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After losing her mobility because of a car accident, Marie Dedieu was bound to move only in a wheelchair. Beside her handicap, she had to follow a medical treatment, taking drugs every day. This rose concern among her family and the French authorities as soon as the news of her abduction spread.

Today, it is with deep emotion that we learnt, via a Quai d'Orsay (the French Ministry for Foreign affairs) communiqué, that "the contacts with who the French government dealt, seeking for Marie Dedieu's release, announced her death without giving any detail about its date and circumstances".

Nicole Guedj, President of the Red Helmets Foundation, holds to present her deepest sympathy to Marie Dedieu's nearest and dearest. She also has a special thought for the remaining 7 French hostages, still kept captive all around the world: Denis Allex, officer in the General direction for external security, captive in Somalia since July 2009; Pierre Legrand, Daniel Larribe, Thierry Dol and Marc Furrer detained since September 2010 in the Sahel desert; and eventually, the three humanitarian workers, kidnapped in Yemen on the 28th of May 2011.

A genius left us yesterday night, someone who was the first to walk on the “e-responsibility’s” path. “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.” declared Mark Zuckerberg one hour after his death’s announcement. In the manner of Facebook’s creator, a new generation of web managers is taking over Apple’s boss.

Besides, this very week, Facebook measured up, when deciding to relay the French Amber Alert on its member’s pages. This proposition that I had formulated 7 months ago in a French daily newspaper, Le Figaro, was finally accepted by the social network. This decision will enable the 25 millions French Facebook members to help spreading the news and description of kidnapped children.

In my universe, humanitarian action and human rights defense ones, I do my best to use news technologies’ full potential to help victims of natural disasters. In that purpose I initiated the creation of the French Amber Alert, called “Alerte enlèvement”, when I was State Secretary for Victims’ Rights, and then its extension to Facebook.

It is also in this perspective that the Red Helmets Foundation, whom I am President for, conceived a humanitarian satellite telecommunications container. It can restore communication and data exchange between rescue teams, which is crucial to organize and coordinate humanitarian aid. This tool was already used in Chad, in refugee’s camps in Darfur and Haiti, after January’s earthquake. Last project backed up by the Foundation, MISSING.NET, a global missing person search engine, made with a partnership with Google and which was used during the Japanese catastrophe.

Steve Jobs was deeply convinced that « people who are mad enough to assume they can change the world are usually the ones who do it ». To be continued.

Nicole Guedj 

Seven months ago, Nicole Guedj, former French Minister, and creator of the Amber Alert in France, initiated a call for Facebook to sign the Convention, in the French daily newspapers: “A partnership with Facebook would be useful. We have to use every new technology available to stop child kidnappers. They have to know that with the old media, the Internet or with the phone, millions of people will be aware of the kidnapping, and it could prevent them from acting out” (1st of March, in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro).

Nicole Guedj, then Secretary of State for the protection of victims’ rights and president of the Red Helmets Foundation, has made herself heard. The next French Amber Alerts will be published on the Facebook users' wall if they previously liked the dedicated Facebook page. 

 User's guide: 

 - "relay information": become a member of the Kidnapping Alert Facebook page

 - "send invitations": ask your friends to join themselves the social network and the Kidnapping Alert page

 - "publish on your wall": share the information with your own network

 - "Bring together your community and this action": if you're a group administrator, call all members to register on the Facebook page and to ask their own group's members to do so

 - "the Kidnapping Alert is now activated": automatically, display of the child's description on the wall of every person registered on the Facebook page. 

At first, the French Amber Alert was only broadcasted on old media. To extend its impact, the Red Helmets Foundation created in 2009 the 2.0 version, in partnership with Orange, Free, SFR, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Dailymotion, blogSpirit, the ASIC and Silicon Sentier. In 2010, the Red Helmets Foundation decided to develop a mobile app for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Windows Phone 7 to involve the largest number of people as possible. Nicole Guedj invites all the Facebook users to support this new evolution of the 2.0 French Amber Alert. 

According to Nicole Guedj, a last step will still need to be taken: extending the French Amber Alert to European countries: “Since its creation, the Kidnapping Alert proved itself and I am particularly pleased about what has already been accomplished. However, more improvements could be made.  It has been a long time I am calling for the extension of the alert to the European scale. Nowadays, it’s very easy for an abductor to cross borders; alert bulletins issued in the same time in several countries would prevent even more kidnappers from acting out. Our Belgian and Swiss neighbours, whom I had supported in their fight to implement the kidnapping alert in their own country, agree to cooperate. Let’s bet this cross-border agreement will be effective before the activation of a new alert”

·         Become a member of the "Kidnapping Alert" Facebook page 

www.facebook.com/alerteenlevement

·         Download the mobile phone application on:

- iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/id356083465?mt=8

- Blackberry: http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/12184?lang=fr

- Android: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.casquesrouges.AlerteEnlevement&feature=search_result

·         More information : 

www.casques-rouges.org

·         Press contact : 

Sarah Aizenman – 06.15.89.91.85 – sarah.aizenman@casques-rouges.org

After a bomb attempt or a natural disaster, the first hours are very crucial to save lives. NGOs, first-aid or relief teams try everything to confront the reality and help the surviving. Most of the time, they lack means to be fully effective, which makes the death toll heavy. This breath detector can identify organic traces that come from missing people when they breathe, sweat or urinate. "Such a device can be used on the field without any laboratory support. It should enable first-aid and humanitarian teams to look for signs coming from living people covered with rubble, at a wide scale and for a long period of time", Professor Paul Thomas, from the British University in Loughborough, who invented this detector, sums up.

The Red Helmets Foundation also contributes to create innovations, in order to strengthen abilities of the teams on the field. Indeed, MISSING.NET, an international search engine for missing people, was launched a few days after the Tsunami in Japan. Emergesat, a satellite container was implemented in Port au Prince, a few hours after the earthquake that stroke Haiti, in order to establish an emergency local communication network.