Two-thirds of those raped in Liberia in 2013 were children, the government of the West African country says. The Liberian Ministry of Gender and Development said in a statement on Tuesday that 65 percent of the 1,002 rape cases reported last year were between three and 14, AFP reported. The statement also revealed that ten under-14 children also died by injuries after being raped. “As a result of rape, 10 children from eight counties between the ages of three and 14 died during the year 2013. In some of the cases the perpetrators are still at large,” said the ministry.

A woman convicted of child abuse is now free from jail. She served less than a year of her sentence. A judge made the decision this morning. Our FOX23 crew talked to the father of one of the victims in the case. The woman was sentenced to 15 years in the Department of Corrections, but according to court documents, Meredith Howard is now out after only serving 10 months. It’s a story FOX23 has been following since 2010. Meredith Howard was convicted of two counts of child abuse. “One of the counts involved her breaking the femur bone of a 9-month-old baby,” said Tulsa County district attorney Sarah McAmis. The other was an assault on a 19-month-old. “The baby required immediate surgery and literally almost died on the way to the hospital,” said McAmis.

Children were forced to eat their own vomit and put soiled bed sheets on their heads as punishment at care homes run by nuns, the largest public inquiry into institutional child abuse was told. The investigation into the behavior of Catholic nuns from the Sisters of Nazareth children’s homes in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, heard children were also forced to bathe in disinfectant and were beaten for wetting the bed. In a harsh regime where the youngsters were known by numbers rather than their names, many were subjected to humiliation, threats and physical abuse, counsel to the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, Christine Smith QC said.

The suicide note left by a former Senate chief of staff who killed himself after being charged with child porn posession has been revealed and makes allegations about his own history of sexual abuse. Jesse Ryan Loskarn’s body was found on Thursday in his family’s Maryland home where he was ordered to stay while out on bail before his trial for the child pornography charges. His mother typed up the note and posted it on a dedicated website in its entirety on Monday night. Loskarn, 35, wrote of ‘my deepest, darkest secret’ and told how he was abused between the ages of five and nine years old. He went on to explain that because of said abuse, he ‘saw’ himself in the pictures of the children being sexually abused in the pornography.

MORGANTOWN — A West Virginia teenager pleaded guilty to a first-degree murder charge Friday in the stabbing death of her one-time best friend. Shelia Eddy entered into a plea agreement Friday in Monongalia County Circuit Court in the July 2012 death of 16-year-old Skylar Neese. Eddy’s trial was scheduled to start next week. Under the agreement, prosecutors agreed to recommend mercy, meaning that the 18-year-old Morgantown woman would be eligible for parole after serving 15 years. In return for Eddy’s plea, a kidnapping charge and two counts of conspiracy will be dropped.

PITTSBURGH — The FBI and federal prosecutors were reviewing allegations against a college student from Russia who has been charged with possessing bomb-making and marijuana-growing materials, though police acknowledge the suspect told them he wasn’t planning on “blowing anything up.” No federal charges had been filed against Vladislav Miftakhov by early Monday. The 18-year-old was arraigned Saturday on state court charges filed after Altoona police said they found bomb materials in his rented room near the Penn State-Altoona campus, about 85 miles east of Pittsburgh. On Monday, Miftakhov was in the Blair County Prison, unable to post $500,000 bond.

Sunday mornings are filled with praise and worship in church buildings across the South, but when one grandmother began to jingle her keys to leave her home and go to her place of worship there were three little black grandchildren who began to shake with fear and trembling. That’s because Johnnetta McSwain and her sister and male cousin were forced to endure severe child incestand abuse by three older male cousins while their mother’s mother went off to church. And on Jan. 25, in a phone conversation with this past abuse victim, the Atlanta Top News Examiner learned why other children who suffer such abuse ask this question of McSwain when she goes to tell them how she overcame her victimization: How can you believe and talk about God when he allowed this to happen to you and to me?

It has been more than two years since the capture and death of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator whose reign subjected an impoverished people to four decades of murder and terror. When the bedraggled former leader was hauled out of a drainpipe and shot in October 2011, his death ended the bloody Nato-led civil war that had ravaged the country since the start of that year. The full horror of his brutality has been slow to emerge, with many Libyans still fearing retaliation by those who continue to be loyal to their late leader. But it can now be revealed that the most heartbreaking of Gaddafi’s victims include hundreds, possibly thousands of teenage girls who, throughout his 42-year reign, were beaten, raped and forced to become his sex slaves.

TV weatherman Fred Talbot has been charged with a string of offences following investigations into historic sexual abuse claims. The 64-year-old was today charged with 10 sexual offences dating back to his time as a teacher at Altrincham Grammar School for Boys and at a school in Tyne and Wear during the 1970s and 1980s. A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said today’s charges related to the sexual abuse of five victims, three of whom were under 16 at the time.

Riverside police asked for the public’s help Monday in locating two missing girls who were believed to have run away. Raylynn Bolt, 12, and Diana Tourdot, 14, were initially reported as having last been seen late Saturday night around midnight at Tourdot’s house, according to a news release from the Riverside Police Department. “The girls are friends and one was spending the night at the other’s home,” authorities stated in the release. “Extensive efforts have been made by police, family and friends to locate the two girls with no success.”

A former Los Angeles County fire captain accused of sexually abusing a young female relative was sentenced to six years in state prison on Monday. Edward John Cervantes, 62, had pleaded no contest on Jan. 8 to one count each of a lewd act upon a child and continuous sexual abuse. On Monday, he was immediately taken into custody after Commissioner Wade Olson sentenced him to six years in state prison during a hearing in Pomona Superior Court, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

Detroit — A man and woman were formally charged today in connection with the death of a year-old infant who died from burns he received when his stroller was left too close to a space heater. Sanford McQueen, 22, and Karen Marie Geletzke, 23, both of Detroit, were arraigned Sunday in 34th District Court in Romulus on charges of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and second-degree child abuse. They were not given bond.

WORCESTER, Mass. — Opening statements are getting underway in the trial of a Massachusetts woman charged with beating and strangling her pregnant friend, then cutting the fetus from her womb. Prosecutors and defense attorneys are scheduled to present their cases Monday in the murder and kidnapping trial of 39-year-old Julie Corey in Worcester Superior Court. Prosecutors say Corey killed Darlene Haynes, who was eight months pregnant, made an incision in Haynes’ abdomen and took her fetus in July 2009. The baby girl survived, and Corey told her boyfriend that the child was theirs.

A 3-year-old Florida boy is dead after enduring horrific torture including having been burned, beaten and thrown across a room – and, according to authorities, the boy’s 21-year-old mother is to blame. Ghanson Debrosse was rushed to the Jackson North Medical Center about 3:30 am on Tuesday after his mother, Fafane Caze, called 9-1-1 to report that he wasn’t breathing. At the hospital, doctors determined that the 3-year-old boy had been dead for several hours.