'Girl taught to hate'

Looks like someone skipped out on Parenting 101:

A seven-year-old girl apprehended by Child and Family Services said she believed only white people deserve to live and talked casually of how to kill black people, a court heard yesterday.

"She said 'You would whip black people with a ball and chain and they would die,' " testified a social worker who interviewed the girl after she showed up at school last year with a swastika and racist writings drawn on her body.

Child and Family Services is seeking permanent guardianship of the now eight-year-old girl and her three-year-old stepbrother, while the boy's father is fighting to regain custody of the children. A two-week trial began yesterday.

The mother and the boy's father, who are now separated, cannot be identified under terms of a publication ban.

The children's mother was not present in court yesterday. A lawyer retained on her behalf just last week asked that the case be adjourned. Justice Marianne Rivoalen rejected the request.

The social worker testified the girl told her she and her parents routinely watched "white pride" videos which discussed killing black people. She said the girl said "everyone who is not white should die."

The girl also said her parents featured her and her brother in a poster with the words "Missing: a future for white children" and then plastered it across town.

In an assessment forwarded to CFS, the social worker said the girl was taught to hate everyone who is not white, was "very knowledgeable about (Adolf) Hitler," and considered such racist beliefs as normal.

The social worker said the children's mother called her several days after they were apprehended "yelling about freedom of speech" and protesting that she and her husband were being persecuted for their religious beliefs.

'PROUD TO BE WHITE'

The social worker said the girl's mother told her she didn't wash off the racist writings and symbols "because she wanted to piss off the school" and that she was "proud to be white."

The father's lawyer asked the social worker if the children would have been candidates for apprehension if one of them showed up at school with a "sign of the cross or a Star of David" drawn on their arm.

The social worker said "it had nothing to do with what was drawn on her arm, it was what was disclosed in the interview (with the girl)."

Outside court, the girl's biological father defended her mother as a good person easily manipulated by others.

"If (she) met a priest on Wednesday she'd be a nun by Thursday," the man said. "I know there is good in her ... But she is a lost kid."

The trial continues.

Thoughts?

Couple sues hospital for keeping sick baby alive

A Quebec couple is launching a lawsuit against Montreal Children's Hospital after their severely-ill newborn daughter was put back on life support without their consent.

In November 2007, Marie-Eve Laurendeau gave birth to Phebe Mantha at LaSalle Hospital.



Due to complications at birth, Phebe was transferred to Montreal Children's Hospital in critical condition and kept on life support.

Laurendeau and Phebe's father, Stephane Mantha, say doctors told them at that time that their daughter had little chance she'd survive.

If she did survive, doctors said she would probably be deaf, blind and may need to be institutionalized.

The couple was given the option to withdraw Phebe's life support and to withdraw artificial feeding.

They said they agreed to withdraw respiratory support and later, at the suggestion of doctors, to withdraw the artificial feeding.

"They say they thought that if there was never going to be quality of life for their baby girl then why let her suffer," CTV Montreal's Daniele Hamamdjian reported Friday after the parents held a press conference.

However, the hospital's ethics committee met and reversed the parent's decision without their consent or permission from a court.

After two-and-a-half months, Phebe was still alive and the hospital told the parents to take their child home or they'd place her in protective custody, Hamamdjian said.

Now, 15 months later, Laurendeau has been forced to quit her job to take care of Phebe full time.

Phebe is neither deaf nor blind. But she cannot hold up her head, sit up, or babble as another baby her age would, and she is fed through a hole in her stomach.

She does smile at her parents, though, a recent breakthrough they are thrilled with, CTV's Genevieve Beauchemin reported.

"They say they have no support and are living on one income," Hamamdjian said.

The couple's lawyer says the hospital violated Quebec law and that only the court should have the power to overrule the couple's decision.

A spokesperson for Montreal Children's Hospital refused to comment saying the matter was before the courts.

A 10-Year-Old Divorcée in Paris

In a dimly lit corner of a Paris bar a delighted young divorcée describes in a soft voice how she spent the day throwing snowballs for the first time in her life. That is not remarkable.

This is: Nujood Ali is just 10 years old — and was, until recently, the youngest known divorced person in the world.



Slender with thick hair and a shy smile, Ali made headlines in Yemen last April when she walked out on a man more than three times her age, to whom her father had married her off. It was an act driven by terror and despair.

Nujood's ordeal began last February, when the family gathered to celebrate her wedding to a motorcycle deliveryman in his 30s. She first set eyes on the groom when she took her marriage vows. After spending her wedding night with her parents and 15 brothers and sisters, Nujood was taken by her new husband to his family village, where, she says, he beat and raped her every night. After two nightmarish months he allowed her to visit her parents, who rebuffed her pleas to end the marriage.

Nujood finally found her moment to escape one day, when her mother gave her a few pennies and sent her out to buy bread. Instead she took a bus to the center of the capital, Sanaa — a city of 3 million people — where she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the courthouse. She had never been inside a courtroom but had once seen one on television, she says, and knew it was a place where people went for help. There she sat silently on a bench, uncertain as to what to do, while crowds of people scurried past, scarcely glancing at the quiet child. It was only once the courthouse emptied during the lunch recess that the judge noticed her and asked why she was there. "I came for a divorce," she told him. Horrified, he took her to his house to play with his 8-year-old daughter, and granted the divorce two days later.

Nujood's story might have ended there, had it not caught the attention of reporters from Sanaa's newspapers, then of journalists from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Last November, New York City–based Glamour magazine gave Nujood its Woman of the Year award in a splashy Manhattan ceremony with fellow honorees that included Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. Now Delphine Minoui, a French reporter for Le Figaro, has ghostwritten Nujood's autobiography.

Asked how she spent her week in Paris, Nujood's eyes widen as she says, "I saw the Eiffel Tower; I saw the Seine." Shaken by the testimony of violence during her divorce trial, Yemen's lawmakers raised the minimum age of marriage from 15 to 18. Two other girls in Sanaa — one age 9, the other 12 — have since sued for divorce, while an 8-year-old in Saudi Arabia has won a divorce suit, apparently inspired by Nujood's tale. Nujood says she hopes to ignite a far broader movement of girls to quit their child marriages, adding, "They should not be scared of their fathers or their husbands."

That might be easier said than done, especially in cultures where a girl's honor is held as supremely important. Minoui, who has spent considerable time with Nujood, says the girl still risks attacks from male relatives who believe she has sullied the family's reputation. But her fame appears to have protected her from that possibility for now.

Nujood says she thinks only about learning now — hardly the typical response from a 10-year-old child. As though she has no time to lose, she cut short her stay in Paris this week — including canceling a press conference — saying she wanted to get back to school. She says she ultimately hopes to work for women's rights in Yemen; in Paris she discussed the problem of child marriage with France's Human Rights Minister, Rama Yada, and Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara. And Nujood says she has already chosen her future career: "I want be a lawyer."

Nujood's services would be welcome. Despite Yemen's laws against child marriage, about 52% of Yemen's girls marry before the age of 18, often as the second or third wives of far older men. Worldwide, child marriage has been slow to change, according to UNICEF's "State of the World's Children" report released last month. About 49% of South Asian women in their early 20s were married before the age of 18, according to statistics gathered by UNICEF, which links early marriage to high rates of infant death and maternal mortality in very poor countries. "Often families marry off girls very young because they want to protect them, not realizing the dangers they face," says Stella Schumacher, a UNICEF child-protection specialist in New York. "It requires a change of social norms. Legislation is not enough."

Laws were certainly not enough to win redress for Nujood. Although her father and ex-husband were arrested for arranging an underage marriage, both were released within 10 days. Nujood's father, an out-of-work laborer, told the judge he simply wanted to shield his daughter from possible violence on Sanaa's streets. Nujood's ex-husband slipped out of sight last summer as the media attention grew. A sympathetic friend reimbursed him for the dowry of about $250 that he had paid to Nujood's father. Asked by a reporter in Paris if she hopes to meet her Prince Charming one day, Nujood sat back in her chair, crossed her arms and said bluntly, "I no longer think about marriage."

Peruvian Jesus born to Virgin Mary on Christmas

Virgin Mary, a 20-year-old Peruvian woman, gave birth to a baby boy on Christmas day and named him Jesus, Peru's state news agency said on Friday.

The baby's father, Adolfo Jorge Huamani, 24, is a carpenter. Religious Peruvians compared him to Joseph the Carpenter in the Bible.

"Two thousand years later the story of Bethlehem is relived," read the headline about the birth in El Comercio, the main newspaper in Peru, a predominantly Catholic country.

The mother, Virgen Maria Huarcaya, delivered the 7.7 pound (3.5 kg) boy, Jesus Emanuel, in the early hours of Christmas at the central maternity hospital in Lima, the capital.

"A few days ago we had decided to name my son after a professional soccer player," the father said. "But thanks to a happy coincidence this is how things ended up."

Woman nabbed for injecting contaminated water into daughter's IV drip

A 35-year-old woman from Gifu Prefecture was arrested Wednesday for allegedly attempting to kill her 1-year-old daughter by adding contaminated water to the intravenous drip the child was being administered at Kyoto (Japan) University Hospital in Kyoto, police said.

While the suspect has denied her intention to kill the girl, the hospital has said this could be a case of Munchausen by proxy, a form of child abuse in which the mother intentionally sickens her child through medication and other methods, according to the police.

"I can nurse (my child) if she becomes ill. I did not do it with a view to causing her death, " the woman was quoted as telling the police.

According to investigations, the woman used a syringe to inject contaminated water into an intravenous drip hooked up to her fifth daughter at the hospital's intensive care unit between Monday and Tuesday.

Her daughter, who is 1 year and 10 month old, could have died due to blood poisoning, but her condition is improving following treatment.

The woman's second, third, and fourth daughters all died of illness by the age 4.

The fifth daughter was transferred to Kyoto University Hospital early December from a Gifu hospital. Her condition was worsening due to blood poisoning, and tests detected the presence of the fungus candida albicans, which is not normally found in the bloodstream.

Suspecting child abuse, the hospital consulted the police and checked on the woman's movements. They found she had mixed a sports drink with water and waited until the liquid went bad before using it in the case, according to police. She also possessed a syringe, they added