August produces worst toll in Syria conflict, says U.N.

Villages slowly vanish as Hispaniola lakes grow

In this Sept. 6, 2012 photo, children stand on the shores of Lake Azuei near a submerged hotel in Thomazeau, Haiti, near the border with the Dominican Republic. The waters' rise has worsened exponentially in recent years, especially after heavy rains in 2007 and 2008 hit the island of Hispaniola. Tropical Storm Isaac dumped more water on the region last month, sparking more damage. (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

In this Sept. 5, 2012 photo, a man stands on the wall of a submerged home to fish in Lake Azuei near Jimani, Dominican Republic, on the border with Haiti. The waters' rise has worsened exponentially in recent years, especially after heavy rains in 2007 and 2008 hit the island of Hispaniola. Tropical Storm Isaac dumped more water on the region last month, sparking more damage. (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

BOCA DE CACHON, Dominican Republic (AP) — No one thought much about it when the largest lake in the Caribbean began rising in a year of heavy rains. But then it never stopped.

Lake Enriquillo in the Dominican Republic has doubled in size over the past eight years, swallowing thousands of acres of farms and more than a dozen villages.

In neighboring Haiti, smaller Lake Azuei has also steadily swelled, destroying homes and farms as well as disrupting trade by occasionally blocking a key cross-border highway. The two lakes are only three miles (five kilometers) apart and are fed by some of the same streams.

It's been a slow-motion disaster and potentially catastrophic for two countries already burdened by major environmental challenges. The waters' rise has worsened exponentially in recent years, especially after heavy rains in 2007 and 2008 hit the island of Hispaniola, which both countries share. Tropical Storm Isaac dumped more water on the region last month, sparking more damage.

While the cause remains a mystery, theories as to why the lakes are rising range from sediment and trash clogging the water system to increased rainfall from climate change and heavy storms.

Dominican farmer Domingo Bautista recalls how the water gradually overtook his sugar cane, banana and sweet potato crop. Within two months, the family had to abandon their one-bedroom home in the sunbaked village of Boca de Cachon.

"The water just crept up on us," said Bautista, who now works as a janitor at a roadside inn. "It didn't happen overnight."

The spread of Enriquillo has flooded 16 communities in two provinces, more than 46,500 acres of agriculture land and 1,000 properties, according to a July study authored by the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo and the NOAA CREST Center of the City College of New York. In all, some 10,000 families have lost cattle, farmland or their homes.

In Haiti, heavy rains made the situation worse last year and dozens of families were forced to evacuate. Many migrant laborers who cross into the Dominican Republic couldn't make the journey.

"It's a clear environmental disaster," said Antonio Perera, the Haiti country manager for the United Nations Environment Program. "It's happening slowly, slowly, slowly, and you won't see the immediate effects like an earthquake or hurricane."

Researchers have brought up several factors behind the rise of Enriquillo and Azuei, which both contain salt water because the low-lying region was once part of the ocean.

Scientists have speculated that, on the Haiti side, massive deforestation has caused sediment to fill the lake while trash clogs the canals that would drain it. The lakes in both countries may also be growing because of heavier than average rainfall in recent years.

On top of that, Perera said, Haiti's January 2010 earthquake may have shifted faults beneath both lakes and somehow altered the hydrology of the area, though water levels began rising years before the quake.

"Two or three days after the earthquake there were springs everywhere in Thomazeau," he said, referring to a lakefront town on the northern end of Azuei he visited after the quake. "Even in the living rooms."

Lake Azuei has expanded outward by about three feet per year for the past 10 years, growing to 52 square miles (134 square kilometers), according to satellite images captured in the City College of New York study. It was once only on the Haitian side but extends across the border by one to two kilometers, covering a Dominican customs office in brackish water.

Similarly, Enriquillo's shores have moved out by about three feet per year over the past decade, reaching 128 square miles (331 kilometers), double the size of the lake in 2004.

Many believe that the two lakes will soon merge as the water levels rise. Right now, they're separated by a road that often floods during heavy rainfall. Back-to-back storms in 2008 caused Azuei to spill and the border closed for several days, causing an untold loss in commerce.

Like Enriquillo, Azuei is surrounded by cinderblock homes, and even a two-story resort, that are either partially underwater or completely so.

Haitian farmer Cathleen Pierre and her family fled their home, now a part of Azuei, and live in a hodgepodge of shacks sandwiched between the lake and the mountains. The high cost of living in Port-au-Prince makes sure they stay there.

"If the water rises again, we'll move farther up the hill," Pierre, 58, said as she hiked among her crops of corn and coconut. "We don't have another place to go."

Despite the obvious concerns, both governments have done little to stem the rising water levels or help the families displaced by them. And it's not clear what the countries plan to do in the long term.

Both sides are studying the phenomenon and have called upon the United Nations to implement a $2.5 million project that has planted thousands of fruit trees along the border.

"The governments really need to get serious about this issue," said Jorge Gonzalez, a professor of mechanical engineering at City College of New York and the lead author of the July study.

Authorities in the Dominican Republic have been sending food weekly to the poorest villages on the lake. They've also rebuilt broken water channels that were damaged in the 2007 and 2008 storm seasons. The Agriculture Ministry said it plans to relocate 500 families around the lake to give them fresh land for farming.

The Haitian government, for its part, has laid gravel to elevate the road that leads to the southern border crossing, and Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe recently visited the area.

The new environment minister, Jean-Vilmond Hilaire, said Haitian and Dominican officials were first trying to understand what was going on before coming up with a plan.

"Both governments need to sit down and work to solve the problem," said Hilaire, who assumed the post in August.

The rising waters have only added to the region's environmental challenges. Already, Haiti has only 2 percent of its forest cover left, after people deforested the mountains by chopping down trees to make charcoal. In the Dominican Republic, deforestation has hit more than 20 percent of the country.

Plus, the lack of a proper sanitation system aggravated a deadly cholera epidemic that surfaced in Haiti the year of the earthquake and then spread, though mildly so, across the border.

After 2007's Hurricane Noel caused the lake water to flood his home and crops, Bautista left his farm for the border town of Jimani. He spent three months there, waiting for the water to subside as he took odd jobs to get by.

When he returned to Boca de Cachon, he found the water covered his house, which was stripped of its belongings by thieves. Bautista became frustrated while describing how little the government has helped him, and how he's forced to clean rooms at a love motel named El Encuentro, or The Encounter.

"I have kids and I have to work because I'm not going to steal anything," Bautista said in the middle of a two-lane road where it vanished into lake water. "I have to earn a living for my family and will do it with my own sweat."

___

Associated Press writer Evens Sanon contributed to this report from Port-au-Prince.

More than 130 escape from Mexican prison on U.S. border

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - More than 130 inmates escaped through a tunnel from a Mexican prison on the border with the United States in one of the worst jailbreaks the country's beleaguered penal system has suffered in recent years.

Homero Ramos, attorney general of the northern state of Coahuila, said 132 inmates of the prison in the city of Piedras Negras had got out through the tunnel in an old carpentry workshop, then cut the wire surrounding the complex.

Corrupt prison officials may have helped the inmates escape, said Jorge Luis Moran, chief of public security in Coahuila, adding that U.S. authorities had been alerted to help capture the fugitives if they try to cross the border.

The jailbreak is a reminder of the challenges that await Enrique Pena Nieto, the incoming president, who has pledged to reduce crime in the country after six years of increased gang-related violence under President Felipe Calderon.

Many of Mexico's prisons are overcrowded and struggle to counter the influence of criminal gangs that can use their financial muscle to corrupt those in charge.

Ramos said that the state government of Coahuila was offering a reward of 200,000 pesos ($15,700) for information leading to the capture of each fugitive.

The Piedras Negras complex housed a total of 734 inmates, and the tunnel through which the prisoners escaped was about 1.2 meters (four feet) wide, 2.9 meters (9-1/2 feet) deep and seven meters (23 feet) long, Ramos said.

MASS BREAKOUTS

There have been numerous mass breakouts in the last few years from Mexico's penal system, and prison officials are frequently accused of complicity with drug cartels.

At the end of 2010, more than 140 inmates escaped a prison in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. This February, at least 44 people died in a fight between rival gangs at an overcrowded prison in northern Mexico.

Pena Nieto has pledged to reform the prisons, though experts say he will struggle to make an impact unless he combines this with root-and-branch reform of the justice system.

Pena Nieto, 46, of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), will take office in December. The PRI was widely accused of corruption during its long rule between 1929-2000, and he has promised to break with that checkered past.

Northern Mexico has been hit particularly hard by violence stemming from brutal turf wars between drug gangs that have overshadowed Calderon's conservative administration.

Calderon has used the military to try and crack down on the gangs, and has captured or killed many of the top drug lords.

But his efforts have come at a price.

Gang-related violence has surged on Calderon's watch, and fighting between cartels and their clashes with security forces have claimed more than 55,000 lives over the past six years.

Last week the Mexican Navy captured one of the biggest kingpins active near the U.S.-Mexican border, the leader of the Gulf Cartel, Jorge Costilla, known as "El Coss.

Analysts forecast this would lead to an increase in criminal activity in northern Mexico as rival gangs fought for control of lucrative smuggling routes in the area. ($1 = 12.7486 Mexican pesos) (Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz and Armando Tovar; Writing by Dave Graham; Editing by Eric Walsh and Christopher Wilson)

UK opposition: Afghanistan exit strategy in doubt

Associated Press/Ahmad Jamshid - French soldiers arrive at the scene of a suicide bombing, Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012 in Kabul, Afghanistan. A suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a mini-bus carrying foreign aviation workers to the airport in the Afghan capital early Tuesday, killing at least nine people in an attack a militant group said was revenge for an anti-Islam film that ridicules the Prophet Muhammad. (AP Photo/Ahmad Jamshid)

LONDON (AP) — NATO's decision to scale back operations with Afghan soldiers and police amid a spike in insider attacks risks undermining the entire international mission in Afghanistan, British lawmakers warned Tuesday.

Following the deaths this year of 51 international troops killed by Afghan forces or militants wearing Afghan uniforms, NATO has said that troops will no longer routinely carry out operations such as patrolling or manning outposts with their Afghan counterparts.

U.K. Defense Secretary Philip Hammond told lawmakers that the decision was a temporary response to elevated threat levels following the outrage in Muslim countries over an anti-Islam video produced in the United States.

Troops would "return to normal operations" as soon as the tension eased, Hammond insisted after he was called to the House of Commons to explain the changes.

However, Hammond acknowledged that British forces are likely to carry out fewer joint missions.

Afghan police and soldiers were increasingly capable of carrying out operations alone, meaning Britain's "level of partnering activity on the ground has therefore been steadily decreasing," he said.

Britain said most of its work advising Afghan security forces would be carried out with entire Kandaks, or battalions — groups of about 300 to 500 troops. Joint operations involving smaller groups of troops would be "evaluated on a case by case basis," the U.K. defense ministry said.

Opposition lawmakers criticized the plan as potentially undermining the strategy of training local forces to provide security in Afghanistan once U.S. and NATO's International Security Assistance Force leave at the end of 2014.

"It does appear to be a really significant change in the relationship between U.K., ISAF and Afghan forces," said opposition Labour Party lawmaker Jim Murphy.

John Baron, a member of the ruling Conservative Party, said the change "threatens to blow a hole in our stated exit strategy, which is heavily reliant on these joint operations continuing."

"This announcement adds to the uncertainty as to whether Afghan forces will have the ability to keep an undefeated Taliban at bay once NATO forces have left," Baron, a former army officer, told the House of Commons.

Labour legislator Paul Flynn, a staunch opponent of the Afghanistan war, was banned from the Commons for a day after he accused Hammond of misrepresenting the truth.

"Our brave soldier lions are being led by ministerial donkeys," Flynn said.

On Monday, Hammond had told lawmakers that insider attacks, including the killing of two British soldiers by a man in Afghan police officer's uniform on Saturday, would not derail the process of training Afghan security forces.

Hammond held talks in Afghanistan last week with President Hamid Karzai on so-called "green on blue" killings, and suggested the only planned change to policy was likely to be more extensive vetting of Afghan forces who work alongside NATO troops.

Foreign Secretary William Hague insisted the NATO decision did not represent a major shift in policy.

Since 2008, Britain has suffered 18 deaths in insider attacks, including Saturday's killings of two soldiers by an assailant dressed as an Afghan policeman who feigned injury and opened fire as troops came to his aid.

Al-Qaida threatens attacks on US diplomats

Kashmiri Muslims shout slogans against the U.S. during a protest in Srinagar, India, Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. The protest was held against an anti-Islam film called "Innocence of Muslims" that ridicules Islam's Prophet Muhammad. Banner reads "Muslims can sacrifice their precious lives for Prophet Muhammad." (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

CAIRO (AP) — Al-Qaida's branch in North Africa on Tuesday called for attacks on U.S. diplomats and an escalation of protests against an anti-Islam video that was produced in the United States and triggered a wave of demonstrations and riots in the Middle East and beyond.

While demonstrations have tapered off in nations including Egyptand Tunisia, protests against the film turned violent in Pakistan and Indian-controlled Kashmir and hundreds of people rallied in Indonesia and Thailand.

In Kabul, the Afghan capital, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a mini-bus carrying South African aviation workers to the airport, killing at least 12 people in an attack that a militant group said was revenge for the film "Innocence of Muslims," which was made by an Egyptian-born American citizen.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the attack killed eight South Africans, three Afghans and a Kyrgyzstani.

At least 10 protesters have died in riots in several countries, bringing the total number of deaths linked to unrest over the film to 22.

U.S. officials describe the video as offensive, but the American government's protection of free speech rights has clashed with the anger of Muslims abroad who are furious over the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, womanizer and pedophile.

In a statement, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb praised the killing of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11. The group threatened attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania, and condemned the United States for "lying to Muslims for more than 10 years, saying its war was against terrorism and not Islam."

The group urged Muslims to pull down and burn American flags at embassies, and kill or expel American diplomats to "purge our land of their filth in revenge for the honor of the Prophet."

Yemen-based al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula recently issued a similar call for attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities. It is al-Qaida's most active branch in the Middle East.

An Islamist militant group, Hizb-i-Islami, claimed responsibility for the attack in Kabul. The group is headed by 65-year-old former warlord Gubuddin Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister and one-time U.S. ally who is now listed as a terrorist by Washington. The militia has thousands of fighters and followers across the country's north and east.

In Pakistan, hundreds of angry protesters broke through a barricade outside the U.S. Consulate in the northwest city of Peshawar, sparking clashes with police that left several wounded on both sides, said police officer Arif Khan. The demonstrators threw bricks and flaming wads of cloth at the police, who pushed them back by firing tear gas and rubber bullets and charging with batons. The protest was organized by the youth wing of the hardline Jamaat-e-Islami party.

In Kashmir's main city of Srinagar, a strike shut down businesses and public transportation as marchers burned U.S. flags and an effigy of President Barack Obama. When the protesters tried to march into the main business district, police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse them, a police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. Protesters hurled rocks at the troops, he said. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

An alliance of Kashmiri religious groups called the strike in response to the anti-Islam film. The shutdown was supported by the bar association, trade unions and separatist groups in the volatile region, where strikes are a common tactic to protest against Indian rule.

In Indonesia, about 200 people from various Islamic groups torched an American flag and tires outside the U.S. Consulate in the third largest city of Medan. Some unfurled banners saying, "Go to hell America," while others trampled on dozens of paper flags. Also Tuesday, about 100 Muslim students in Makassar, a city in central Indonesia, called for the death penalty against the filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

Some 400 people protested peacefully outside the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand's capital. Protesters carried signs and banners saying, "We love Prophet Muhammad" and "Stop insulting our religion," and chanted, "Down with America" and "Down with Israel."

The government in Bangladesh blocked YouTube on Monday to prevent people from seeing the video. Mir Mohammaed Morshed, a spokesman for the state-run Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd., said the decision will remain effective until further notice.

Google has blocked access to the video in Libya and Egypt following violence there, and in Indonesia and India because it says the video broke laws in those countries.

Associated Press writers Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan and Aijaz Hussain in Srinagar, India contributed to this report.