NEW YORK (AP) — From a teenager who was a month old when her parents were killed in Rwanda’s genocide to a young man inspired to become a doctor, hundreds of orphans have found hope for the future in a special village outside the Rwandan capital.
Now, the South African-born, New York woman who founded Agahozo Shalom hopes the village can be a model for orphans around Rwanda and the rest of the world. Anne Heyman brought five of the young people from the village to New York this week, where they helped raise money and met with Rwanda’s U.N. Ambassador Eugene-Richard Gasana.
“The dream is that others will come and see what we are doing and understand that there is a systemic solution to the orphan problem that plagues much of the developing world,” Heyman said.
Heyman got the idea for the village at a 2005 dinner when she and her husband were seated at a table with Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan hotel manager made famous in the movie “Hotel Rwanda” for trying to protect Tutsis and moderate Hutus targeted in the 1994 slaughter of at least 500,000 people.
Her husband asked Rusesabagina what Rwanda’s biggest problem was.
Orphans, he replied.
Heyman, a former New York assistant district attorney and mother of three, thought of the thousands of Jewish children orphaned by the Holocaust who were resettled in youth villages in Israel. She believed that model could work in Rwanda, where there are more than 610,000 orphans, including 95,000 orphaned by the genocide, according to the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.
So after that dinner conversation, Heyman started raising money and making contacts in Rwanda and Israel. She founded Agahozo Shalom, which combines the Kinyarwanda word agahoza meaning “tears are dried” with the Hebrew word shalom which means “peace.”
She collected donations from Liquidnet Holdings, the electronic stock-trading firm founded by her husband Seth Merrin, and other foundations, companies and individuals. With $12 million and help from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the first 125 high school students arrived at the 144-acre (58-hectare) village in January 2009.
The village, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the capital Kigali, is now home to 500 young people who live in “families” — 16 to a house, with a house mother or father, and big sister or brother. They get health care and plenty of emotional support, Heyman said.
Heyman’s goal is to integrate the orphans into a community, giving them families and individual attention as well as a full school curriculum including music, art and sports. They are expected to use the education and skills they are learning to help other struggling Rwandans, whether by building houses, growing crops or teaching.
“The philosophy of how we do things is really the same for every orphan in the world,” Heyman said, “and so whether the kids are orphaned by AIDS, conflict, genocide, they’ve been abandoned by the world, the solution is really the same.”
Gasana, the Rwandan ambassador, suggested that Heyman partner with UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency.
“It’s a good model I think to sell everywhere in the world,” he said.
In New York, the young Rwandans performed music at a fundraiser that brought in about $500,000 on Monday, Heyman said.
To select new members of the village, Heyman said Agahozo Shalom sends letters to Rwanda’s mayors asking them to identify 10 orphans who meet specific criteria, all based on vulnerability, including a lack food or shelter or someone to take care of them and emotional problems. There is no medical or academic testing, she said.
Sitting around a table in the ambassador’s conference room, the five young people talked about their difficult lives before going to Agahozo Shalom village.
Peace Grace Muhizi Umutesi, 18, lost both her parents to the genocide when she was a month old. She then lived with her aunt, who has five children, for 10 years. The family was so poor that sometimes they missed meals. Nobody had ever asked her what she wanted for her future until she was interviewed by Agahozo Shalom.
“I didn’t have any dream in me. I was just studying for studying, not studying for being someone in the future,” she said.
Now she is singing, and studying math, economics and computers. She dreams of being a famous singer and a software engineer.
“They told us ‘if you see far you will go far’. … That’s made me strong,” she said.
She said Agahozo Shalom “is like my family” and added: “I feel very powerful and I know that if something is good it is wonderful and if it goes wrong it is an experience.”
Pascasie Nyirantwari, 21, who lost her father in the genocide and her mother to illness seven years later, said she had no hope for the future when she came to the village from an orphanage. She will be part of the village’s first high school graduating class in November and wants to continue singing and acting and study interior design.
“Now I have a hope for tomorrow,” she said.
Innocent Nkundiye, 19, also lost his father in the genocide and his mother struggled to raise him and his brother. He went to school but didn’t do well. Now, he’s studying math and science and wants to be a doctor. He said that when the local physician in his district died, the women cried because they didn’t know who would take care of them when they got pregnant.
“So because of that, I got a dream,” Innocent said. “Maybe I can change something, and I can solve these problems … and I said I have first of all to do something that can make me a doctor. So I chose math, biology and chemistry to study — and I will be a doctor.”
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Attorneys for the file-sharing site Megaupload.com and its founder, Kim Dotcom, are challenging the federal government’s piracy case against them even before company officials have been brought to the U.S. to answer charges.
Lawyers for Megaupload on Wednesday filed papers in U.S. District Court to dismiss charges against the company. Prosecutors have charged Megaupload, Dotcom and other company officials with facilitating piracy of copyrighted movies and TV shows on a massive scale. The case is one of the biggest copyright-infringement cases ever alleged, with prosecutors charging that the piracy cost movie studios and other copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue.
The legal motions do not seek dismissal of the case against the individual defendants, but they do seek release of millions of dollars in frozen assets so lawyers can prepare a full defense.
The defense attorneys argue that Megaupload and its officers can’t be held criminally responsible for copyright infringement by its users. They also said the company itself cannot be charged criminally in U.S. court because it is a foreign company, based in Hong Kong, that does not even have offices in the U.S. and cannot be legally served notice of the charges.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment on the court filings Wednesday, saying the government will respond in court.
The filing is unusual because Dotcom and his co-defendants have not actually entered appearances in the case. Dotcom, who had his name legally changed, is currently in New Zealand fighting extradition.
Ira Rothken, one of Megaupload and Dotcom’s lawyers, said Dotcom is exercising his legal rights by challenging extradition in New Zealand, and shouldn’t be punished for doing so by having his assets frozen and making it difficult for his lawyers to fully represent him.
The seizure of more than $67 million in assets is especially egregious, Rothken said, because the case against Megaupload and Dotcom is weak.
In court papers, Rothken and the defense team called the criminal charges “an experiment in stretching U.S. criminal law well past the breaking point.”
The U.S. government, in its indictment, alleges that Megaupload was more than a neutral bystander to the illegal conduct of its users. The government alleges that the whole structure of Megaupload was designed to facilitate copyright infringement and reward users who uploaded popular movies and TV shows for public consumption.
Before it was shut down in January, Megaupload was one of the world’s most popular websites, with millions of users who stored data with the site, either for free or by paying for premium service. The cache of data stored on Megaupload is roughly equivalent to half of the entire Library of Congress, according to court records. While the government does not dispute that some users of Megaupload were perfectly legitimate, prosecutors and lobbying groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America believe that the vast majority of the 25 million gigabytes stored on Megaupload’s servers is content that was copied and shared in violation of copyright laws.
The flamboyant Dotcom made a particularly high-profile target. Dotcom, a German who was born as Kim Schmitz and convicted of computer fraud and manipulating the stock price of an Internet startup but never served jail time, moved to New Zealand and lived something of a playboy lifestyle from his $24 million mansion. He even became the world’s highest-rated player of the popular video game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.”
A judge in New Zealand this week ordered the U.S. government to share its evidence against Megaupload and Dotcom so he can evaluate whether the U.S. request for extradition is valid. The extradition hearing is set for August.
OXON HILL, Md. (AP) — Lena Greenberg was in constant motion as she stood waiting for her turn at the microphone at the National Spelling Bee — arms waving, feet dancing, head bobbing.
“It calmed me down,” Greenberg said later, although she certainly never looked calm.
Speaking in a loud, high-pitched voice, she spelled the words “jong” and “thalian” correctly. When the judges nodded their heads, she sprinted and skipped back to her chair and doubled over in delight.
Greenberg, 14, of Philadelphia, was one of 50 spellers to advance to the semifinals of the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee on Wednesday after 228 participants were eliminated. Last year, she missed the semifinals by one point.
Thursday’s semifinals will not include the youngest speller in bee history, 6-year-old Lori Anne Madison of Lake Ridge, Va., although she made a valiant effort. Lori Anne misspelled one of her two words during the preliminary rounds — “ingluvies,” which she started with an “e” — and her score on Tuesday’s computer test wasn’t enough to make up the difference.
“It was close,” said spelling bee director Paige Kimball.
Only one semifinalist advanced with a perfect score — 10-year-old Vanya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kan. Vanya’s sister, Kavya, won the 2009 National Spelling Bee. On Wednesday, the fifth-grader spelled “debellation” and “auteur” with obvious ease, and she got all 25 scored words right on Tuesday’s 50-word computer test — including “semelparous” and “outrecuidance.”
Like her sister, Vanya aspires to be a surgeon, and she’s part of a customarily strong contingent of Indian-Americans in the semifinals. Spellers of Indian descent have won four years in a row and nine of the last 13 years, a run that began when Nupur Lala captured the crown in 1999 and was featured in the documentary “Spellbound.”
Last year, five spellers got perfect scores, and semifinalists could only afford to miss two words. This year’s test was much more difficult — so 17 out of 25 was enough to advance.
Two of last year’s finalists also advanced — Nabeel Rahman of Buffalo, N.Y., and two-time finalist Arvind Mahankali of Bayside Hills, N.Y.
While 6-year-old Lori Anne was the talk of the spelling bee, Wednesday belonged to the veterans. In contrast to Greenberg’s jitters, five-time National Spelling Bee participant Nicholas Rushlow was the picture of cool as he strutted to the microphone and greeted pronouncer Jacques Bailly.
Rushlow, a year-round competitive swimmer who reads “Get Fuzzy” comic books to relax before spelling, made the semifinals for a fourth time.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do after this bee,” he said. “I’ll have to find a new hobby.”
Rahul Malayappan of Danbury, Conn., the other fifth-time participant, also made the semifinals. Emily Keaton of Pikeville, Ky., made them for the third time in four appearances.
“It’s still a big deal,” she said. “Everyone wants to do better than you’ve done before.”
Three foreign competitors made the semifinals: Mignon Tsai of Vancouver, Jennifer Mong of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the unfailingly polite Gifton Wright of Spanish Town, Jamaica, who said “Thank you, sir” every time Bailly gave him a definition or word origin.
This week, Scripps announced tentative plans for a world spelling bee with teams of spellers from dozens of countries. Once that gets off the ground, the National Spelling Bee would be closed to international participants.
This year’s winner gets $30,000 in cash, a trophy, a $2,500 savings bond, a $5,000 scholarship, $2,600 in reference works from the Encyclopedia Britannica and an online language course.
Most spellers have a routine, asking for the definition and country of origin even if they know the word immediately. Many pretend to write the words on their hands or arms. But some are confident enough to wing it.
Wearing a black hoodie, T-shirt and blue jeans, Dylan Bird, 13, of Pebble Beach, Calif., greeted Bailly with “‘Sup?” before spelling “catalineta.” Earlier, he spelled “corpuscle.” Neither time did he ask for so much as a definition.
“I never really felt the need,” said Bird, a second-time participant. “With experience, you kind of are able to relax a bit more.”
His nonchalance apparently didn’t work as well on the computer test. Bird didn’t make the semifinals.
Neither did Jack Pasche, 13, of Sutton Bay, Mich., whose attempt to spell “idiosyncratically” was, well, idiosyncratic.
“I-O-Q-R-S-Z-quatro,” he said, before laughter drowned him out.
___
Follow Ben Nuckols on Twitter at http://twitter.com/APBenNuckols .
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — American Indian tribes authorized to triple the amount of time tribal members can spend in jail say they’re challenged by a lack of funding.
The increase in tribal courts’ sentencing authority from one year to three years for a single crime came two years ago under the federal Tribal Law and Order Act. But a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday showed that none of the 109 tribes who responded to a survey about the sentencing increase were taking advantage of it.
Nearly all of those tribes said they need more money and technical help from the federal government to provide public defenders, establish or update criminal codes, and have sufficiently trained judges as the law requires.
The report shows 36 of the tribes surveyed are working toward the new authority. Another 34 tribes were unsure whether they would go in that direction, while 31 said they had no plans to do so, the report said. The enhanced sentencing isn’t mandatory for tribes.
Troy Eid, chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission born out of the Tribal Law and Order Act, said tribes across the country are exploring the authority but it will take time to get all the elements in place if that’s the path they choose.
“My impression is that within the next year, you’ll start to see some tribes actually implementing the system,” he said. “Tribes are being super careful. No tribe wants to get this issue wrong; it has to be legally correct.”
The GAO cautioned the report isn’t representative of all tribes. Congressional investigators identified 171 of the 566 federally recognized tribes that received federal funding for tribal courts to include in the survey, but not all of them responded.
Tribal leaders have said a year in jail for any crime under tribal law, including homicide, hasn’t served as much of a deterrent on reservations. Members of the Navajo Nation Council have been debating whether the enhanced sentencing provision would help send a message that tribal officials are serious about combatting crime.
“The bad guys are saying they could get away with anything on the rez, which now pretty much is true,” said Edmund Yazzie, chairman of the Navajo Nation Council’s Law and Order Committee, and a former sheriff’s deputy. “But now the committee is trying to take another look at it.”
Seventy of the tribes surveyed said they had at least half the requirements in place to hand down lengthier sentences, but some are choosing not to because of associated costs, like probation. One unnamed tribe said it has had an effective criminal and civil justice system for 40 years without the requirement of a law-trained judge, and that hiring one from outside the community would be unreasonable.
The Hopi Tribe in Arizona set aside funds from its own budget to hire law-trained judges and a prosecutor last year to meet the requirements of the tribal law and order act, said tribal Chairman Le Roy Shingoitewa. The tribal council is expected to vote on an updated criminal code next month that Shingoitewa says could help ensure that victims get justice.
“Now we have some teeth in enforcing our laws. Previous to this, all we did is slap the hands of perpetrators,” he said.
Tribes receive funding, training and other assistance through the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Department of Justice, but it’s not always enough.
The BIA said it has provided more than 60 recording devices to tribes to help them meet another requirement that they maintain a record of criminal proceedings. The agency said it has plans to give 15 more to tribes that request them and also has asked for $1 million more in funding for tribal courts in its 2013 budget justification.
The GAO recommended that the federal government clarify to tribes the funding sources available to help them pursue the enhanced sentencing.
Mato Standing High, attorney general of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, said the tribe is fortunate in that it has the financial resources to meet many of the requirements under the Tribal Law and Order Act. The only thing missing is an updated tribal code that would reflect a new class of crimes, like rape, arson or homicide, with lengthier sentences, he said.
The tribe hasn’t decided officially whether to move forward with the enhanced sentencing authority, he said, but is considering how to classify crimes after comparing them to state and federal crimes and penalties.
“Tribes really need to see it as an opportunity to exercise sovereignty and have more local control,” Standing High said. “That’s the goal of it, and I understand also that it takes a lot of resources that a lot of tribes don’t have.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Colombian superstar Juanes said singer-songwriter-producer Juan Luis Guerra got him out of his comfort zone when the musician started rearranging his songs for his “MTV Unplugged” taping.
And Juanes was happy to take on the challenge.
“He put me in another place, but for me as a musician, as an artist, I was like: ‘Wow. This is a new world. I feel like I can do this,’” Juanes said in a recent interview. “We tried different styles … (and) I was not used to that kind of arrangement.”
Guerra, the Dominican Grammy-winning producer, is known for his bachata and merengue sound. He’s won the Latin Grammy for album of the year three times. Juanes, also a Grammy winner, has a sound that is built from rock and metal genres.
The singer said the 14 songs on “Juanes: MTV Unplugged,” released this week, are a blend of Latin, jazz, blues, rock, folk and classic sounds. He says the process felt new.
“You know, it’s scary, but it’s kind of what I’m looking for now,” he said. “Just to take the risk and go to different places and try different things. So it’s not about fear, it’s more about risk.”
The first single, “Le Senal (The Sign),” has peaked at No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. Latin Songs chart. The special, which aired Monday, was taped at the New World Symphony Center in Miami Beach, Fla., in February.
Juanes says a new sound will be all over his upcoming studio album, due out next year.
“The ‘Unplugged’ right now is like a transition album. It’s going to give (me) some more time to keep writing my songs and go the studio,” he said. “It’s going to be completely different, wild and loud, and happy.”
The 39-year old is married to model-actress Karen Martinez. He says he’s noticed his musical abilities spillover onto his daughters, ages 7 and 8, who are now taking piano lessons. He also has a 2-year-old son, who he says is “crazy with cars and superheroes.”
“Unplugged” is the singer’s first release since splitting with his longtime manager, Fernan Martinez.
“It’s all about cycles, things stop and sometimes things end,” he said of the split. “And now I just feel like writing new pages of my life, new chapters. So I feel really positive, and at the same time, really thankful of the past.”
____
Online:
http://www.juanes.net/home
http://www.tr3s.com/specials/unplugged/juanes/
____
Mesfin Fekadu covers entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/musicmesfin
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska wildlife biologists are warning about the dangers of moose calving season after several people were injured in the past week by protective cows, including a 6-year-old girl who was stomped by one in her backyard until her father scared it off with a log and a baseball bat.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Jessy Coltrane said cow moose are giving birth now, and people need to be extra careful in and near the woods.
“Cows are dropping calves all over town right now,” Coltrane said. “Those cows are so defensive of their little babies. They will literally stand there on the edge of the woods watching you, and if you take one step into their personal bubble, they’ll come out hooves flying.”
The warning comes after 6-year-old Chloe Metzger was stomped by a moose Monday in her Eagle River backyard. She suffered a broken clavicle and injuries to her back, according to Wednesday’s Anchorage Daily News (http://is.gd/B94Tfm).
The same day, a moose struck a man outside an Anchorage elementary school, but he was uninjured, police said. Over the weekend, a moose charged and injured at least two mountain bikers on trails at a south Anchorage park.
Chloe Metzger’s mother, Julie, said her daughter and an 11-year-old friend were jumping on a trampoline when they decided to venture toward the woods into some nearby bushes.
They encountered the moose, which chased them back into the yard. The older girl ran and hid in a playhouse with an attached swing set, Julie Metzger said.
“My daughter didn’t make it. I looked out, and she was curled in a ball protecting her head,” she said. “Everybody was screaming.”
The moose stomped on Chloe’s back with its two front hooves until Julie’s husband, Wade, threw a log at it, she said. It stunned the moose long enough that Chloe was also able to run to the playhouse, and Wade Metzger threw a baseball bat at it, Julie Metzger said.
Unfortunately for the girls, the moose ran into the swing set, became tangled and injured the older girl as well, Julie Metzger said. Eventually they were able to scare away the animal and rush Chloe to a hospital, where she had surgery.
The moose was calm when Coltrane and another biologist went to see it Monday after the attack.
Coltrane said moose can be unpredictable this time of year.
Several groups of mountain bikers learned that over the weekend on the trails at Kincaid Park. A couple of them were injured when a moose either attacked or drove the bikers off the trail, she said.
“It was all fast-moving, blind corners and basically running smack into the moose,” Coltrane said. “I would definitely recommend to people to get a new hobby for the next couple weeks.”
___
Information from: Anchorage Daily News, http://www.adn.com
This photo provided by DKC Public Relations, Marketing & Government Affairs, shows Innocent Nkundiye and Claude Irankunda, residents of the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village in rural Rwanda, performing at the offices of Liquidnet Holdings in New York, on Tuesday, May 22, 2012. Their village is modeled after youth villages established in Israel to help World War II orphans. About 500 young people live in "families" _ 16 to a house, with a house mother or father, and big sister or brother. (AP Photo/DKC Public Relations, Marketing & Government Affairs)(Credit: AP) 