Indian gang rape victim dies; protesters defy lock-down

NEW DELHI/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A woman whose gang rape sparked protests and a national debate about violence against women in India died of her injuries on Saturday, prompting a security lockdown in New Delhi and an acknowledgement from India's prime minister that social change is needed.

The six suspects held in connection with the December 16 attack on the 23-year-old medical student on a New Delhi bus were charged with murder following her death, police said. The maximum penalty for murder is death.

Earlier, bracing for a new wave of protests, Indian authorities deployed thousands of policemen, closed 10 metro stations and banned vehicles from some main roads in the heart of New Delhi, where demonstrators have converged since the attack to demand improved women's rights.

Despite efforts to cordon off the city centre, more than 1,000 people gathered for peaceful protests at two locations. Some protesters shouted for justice, others for the death penalty for the rapists.

The woman severely beaten, raped and thrown out of a moving bus, had been flown to Singapore in a critical condition by the Indian government on Thursday for treatment.

The intense media coverage of the attack and the use of social media to galvanize protests, mostly by young middle-class students, has forced political leaders to confront some uncomfortable truths about the treatment of women in the world's largest democracy.

Most sex crimes in India go unreported, many offenders go unpunished, and the wheels of justice turn slowly, according to social activists who say that successive governments have done little to ensure the safety of women.

"The need of the hour is a dispassionate debate and inquiry into the critical changes that are required in societal attitudes," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a statement.

"I hope that the entire political class and civil society will set aside narrow sectional interests and agenda to help us all reach the end that we all desire - making India a demonstrably better and safer place for women to live in."

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in the northern Indian city of Lucknow. In Hyderabad, in southern India, a group of women marched to demand severe punishment for the rapists. Protests were also held in the cities of Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.

The demonstrations were peaceful, unlike last weekend, when police used batons, water cannon and teargas in clashes with protesters.

Sonia Gandhi, the powerful leader of the ruling Congress party, directly addressed the protesters in a rare broadcast on state television, saying that as a mother and a woman she understood their grievances.

"Your voice has been heard," Gandhi said. "It deepens our determination to battle the pervasive and the shameful social attitudes that allow men to rape and molest women with such impunity."

The Indian government has chartered an aircraft to fly the student's body back to India on Saturday, along with members of her family, T.C.A. Raghavan, the Indian high commissioner to Singapore, told reporters.

The body was taken to a Hindu casket firm in Singapore for embalming. Indian diplomats selected a gold and yellow coffin to transport her home, staff at the firm told reporters.

"She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome," Kelvin Loh, chief executive officer of the Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore said in a statement announcing her death from multiple organ failure.

The victim and a male friend were returning home from the cinema by bus when, media reports say, six men on the bus beat them with metal rods and repeatedly raped the woman. Media said a rod was used in the rape, causing internal injuries. Both were thrown from the bus. The male friend survived.

Six suspects, from a slum in south Delhi, are in custody.

The attack has put gender issues centre stage in Indian politics arguably for the first time. Issues such as rape, dowry-related deaths and female infanticide have rarely entered mainstream political discourse.

Analysts say the death of the woman dubbed "Amanat", an Urdu word meaning "treasure," by some media could change that, although it is too early to say whether the protesters calling for government action to better safeguard women can sustain their momentum through to national elections due in 2014.

WORST PLACE

The outcry over the attack caught the government off-guard and it was slow to reach. It took a week for Singh to make a statement on the attack, infuriating many protesters who saw it as a sign of a government insensitive to the plight of women.

The prime minister, a stiff 80-year-old technocrat who speaks in a low monotone, has struggled to channel the popular outrage in his public statements and convince critics that his eight-year-old government will now take concrete steps to improve the safety of women.

"The Congress managers were ham-handed in their handling of the situation that arose after the brutal assault on the girl. The crowd management was poor," a lawmaker from Singh's ruling Congress party said on condition of anonymity.

Commentators and sociologists say the rape has tapped into a deep well of frustration many Indians feel over what they see as weak governance and poor leadership on social issues.

A global poll by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in June found that India was the worst place to be a woman because of high rates of infanticide, child marriage and slavery.

New Delhi has the highest number of sex crimes among India's major cities, with a rape reported on average every 18 hours, according to police figures. Government data show the number of reported rape cases in the country rose by nearly 17 percent between 2007 and 2011.

For a link to the poll, click http://www.trust.org/trustlaw/news/special-coverage/g20women/

(Additional reporting by Devidutta Tripathy, Satarupa Bhattacharjya, Diksha Madhok, Shashank Chouhan and Suchitra Mohanty in Delhi, Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow, Sujoy Dhar in Kolkata, Anupama Chandrasekaran in Chennai, Kevin Lim, Saeed Azhar, Edgar Su and Sanjeev Miglani in Singapore; Editing by Mark Bendeich and Robert Birsel)

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French 75% tax rate on rich struck down

PARIS: France's top constitutional body on Saturday struck down a 75 per cent upper income tax rate, dealing a major blow to Socialist President Francois Hollande who had made it his centrepiece tax measure.

The government vowed to push ahead with the tax rate, which would apply to incomes over a million euros (US$1.3 million) a year, and propose a new measure that would conform with the constitution.

The tax rate had angered business leaders and prompted some wealthy French citizens to seek tax exile abroad, including actor Gerard Depardieu who recently took up residency in Belgium.

The Constitutional Council said in its ruling that the temporary two-year tax rate, due to start next year, was unconstitutional because, unlike other forms of income tax, it applied to individuals instead of whole households.

As a result, the council said, the tax rate "failed to recognise equality before public burdens".

Though largely symbolic -- it would have applied to only about 1,500 individuals -- the Socialists said the tax rate was aimed at making the ultra-rich contribute more to tackling France's budget deficit.

It was a flagship promise of the election campaign that saw Hollande defeat right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy in May.

"The government will propose a new system that conforms with the principles laid down by the decision of the Constitutional Council. It will be presented in the framework of the next Finance Act," Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said in a statement after the ruling.

The Constitutional Council also rejected new methods for calculating the wealth tax, striking down a provision that would have increased the amount of taxable revenues and capital gains.

A source close to the government said the council's decisions would have a minimal effect, reducing revenues by only 500 million euros in the 300 billion euro 2013 budget.

Other new measures in the budget were approved, however, including an increase in some upper tax rates to 45 per cent and the addition of capital gains to taxable income.

The council also approved a 20 billion euro business tax credit included in the 2012 budget as a way of promoting economic growth and competitiveness.

France is struggling to plug a 37 billion euro hole in its public finances to meet its target of reducing the budget deficit to the EU ceiling of three percent in 2013.

The 2013 budget included 12.5 billion euros in spending cuts and 20 billion euros in new taxes on individuals and businesses.

Critics have said the new tax measures will stifle economic growth, with the French economy already expected to contract by 0.2 per cent in the final quarter of this year.

The 2013 budget is based on a government forecast of 0.8 per cent economic growth next year -- a figure many economists consider too optimistic.

Hollande, who has pushed policies of economic growth over austerity, has seen his popularity plummet in recent months as the economy stagnates and unemployment mounts.

- AFP/xq

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Gang-rape victim's body to be flown to India around midnight

SINGAPORE: The body of the 23-year-old victim of brutal gang-rape and assault in Delhi is likely to be flown to India around midnight, hours after she died at a Singapore super specialty hospital.

The girl, who was shifted here on December 27 from the Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi, breathed her last at 4.45am (2.15am IST), Singapore's Mount Elizabeth Hospital, where she was being treated, said in a statement.

Indian high commission sources said the body will be flown back in a chartered Air India plane that would take off around midnight local time (9.30pm IST).

On the chartered plane, sent here by the Indian government, would be her family members who have been in Singapore since the girl was brought to the hospital here in an extremely critical condition.

The victim, who underwent three surgeries at Safdarjung Hospital, was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on December 16 by six men in a moving bus in Delhi. The assault had damaged her internal organs. She also suffered a cardiac arrest and brain injury.

"We are very sad to report that the patient passed away peacefully at 4.45am on 29 December 2012 (Singapore time)," the Singapore hospital's chief executive officer Dr Kelvin Loh said in a statement.

"Her family and officials from the high commission of India were by her side. The Mount Elizabeth Hospital team of doctors, nurses and staff join her family in mourning her loss," the statement said.

Indian high commissioner TCA Raghavan told reporters that the girl, who was conscious, fought a brave battle till the end.

He said the final few hours was a trying time for the girl's family and they bore the entire process with a great deal of fortitude and courage.

Raghavan said the family has requested that their privacy be respected in their hour of grief.

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

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Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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Obama Still Hopeful in Final Days Before 'Cliff'

Dec 29, 2012 6:00am

AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

Three days remain for Congress to pass a federal budget agreement that would avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” and today President Obama said he believes the House and Senate leadership can squeak out a deal in time.

In his weekly address, released this morning, the president said allowing the package of perilous tax increases and budget cuts set to take effect in the New Year “would be the wrong thing to do for our economy.”

“Congress can prevent it from happening if they act now,” he said. “Leaders in Congress are working on a way to prevent this tax hike on the middle class, and I believe we may be able to reach an agreement that can pass both houses in time.”

The president was referring to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who were attempting to quickly fashion a deal that can pass both chambers of Congress. Although not mentioned specifically in the video, the two leaders and their House counterparts, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., met with the president and his staff at the White House Friday that left both parties’ leadership cautiously optimistic in public statements following the meeting.

INFOGRAPHIC: Fiscal Cliff: Why It Matters

Largely repeating remarks he made following the meeting, the president noted that should the last-minute wrangling fail he has asked Reid to deliver a basic proposal to the Senate floor for a simple up-or-down vote.

“We believe such a proposal could pass both houses with bipartisan majorities -as long as these leaders allow it to come to a vote.  If they still want to vote no and let this tax hike hit the middle class, that’s their prerogative – but they should let everyone vote.  That’s the way this is supposed to work,” he said. “We just can’t afford a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy.”

Reid’s backup legislation would reflect the Democrats’ side in this quagmire, demanding a tax boost for household incomes greater than $250,000 and an extension of unemployment benefits for roughly 2 million Americans that is set to expire without their reauthorization.

Fiscal Cliff: By The Numbers

“You meet your deadlines and your responsibilities every day,” Obama said. “The folks you sent here to serve should do the same.”

The president’s statement came a day before what could be a critical turning point in the “cliff” ordeal. On Sunday, the House of Representatives returns from holiday recess, the same day McConnell and Reid could offer up a hypothetical deal for a vote. Meanwhile, NBC’s “Meet the Press” will air a televised interview with Obama that morning.

SHOWS: Good Morning America World News

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Putin signs ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Friday that bans Americans from adopting Russian children and imposes other sanctions in retaliation for a new U.S. human rights law that he says is poisoning relations.

The law, which has ignited outrage among Russian liberals and child rights' advocates, takes effect on January 1. Washington has called the law misguided and said it ties the fate of children to "unrelated political considerations."

It is likely to deepen a chill in U.S.-Russian relations and deal a blow to Putin's image abroad.

Fifty-two children whose adoptions by American parents were underway will remain in Russia, Interfax news agency cited Russia's child rights commissioner, Pavel Astakhov, as saying.

The law, whose text was issued by the Kremlin, will also outlaw some non-governmental organizations that receive U.S. funding and impose a visa ban and asset freeze on Americans accused of violating the rights of Russians abroad.

Pro-Kremlin lawmakers initially drafted the bill to mirror the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which bars entry to Russians accused of involvement in the death in custody of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and other alleged rights abuses.

The restrictions on adoptions and non-profit groups were added to the legislation later, going beyond a tit-for-tat move and escalating a dispute with Washington at a time when ties are also strained by issues such as the Syrian crisis.

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Magnitsky Act had "seriously undermined" the "reset" -- the moniker for the effort U.S. President Barack Obama launched early in his first term to improve relations between the former Cold War foes.

Putin has backed the hawkish response with a mix of public appeals to patriotism, saying Russia should care for its own children, and belligerent denunciations of what he says is the U.S. desire to impose its will on the world.

Seeking to dampen criticism of the move, Putin also signed a decree ordering an improvement in care for orphans.

Critics of the Russian legislation say Putin has held the welfare of children trapped in an crowded and troubled orphanage system hostage to political maneuvering.

"He signed it after all! He signed one of the most shameful laws in Russia history," a blogger named Yuri Pronko wrote on the popular Russian site LiveJournal.

BLOW TO RUSSIA'S IMAGE

The acquittal on Friday of the only person being tried over Magnitsky's death will fuel accusations by Kremlin critics that the Russian authorities have no intention of seeking justice in a case that has blackened Russia's image.

A Russian court on acquitted Dmitry Kratov, a former deputy head a jail where Magnitsky was held before his death in 2009 after nearly a year in pre-trial detention, after prosecutors themselves dropped charges against him.

Lawyers for Magnitsky's family said they will appeal and called for further investigation.

Magnitsky's colleagues say he is the victim of retribution from the same police investigators he had accused of stealing $230 million from the state through fraudulent tax refunds -- the very same crimes with which he was charged.

The case against Magnitsky was closed after his death but then was reopened again in August 2011.

In an unprecedented move, Russia is trying Magnitsky posthumously for fraud, despite protests from his family and the lawyers that it is unconstitutional to try a dead man. A preliminary hearing is scheduled next month.

Magnitsky's death triggered an international outcry and Kremlin critics said it underscored the dangers faced by Russians who challenge the authorities. The Kremlin's own human rights council said Magnitsky was probably beaten to death.

The adoption ban may further tarnish Putin's international standing at a time when the former KGB officer is under scrutiny over what critics say is a crackdown on dissent since he returned to the Kremlin for a six-year third term in May.

"The law will lead to a sharp drop in the reputation of the Kremlin and of Putin personally abroad, and signal a new phase in relations between the United States and Russia," said Lilia Shevtsova, an expert on Putin with the Carnegie Moscow Centre.

"It is only the first harbinger of a chill."

(Additional reporting by Alexei Anishchuk and Maria Tsvetkova; Editing By Steve Gutterman, Andrew Osborn and Roger Atwood)

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Japan new foreign minister vows China patch-up

TOKYO: Japan's new foreign minister said on Friday he would work to patch up ties with China, soured over a bitter territorial row that has blighted relations for months.

"I believe it is very important to have good communication between the two governments, as well as between two foreign ministers," Fumio Kishida said in an interview with journalists.

"It is primarily important that I, as foreign minister, make the effort to deepen communications between the two countries," he said.

Kishida, seen as a relative dove in the government of hawkish new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, begins the top diplomatic job as ties with China show few signs of improving following an ill-tempered territorial stand-off.

Abe won conservative support in national polls earlier this month with his forthright pronouncements on a group of East China Sea islands that Tokyo controls, vowing not to budge on Japan's claim to the Senkaku chain.

China also lays claim to the islands, which it calls the Diaoyu.

Additionally, Abe has said he would consider revising Japan's post-war pacifist constitution, alarming officials in Beijing and Seoul.

But he has quickly toned down the campaign rhetoric and has said he wants improved ties with China, Japan's biggest trading partner. He called for a solution through what he described as "patient exchanges".

"I am aware that some view the new Cabinet as right-leaning," Kishida said. "As a state, we need to do whatever we need to do to construct firm national security."

Kishida, 55, a former banker who leads a liberal faction in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, was an unexpected pick by Abe.

However, his experience as a state minister in Abe's cabinet during his first prime ministerial incarnation, dealing with territorial disputes with Russia and in Okinawan affairs, proved a plus.

Japan and Russia have never signed a post-Second World War peace treaty because of an unresolved spat over the ownership of islands to the north of the archipelago.

In Okinawa, the presence of a large number of US military personnel is a major source of contention for the local population, but a vital strand of Tokyo's defence pact with Washington.

- AFP/xq

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Campaigns against gender-based violence have kids as primary target

NEW DELHI: The roots of gender-based violence go so deep-seated that organizations battling it have practically written the adults off. Nearly every campaign pushing for gender equality has kids and youths as their primary target.

Breakthrough involved youths for community mobilization and training in schools and colleges; Must Bol, run by the Youth Collective, works mainly with college students. After Sunday's gang rape, child rights NGO, Butterflies held a "consultation with children" on the issue of sexual violence against women.

"Children are as much part of the value-system and being indoctrinated from day one but they are also the most receptive," says Sonal Khan, vice president, Breakthrough. With adults, it's always a battle. "It was such hard work moving the issue (domestic violence) as these attitudes are part of the psyche," she says.

Umang Sabarwal, who, in 2011, had tried to engage adults in a discussion on women's safety and freedom, learnt more from the opposition to the Slut Walk than the walk itself.

"There was an entire movement by the media dismissing it as an attention-seeking attempt. But in the media too, women are objectified and sexualized," she says. She'd only hoped to "get a thought in people's heads" she says and "never expected [the walk] to revolutionize things" but found that the roots of this "mindset" go too deep.

Activists find even language against them. "You can't deal with it, if you don't have words for it," says Khan. The expression "eve-teasing" trivializes sexual harassment; and family members of women who were attacked are more likely to say, " kuchch kharab hua ladki ke saath" than say they were sexually assaulted.

"Many young people have had little access to spaces for interactions between the genders and these boys feel it's okay to tease girls. They may consider rape violence but not harassment. That recognition is missing," says Manak Matiyani of Youth Collective. Plus gender stereotypes work against both the sexes - women have to be fair and "homely" (meaning, good around the house) and men, masculine and tall. "People don't take harassment on the road seriously. A woman complains and there are the neighbours and elders who'll ask questions about what she was doing," says Khan. She insists that all initiatives should seek equal participation from men and women. "Otherwise we'll fall back into the same dialectic and make this a "women's issue"."

Because the youth are net savvy, these organizations have used social media extensively. Those involved in Must Bol use short films. Blank Noise started as a blog in Bangalore in 2003, to address issues of harassment on the streets. The blog lists 29 forms of it and posts photographs of garments worn by women when they were harassed. Their initiative, Action Heroes Special, a "blogathon" inviting women to share stories harassment conducted over July-August 2012, has eight-pages worth of stories from Delhi alone.

Delhi-based WhyPoll Trust runs a similar initiative - Voices from the Dark -telling harassment stories in Q&A format. In 2012, they had launched the "Fight Back" application for smartphones using which women in distress could send out SOS emails, text messages and social network posts - one of the founders, Hindol Sengupta, says it was downloaded over a hundred times. In 2011, WhyPoll had also drawn up a list of the 100 spots or roads in Delhi the women found most dangerous after a survey - Nelson Mandela Marg, Dhaula Kuan, Benito Zuarez Marg, Paharganj and Mehrauli-Gurgaon road were the top five.

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

___

Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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Man Killed After Being Pushed in Front of NY Subway

Detectives in New York are searching for a female suspect who fled a subway station after a man was fatally pushed in front of a train on an elevated platform in Queens, N.Y.

At 8:04 p.m. on Thursday an unnamed man was standing on the northbound platform at 40th Street and Queens Blvd., waiting for the 7 train. Witnesses told police that a woman was walking back and forth on the platform and talking to herself before she took a seat on a wooden bench on the platform.

As the 7 train approached the station, witnesses said the woman rose from the bench and pushed the man onto the tracks, who was standing with his back to her.

New York City Subway Pusher Charged With Murder Watch Video

Witnesses told police that the victim did not notice the woman behind him. He was struck by the first of the 11-car train, with his body pinned under the front of the second car as the train came to a stop, according to a statement from Deputy Commissioner Paul Brown.

After pushing the man onto the platform the woman then fled down the stairs to Queens Blvd. She was described as wearing a blue, white and grey ski jacket, and grey and red Nike sneakers.

It is unclear if the two knew each other, or whether anyone attempted to help the man to the platform before he was struck by the train.

Overnight the NYPD released surveillance video of the woman believed to be the suspect, Detectives were also canvassing locations along Queens Blvd for other witnesses and surveillance video.

Thursday's incident marks the second straphanger death this month--a man was killed in midtown after being pushed onto the subway tracks under an oncoming train.

On Dec. 3, 58-year-old Ki-Suck Han was tossed onto the subway track at 49th Street and Seventh Avenue around 12:30 p.m. after an altercation with a man who was later identified as 30-year-old Naeem Davis. Davis has been charged with murder in Han's death and was ordered held without bail.

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