Mom in Spain Happy That Her 10-Year-Old Gave Birth

MADRID -- A Romanian Gypsy woman whose 10-year-old daughter just gave birth in Spain says she's delighted to have a new granddaughter and doesn't understand why the birth has shocked anyone -- let alone become an international sensation.

Spanish authorities have released few details about the case to protect the girl's privacy.

But in comments published Wednesday, her mother told reporters the baby's father is a 13-year-old boy who is still in Romania and is no longer going out with her daughter.

The 10-year-old girl and her baby daughter plan to stay in Spain because the young couple separated, said the girl's mother. She identified herself only as Olimpia and appeared to be in her 30s but did not give her age.

She also said she didn't understand the attention the case was generating because she and her daughter are Romanian Gypsies, or Roma, and their custom is to allow girls to marry young even though that's against the law in Romania.

"That's the way we get married," the girl's mother told reporters Tuesday outside the modest apartment building in the southern town of Lebrija where the family lives.

Meanwhile, the story was going viral on the Internet and causing an uproar in Spain.

"Mother at 10 years old" blared a headline in Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper, which dedicated two pages to the story.

The girl moved to Spain about three weeks ago, her mother said, and her baby was born in a public hospital last week in the nearby city of Jerez de la Frontera. There were no complications during the birth, and the 10-year-old and her baby are doing fine, her mother said.

"She's doing well and is very happy with her daughter," the woman said.

Under Spanish law, having consensual sex with someone under age 13 is classified as child abuse. But a Justice Ministry official said this particular case is complicated, because the alleged father is not in Spain and is also a minor. It is not clear whether he could be charged, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of ministry policy.

Romanian law allows girls to get married at age 16 with parental consent, or at 18 without it.

But arranged "marriages" between teenagers are relatively common among Roma, who make up about 1.5 million of Romania's 22 million people. Families "marry off" daughters when they reach puberty, with the "husband" usually being a couple of years older. The marriages are not recognized by the state.

Roma girls are often not encouraged to pursue a full education, and Romanian authorities do not widely enforce education laws that require children to attend school until age 16.

In 2003, there was an international outcry after the European Union envoy to Romania, Baroness Emma Nicholson, demanded that a 12-year-old Roma girl and her 15-year-old common-law husband separate and cease all intimate relations until they were legally able to be married.

News about the 10-year-old mother barely registered in Romania, with stories buried inside newspapers focusing on the controversy the birth had caused among Spaniards.

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Haiti Wants Major Camp Evacuated Ahead of Storm

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- It was the jewel of Haiti's post-earthquake recovery: an organized relocation camp with thousands of tents billed as hurricane-resistant, lined up in neat rows on graded mountain soil.

Now, staring down an expected hit later this week from a hurricane, officials say Corail-Cesselesse is not safe. On Tuesday, the government advised the estimated 7,850 residents of its primary relocation camp to ride out the storm somewhere else.

"We're asking people in Corail to voluntarily move from where they are and go to the houses of family or friends. The places the government has identified are churches and schools that are available for shelter from the storm," Haiti civil protection official Abel Nazaire told The Associated Press.

Camp managers held a "loudspeaker meeting" with megaphones to tell residents about the evacuation order, said Bryant Castro, the American Refugee Committee staffer managing the camp. Residents were told to seek any home they could find and are expected to start leaving as soon as Wednesday.

A hurricane over the weekend, Tomas weakened to a tropical depression early Wednesday with maximum sustained winds near 35 mph.

"This short-term trend is sort of baffling at this point," said Dave Roberts, hurricane specialist at National Hurricane Center in ort-au-Prince, Les Cayes, Gonaives and Cap-Haitien. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said rainfall of up to 5 inches could cause catastrophic floods in the severely deforested country.

Aid workers are scrambling to prepare but are badly short of supplies including shelter material because of the responses already under way to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake and an unprecedented cholera outbreak that has killed more than 330 people and hospitalized more than 4,700.

A U.S. Navy vessel, the amphibious warship Iwo Jima, was steaming toward Haiti on Tuesday to provide disaster relief.

Some of the biggest concern is for 1.3 million earthquake survivors still living under tarps and tents nearly 10 months after the disaster. The government said there are some shelters in the capital -- a handful have been built in nearby Leogane and several hours north in Gonaives -- but basically people will be on their own if Tomas hits.

"The government doesn't have shelters for 1,300,000 people," Nazaire said.

An enormous international aid effort flowed into Haiti in the immediate wake of the quake, but reconstruction has barely begun, in part because donors have not come through with promised funds. The United States has not provided any of the $1.15 billion in reconstruction aid it pledged last March.

When Corail opened in April, it was portrayed as a model for how camps could be built and run. A joint effort by the Haitian government and international aid groups, including U.N. peacekeepers and U.S. military engineers, it was billed as a refuge from dangerous ' she said.

"We knew a hurricane was going to come -- this is Haiti, this always happens -- and we have not had a level of reconstruction that gets people under tents into houses."

At this point there is little to be done before the storm. Romelus said his family -- his wife, two daughters ages 2 and 5, a sister and nephews -- will stay in the camp unless the government can provide shelter. They have nowhere else to go.

"God will protect me. I'm not going to be the only one (staying Corail). If something happens, we'll deal with it," he said. "If they could have moved more quickly and built more houses, it would have been safer."

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WFP to Allow Donor Nations to Review Confidential Audit Documents

The nations that pay the bills of the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) are getting the chance for a better look into the workings of the huge food aid agency—but not a lot better.

More than a year after a WFP administrative document revealed that the agency’s internal auditors had discovered “numerous” irregularities in the way the program reported its multimillion-dollar financial and commodity management in North Korea, WFP’s 36-country supervisory Executive Board is about to allow curious nation-states—including those, like the U.S., that are its biggest donors --to look at similar confidential audit documents for the very first time.

But only if they ask precise questions and promise to behave once access is granted.

And as for any internal WFP audits from the past—including those that itemized WFP’s “lapses,” “anomalies” and inconsistencies in reporting what happened to food aid and financial management in dictatorial North Korea—they will remain secret forever, so far as the food agency is concerned.

Nonetheless, WFP itself is hailing the action as an affirmation of its “commitment to transparency and accountability in all its activities and decision-making.”

That transparency, however, is still notably lacking in the case of North Korea, a habitually belligerent country that has been under international financial and other sanctions for years in a bid to stop, or at least slow down, its illegal nuclear weapons program. Only relief supplies for the neediest of North Korea’s starving millions of people have been trickling in.

Those efforts at financial pressure have not been far successful. Even as WFP’s Executive Board prepared to approve its new and still limited disclosure policy at a four-day meeting that starts Nov. 8, press reports have indicated North Korea is preparing for a third illicit nuclear weapons test.

WFP’s circumspection about its internal audit documents has been longstanding. But it reached a crescendo of sorts in September, after Fox News revealed the highlights of an internal audit that found “inconsistent data and unreliable information systems” and “numerous anomalies” in reporting management of WFP relief supplies in the country.

WFP claimed that there were only “a small number of inconsistencies in commodity accounting that have subsequently been addressed.” But the document uncovered by Fox News strongly suggested otherwise. Click here to read more on this from Foxnews.com.

The agency regards the audits as management tools—as do many other U.N. agencies and programs. Even powerful contributors like the U.S., which traditionally provides at least 22 per cent of WFP funds, WERE barred from viewing them.

According to the guidelines WFP’s Executive Board is about to approve, curious nations must apply in writing, and name the specific report they wish to read. They must also supply their reasons for wanting to look, and promise to keep anything they read confidential. Just to be sure, they won’t get a copy. They will instead be allowed to read one only in the office of WFP’s inspector general. No copying or note-taking is allowed during what the rules call a “consultation.”

Even that scrutiny may take a long while. Before agreeing to make a copy of any report available, WFP will notify any government specifically singled out in the audit, giving them a chance to read it as well, and comment. The new disclosure period says that reaction can take a “reasonable time,” without spelling out what’s reasonable. And if the report is deemed sensitive enough, it can be redacted--or even withheld entirely.

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Adding to the potential complexity is that fact that some of WFP’s biggest food aid recipients are also on its Executive Board—a circumstance that any bureaucrat might consider very sensitive.

Among them: Sudan, the strife-torn area where WFP conducts a program that it says is its largest in the world; Democratic Republic of Congo, where WFP spent $259 million last year and, according to its website, wants to spend $198 million in 2010; Burkina Faso, one of the world’s poorest nations; and battered Haiti.

Three of those countries—Haiti, Congo and Sudan, in that order, are listed among the worst on Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index; Burkina Faso sits back in the middle of the international pack at Number 98.

George Russell is Executive Editor of Fox News

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