CBS News
Haiti’s gangs luring more children into crime and sexual abuse, HRW says, as 115 people killed in attack
Haiti’s rampant criminal gangs are luring more children into lives of crime and sexual abuse, as hunger and poverty in the tiny Caribbean nation drive young people to desperation, according to a report published Wednesday by the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch. Hundreds, possibly thousands more children have joined the violent gangs in recent months, HRW says, with members forcing youngsters to commit crimes and subjecting them to sexual abuse and violence.
The bloodshed and political chaos that has beleaguered Haiti has shown no signs of abating, with a single gang attack last week in the town of Pont-Sondé, about 40 miles from the capital Port-au-Prince, leaving 115 people dead and at least 16 others seriously wounded, according to local officials.
Myriam Fièvre, the mayor of the nearby city of Saint-Marc, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the toll from the Oct. 3 attack would likely rise further, as authorities still hadn’t managed to access certain parts of Pont-Sondé. At least three infants were among those killed, according to a previous statement from the United Nations human rights commissioner.
Marckinson Pierre / REUTERS
The HRW report published Wednesday says the gangs likely started drawing more children into their ranks in response to law enforcement operations against their members by the Haiti Police and the United Nations-backed Multinational Security Support Mission. The MSS mission was recently approved by the United Nations. Led by Kenya, the force has only been partially deployed.
Criminal groups control almost 80% of Port-au-Prince, and HRW says joining the gangs is often the only option children have to obtain food and shelter. Around 125,000 children suffer from acute hunger in Haiti, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Some 2.7 million people live in gang-controlled territory, including 500,000 children.
HRW says almost a third of gang members now are believed to be children. A humanitarian worker in the country told HRW the gangs are using social media platforms including TikTok to attract young recruits.
HRW said girls are sexually abused by gang members and exploited for domestic labor once lured in.
“The [gang] leaders force them to perform sexual acts with them or their members while others watch,” HRW quoted one humanitarian worker as saying. “They tell them that they are their girlfriends and that they must obey them, but in reality, they exploit them for their pleasure and consumption.”
Pedro Valtierra Anza/REUTERS
Boys are often used by the gangs to run errands, act as informants to get information on police activity and to transport weapons, HRW says, though they’re sometimes commissioned to assist in carrying out more serious, violent crimes, including kidnapping and murder. For this, they are fed and often paid — money which the young recruits often use to support family members facing poverty.
Gang members often use violence to control child soldiers once they’ve been recruited, beating and threatening them if they refuse to follow orders. One boy interviewed by HRW told the organization he originally joined a gang as an 8-year-old orphan, living on the street. He said he was given a gun and told to wear it on his back.
“Girls are not usually offered incentives for loyalty,” the HRW report says in the report, citing aid workers on the ground. “Instead, they are usually let go after some time, typically when they become pregnant as a result of rape.”
Despite the spiraling violence, the U.S. government resumed deporting some migrants back to Haiti‘s capital after a pause in the flights. The Biden administration has, however, extended temporary protected status to Haitians in the U.S. until 2025.
Former President Donald Trump has vowed, if reelected in November, to enact large-scale deportations of migrants, including Haitians.
HRW says more international aid is desperately needed in Haiti and in its new report, it calls on the country’s transitional government to prioritize initiatives to protect children. The transitional council took power in April with a mandate to start rebuilding Haiti’s crippled civilian government after years of turmoil amplified by the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, with the Nobel committee lauding the “grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki” for its work to “achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”
The 2024 Peace Prize was awarded against a backdrop of devastating conflicts raging in the world, notably in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan.
Alfred Nobel stated in his will that the prize should be awarded for “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Since 1901, 104 Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded, mostly to individuals but also to organizations that have been seen to advance peace efforts.
Last year’s prize went to jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi for her advocacy of women’s rights and democracy, and against the death penalty. The Nobel committee said it also was a recognition of “the hundreds of thousands of people” who demonstrated against “Iran’s theocratic regime’s policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women.”
In the Middle East, persistently spiraling levels of violence over the past year have killed tens of thousands of people, including thousands of children and women. The war, sparked by a bloody raid into Israel by Hamas-led militants on Oct. 7, 2023 that left about 1,200 people dead, mostly civilians, has spilled out into the wider region.
The war in Gaza has killed more than 42,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count but says more than half are women and children. In Lebanon, more than 1,400 people have been killed, with thousands more injured and around 1 million displaced since mid-September, when the Israeli military dramatically expanded its offensive against Hezbollah.
The war in Ukraine, sparked by Russia’s invasion, is heading toward its third winter with a staggering loss of human life on both sides.
The U.N. has confirmed more than 11,000 Ukrainian civilian dead, but that doesn’t take into account as many as 25,000 Ukrainians believed to have died during the Russian capture of the city of Mariupol or unreported deaths in the occupied territories.
Western officials have estimated Russian military casualties around 600,000, with perhaps 150,000 dead, and public reports put Russian civilian dead around 150, mostly in the border region of Belgorod.
Ukrainian military deaths were last announced in February at 31,000 and the president has said there are six wounded for every soldier killed.
On the African continent, Sudan has been devastated by a 17-month war that that has so far killed more than 20,000 peopleand forced more than 8 million people from their homes, while roughly another 2 million were already displaced within the country before hostilities broke out.
The Nobel prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million). Unlike the other Nobel prizes that are selected and announced in Stockholm, founder Alfred Nobel decreed the peace prize be decided and awarded in Oslo by the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee.
The Nobel season ends Monday with the announcement of the winner of the economics prize, formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
CBS News
Using night mode on your phone can help capture photos of the northern lights. Here’s how to turn it on.
PITTSBURGH, Pa. (KDKA) — The northern lights are expected to be visible again throughout parts of the United States on Friday night.
When the northern lights, or the aurora borealis, are visible, the best way to see them is to find a dark spot away from bright lights, allow time to enable your eyes adjust to the darkness and look toward the north.
The northern lights show up best in photos.
Here’s how to use night mode on your phone’s camera to try to capture photos of the colorful auroras.
How do I turn on night mode on an iPhone?
If you are using an iPhone, Apple says the default settings will have night mode turn on automatically “when the camera detects a low-light environment.”
When night mode is active, an icon will turn yellow in the top left corner of your screen.
A number will show up next to that icon showing you how long it will take for the photo to take.
You can adjust how long the exposure will last by tapping the arrow that shows up above the viewfinder.
How do I turn on night mode on an Android phone?
Starting night mode on an Android device will depend on the type of device you have.
On a Samsung Galaxy device, a yellow moon icon will pop up in the bottom right of your screen. On a Pixel device, you can tap Night Light, then tap Capture and hold your phone still for a few seconds. In the Google Camera app, you can turn Night mode on by tapping settings and turning the mode on or off.
Will the northern lights be visible where I live?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center has issued its “Aurora Forecast” for Friday with numerous parts of the United States in the range of potentially being able to see the bright auroras of the northern lights.
Space Weather Prediction Center
The map of the aurora forecast shows that northern parts of the country have a better chance of seeing the auroras.
A view line that shows “the southern extent of where aurora might be seen on the northern horizon” stretches from Washington, D.C. across the Midwest and through Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York.
The northern lights were on display on Thursday night
The northern lights were visible all throughout the country on Thursday night.
Mario Carrasco
Photos of the northern lights were captured in places like Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.
The colorful auroras had green, purple, red and pink hues scattered throughout the skies.
What causes the northern lights?
When a geomagnetic storm occurs, solar wind is sent toward Earth.
Charged protons and electrons follow Earth’s magnetic field and enter the atmosphere where the magnetic fields are the weakest: the poles.
The electrons smash into all the different molecules that make up our atmosphere, creating a dazzling display of colors in the sky.
Deer Park, Texas — At least two workers at a Houston-area oil refinery were killed Thursday when hydrogen sulfide leaked at the plant, setting off urgent warnings for nearby residents to stay indoors before authorities later determined that the public wasn’t in danger.
Nearly three dozen other people were either transported to hospitals or treated at the scene, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said. Hours after the leak began, Gonzalez said the area was still unsafe for investigators to enter and that officials may not be able to get inside until Friday.
The plant is operated by Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, and located in the suburb of Deer Park.
Adrees Latif / REUTERS
Gonzalez said the gas release happened during work on a flange at the facility, which is part of a cluster of oil refineries and plants that makes Houston the nation’s petrochemical heartland.
Pemex said in a statement that investigations were underway and that operations had been “proactively halted” at two units with the aim of mitigating the impact.
Local officials issued a shelter-in-place order but lifted it hours later after air monitoring showed no risk to the surrounding community, Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton said.
The chief meteorologist at CBS Houston affiliate KHOU-TV, David Paul, said the wind was calm Thursday night.
Hydrogen sulfide is a foul-smelling gas that can be toxic at high levels.
“Other than the smell, we have not had any verifiable air monitoring to support that anything got outside the facility,” Mouton said.
Television news crews showed multiple ambulances and emergency vehicles at the scene. Gonzalez had originally posted on the social platform X that one person was transported to a hospital by helicopter, but officials later said at a news conference that no one was airlifted.
The leak caused the second shelter-in-place orders in Deer Park in the span of weeks. Last month, a pipeline fire that burned for four days forced surrounding neighborhoods to evacuate.
2024 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Japanese group for anti-nuclear weapons work
Using night mode on your phone can help capture photos of the northern lights. Here’s how to turn it on.
At least 2 killed, several injured when Texas Pemex plant leaks hydrogen sulfide
2024 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Japanese group for anti-nuclear weapons work
Using night mode on your phone can help capture photos of the northern lights. Here’s how to turn it on.