Tag Archives: Children

Boy, 6, fights for his life after South Carolina school shooting

Sheriffs and officers at the scene of the South Carolina School Shooting

By Harriet McLeod

CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) – A first grader who was shot and wounded by a 14-year-old boy accused of killing his father before he opened fire outside a South Carolina elementary school is “fighting for his life,” a fire chief and the boy’s family said on Thursday.

Jacob Hall, 6, was struck in the leg on Wednesday afternoon during a shooting spree that also wounded another boy and a first-grade teacher at Townville Elementary School, about 100 miles (160 km) northeast of Atlanta.

Police said the teenager crashed a pickup truck into a fence around the rural school’s playground after he fatally shot his father, Jeffrey DeWitt Osborne, 47, at their home about 2 miles (3 km) away. The teen, who has not been named, is in custody.

“I hate my life,” he said before firing a handgun at the school, the Greenville News reported, citing the aunt of a 6-year-old girl who was headed outside for recess at the time.

The incident was the latest in a series of shootings at U.S. schools that has fueled debate about access to guns in America. Many schools have beefed up security precautions since 2012, when a gunman shot and killed 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Hall’s family said in a statement the 6-year-old was a “very sick little boy.” The message, provided through the Greenville Health System Children’s Hospital where he remains in critical condition, said a bullet tore through his femoral artery, causing massive blood loss that led to a “major brain injury.”

Billy McAdams, chief of the Townville Volunteer Fire Department, choked up on Thursday as he asked for prayers for “little Jacob,” whom he had helped treat at the scene.

“He’s still fighting for his life,” McAdams told a news conference.

Teacher Meghan Hollingsworth, who was shot in the shoulder, and the other boy, also 6, according to media reports, were treated and released.

McAdams credited fellow first responders and the school’s staff for taking action to prevent another school massacre. Hollingsworth shepherded students inside to safety and urged medical staff to care for the injured children before her, he said.

Jamie Brock, a 30-year veteran of the Townville Volunteer Fire Department, was unarmed when he confronted the shooter and pinned him down for police, McAdams said.

Brock has declined media interviews, saying he wanted the focus to remain on the victims.

“The true heroes of yesterday’s senseless tragedy are the teachers that put their lives on the line to protect the students,” Brock said in a statement read by McAdams at the news conference. “This will not take us down.”

Authorities said they did not know of any connection between the shooter and the school victims but had ruled out terrorism and ethnicity as motivating factors.

The suspect, who was home-schooled, was emotional when he called his grandparents Wednesday afternoon, authorities said.

His grandmother “could not make out what he was saying because he was crying and upset, and so they went to the house, and that’s when she discovered her son and called 911,” coroner Greg Shore told reporters. The teenager was gone.

His mother offered no insight into his motive in a statement released to media on her behalf on Thursday.

“Our entire family is absolutely shocked and saddened by the senseless actions of our son and grandson,” the statement said.

(Additional reporting Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Bill Trott, Lisa Shumaker and Paul Tait)

Flawed CDC Report left Indiana children vulnerable to lead poisoning

Yasir, 5, waits for his bus with his father Yarnell R. Arrington Sr. in the West Calumet Complex where he resides in East Chicago, Indiana, U.S.

By Joshua Schneyer and M.B. Pell

EAST CHICAGO, Indiana (Reuters) – In this industrial northwest Indiana city, hundreds of families who live in a gated public housing community with prim lawns and a new elementary school next door are searching for new homes. Their own places have been marked for demolition.

The school, temporarily closed, has been taken over by the Environmental Protection Agency and health officials who offer free blood tests to check residents for lead poisoning. Long after the U.S. lead industry left East Chicago, a toxic legacy remains. Smokestacks at one smelter next door, shuttered 31 years ago, for decades polluted these grounds.

Emissions from the now-defunct U.S. Smelter and Lead Refinery Inc, or USS Lead, left a potent hazard in the soil. By early this year, the EPA detected concentrations of the heavy metal so high in some yards that they could pose a serious health risk to families at the West Calumet Housing Complex. Children are told not to play outdoors.

At the 44-year-old housing complex, all 1,100 residents are being forced to move out. Many are outraged about why the dangerous soils weren’t identified and removed earlier.

One reason: Five years ago, a unit of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a 19-page report that all but ruled out the possibility of children here getting lead poisoning. (http://bit.ly/2dAYVOt)

That CDC branch – the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, – conducts public health assessments to examine potential contamination risks and point the way to next steps to be taken by EPA and others.

In its January 2011 report, ATSDR said it reached “4 important conclusions.” Among them: “Breathing the air, drinking tap water or playing in soil in neighborhoods near the USS Lead Site is not expected to harm people’s health.”

ATSDR’s report was built on flawed or incomplete data, a Reuters examination found: The assumption that residents weren’t at risk was wrong, and many of the report’s key findings were unfounded or misleading.

The report said “nearly 100 percent” of children were being tested for blood lead levels in the impacted area. State data reviewed by Reuters show the annual rate of blood lead testing among children in East Chicago ranged from 5 percent to 20 percent over the last 11 years.

 

In the area, well known for its history of lead contamination, ATSDR reported that “declining blood lead levels in small children appear to confirm that they are no longer exposed to lead from any source.”

Yet from 2005 to 2015, nearly 22 percent of children tested in the Indiana census tract that contains the West Calumet houses showed an elevated blood lead level – 160 such results in all. Children tested in this tract were more than twice as likely to have an elevated reading than in other areas of East Chicago, state data reviewed by Reuters shows.

The CDC’s conclusions help explain why many West Calumet residents didn’t learn until recently that their yards were toxic, according to health experts, city administrators and data compiled by Reuters.

GRAPHIC – A Neighborhood and Lead: http://tmsnrt.rs/2d0QCcM

Carla Morgan, East Chicago’s city attorney, believes the report contributed to a false sense of safety. “In 2011, the ATSDR lacked data to make any conclusion about the potential health risks,” she said.

Contacted by reporters, the ATSDR initially said it would respond to detailed questions about its 2011 report. Over a period of weeks it said it was finalizing its responses. A spokeswoman, Susan McBreairty, told Reuters the answers were “complicated.” Reporters also sought comment from the two ATSDR scientists listed as authors of the 2011 report; neither responded.

Ultimately, ATSDR didn’t address the questions.

Instead, it released a broad media statement Thursday saying it is evaluating new EPA data “to determine if a human health hazard has developed since the Agency’s 2011 public health assessment (PHA) of the USS Lead and Smelter site.”

A new analysis will come next year, ATSDR said in the statement, and “will help determine if additional public health activities are warranted.”

BARRIER BETWEEN CHILDREN, SOIL

The report’s findings factored significantly into EPA’s decision not to conduct more urgent soil testing or urge residents to relocate, said EPA Region Five Administrator Robert Kaplan. Believing residents weren’t at imminent risk, EPA focused on a multi-year plan to gradually test for and replace lead-tainted soil.

Once EPA completed its soil-sampling this year, the scope of the danger for children was clear.

“The high levels of lead in many yards in East Chicago would require a barrier to be placed between children and the soil, to protect them,” said Dr. Helen Binns, a pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago and professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, who reviewed the testing data with Reuters.

EPA’s sampling found that 50 percent of the West Calumet homes tested had lead in their topsoil exceeding 1,200 parts per million, or three times the federal “hazard” level for residential areas.

That level warrants “time-critical” removal action within six months to protect human health, EPA standards say. In the most polluted yard found, a top layer of soil had 45,000 parts per million of lead.

Environmental Protection Agency signs that read "DO NOT play in the dirt or around the mulch" are seen at the West Calumet Complex in East Chicago, Indiana,

Environmental Protection Agency signs that read “DO NOT play in the dirt or around the mulch” are seen at the West Calumet Complex in East Chicago, Indiana, U.S. September 16, 2016. REUTERS/Michelle Kanaar

Patrick MacRoy, a former head of the lead poisoning prevention program in Chicago, expressed shock after reviewing the ATSDR report. He found especially troubling its conclusion that children faced no threat of lead exposure.

“I can’t believe anyone with any degree of training or familiarity with environmental health would ever make (that) statement,” MacRoy said. “I can’t believe that no one reviewing that report internally, or even at EPA or the state, wouldn’t have flagged that as grossly misstating the available evidence.”

“I generally respect ATSDR, but that report is embarrassingly bad,” he said.

GRAPHIC – Industry and Housing: http://tmsnrt.rs/2d3MtIp

In recent months, 10 children under age 7 at West Calumet houses or in nearby areas were confirmed to have elevated lead levels, or around 5 percent of those tested, according to Indiana’s State Department of Health.

Following the notorious lead contamination of the drinking water supply in Flint, Michigan, around 4.9 percent of children tested there had high blood lead levels.

In East Chicago, more monitoring is planned, and the recent results do not mean children are in the clear, experts said.

Blood lead testing is usually indicated for children ages one and two. Ingesting lead-tainted soil, dust or paint chips is most common among infants and toddlers with hand-to-mouth behavior, said Dr. Bruce Lanphear, an expert on neurotoxins at Simon Fraser University.

A child poisoned at age two will often later test within a normal range. But the earlier exposure may have already wrought irreversible damage, including lifelong cognitive impairments.

‘WHAT ARE THEY DIGGING FOR?’

Today, outside the orderly brick houses in the community – due west of Gary, Indiana, and some 23 miles south of Chicago – moving vans are parked, and poster board signs warn residents not to play in the dirt.

Some of the 92 EPA staffers on site go door to door to speak with residents, offering testing and clean-up for lead inside their homes. Contractors have placed mulch over exposed dirt areas.

The forced exodus of tenants comes after East Chicago’s mayor told them this summer that lead and arsenic contamination in the area made it unacceptably risky to live here, especially for the area’s more than 600 children.

“I have lived here for five years and was never told anything about contamination until now,” said Akendra Erving, a mother of five young children who is moving her family to Alabama. “In May or June, I started to see these crews digging in peoples’ yards. ‘What are they digging for?’ I thought.

“Now I know.”

Recently, Erving got more bad news. A test showed that her three-year-old son, King, had a blood lead level of 8 micrograms per deciliter. Her daughter Kelis, 4, tested at 9 micrograms per deciliter. CDC recommends a public health response for children who test at 5 or above.

The lead crisis is the focus of several agencies, including ATSDR. EPA has taken a leading role, with Indiana’s State Department of Health, city officials, state environmental officials and federal and local housing agencies also involved.

Tensions and finger-pointing among the parties has sometimes grown heated. In July, East Chicago’s mayor wrote EPA a scathing letter, accusing the agency of withholding soil testing data that demonstrated grave health risks.

EPA’s Kaplan says the soil data was shared with the city as soon as the EPA could verify it, in May.

Recently, a “peacekeeper” division of the U.S. Justice Department, its Community Relations Service, stepped in to de-escalate conflicts.

ON TOP OF ANACONDA

The West Calumet Housing complex stands near the center of a once humming U.S. industry hub. It was also a dirty one.

In the early 1970s, the houses were erected atop the former Anaconda Lead and International Refining Company. For decades, the plant churned out white lead pigment for use in paint.

In 1978, the United States outlawed the type of paint Anaconda produced for residential use. That and other measures brought a sharp drop in average U.S. blood lead levels in recent decades. No level of lead in the blood is safe for children.

Next door was another smelter, USS Lead. From 1920 through 1985, the facility refined lead or lead products. Its blast furnaces pumped out soot that blanketed the land where the housing complex stands.

Also nearby was a facility, formerly operated by chemicals giant DuPont, that produced lead arsenate from 1928-1949. Its main ingredients were lead and arsenic. The product was banned as an insecticide in 1988.

Much of the waste was stockpiled within the city’s industrial complexes. Sometimes it got spread over nearby marshland or dumped in the Calumet River.

Back in 2009, this corner of East Chicago, a working class city of 29,000, was placed on the federal Superfund’s National Priorities List, or NPL.

Michael Berkoff, an EPA project manager who led a 2012 public hearing in East Chicago to inform residents about clean-up plans, described the NPL as “EPA’s nationwide list of the most contaminated sites in the country.”

Numbering more than 1,300 nationwide, the Superfund sites require clean-up to protect the environment and human health. In many cases, the companies that used to operate them folded years ago.

At the hearing, Berkoff laid out EPA’s long-term goal of removing contaminated soil from West Calumet yards and other polluted zones in East Chicago. “Some of the contamination here is at higher levels than we would consider hazardous waste,” he told the audience, according to a transcript.

Years earlier, the EPA had already cleaned up several area yards where topsoil testing detected lead levels exceeding 1,200 parts per million, ppm.

The next round of remediation EPA proposed would cost tens of millions of dollars and take a few years, Berkoff said. At West Calumet, wherever EPA found yards whose shallow soil exceeded 400 ppm of lead, it would excavate and replace the layer with clean soil.

To fund the effort, EPA and the U.S. Department of Justice pursued what they called potential responsible parties for some of the area’s contamination. In 2014, chemicals company DuPont and ARCO, a unit of oil giant BP, agreed to contribute $26 million to the East Chicago clean-up.

Under a consent decree, the companies acknowledged no wrongdoing.

ARCO said it had taken on certain liabilities after it acquired the Anaconda Company in the late 1970’s, though it never operated the Anaconda lead plant itself.

DuPont said it cooperated with EPA but its responsibilities under the consent decree were assumed by the Chemours Company, a former DuPont business now operating independently, a DuPont spokesman said. Chemours said it will cooperate with the EPA, a spokesman said.

To date, the earth-moving envisaged in the plans EPA’s Berkoff described in 2012 hasn’t happened. Securing funds, soil testing, and issues that crept up with contractors all took time. West Calumet soil replacement would have started this summer, EPA’s Kaplan said. Instead, the city plans to raze the houses.

TROUBLED TRACT

The CDC’s role in ensuring the health of people near Superfund sites is enshrined in federal law. When an area is added to the National Priority List, the ATSDR conducts an independent public health assessment.

ATSDR’s role is advisory, but its reports can lead to strongly worded health bulletins or other actions, including condemnation of properties deemed unfit for human habitation.

EPA commissioned the ATSDR report because “we wanted to know, is it an emergency, time-critical response or something that needs a remedy but isn’t necessarily as urgent?” said Kaplan.

The CDC branch concluded that results from childhood blood tests in the region suggested there was no risk.

Other report statements appeared to support that finding: Virtually all children in the area were being tested for lead poisoning, the report said, seeming to reflect close monitoring. Kids living in the area had blood lead levels “consistent with the national average,” it said.

Properties found to contain unsafe levels of lead in the soil had already been cleaned up by the EPA, the ATSDR said, and local health officials offered assurances there were no reports of health problems linked to lead.

Citing Indiana Department of Health data from the 1990s through 2008, ATSDR said children in East Chicago had experienced a sharp decline in blood lead levels.

Yet the report did not specifically cite the most recent blood testing data from residents at the West Calumet Housing Complex, or the census tract where it is located.

Reuters obtained testing data from the Indiana census tract, labeled 303, from 2005 through 2015. The data compiled by Indiana shows that 21.8 percent of children aged up to 6 tested there had blood lead readings above CDC’s current “elevated” threshold.

Although only a portion of the area’s children were being tested in the period, the 303 tract registered 160 elevated test results among small children. That was more than in any other tract in Lake County, where East Chicago is located, and more than in all but a dozen of Indiana’s 1,507 census tracts.

As recently as 2014, 25 percent of the children tested in the 303 tract had elevated levels.

During that same year, Indiana data shows, around 6.4 percent of kids tested across the state had elevated lead levels. CDC estimates show that, across the United States, the prevalence of children with elevated blood lead levels is around 2.5 percent.

The ATSDR report credited Indiana’s state health department with “excellent work” in ensuring almost universal testing.

State and county data reviewed by Reuters tell a different story. The annual rate of blood lead testing among children aged up to 6 in Indiana hovered around 7 percent in recent years. Although around 20 percent of children in East Chicago were tested each year between 2005 and 2010, the rate plummeted to 5 percent in 2014.

As for the ATSDR report’s claim that it had heard of no concerns from local health officials, City Attorney Morgan said the agency never consulted East Chicago’s health department, which declined comment.

The Indiana State Department of Health told Reuters it “does not support the conclusions of that report,” without elaborating.

UPROOTED TO NEVADA

Shantel Allen is a 28-year-old mother of five who has lived at West Calumet since 2011, the year of ATSDR’s report. Allen is moving her family to southern Nevada next month. The housing voucher the family received won’t cover the high costs of the move, she said.

In July, around the time Allen was told her current home faces the wrecking ball, she received a letter from Indiana’s health department. It said her daughter, Samira, 2, had tested positive for lead poisoning with a level of 33 micrograms per deciliter, nearly seven times the elevated threshold. That result, the letter said, was from a test conducted 17 months earlier, around Samira’s first birthday.

“I wanted to know how she was exposed to lead, when and where?” Allen said. “I wanted to know why I was only informed more than a year later.”

The state health department said privacy law does not allow it to comment on a specific patient’s case. However, it said local health departments have primary responsibility for conveying blood lead test results to family.

Since July, Allen has had all her kids tested. Two had elevated levels, she said.

Then, last month, Allen recalled an information packet she’d received from the EPA, dated from late 2014. She didn’t pay much attention to it back then, because she says she didn’t understand its implications. It said the agency had conducted soil testing in her yard.

Reading back the findings recently, she said EPA had detected lead at 4,510 parts per million in the top layer of her front yard, or more than 10 times the action level. Arsenic was found at nearly 13 times the action level.

It was the yard her older kids had always played in, often tracking in dirt to the apartment, where Samira would crawl around on the floor.

Another former West Calumet resident, Krystle Jackson, said she moved her family out in July after two of her children tested with elevated lead levels. Her son, Kavon, 1, had a level of 7. She relocated to her parents’ home in Cedar Lake, 40 minutes south, which is facing a potential bank foreclosure. Jackson worries she’ll be left homeless.

The timing of Jackson’s move, weeks before hundreds of other West Calumet residents learned the complex will be demolished, made her ineligible for a voucher others are getting to move into public housing.

“The housing authority told me there was nothing they could do for me,” she said.

“I just wanted to get out of the public housing because nobody could tell me why my kids were being exposed to lead.”

(Editing by Ronnie Greene)

Cost hampers drive to double number of children treated for starvation

Malnourished children wait for medical attention at the Halo health post in Halo village, a drought-stricken area in Oromia region in Ethiopia,

By Alex Whiting

ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A drive to give six million severely malnourished children life-saving treatment every year by 2020 – twice the current number – will only succeed if governments prioritize it alongside other killers and treatment costs are cut, hunger experts said on Thursday.

The number of children treated for severe hunger has plateaued at just over 3 million in recent years, comprising a fraction of the 16 million who need it, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said.

“Severe acute malnutrition is a silent emergency,” said Diane Holland, senior nutrition advisor at UNICEF in New York.

“Greater advocacy around the issue is essential, so that governments, companies and civil society organizations mobilize and make treatment … a priority,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A child suffering from severe hunger is up to nine times more likely to die from malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea, according to Saul Guerrero, director of nutrition for Action Against Hunger UK.

“The performance and impact of absolutely every intervention worldwide addressing malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea will be significantly enhanced if the children … are simultaneously treated for severe acute malnutrition,” he said from New York.

UNICEF and Action Against Hunger are part of a coalition which aims to double the numbers of children treated for extreme hunger.

No Wasted Lives also includes the European Union, UK government and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.

Two thirds of children who are severely malnourished are in Asia, and a third in Africa. The majority of cases are in countries where there is no hunger emergency, UNICEF said.

Severe acute malnutrition is treated with a paste of peanuts and dried milk, which costs between $150 and $200 a child, but to boost the number of children on treatment, that price tag needs to drop to less than $100 per child, the coalition said.

Many of the treatments are made in Europe and north America.

So producing more treatments in countries where they are needed, finding cheaper but equally effective ingredients – perhaps chickpeas or sesame seeds – would help cut costs, Guerrero said.

Children also need treatment nearer home – at the moment many have to be taken long distances to a health clinic.

The coalition is proposing that community health workers who treat malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea, are also trained in treating severe hunger.

No Wasted Lives was launched in New York on Tuesday. A high-level U.N. meeting on how to end hunger by 2030, is taking place in New York on Thursday.

(Reporting by Alex Whiting, Editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Study confirms ZIKA causes brain birth defects, questions remain

Physiotherapist Leal does exercises with Lucas, 4-months old, who is Miriam Araujo's second child and born with microcephaly in Pedro I hospital in Campina

By Kate Kelland

LONDON, Sept 15 (Reuters) – Early results from a crucial case-control study in Brazil have confirmed a direct causal link between Zika virus infection in pregnant women and the brain damaging birth defect microcephaly in their babies, scientists said on Thursday.

But while preliminary findings from the first 32 cases involved in the study confirm causality, the researchers said, the true size of the effect will become clear only after full analysis of all 200 cases and 400 controls.

The study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, was requested by the Brazilian health ministry to investigate the causes of the microcephaly epidemic that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an international public health emergency earlier this year.

The outbreak of Zika, a mosquito-borne disease, was detected last year in Brazil, where it has been linked to more than 1,700 cases of microcephaly, a birth defect marked by small head size that can lead to severe developmental problems. The virus has since spread rapidly through the Americas and Caribbean.

While the WHO and other disease experts had said there was strong scientific consensus that Zika and microcephaly were linked, evidence until now has been largely circumstantial.

MISSING PIECE OF JIGSAW

Laura Rodrigues, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who worked on this study, said its results were “the missing pieces in the jigsaw” proving the link.

The research followed and compared pregnancies that resulted in healthy babies with those that resulted in cases of microcephaly – looking for signs that the Zika virus is passed onto fetuses who develop the defect.

It covered all babies born with microcephaly delivered in eight public hospitals in Brazil’s north-eastern Pernambuco State between January 15 and May 2 this year. For each case, two controls were added. These were the first two babies born the following morning without microcephaly in one of the hospitals.

After taking samples and conducting brain scans, the researchers found that 41 percent of mothers of babies with microcephaly tested positive for Zika infection in blood or cerebrospinal fluid samples, compared with none of those whose babies did not have microcephaly.

A high proportion of mothers of both microcephaly and non-microcephaly babies also tested positive for another mosquito-borne virus, dengue fever, as well as other infections such as herpes, rubella and toxoplasma.

“Our findings suggest Zika virus should be officially added to the list of congenital infections,” said Thália Velho Barreto de Araújo of Brazil’s Pernambuco University, who also worked on the research team. “However, many questions still remain to be answered – including the role of previous dengue infection.”

Rodrigues warned that preliminary analyzes should be viewed with some caution, since they can overestimate the strength of a link. “When complete, the study, along with other ongoing research, will provide vital information on any role co-factors might have in the epidemic,” she said.

(Editing by Ralph Boulton)

 

Bomb kills father and daughter at school in Thailand’s troubled south

A school bag lies on a street next to the site of a bomb attack at Tak Bai district in the troubled southern province of Narathiwat

BANGKOK (Reuters) – A motorcycle bomb killed a father and daughter in front of a Thai elementary school as parents were dropping off their children on Tuesday, officials said, the latest in a series of attacks in the troubled south.

The bomb went off in Narathiwat province, one of three Muslim-majority provinces in predominantly Buddhist Thailand where a separatist insurgency has been raging since 2004.

The blast killed a man and his five year-old daughter, the army’s Internal Security Operations Command said. The motorcycle was parked opposite the school entrance. Eight people were wounded.

“We suspect this to be the work of people who want to destabilize the situation and cause chaos,” the deputy spokesman of the ISOC, Yuthanam Petchmuang, told Reuters.

The attack occurred less than a month after a wave of bombings in tourist towns, including Hua Hin, Phuket and Surat Thani, killed four people and injured dozens.

Military personnel inspect the site of a bomb attack at Tak Bai district in the troubled southern province of Narathiwat

Military personnel inspect the site of a bomb attack at Tak Bai district in the troubled southern province of Narathiwat, Thailand, September 6, 2016. REUTERS/Surapan Boonthanom

Police say the tourist-town bombings were linked to the southern insurgency and arrested a suspect over the weekend in connection with the attacks.

Defence Minister Prawit Wongsuwan told reporters on Tuesday that the military government, which took power in May 2014, were making security preparations ahead of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha on September 12.

More than 6,500 people have been killed in insurgency-related violence in the Muslim-majority provinces Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani Province since the conflict began, according to Deep South Watch, which monitors the conflict.

While the conflict has been largely confined to the three southern provinces, analysts say that the spread of violence to other provinces could affect Thailand’s tourism industry.

(Reporting by Aukkarapon Niyomyat and Panarat Thepgumpanat; Writing by Cod Satrusayang; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Cluster bombs kill more than 400 people over a third of them children

A file photo shows an unexploded cluster bomblet along a street after airstrikes by pro-Syrian government forces in the rebel held al-Ghariyah al-Gharbiyah town,

By Magdalena Mis

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – More than 400 people were killed by cluster bombs in 2015, most of them dying in Syria, Yemen and Ukraine, which have not signed up to a treaty banning the weapon, an international anti-cluster bomb coalition said on Thursday.

Cluster bombs, dropped by air or fired by artillery, scatter hundreds of bomblets across a wide area which sometimes fail to explode and are difficult to locate and remove, killing and maiming civilians long after conflicts end.

They pose a particular risk to children who can be attracted by their toy-like appearance and bright colors.

In 2015, cluster bombs killed 417 people, more than a third of them children, the Cluster Munition Coalition said, adding that the actual number of casualties was likely to be much higher.

“The suffering is still continuing and civilians continue to be the predominant victims of cluster bombs,” said Jeff Abramson, program manager at Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, which is part of the coalition.

“Unfortunately now we’re seeing a new spate of people being injured at the time of attack, which is something that needs to be condemned very strongly,” he told Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone from Geneva.

Abramson did not give figures for 2014, saying data was constantly being revised due to difficulties in gathering it, especially in conflict zones like Syria.

The majority of cluster bomb casualties in 2015 were in Syria (248), followed by Yemen (104) and Ukraine (19), the coalition said in a report.

None of these countries are signatories of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of the weapons, it said.

The Convention, which came into force in 2010, also requires the destruction of stockpiles of cluster bombs and clearance of contaminated areas.

Since August 2015, five more countries – Colombia, Iceland, Palau, Rwanda and Somalia – have ratified the Convention, while Cuba and Mauritius acceded, bringing the total number of states that have signed or accepted the treaty to 119, the coalition said.

Casualties were also recorded in Laos, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Western Sahara, Chad, Cambodia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

The report was published ahead of the Sixth Meeting of states Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions that will be held in Geneva on Sept. 5-7.

(Reporting by Magdalena Mis; Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Teacher in violence-torn Indian Kashmir starts makeshift classrooms

A protester prepares to throw a stone towards an Indian policeman during a protest in Srinagar against the recent killings in Kashmir

By Fayaz Bukhari

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) – Wedding halls and prayer rooms have been turned into classrooms in Indian-administered Kashmir as families struggle to provide children with a normal life after more than 50 days of the Muslim-majority region’s worst violence in years.

At least 68 civilians and two security officials have been killed and more than 9,000 people injured, according to official tallies, in clashes between protesters chaffing at Indian rule and security forces.

Authorities trying to stifle protests that erupted after a young militant leader was gunned down by the security forces on July 8 ordered schools and colleges to close two days later.

There’s no sign of them re-opening.

Teacher Ghulam Rasool Kambay, seeing children becoming increasingly restless cooped up at home, decided to do something.

He opened a tutorial center in a village on Aug. 3 and now has more than a dozen of them in villages in a district south of the region’s main city of Srinagar.

“The response is good. We have about 800 students in these centers. Parents are eager to send their children as they have no option right now,” Kambay told Reuters.

Students find their way to the makeshift schools in small groups through back lanes, careful not to attract the attention of police.

They often sit on the floor as there are not enough desks and share books.

“It’s more like a self-learning exercise, just a way to keep in touch with books,” said Muneer Wani, 16, at his temporary school at a mosque where classes begin after morning prayers.

Muneer said it was the only place to meet friends and study.

“We can’t even go outdoors.”

Disputed Kashmir is claimed by both India and Pakistan and has been a flashpoint for more than 60 years, sparking two wars between them.

Militant groups have taken up arms to fight for independence from Indian rule or to merge with Pakistan. India has blamed Pakistan for supporting the violence. Pakistan denies that.

Thousands of teenage boys defy a curfew every day and gather in groups to throw stones at police. Almost all of the deaths have been caused by security forces shooting at protesters.

On the streets of Srinagar, people have scrawled “Go India, go back”.

Zubair Ahmad said he was too worried about the safety of his two children to send them to classes at a nearby mosque.

His wife has been teaching them at home instead, but the children were getting restless, he said.

“It is very difficult for children … they’ve become aggressive.”

(Writing by Rupam Jain; Editing by Tom Lasseter, Robert Birsel)

Without aid, 49,000 children will die this year in northeast Nigeria

Chadian refugee Fatime Hassan, 7, poses for a picture in Darnaim refugee camp, Lake Chad region, Chad

LAGOS (Reuters) – Nearly half a million children around Lake Chad face “severe acute malnutrition” due to drought and a seven-year insurgency by Islamist militant group Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, UNICEF said on Thursday.

Of the 475,000 deemed at risk, 49,000 in Nigeria’s Borno state, Boko Haram’s heartland, will die this year if they do not receive treatment, according to the United Nations’ child agency, which is appealing for $308 million to cope with the crisis.

However, to date, UNICEF said it had only received $41 million, 13 percent of what it needs to help those affected in the four countries – Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon – that border Lake Chad.

At the start of 2015, Boko Haram occupied an area the size of Belgium but has since been pushed back over the last 18 months by military assaults by the four countries.

Most of its remaining forces are now hiding in the wilds of the vast Sambisa forest, southeast of the Borno provincial capital, Maiduguri.

UNICEF said that as Nigerian government forces captured and secured territory, aid officials were starting to piece together the scale of the humanitarian disaster left behind in the group’s wake. “Towns and villages are in ruins and communities have no access to basic services,” UNICEF said in a report.

In Borno, nearly two thirds of hospitals and clinics had been partially or completely destroyed and three-quarters of water and sanitation facilities needed to be rehabilitated.

Despite the military gains, UNICEF said, 2.2 million people remain trapped in areas under the control of Boko Haram – which is trying to establish a caliphate in the southern reaches of the Sahara – or are staying in camps, fearful of going home.

Boko Haram is thought to have killed as many as 15,000 people since the launch of its insurgency in 2009.

Responding to its battlefield setbacks, Boko Haram has turned to suicide bombings, many involving children.

UNICEF said it had recorded 38 cases of child suicide bombings so far this year, against 44 in the whole of 2015 and just four the year before that.

(Reporting by Ed Cropley; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Slow EU aid puts Syrian children’s lives on hold in Turkey

Muhammed Mazin Mekansi poses with his family at their home in Ankara

By Dasha Afanasieva

ANKARA (Reuters) – Their faces so burned by a rocket blast they cannot fully close their eyes, 13-year-old Gheis Mekansi and his sister Limar, both Syrian refugees, wait in limbo in Turkey for surgery they need to return to life and school.

A year and a half after they were caught in the attack on an opposition-controlled area of Damascus, the siblings may become victims again as 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) in aid promised by the European Union has been held up by political wrangling and red tape.

Gheis has six months to wait for facial reconstruction and needs prosthetic fingers available in Europe but not in Turkey. Until then, he and his sister stay indoors, unwilling to go outside where others laugh and stare at their disfigured faces.

“I just want to get my real face back,” Gheis said sitting next to his mother and sister in the small apartment they share in an Ankara suburb filled with Syrian refugee families.

In return for billions in cash for refugees taken in from Syria, visa liberalization and revitalized EU accession, Turkey has agreed to cooperate in stopping migrants crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece and take back those who do not qualify for asylum.

However, months after the deal was signed the EU now expects 182 million euros will have been disbursed by the end of August.

Asked why so little money had been put to use, an EU official pointed to the vast scale of the program, as well as the need to ensure that NGOs earmarked to receive the aid are up to the task.

But last month’s attempted coup in Turkey has also heightened tensions between Ankara and Brussels. Angry Turkish officials perceive a lack of sympathy from Western officials and last month President Tayyip Erdogan questioned the EU’s commitment to promises made in the migrant deal.

One Turkish NGO director who did not want to be named said disagreements between the EU and Turkey were partly to blame for delays in payments.

“The government’s perception is that the EU side is using this money as a political tool instead of wanting it to go to refugees,” he said, adding that the government does not trust the NGOs partnered with the EU.

Two government officials declined to comment, while a presidency official said only that it was important for the EU to live up to its side of the deal.

MONEY WAITING TO BE SPENT

Turkey says it is now host to 2.72 million Syrian refugees, plus tens of thousands of asylum seekers, including Iraqis and Afghans who are fleeing violence in their homelands.

It has argued it would be easier to give the money directly to the government – something the EU rejects, saying it always channels humanitarian aid through specialized agencies and non-governmental institutions so it goes directly to those in need.

However the EU official said that some NGOs in Turkey are unused to the needs and extraordinary scope of the current refugee crisis, and may lack capacity, meaning that extra checks and preparation are needed before the money is disbursed.

In the past ECHO, the European Commission’s aid arm, would typically spends around 1 billion euros backing humanitarian projects globally every year. This year it may spend that in Turkey alone.

Far from EU and Turkish bureaucracy and diplomatic tensions, Gheis and his six-year old sister Limar look at a photograph of their brother Muhammed, who died after an agonizing 10 days in hospital following the rocket attack.

Photographs showing the children building a snowman in happier times are stark contrast to their lives since the blast. In the three months Limar and Gheis were in hospital they underwent four operations each but are still unrecognizable. Gheis has no fingers and Limar can’t breathe properly.

Kerem Kinik, president of the Turkish Red Crescent, told Reuters he expected EU funds would allow children like Gheis and Limar to go to special schools and get treatment faster.

“We were expecting UN agencies and Europe to build up new capacities for at least primary health care but unfortunately we could not receive contributions.”

While Gheis’ family is getting some support from a local NGO, aid workers say there are thousands of devastated families with serious medical problems not receiving adequate help.

Muhammed Elhacmansur and his wife Meryem Elseyh hope to get their four-year-old son Ali, who was blinded by a landmine as the family fled Islamic State, to Europe for an operation to give him back his sight. Four of Ali’s siblings were killed in the explosions.

“We didn’t have any time to even bury them and gather their pieces on the field,” 42-year old Muhammed said.

While Turkey does not officially grant Syrians refugee status, a temporary protection status, in theory, allows them access to healthcare and education for children at least in Turkish. But these efforts cannot make Ali see.

“I don’t need food or clothes or any things,” Ali’s mother said. “I just want my son to recover.”

($1 = 0.8833 euros)

(Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Orhan Coskun in Ankara; editing by Patrick Markey and Dominic Evans)

In Iraq, Nigeria and now Turkey, child bombers strike

Iraqi security forces remove a suicide vest from a boy in Kirkuk, Iraq,

By Patrick Markey

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – The boy looked scared and younger than 16 when Iraqi police grabbed him on the street in the northern city of Kirkuk. Pulling off his shirt, they found a two-kilogram bomb strapped to his skinny frame.

That was last Sunday. Less than a day earlier, Turkey was less fortunate: a teenage bomber detonated his suicide vest among dancing guests at a Turkish wedding party, officials say, killing 51 people, nearly half of them children themselves.

Saturday’s attack at the wedding in Gaziantep marked not only Turkey’s deadliest this year, but also the first time in Turkey that militants may have deployed a child bomber in a way already used to deadly effect in wars from Africa to Syria.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has long used children. One 14-year-old bomber on a bicycle hit the Kabul NATO base in 2012 killing six people; two years later a teenager blew himself up at French cultural center in the Afghan capital.

Researchers and officials say Islamic State and other militants are now increasingly using the same tactics, perhaps to build ranks depleted by losses, preserve adult fighters or simply catch security forces off guard.

In West Africa, Boko Haram has preyed on displaced children or young girls it kidnapped to force them to become bombers. In Iraq and Syria, activists say Islamic State took in children from towns it captures or recruited families to its territory, and indoctrinated their children in its schools and camps.

Islamic State in particular, highlights its child recruits for its “Cubs of the Caliphate” brigades, publishing images and videos on social media of children receiving training and indoctrination, and carrying out bombings or executions.

“Child recruitment across the region is increasing,” said Juliette Touma, a UNICEF regional spokesperson. “Children are taking a much more active role …, receiving training on the use of heavy weapons, manning checkpoints on the front lines, being used as snipers and in extreme cases being used as suicide bombers.”

Little has been publicly released about the attacker in the Gaziantep bombing. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that the bomber was between 12 to 14 years old, and said Islamic State was probably responsible.

The blast tore into celebrations at a Kurdish wedding on the street late at night. As many as 22 of the dead were under the age of 14. No one claimed the attack, but Islamic State in the past has targeted Kurdish gatherings to stir ethnic tensions.

Turkey’s prime minister was more cautious on Monday, saying it was too early to say who carried out the attack, though security sources say witnesses reported the bomber was a child.

Turkish authorities are also investigating whether militants may have placed the explosives on the suspect, without his or her knowledge before detonating them long distance.

That tactic has been used before in Iraq, where children or even mentally disadvantaged adults have been dispatched as unwitting bomb couriers into markets and checkpoints before they are blown up from afar.

TEENAGE RECRUITS

In the failed attack in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk a day later, local television images and photographs showed the boy crying and screaming as he was grabbed by Iraqi security forces near an interior ministry building.

Security officials said the boy is 16 years old, though local media reports said he was much younger. He is an Iraqi national from Mosul, the largest urban center still under militant control, which Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces backed by U.S. air strikes are moving to liberate.

Hisham al-Hashimi, an analyst and author who advises the Iraqi government on Islamic State, says militants this year had reactivated their Heaven’s Youth Brigade, in reaction to the group’s battlefield losses in Iraq and Syria.

“Teenagers are easier to recruit for suicide missions, especially in moments of suffering or despair having lost loved ones,” he said. “They also attract less attention and less suspicion than male adults.”

Child recruits who have escaped from Islamic State ranks in its base in Syria’s Raqaa have described how they were taught to handle weapons, and also how to detonate suicide belts.

A study in February for Combating Terrorism Center at West Point military academy that examined Islamic State propaganda on child and youth ‘martyrs’ between January 2015 and 2016, found three times as many suicide operations involving children over the year.

“They represent an effective form of psychological warfare—to project strength, pierce defenses, and strike fear into enemy soldiers’ hearts,” the study said. “Islamic State is mobilizing children and youth at an alarming rate.”

Those tactics are mirrored in West Africa where U.N. officials have tracked a rise in attacks like the one carried out by a girl as young as ten who last year exploded a bomb in a busy market place in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing 16 people.

Security sources at the time said the explosive device was wrapped around her body.

In an April report, UNICEF said attacks involving child suicide bombers between 2014 and this year rose four-fold in northeastern Nigeria, where militant group Boko Haram is based, and neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

A 12-year-old Nigerian girl captured with explosives in Cameroon in March told police she had been abducted by Boko Haram after the group overran her village a year earlier.

According to the UNICEF report, nearly two thirds of all the child attackers they tracked were girls. In the first six months of this year alone, UNICEF says it has also noted 38 child suicide bombers in West Africa.

“This is one of the defining features of this conflict,” said Thierry Delvigne-Jean of the agency’s west and central Africa office.

(Additional reporting by Maher Chmaytelli in Baghdad; Dasha Afanasieva and Orhan Coksun in Ankara; Editing by Richard Balmforth)