A tortured choice in famine: Which child lives? (AP)

By MALKHADIR M. MUHUMED, Associated Press Malkhadir M. Muhumed, Associated Press – 33?mins?ago

DADAAB, Kenya – Wardo Mohamud Yusuf walked for two weeks with her 1-year-old daughter on her back and her 4-year-old son at her side to flee Somalia's drought and famine. When the boy collapsed near the end of the journey, she poured some of the little water she had on his head to cool him, but he was unconscious and could not drink.

She asked other families traveling with them for help, but none stopped, fearful for their own survival.

Then the 29-year-old mother had to make a choice that no parent should have to make.

"Finally, I decided to leave him behind to his God on the road," Yusuf said days later in an interview at a teeming refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. "I am sure that he was alive, and that is my heartbreak."

Parents fleeing the devastating famine on foot — sometimes with as many as seven children in tow — are having to make unimaginably cruel choices: Which children have the best chance to survive when food and water run low? Who should be left behind?

"I have never faced such a dilemma in my life," Yusuf told The Associated Press. "Now I'm reliving the pain of abandoning my child. I wake up at night to think about him. I feel terrified whenever I see a son of his age."

Dr. John Kivelenge, a mental health officer for the International Rescue Committee at Dadaab emphasizes the extreme duress Somali mothers and fathers are facing.

"It is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. They can't sit down and wait to die together," he said. "But after a month, they will suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, which means they will have flashbacks and nightmares.

"The picture of the children they abandoned behind will come back to them and haunt them," he said. "They will also have poor sleep and social problems."

The United States estimates that more than 29,000 Somali children under age 5 have died in the famine in the last three months. An unknown number too weak to walk farther have been abandoned on the sandy trek to help after food and water supplies ran out.

Faduma Sakow Abdullahi, a 29-year-old widow, attempted the journey to Dadaab with her baby and other children ages 5, 4, 3 and 2. A day before she reached the refugee camp, her 4-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son wouldn't wake up after a brief rest.

Abdullahi said she did not want to "waste" the little water she had in a 5-liter container on dying children when the little ones needed it.

Nor did she want to wait for too long until her other children started dying, so she stood up and walked away a few paces — then returned in the hopes the youngsters were in fact alive.

After several back-and-forth walks, she finally left her two children under a tree, unsure whether they could be resuscitated.

More than 12 million people in East Africa are in need of food aid because of the severe drought. The U.N. says 2.8 million of those are in need of immediate lifesaving assistance, including more than 450,000 in Somalia's famine zones.

Ahmed Jafar Nur, a 50-year-old father of seven, was traveling with his 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter to Kenya. But after only two days of walking, they ran out of water. By the third day, they could only sit beneath a big tree — thirsty, hungry and exhausted.

"The two children could not walk on anymore. Then instead of us all dying there, I was forced to leave them to their fate, especially after I thought of the other five children and their mother I left behind at home. I said to myself, 'Save your life for the interest of the five others. These two have their God,'" he said.

"That was the worst thing I experienced in my life. It was a heartbreaking experience to abandon my children who are part of myself," he said. "For almost three months, my mind was not stable. Their images were in front of me."

Miraculously, the two teenagers were saved by nomads, and they have since made their way back to their mother in Somalia. But Nur said he can't afford to bring the rest of his family to Kenya because it cost too much.

"I was a farmer and had no education that can help me now get jobs. We depend on handouts," he said. "My mind is preoccupied with them: Will they all die, including their mother, or will some survive? That is what I always ask myself."

When Faqid Nur Elmi's 3-year-old son died of hunger and thirst on the road from Somalia, his mother could only surround his body with small dried branches to serve as a grave. She couldn't stop to mourn — there were five other children to think about.

"Where will I get the energy to dig up a grave for him?" she asked. "I was just thinking of how I can save the rest of the children. The God who gave me him in the first place took him away. So I didn't worry much about the late son. Others' lives were at risk."

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How to help: http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/interaction-members-respond-drought-crisis-horn-africa

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Lauryn Hill: Rohan Marley not father of 6th child (AP)

NEW YORK – After the birth of her sixth child, Lauryn Hill wants to clear up two things: Rohan (RO'-han) Marley didn't abandon her while she was pregnant, and he's not the baby's father.

The blogosphere has been abuzz after word came last week that the reclusive Grammy winner had a baby boy. Marley, the father of her five other children, sent a message on Twitter "forwarding all well wishes to Ms. Hill on the birth of her new son." That tweet, along with pictures showing him in an embrace with another woman, created speculation.

Hill has rarely discussed their yearslong relationship. She posted a message on Twitter and her website Tuesday defending Marley. She says they've had a "long and complex history" but love their five children together.

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Online:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_en_mu/storytext/us_people_lauryn_hill/42394911/SIG=10rqgep68/*http://www.laurynhill.com

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Ireland unveils new report on Catholic child abuse (AP)

DUBLIN – A new investigation into the Catholic Church's chronic cover-up of child abuse found Wednesday that a rural diocese and its bishop ignored Irish church rules requiring all suspected molestation cases to be reported to police — and the Vatican encouraged this concealment.

The government, which ordered the two-year probe into 1996-2009 cover-ups in the County Cork diocese of Cloyne, warned its findings suggest that parishes across Ireland could pose a continuing danger to children's welfare today.

Justice Minister Alan Shatter pledged to pass a new law making it an imprisonable crime to withhold knowledge of suspected child abuse as he published the investigation into the Cloyne diocese in southwest Ireland.

Shatter said previous pledges by Irish church leaders to place Irish civil law first and report all abuse cases dating back to 1995 had been "built on sand."

The 341-page Cloyne report is the fourth such government-ordered probe into how church leaders for decades protected their own reputation — and their own pedophile staff members from the law — at the expense of Irish children. The previous reports and scandals since 1994 have decimated the church's reputation and standing in this once-devoutly Catholic nation.

Wednesday's report by an independent panel of investigators found that former Cloyne Bishop John Magee, who resigned last year without admitting he'd covered up crimes, and senior aides failed to tell police anything about most abuse reports from 1996 to 2009 and withheld basic information in all cases.

It documented a catalog of errors in the church's suppression of information on 19 suspected child-abusing priests, only one of whom is currently facing criminal charges.

Shatter and Children's Minister Frances Fitzgerald called Magee's failures particularly shocking because they were so recent and followed a series of Irish church initiatives to protect children from abuse.

"That's the most horrifying aspect of this document. This is not a catalog of failure from a different era. This is not about an Ireland of 50 years ago. This is about Ireland now," Fitzgerald said.

The primate for Ireland's 4 million Catholics, Cardinal Sean Brady, and the official who replaced Magee in Cloyne, Archbishop Dermot Clifford, issued immediate apologies and pledged greater openness and cooperation with state authorities. Brady himself last year admitted he helped to conceal the crimes of one serial-rapist priest from Irish authorities in the mid-1970s but rejected calls to resign.

Magee, a former senior Vatican official and private secretary to Popes Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II, said he took "full responsibility" for what he called "the flawed implementation of the church procedures."

"I now realize that I should have taken a much firmer role in ensuring their implementation," said Magee, who was the fifth Irish bishop to resign amid accusations they encouraged the endangerment of children.

But Irish government leaders and abuse-rights advocates said the Vatican also bore heavy responsibility particularly for encouraging the most recent known cover-ups.

They and the investigators emphasized that Ireland's bishops formally agreed in 1995 to begin reporting suspected child-abuse cases to police in rules that became valid Jan. 1, 1996. The Irish church took that step after the first abuse victims went public with their lawsuits, a development that opened the floodgates for more than 13,000 such cases.

But a confidential January 1997 letter from the Vatican's diplomat in Ireland to the Irish bishops warned them that the Irish church's child-protection policies were invalid under Catholic canon law; those internal church laws must be respected foremost; and any accused priests were likely to have any punishments successfully appealed in Rome.

That letter from the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, then Pope John Paul II's ambassador to Ireland, dismissed the Irish policy as representing "a study document." The Associated Press was the first media organization to publish that letter in full in January.

Shatter said the Vatican's criticisms of the 1996 child-protection initiative "was entirely unhelpful, giving comfort and support to those who dissented from the guidelines. We want to say as clearly as we can that this approach, when the state was entitled to rely on assurances about the operation of the guidelines, was wholly unacceptable."

The Vatican offered no immediate response.

In his 2010 pastoral letter to Ireland's Catholics condemning pedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted bishops for failing to follow canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of Irish child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state. Benedict was widely criticized in Ireland for failing to admit any Vatican role in covering up the truth.

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Fierce storm surprises Wis. campers, child killed (AP)

GRANTSBURG, Wis. – A fierce thunderstorm swept through a normally rural Wisconsin county that was packed with holiday campers, toppling trees that killed an 11-year-old girl, blowing boats ashore and injuring more than three dozen people, officials said Saturday.

The storm moved across Minnesota and Wisconsin on Friday, packing winds approaching 80 mph and hail as large as softballs.

In northwestern Wisconsin's Burnett County, at least 39 people went to hospitals after the storm toppled hundreds of trees and left several thousand utility customers without power. Authorities said most of the injured were treated and released, but three were in critical condition Saturday afternoon.

A search was under way Saturday along the St. Croix River for missing canoeists, the Wisconsin Emergency Management Office reported. Boats were upended and blown ashore in the area, while an airport hangar in neighboring Douglas County collapsed onto a single-engine plane.

The storm came at one of the worst times of the year for rural Burnett County: a summer holiday weekend, when the area's lakes and rivers attract tens of thousands of visitors, said Rhonda Reynolds, a regional director for Wisconsin Emergency Management.

The county population is 17,000 she said, but the long weekend drew an estimated 80,000 visitors to the county about 90 miles northeast of Minneapolis.

"The weekend holiday traffic is complicating things just because of the number of people," she said. "Emergency crews are trying to get access to various areas but with trees blocking roads, and with all the people, movement is restricted."

Law enforcement reported the girl who died was killed when a tree fell on her at a campground in the county. No other details were immediately released.

The storm moved into southwest Minnesota on Friday afternoon and took nearly six hours to pass through before slipping into northwest Wisconsin, said Matt Friedlein, a National Weather Service meteorologist. The bad weather had moved out by Saturday morning, when skies were clear and sunny with temperatures in the 80s.

Anita Frase, the owner of Bay Park Resort & Campground in Trego, said she and the resort's 300 visitors knew a storm would be coming but they didn't expect it to hit so swiftly and with such intensity.

"About 9 o'clock the winds picked up and within five minutes it was upon us. Those were probably the darkest skies I've ever seen up here," she said, adding that the storm knocked down several trees, with some landing on vehicles. "A lot of people were very nervous. Some of the kids were crying."

Workers were also rattled at a Grantsburg store near the St. Croix River that rents canoes, kayaks and boating gear. Store clerk Aimee Van Tatenhove said the wind was so strong and loud that no one realized a medium-sized tree had fallen into the roof until employees went outside.

In Minnesota, a driver suffered minor cuts when hail the size of a baseball hit a vehicle's windshield, said Meeker County Sheriff Jeff Norlin. Roofs were torn away in several towns.

"Some communities had multiple passes at this storm — including golf ball-, baseball- and softball-sized hail," said McLeod County Emergency Management Director Kevin Mathews, who said two tractor-trailers were blown off local highways.

Two Minnesota state parks sustained tree damage so heavy that a conservation officer who was making sure no campers were in the area had to abandon his vehicle and hike back out on foot, said Chris Niskanen of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

He urged people to stay out of Camden State Park and St. Croix State Park, which are technically closed because of the state's government shutdown but could still attract campers because they're public land. He cautioned that some trees may have uprooted but gotten hung up tenuously on other trees.

"It's an issue of health and safety," he said. "Since those parks are closed they don't have the personnel to go in and remove (the trees). People need to know there's a danger if they start wandering around."

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