Correction: Somaliland-Rapes story

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — In a story May 12 about rapes in a region of Somalia known as Somaliland, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Somaliland declared independence from the rest of Somalia in 1960. Somaliland declared independence in 1991.

A corrected version of the story is below:

An upsurge of gang rapes has hit the breakaway region of Somaliland — a normally peaceful enclave considered by many to be a sanctuary from Somalia's decades of violence.

Knife-wielding young men follow women along the dusty streets of Hargeisa, the capital of the region, dragging them inside buildings to rape and rob them. Children are among the victims.

At least 84 women have been raped since the beginning of this year, according to rights activists and medical officials.

"This year is more terrifying than last year when we were barely receiving two or three in each month. This year we are seeing a new victim for every day," said a nurse at a hospital in Hargeisa. She insisted on anonymity because she is not authorized to release the details.

"It's rampant and victims are being attacked at homes, streets or anywhere now," she said.

The northern region of Somaliland declared independence from the rest of Somalia in 1991, but it has not won international recognition as an independent state. Having escaped decades of conflict in Somalia, Somaliland employs its own security and police forces, justice system and currency. It is seen by some neighboring countries as a bulwark against terrorism. It also has a reputation for successfully maintaining law and order for its population of 3.5 million.

The outbreak of gang rapes in Somaliland began early this year and has surprised local residents who blame gangs of young men.

Confronted by the spate of attacks, police have arrested dozens of suspects, but the rapes continue on Hargeisa's streets and in back roads.

Some of the victims were beaten while others suffered stabbings by the gangs. This could dent the women's freedom in Somaliland where they can drive and exercise many freedoms. Many women do not wear the veil in public.

But now some religious leaders suggest that women remain closer to their homes to avoid the rapes.

"This is in fact a horrible outbreak, raped and bleeding children are being brought into hospitals every day," said Nimo Hussein Qowdhan, Somaliland's deputy health minister. "It's becoming out of control. We must concentrate on fighting it."

Two young children were recent victims of the gang-rape attacks, said officials.

"It's a disturbing development, even children are being raped by criminals," said Fathia Hussein Ahmed, chairwoman of Somaliland's national human rights commission. "According to a report we have made, children are the most affected."

She said rapes continue to haunt victims, as many women are shunned by some communities after being raped by gangs. Some are divorced by their husbands because of the rapes.

"We are creating awareness among local communities to illustrate the negative impact of rape," she said.

The sexual attacks have brought the long-taboo subject into street conversations and have provoked calls for a new approach toward rapists, instead of the traditional clan-related legal solutions. Clan elders often let off rapists with softer punishments. In Somaliland, it is common for the clans to make their own rulings to evade harsher sentences from the government judiciary.

"We warn that the traditional clan justice system (should) avoid solving these cases, instead, courts must apply the ruling to such cases," said a statement from a consortium of human rights groups in Somaliland.

Unlike the rest of Somalia where women avoid reporting crimes to law enforcement agencies, women in Somaliland are increasingly reporting their cases to the hospitals and police. Hospitals are creating counseling for victims of sexual attacks. Activists say this may also be driving the increase in reported rapes, as women are aware of services and more likely to seek help or report rape.

However, police and rape victims struggle to identify the culprits who are believed to be unlinked, making it hard for investigators to contain the violence through arrests.

"You never know who's to blame," said Sadiya Hassan, a resident in Hargeisa, the capital of the breakaway region by phone. "The attacks forced us to avoid walking while dark or through back roads."

"This is not easy to pinpoint exactly what triggered (the rapes) but the cost of marriage for young people in Somaliland is too high and contacts between the opposite sex before marriage is also frowned upon and the fact that many youths in the diaspora returned to the country may also have contributed," said Mohamed Abdillahi, a university professor in Hargeisa city.

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Correction: Somalia-Famine Deaths story

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — In a story April 29 about a report estimating the number of Somalis who died in the country's 2011 famine, The Associated Press erroneously reported that about half of the 260,000 victims were age 5 and under. Instead, half of the victims were under the age of 5.

A corrected version of the story is below:

APNewsBreak: Report: 260,000 died in Somali famine

APNewsBreak: 260,000 died in 2011 Somali famine, new report say; half were under 5

By JASON STRAZIUSO

Associated Press

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The 2011 Somali famine killed an estimated 260,000 people, half of them under age 5, according to a new report to be published this week that more than doubles previous death toll estimates, officials told The Associated Press.

The aid community believes that tens of thousands of people died needlessly because the international community was slow to respond to early signs of approaching hunger in East Africa in late 2010 and early 2011.

The toll was also exacerbated by extremist militants from al-Shabab who banned food aid deliveries to the areas of south-central Somalia that they controlled. Those same militants have also made the task of figuring out an accurate death toll extremely difficult.

A Western official briefed on the new report — the most authoritative to date — told AP that it says 260,000 people died, and that half the victims were under age 5. Two other international officials briefed on the report confirmed that the toll was in the quarter-million range. All three insisted they not be identified because they were not authorized to share the report's contents before it is officially released.

The report is being made public Thursday by FEWSNET, a famine early warning system funded by the U.S. government's aid arm USAID, and by the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit - Somalia, which is funded by the U.S. and Britain.

A previous estimate by the U.K. government said between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in the famine. The new report used research conducted by specialists experienced in estimating death tolls in emergencies and disasters. Those researchers relied on food and mortality data compiled by the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit.

Because of the imprecise nature of the data available, the toll remains only an estimate.

When asked about the report, Somalia Health Minister Maryan Qasim Ahmed said she didn't want to comment until she read it because of questions she had about the accuracy of the figures.

Sikander Khan, the head of UNICEF in Somalia, also said he needed to look at the report's methodology before commenting specifically. But he said generally that the response to the famine was problematic because it depended on political dynamics. He said the international community needs to change the way it classifies famines.

"You lose children by the time people realize it's met the established definition of famine," he said.

Marthe Everard, the World Health Organization's country director for Somalia, said she has not yet seen the report but would not be surprised by such a high death toll.

"The Somalis themselves were shocked about the number of women and children dying," she said, adding later: "It should give us lessons learned, but what do we do with it? How do we correct it for next time?"

Much of the aid response came after pictures of weak and dying children were publicized by international media outlets around the time the U.N. declared a famine in July 2011.

"By then you are too late," Everard said.

A report last year by the aid groups Oxfam and Save the Children found that rich donor nations waited until the crisis was in full swing before donating a substantial amount of money. The report also said aid agencies were slow to respond.

Quicker action wouldn't have prevented the deaths in areas controlled by al-Shabab. The militant group prevented many men from leaving the famine-hit region and allowed no emergency food aid in.

Thousands of Somalis walked dozens or hundreds of miles to reach camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Countless numbers of families lost children or elderly members along routes that became known as roads of death.

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Nigeria reporters face criminal charges for story

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — Prosecutors filed criminal charges Tuesday against two journalists at a Nigerian newspaper over a story they published on alleged plans by the nation's presidency to disrupt opposition parties. The charges are a sign of growing government pressure on the media.

Tony Amokeodo and Chibuzo Ukaibe face 10 counts of forgery after the daily Abuja-based newspaper Leadership reported on a memo it claimed came from officials working for President Goodluck Jonathan. Amokeodo and Ukaibe appeared briefly in court Tuesday before being released on bail, said Azubuike Ishiekwene, the group managing director of the newspaper.

Though the presidency later denied the authenticity of the memo, It is unclear why authorities are charging the two journalists criminally as libel is handled typically as a civil matter in Nigerian courts. Federal police spokesman Frank Mba did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

In the story, the newspaper said the memo called for officials to disrupt the business interest of opposition party leaders. The newspaper said the memo also included a mention of influencing the country's Independent National Electoral Commission, as well as potentially raising the price of the oil-rich nation's subsidized gasoline — an issue that sparked a nationwide strike last year.

Officials with Nigeria's presidency later described the purported memo as a forgery and "cheap blackmail." Yet, police officials earlier detained four journalists from the newspaper over it, including Amokeodo and Ukaibe. Those two journalists were released after their colleagues only on condition they reported regularly to police investigators. Officers arrested the two when they reported to police headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, on Monday.

"We'll have to wait to see how it goes," Ishiekwene told The Associated Press. "It's better for us for the matter to be charged to court and them to be held indefinitely."

Journalists in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation of more than 160 million people, routinely are targeted by security agencies for the stories they write. In December, two journalists from a Hausa-language newspaper were detained for days without charges after their publication printed stories on alleged abuses by the country's military in its fight against a radical Islamist sect. Journalists also face beatings and worse at the hands of thugs. At least 19 journalists have been killed in Nigeria since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The crackdown against the newspaper has drawn criticism across other newspapers and in social media, with some comparing to the crackdowns made by military rulers before Nigeria became a democracy in 1999. Presidential spokesman Reuben Abati went as far as to describe the newspaper in a recent statement as an influence that could "threaten our democracy and undermine law and order."

Abati later said: "This government is proud of its record on press freedom."

The Committee to Protect Journalists earlier called on the Nigerian government to stop its "harassment" of the newspaper.

"Nigerian police efforts to intimidate journalists of Leadership newspaper into revealing the source of a document, which the government has dismissed as fake, is a heavy-handed abuse of power unacceptable in a democracy," the committee's Africa coordinator Mohamed Keita said in a statement.

Still, the press in Nigeria at times resembles the age of newspaper barons and yellow journalism in the U.S. Oligarch families and politicians own many of the major newspapers that circulate in the country, while military rulers previously handed out television broadcast licenses to trusted friends. Journalists themselves remain woefully underpaid, sometimes seeing their salaries arrive months late. That forces some to expect money from interview subjects or collect so-called "brown envelope" bribes from politicians to support themselves.

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Jon Gambrell can be reached at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP .

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Correction: Pope-Latin America story

MEXICO CITY (AP) — In a story March 14 about the significance the election of Pope Francis to Latin America, The Associated Press misidentified the president of El Salvador. His name is Mauricio Funes.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Latin America sees change under region's 1st pope

Latin American homeland sets out tall agenda for change under the New World's 1st pope

By KATHERINE CORCORAN

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The famous words uttered to announce that a leader of the Catholic Church has been chosen now have special resonance for Latin America, which had felt neglected by the Vatican and has finally produced the New World's first pope.

"''Habemus Papam.' 'WE have a pope,'" said Tom Quigley, former policy adviser on Latin American and Caribbean affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "This will instill a sense of pride and happiness and will have a very positive effect."

The selection of former Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as pope is already energizing the world's most Catholic continent, which has been rapidly losing its faithful.

Many hope Pope Francis will bring a familiar cultural warmth, while pushing the church to address a divisive gap between rich and poor in the region. He is also seen as someone who could bridge Latin America's left-right political split as a conservative devoted to fighting poverty and not afraid to speak out against the hierarchy.

But first, the papacy of Francis is being seen as an overdue acknowledgement of the home of 40 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics that felt distant from former Pope Benedict XVI.

"It's a recognition of the millions of Spanish-speaking faithful who belong to the church," said Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes.

Almost everything about Pope Francis suggests a shift from Benedict, his reserved academic predecessor, who put his focus on saving Europe and was criticized for waiting seven years before visiting Spanish-speaking Latin America on a trip last year to Mexico and Cuba.

The new pope picked a name that has never been used, an apparent reference to a humble friar who dedicated his life to helping the poor. He comes from an order, the Jesuits, that had never produced a pope. He considers social outreach, rather than doctrinal battles, to be the essential business of the church.

"For me it's a sign from God, who is inviting us to commit ourselves to a continental mission," said Bishop Eugenio Lira, secretary-general of the Mexican Conference of Bishops. "He will imprint his Latin American personality ... He knows the joys, the pains, the problems and the opportunities of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean and that will create a very close relationship."

Latin America, with roughly 600 million people, is home to some of the world's poorest and most violent countries, with organized crime and drug trafficking causing a spike in killings through the region in recent years. It remains one of the most unequal regions in the world, according to the World Bank, though the gap has been closing in recent years and more people have move into the middle class.

Francis was unafraid to challenge the Argentine government for being too liberal or to label fellow church members as hypocrites for forgetting that Jesus Christ bathed lepers and ate with prostitutes.

"His discourse is very close to the social doctrine of the church," said Elio Masferrer, a religion expert at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. "That includes the criticism that in this time there are sectors of the clergy who behave like aristocrats, like princes of the church."

But one of his main challenges will be to woo back the followers the church has lost to Protestant evangelicals or just to secularism, with some of the biggest drain occurring in the poorest communities.

Perhaps nowhere in Latin America has the church been losing ground faster than in Brazil.

The nation still has more Catholics than any other — 124 million people self-identified as following the faith in the 2010 Census, 65 percent of the population. However, just a decade earlier 74 percent of Brazilians were Catholic, and in 1970 that figure was 92 percent.

The Pentecostal churches expanded rapidly in poor areas in Brazil, offering the downtrodden real-life guidance on employment and education, while the Catholic church was perceived to have largely abandoned poor urban areas in cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

In the slums of those two cities, one would be hard pressed to locate a Catholic house of worship, whereas raucous Pentecostal churches holding daily services are numerous.

Yet in recent years, even the Pentecostals are losing steam in Brazil.

"The biggest challenge facing the church in Latin America isn't the growth of the Pentecostals, but the abandonment of a considerable amount of Catholics and others to agnosticism," said Fernando Altemeyer, a theologian at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo.

The church under Francis also must recover from the financial and sexual abuse scandals that marked Benedict's eight-year papacy before he resigned last month.

"The question is whether the new Pope will achieve transparency when managing the church, whether he manages to re-legitimize the moral and financial questions, I think this is key, not only for Latin America but more generally," said Franklin Ramirez of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Ecuador.

As a cardinal, Pope Francis never held a top post inside the Vatican administration, or curia. This outsider status could pose obstacles in attempts to reform the Vatican, which has been hit with embarrassing disclosures from leaked documents alleging financial cover-ups and internal feuds.

His biographer, Sergio Rubin, told the AP that the new pope reacted strongly to the pedophilia scandal, which hit Argentina among other Latin American countries, saying the church has to make sure that its next priests aren't so susceptible. Only 40 percent of those who enter seminary make it as priests.

"He imposed a system of very strict controls," Rubin said.

The region that celebrated its native son on Wednesday believes he is up to the task.

Jesuits have the gift of spreading the word of God in the most inhospitable of places, said Maurizzio Pavia, an Argentine tourism official who promotes religious and cultural events in Puerto Rico.

"I think his emphasis will be on helping people recover the confidence they had in the church as an institution and as the evangelical messenger," Pavia said.

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Associated Press writers Michael Warren in Argentina, Gonzalo Solano in Ecuador, Bradley Brooks and Marco Sibaja in Brazil, Marcos Aleman in El Salvador, Danica Coto in Puerto Rico, and Olga R. Rodriguez and Adriana Gomez Licon in Mexico contributed to this report.

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