complex digital lives.

“It’s a whole new culture, and the thing is that as adults, we don’t know anything about it because it’s changing every single day,” said Denise Marzullo, the chief executive of Mental Health America of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville, who works with the schools there on bullying issues.

No sooner has a parent deciphered Facebook or Twitter or Instagram than his or her children have migrated to the latest frontier. “It’s all of these small ones where all this is happening,” Ms. Marzullo said.In Britain, a number of suicides by young people have been linked to ask.fm, and online petitions have been started there and here to make the site more responsive to bullying. The company ultimately responded this year by introducing an easy-to-see button to report bullying and saying it would hire more moderators.“You hear about this all the time,” Ms. Norman said of cyberbullying. “I never, ever thought it would happen to me or my daughter.”

Questions have also been raised about whether Rebecca’s old school, Crystal Lake Middle School, did enough last year to help stop the bullying; some of it, including pushing and hitting, took place on school grounds. The same students also appear to be involved in sending out the hate-filled online messages away from school, something schools can also address.

U.S. and Russia Reach Deal to Secure Syria’s Chemical Arms

GENEVA — The United States and Russia have reached an agreement that calls for Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons to be removed or destroyed by the middle of 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday.Under a “framework” agreement, international inspectors must be on the ground in Syria by November, Mr. Kerry said, speaking at a news conference with the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey V. Lavrov. In addition, Syria must submit a “comprehensive listing” of its chemical weapons stockpiles within a week.

American and Russian officials also reached a consensus on the size of Syria’s stockpile, an essential prerequisite to any international plan to control and dismantle the weapons.“If fully implemented,” Mr. Kerry said, “this framework can provide greater protection and security to the world.”If President Bashar al-Assad of Syria fails to comply with the agreement, the issue will be referred to the United Nations Security Council.Mr. Kerry said that any violations would then be taken up under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes punitive action. But Mr. Lavrov made clear that Russia, which wields a veto in the Security Council, had not withdrawn its objections to the use of force.

The joint announcement, which took place on the third day of intensive talks here, eased the United States’ confrontation with Syria.Arms control officials on both sides worked into the night, a process that recalled the treaty negotiations during the cold war.The issue of removing Syria’s chemical arms broke into the open on Monday when Mr. Kerry, in a news conference in London, posed the question as to whether Mr. Assad could rapidly be disarmed only to state that he did not see how it could be done.

“He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that,” Mr. Kerry said. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

Now, however, what once seemed impossible has become the plan — one that will depend on Mr. Assad’s cooperation and that will need to be put in place in the middle of a civil war.Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov had a series of meeting on Friday, including a session that ended at midnight. On Saturday morning, the two sides reconvened with their arms controls experts on the hotel pool deck, sitting under a white umbrella drinking coffee as they pored over the text of the agreement.Before the news conference, Mr. Lavrov said that he had not spoken with Syrian officials while he was negotiating in Geneva. Obama administration officials say the Russia’s role was critical since it has been a major backer of the Assad government.Entitled “Framework For Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons,” the agreement is four pages, including its technical annexes. The agreement, which outlines procedures for “expeditious destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons program and stringent verification,” says that the United States and Russia will submit a plan in the next several days to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which oversees compliance with the chemical weapons accord.

Under the framework, the initial inspection of the chemical weapons sites that the Syrian government declares must be completed by November. Equipment for producing chemical weapons and filling munitions with poison gas must be destroyed by November.The document also says that there is to be “complete elimination of all chemical weapons material and equipment in the first half of 2014.”The framework agreement and the annexes are to be incorporated in a United Nations Security Council resolution that is to be adopted New York. A senior administration official said the schedule outlined in the documents “is daunting, to say the least.” The agreement notes that the United States and Russia have reached a “shared assessment” on the amount and the type of chemical weapons involved, “and are committed to the immediate international control over chemical weapons and their components in Syria.”

U.S.-Russia Talks on Syria’s Arms Make Progress

 

  WASHINGTON — President Obama will not insist on a United Nations Security Council resolution threatening Syria with military action, senior administration officials said Friday, as American and Russian negotiators meeting in Geneva moved closer to an agreement that would seek to ultimately strip Syria of its chemical weapons.

After a second day of marathon talks in Geneva between Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia, both sides expressed optimism, while American officials here said they would give the process a couple of weeks to see if it gained traction. But daunting obstacles remain to dismantling Syria’s vast chemical arsenal as negotiators try to defuse a confrontation that has inflamed politics on three continents.A significant sign of movement at the United Nations came when the Obama administration effectively took force off the table in discussions over the shape of a Security Council resolution governing any deal with Syria. Although Mr. Obama reserved the right to order an American military strike without the United Nations’ backing if Syria reneges on its commitments, senior officials said he understood that Russia would never allow a Security Council resolution authorizing force.

As a strategic matter, that statement simply acknowledged the reality on the Security Council, where Russia wields a veto and has vowed to block any military action against Syria, its ally. But Mr. Obama’s decision to concede the point early in talks underscored his desire to forge a workable diplomatic compromise and avoid a strike that would be deeply unpopular at home. It came just days after France, his strongest supporter on Syria, proposed a resolution that included a threat of military action.

Instead, Mr. Obama will insist that any Security Council resolution build in other measures to enforce a deal with the government of President Bashar al-Assad, possibly including sanctions or other penalties, according to officials who requested anonymity in order to discuss negotiations candidly. The president would not agree to Syria’s demand to renounce any use of force, said the officials, who argued that it was the threat of force that had brought Moscow and Damascus to the negotiating table.Administration officials were encouraged by the talks in Geneva. They said the Russians seemed serious enough to not simply be trying to disrupt the possibility of a military strike, but the officials added that there was no guarantee they could resolve significant disagreements on any eventual deal.In Geneva, a senior administration official said the two sides had moved closer to consensus on the size of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, an essential prerequisite to any joint plan to control and dismantle it.

Russian officials arrived in Geneva with a substantially lower assessment of the arsenal’s size than the 1,000 tons Mr. Kerry had cited. But two days of talks between Russian and American arms control experts, including an intelligence briefing by the American side, came closer to producing a common understanding of the scope of Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Mr. Obama expressed cautious optimism on Friday after meeting at the White House with the visiting emir of Kuwait, Sheik Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah. “I shared with the emir my hope that the negotiations that are currently taking place between Secretary of State Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov in Geneva bear fruit,” the president said. “But I repeated what I’ve said publicly, which is that any agreement needs to be verifiable and enforceable.”

The administration has not laid out publicly how that might be achieved, and officials on Friday left open the possibility that there might be an acceptable alternative to a Security Council resolution, although they did not go into specifics. Verification, they said, cannot simply be a vague commitment but must be a concrete process.