Haitian Village: News

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush put together team to oversee Haiti aid fund

By Philip Rucker
Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush announced late Tuesday that they have appointed a six-member board of former Democratic and Republican senior government officials to oversee the humanitarian fund the presidents established in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti.

Clinton and Bush have tapped Gary Edson, who served as Bush's deputy national security adviser and helped establish the anti-poverty Millennium Challenge Corporation, as chief executive officer of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

Edson will be joined by a board of directors made up of longtime advisers and allies of both presidents.

The presidents said more than 200,000 individuals have donated over $36 million to the fund since President Obama asked them to lead the nation's long-term humanitarian response to the earthquake. The fund has allocated millions to relief groups providing medical care and supplies, mobile clinics, water purification, hygiene kits, education assistance and recovery supplies to quake survivors in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, Saint Martin and Martissant.

Edson and the board will oversee the fund's strategy and processes, including fundraising and cash disbursements.

"We are pleased to appoint a board of bipartisan, distinguished leaders whose experience in past disaster recovery and rebuilding efforts will ensure the effective operation of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund and the strategic allocation of its resources to have the greatest impact on the lives of the Haitian people," Clinton said in a statement. "Their service and dedication will help President Bush and me continue to support the people of Haiti as they build back better in the months and years to come."

Bush added: "I am pleased that such a distinguished group of individuals has agreed to serve. I thank them for donating their time and talents to this worthy cause. This group will ensure that our fundraising efforts remain strong, and that the money is spent on successful programs that build a better future for the Haitian people."

The six board members are:

• Laura Graham, a former Clinton administration official and chief operating officer for the William J. Clinton Foundation, who will serve as a Board Co-Chair.
• Joshua Bolten, former White House chief of staff to Bush and currently a visiting professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, who will serve as a Board Co-Chair.
• Bruce Lindsey, a former Clinton administration official and currently chief executive officer of the Clinton Foundation.
• Dr. Bill Frist, former Republican Senate majority leader, a professor at Vanderbilt University, a partner at Cressey & Company in Chicago, and chairman of Hope Through Healing Hands.
• Henrietta Fore, former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development under Bush and chairman and chief executive officer of Holsman International, an investment and management company.
• Alexis Herman, former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration and currently chief executive officer of New Ventures, LLC.

Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean fights back tears as she addresses a women's group in Jacmel, Haiti.

CTV.ca News Staff

Gov.-Gen. Michaelle Jean met with local leaders in her family's hometown city of Jacmel Tuesday and described her "big dream" of a revitalized port in the wake of January's devastating earthquake.

On the second day of her two-day visit to the country of her birth, Jean listened to concerns from civic leaders about a devastated local school system, a lack of electricity and frustration with the Haitian government's slow distribution of aid funds.

After listening to the leaders' concerns, Jean spoke about her high hopes for the small town in which her mother was born.

"I have this big dream," Jean said. "There is a refurbished port to get goods in and out… There are extraordinary beaches. There are kilometres of white sandy beaches… If we could get ships back in here, to see the port of Jacmel rediscover its pride, to work with all its vigour, it would be extraordinary."

After the meeting, Jean paid an emotional visit with a group of women, whom she encouraged to continue to work together to rebuild their community. Jean promised the women that Canada will "continue to support you."

The governor general spoke after a long and tearful embrace with the daughter of a close friend who died in the earthquake.

After the meeting, Jean and her husband, Jean-Daniel Lafond, went on a walking tour of the town as onlookers rushed to get a glimpse of the woman who enjoys celebrity status in her native land.

Earlier, Jean met with Canadian soldiers and thanked them for their efforts in the earthquake-devastated country.

She arrived by helicopter near a field hospital run by Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team.

About 500 Canadian troops were stationed in the town, but roughly half of them have returned home as part of a staggered withdrawal.

Jean delivered a message of hope when speaking on Monday.

"She refused to show any tears, she had a clear message to the Haitian people and it was a message of strength, 'we need to move on, we need to reconstruct this country,'" CTV's Richard Madan told Canada AM from Jacmel Tuesday morning.

Jean also stopped to see Canadian troops in Leogane, and gave her thanks for their hard work.

"People are talking about you back home," Jean said in French. "People are proud of you … You instil pride in the country you represent. We could not ask for better representatives than you."

Clinton says elections key to Haiti stability

Clinton, speaking to reporters after meeting with Haitian President Rene Preval, said rescheduling elections delayed by the January 12 earthquake should be a top priority "to ensure the stability and legitimacy of the Haitian government."

"I assured President Preval that the United States would work with the international community to hold elections as soon as appropriate," Clinton said.

Preval has said he would not seek to extend his term in office beyond its scheduled conclusion on February 11, 2011, and said on Tuesday he was confident that legislative elections -- originally scheduled for February 28 -- could be organized in time to ensure an orderly transition.

"What we must absolutely avoid is that we have a temporary provisional government that does not enjoy legitimacy," Preval said during his appearance with Clinton.

After the news conference, Preval told reporters that there was no time to lose -- although he gave no dates for when the elections might be held.

"Before I depart we must have a parliament and a new president. We have almost a year to do that," Preval told reporters after the news conference.

"If in a year we have a provisional government, that would be a catastrophe. That government would have no legitimacy, there wouldn't be a parliament ... it would really be a return to 2004."

Presidential elections had been set for November, but it is unclear whether that will happen on schedule.

PREVIOUS POWER VACUUMS

Haiti was left without a government after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced into exile during a bloody rebellion in February 2004. Most parliamentary terms had expired in January 2004, leaving it powerless to appoint an interim president.

BILLIONS IN RELIEF AID

Organizing new elections would be a major task, but is crucial to put in place a new parliament that will be legally empowered to spend the billions of dollars in relief aid flowing in.

The offices of the Electoral Council collapsed in the January 12 earthquake, members of the U.N. mission working with the commission were killed and election materials were buried.

Many of Haiti's government offices were also severely damaged in the earthquake, further slowing recovery efforts.

Ninety-eight of the 99 seats in the legislature's Chamber of Deputies were to be at stake in the February election, along with one-third of the 30-member Senate. The vote for the remaining lower house seat had been set for a later date.

Clinton said the international community was gearing up for a donors conference scheduled for March 31 and that Preval's visit to Washington would help to coordinate priorities.

"We are listening very carefully to President Preval and the voices of the Haitian people as to what our next steps should be," she said.

She said that the United States had already plowed almost $700 million into Haitian reconstruction efforts, but that much more needed to be done on everything from temporary housing to provisioning farmers with seed and fertilizer for the growing season.

She said Washington would also seek to persuade more countries to grant trade benefits to Haiti, while a key U.S. senator on Tuesday supported extending U.S. trade preferences to the country, the poorest in the western hemisphere.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

Haiti frees U.S. missionary held over kidnapping

(Reuters) - A court in Haiti on Monday freed a U.S. missionary jailed for weeks on charges of kidnapping children in the chaos that followed the country's devastating January 12 earthquake, witnesses said.

Charisa Coulter was due to fly out of Haiti for the United States. Haiti authorities arrested 10 missionaries in January but eight were released in February and only the group's leader, Laura Silsby, remains in jail.

Asked by Reuters how she felt on her release, Coulter said: "Bittersweet. I am glad to go back home but the experience has been very difficult."

She then climbed into a U.S. embassy car and left the central police station.

The case threw a spotlight on fears that child traffickers could prey on vulnerable children after the quake and also on the merits of rapid international adoptions for earthquake orphans, a practice the government later banned.

Critics say the case has diverted attention from the hardships faced by more than 1 million Haitians displaced by the quake including thousands of orphaned children.

Silsby, Coulter and eight other Americans, most of whom are members of a Baptist church in Idaho, were arrested on January 29 on charges that they tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country without proper documents.

All have protested their innocence and a judge found no evidence of criminal intent on their part of the eight who were released earlier.

Silsby went to court on Monday but was due to return to jail as an investigating judge looks into a new charge that she was trying to organize travel from Haiti for others without proper papers, a lesser crime under Haitian law.

A Haitian judge on Friday signed an order to free Coulter, but delayed her release until Monday because court officials could not find a stamp used to validate the release document.

(Writing by Matthew Bigg, editing by Jane Sutton)

Long-term food aid risk to Haiti economy - Preval

By Matthew Bigg

PORT-AU-PRINCE, March 8 (Reuters) - Haitian President Rene Preval plans to tell U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday that food aid to the earthquake-devastated Caribbean nation should be stopped because of the risk of damaging its economy.

The two men will meet at the White House in the wake of a Jan. 12 quake that killed 230,000 people, according to Haitian government estimates, crippled the economy and devastated much of the capital Port-au-Prince and other cities.

Donations of food and water have proved a lifeline for more than 1.2 million people displaced by the quake, but Preval told a news conference on Monday the aid could in the long term hurt the economy of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

"I will tell him (Obama) that this first phase of assistance is finished," said Preval, standing in front of the ruined presidential palace in Port-au-Prince.

"If they continue to send us aid from abroad -- water and food -- it will be in competition with the national Haitian production and Haitian commerce," he said.

Preval said the priority should instead be to create employment in Haiti, a country where a high percentage of the population lacked work even before the quake.

The Haitian government, working with the international community, is preparing a master plan for reconstruction that would have ambitious goals, Preval said after a meeting with Canadian Governor General Michaelle Jean.

A trust fund with voting and nonvoting board members would manage donor funds, Preval said.

RECONSTRUCTION

Priorities for reconstruction include strengthening buildings to withstand future earthquakes and rehabilitating the environment, much of which is denuded, to protect against flooding from tropical storms and hurricanes, which last battered Haiti in 2008.

Some $38 million was needed for storm protection, Preval said.

Reopening the country's schools was also key, Preval said, though he gave no date for when that would happen. Education is considered critical to development in Haiti, where 38 percent of the population is under age 15 and nearly half of those 15 and older are illiterate.

"I will also tell him (Obama) that our vision is to rebuild Haiti and if we don't take advantage of this historic event to reinvent Haiti, to reinvent Port-au-Prince, we will be making a mistake of historical proportions," Preval said.

"Our generation has the obligation to shoulder this responsibility," he said.

Many Haitians have criticized the government's performance since the earthquake and argued that Preval has not done enough to communicate with the people or to marshal government aid, instead leaving international aid groups to fill the gap.

Jean's two-day visit is significant because she was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, arriving in Canada as a refugee, and has worked to promote Haiti's needs since the quake.

"We are here ... to say to Haitians that they are not alone ... We have suffered with you," she said in an impassioned speech after her meeting with Preval.

As Canada's governor general, Jean represents Britain's Queen Elizabeth, who is Canada's head of state.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Paul Simao)

Haiti rebuilding plan expected this week

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – Government planners and international experts are racing to produce a blueprint this week to reconstruct Haiti's economy after the earthquake that killed up to 300,000 people and devastated its infrastructure.
A team of 150 Haitian government officials and 90 international experts is to submit the plan to the government by Friday, said Doekle Wielinga, a World Bank disaster recovery specialist in charge of the effort.
The document will then be assessed at a meeting of international technical experts in the Dominican Republic on March 16 before a donor conference in New York on March 31.
"What we are working on is what the requirements will be in terms of recovery and reconstruction," Wielinga told Reuters.
"This is the first PDNA (post-disaster needs assessment) where we have almost the entire international community participating physically," Wielinga said, adding that Haitian communities outside the country were also being consulted.
An outstanding question remains the scope of recovery and whether to attempt to restore the economic status quo that existed prior to the January 12 quake, or go further.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Its society is divided among a tiny elite, many of whom dwell in sumptuous villas on hills overlooking the capital, a small middle class and a majority who earn just a few dollars a day.
At the same time, the fractured relationship between the government and people could undermine long-term recovery.
Wielinga stressed that a single recovery plan produced by international actors and the Haitian government would likely produce more coherence, but he acknowledged the difficulties of restoring a country beset by long-term structural weaknesses.
"Doing this thing in a joint or coherent manner, the ordinary Haitian will see a uniformly managed reconstruction process and therefore get more bang for your buck," he said.
MISTRUST OF GOVERNMENT
Haitians in a series of interviews on Saturday said they had little confidence in the government and criticized its efforts since the earthquake.
The country saw modest stabilization under President Rene Preval, who was elected in 2006. But the views expressed by poor and middle-class Haitians reflected a cynicism bred from decades of political upheaval.
"We have never had the impression that the government was on the side of the people. Never ever," said Florence Romain, a civil engineer. "Haitians got used to it. They ended up counting on God."
"I have the impression that we are in a boat without a captain," said Gaelle Ambroise, who runs a pet food store in Petionville. "We get no help from the government, though we still have to pay taxes."
At a camp in Petionville for around 25,000 people displaced by the quake, several noted that it was international aid groups, rather than the government, who provided assistance.
"The government does nothing for us. It is the international community and that's what everyone says," said Wesner Lafond, an accountant who is living in a tent.
The plan will address eight areas of reconstruction including education, housing, telecommunications, transport and energy. One aspect will deal with boosting the effectiveness of government and macro economic recovery.
Another will look at how to improve the agricultural sector to provide an alternative livelihood for the thousands who have fled the capital, which was overcrowded prior to the earthquake.
At the same time, there would be a special focus on preparing for the storms and hurricanes that regularly batter the country -- as well as for the possibility of another big quake.
The plan would look at what can be done in an initial period of six to 18 months, then within the next three years and finally over a 10-year period, and the aim was to fund the first period at the donor conference, he said.

US troops withdrawing en masse from Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – U.S. troops are withdrawing from the shattered capital, leaving many Haitians anxious that the most visible portion of international aid is ending even as the city is still mired in misery and vulnerable to unrest.
As troops packed their duffels and began to fly home this weekend, Haitians and some aid workers wondered whether U.N. peacekeepers and local police are up to the task of maintaining order. More than a half-million people still live in vast encampments that have grown more unpleasant in recent days with the early onset of the rainy season.
Some also fear the departure of the American troops is a sign of dwindling international interest in the plight of the Haitian people following the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake.
"I would like for them to stay in Haiti until they rebuild the country and everybody can go back to their house," said Marjorie Louis, a 27-year-old mother of two, as she warmed a bowl of beans for her family over a charcoal fire on the fake grass of the national stadium.
U.S. officials say the long-anticipated draw down of troops is not a sign of waning commitment to Haiti, only a change in the nature of the operation. Security will now be the responsibility of the 10,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force and the Haitian police.
A smaller number of U.S. forces — the exact number has not yet been determined — will be needed as the U.N. and Haitian government reassert control, said Gen. Douglas Fraser, head of U.S. Southern Command, which runs the Haiti operation.
"Our mission is largely accomplished," Fraser said.
American forces arrived in the immediate aftermath of the quake to treat the wounded, provide emergency water and rations and help prevent a feared outbreak of violence among desperate survivors. They also helped reopen the airport and seaport.
There has been no widespread violence but security is a real issue. A U.N. food convoy traveling from Gonaives to Dessalines on Friday was stopped and overrun by people, who looted two trucks before peacekeepers regained control, U.N. officials said.
They managed to escort the other two back to Gonaives. There were no reports of injuries.
The military operation was criticized by some Haitian senators and foreign leaders as heavy-handed and inappropriate in a country that had been occupied by American forces for nearly two decades in the early 20th century. But ordinary Haitians largely welcomed the troops, many out of disenchantment with their own government.
"They should stay because they have been doing a good job," 35-year-old Lesly Pierre said as his family prepared dinner under a tarp at an encampment in Petionville. "If it was up to our government, we wouldn't have gotten any help at all."
U.S. soldiers said they had nothing but warm encounters with the Haitian people.
"They're real good people. They just want help," Army Private First Class Troy Sims, a 19-year-old from Fresno, California, said as he prepared to board a flight back to the U.S. "I feel that us being here helped a lot. If we weren't here, things probably would have gotten out of control."
There are now about 11,000 troops, more than half of them on ships just off the coast, down from a peak of around 20,000 on Feb. 1. The total is expected to drop to about 8,000 in coming days as the withdrawal gathers steam. The military said more than 700 paratroopers left this weekend.
Soldiers are now gone from the General Hospital, where they once directed traffic and kept order amid the chaos of mass casualties. There are no more Haitian patients on board the USNS Comfort, which treated 8,600 people after the quake. At a country club in Petionville, where some 100,000 Haitians are living in rough shelters in a muddy ravine, only a few soldiers remain of the several hundred there after the disaster.
Alison Thompson said she was nervous about the smaller U.S. troop contingent.
"Soon we are not going to have any security," said Thompson, medical coordinator of the Jenkins/Penn Relief Organization, which runs a field hospital at the edge of the ravine. "Everybody is just so worried that they are pulling out because it's going to get dangerous."
It was the same concern for Louis at the national stadium.
"If the troublemakers see that there is some kind of force here, they will think twice before they do anything," she said. "They are already getting ready to stir up trouble."
But Ted Constan, chief program officer for Partners in Health, said that the way to address security is to get adequate shelter and other aid to the hundreds of thousands of people who are now stranded in squalid encampments.
"The real solution is to deliver services ... rather than turn Haiti into a military state," he said.

Dominican Republic to host international conference of Haiti donors

Santo Domingo.- Dominican Republic will host the international conference of high level technical donors who’ll evaluate the economic consequences of the quake Haiti.

The conclave slated for March 16 and 17 will serve as the base for the meeting on March 31 in the United Nations in New York, where the donors are expected to assume concrete commitments for Haiti’s reconstruction.

In a National Palace press conference Economy minister Temistocles Montas was accompanied by Kristalina Georgieva, of the European Commission for Humanitarian Aid, of the International Cooperation and Response to Crisis.

Her visit to Dominican Republic comes after observing the situation together with Haiti authorities for several days, to channel the European Union’s aid.

Montas is the Dominican Government’s commissioner to work with Haiti’s authorities to draw up a plan of action for that nation’s reconstruction.

AES Corporation restores power to important sector of Port-au-Prince

Santo Domingo.- A team of technicians of the multinational company AES Corporation from several countries restored the energy service to an area of the capital Port-au-Prince, where they concluding the installation of the substation in Verraux this week, to supply electricity to one Haiti’s most important industrial and residential zones.

The work will provide energy for the first time since the January 12 quake for around 10,000 customers, or 60% of the billing by Haiti’s electricity provider, EDH.

As part of the substation’s inaugural the AES team donated personal protective equipment for EDH workers, and began a transference program on better practices in security and operational excellence.

The team of volunteers with AES representatives from several countries including El Salvador, Cameroon and Dominican Republic carried out the work in the substation, and continues its contributions to restore Haiti’s electrical infrastructure, in coordination with Dominican Republic’s State-owned energy group CDEEE.

Haiti wants more information on foreign aid

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti's prime minister demanded more information on Wednesday about foreign aid pouring into the earthquake-stricken country and urged that his government not be sidelined in reconstruction efforts.

The issue is sensitive for international donors who considered corruption a major problem before a January 12 quake that killed as many as 300,000 people, according to government estimates.

The quake also killed many civil servants and left government structures in ruins.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive decried a lack of coordination by aid donors with his government but stopped short of saying all bilateral aid should be funneled through the government.

"We don't know who has given money to NGO's (nongovernmental organizations) and how much money have they given. ... At the moment, we can't do any coordination or have any coherent policies for giving to the population," Bellerive told a news conference.

His remarks came as European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton visited the country to discuss reconstruction aid before a donor conference in New York at the end of the month.

Ashton, criticized by some European politicians for waiting until now to make her first visit to the country since the quake, toured an Italian rubble removal project and visited an Italian hospital ship and a Spanish ship off the city of Petit Goave.

ENSURING AID REACHES PEOPLE

The EU and its members have together pledged about 609 million euros ($834 million) to Haiti since the quake, including 120 million euros ($164 million) from the EU Commission in immediate humanitarian aid and a further 300 million ($411 million) in the medium term, a Commission spokesman said.

That money also includes 100 million euros ($137 million) in direct support to the government.

"There is a capacity problem that has been exacerbated by this earthquake. When I met the president and the prime minister, it was to talk about the long-term plan and to see that we are able to support them economically," Ashton said.

"One of the issues that all governments have to tackle is making sure there is a system in place to ensure that the aid reaches the people it's intended for. We will work with them (the government) to try and make sure that that happens," Ashton said.

In one measure of the amounts of aid flowing into the country, about $70 million has been donated to the Catholic Relief Services charity since the quake and a further $35 million was donated by U.S. dioceses in a single Sunday collection, senior U.S. Catholic officials said.

Those sums are a fraction of the total amount given by the Catholic Church to Haiti since the quake, they said.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Peter Cooney)

Governor General Michaëlle Jean visits Haiti next week to meet with President Renee Preval

Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean will travel to her native Haiti next Monday for a two-day visit of the country, which was devastated by an earthquake on Jan. 12. The trip will mark the first time Jean has visited Haiti since the earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and left tens of thousands homeless. Several of Jean's family members still live in Haiti.

Canada's Haitian-born governor general, Michaelle Jean, will travel to the quake-stricken Caribbean nation and neighboring Dominican Republic on March 8-10, the government announced Tuesday.

The visit "will reinforce the partnership between Canada and Haiti in the recovery and reconstruction of that country," said a statement.

Accompanied during the working visit by her husband, Jean-Daniel, Jean is to "engage the Haitian authorities and civil society groups as central players in a long-term, sustainable strategy for reconstruction and development of Haiti."

During the second part of their trip, Jean will encourage the Dominican Republic "to remain engaged in the long-term reconstruction of Haiti as well as in the development strategy for the Island of Hispaniola."

Days after the catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake on January 12, a visibly distraught Jean said in a televised message to her former compatriots in Creole to "stand firm."

"Like me, Haitian communities across Canada are heartbroken and overwhelmed by the magnitude of this catastrophe," said Jean, who was born in Port-au-Prince in 1957, but fled the barbarous regime of Papa Doc Duvalier with her family when she was 11 years old.

"The images and news reports are unbearable to watch," she said. "So much distress, suffering and loss. We are also, of course, imagining the worst, situations no image can capture that only increase our feeling of helplessness."

But "we are a courageous people, stand firm," she added in a nod to Haitians in Canada and back home, unable to hold back tears.

Since moving to Canada with her family, Jean has visited Haiti as a journalist and collaborated on documentaries about Haiti and the expatriate community in Canada.

As Canada's first black governor general, she returned to her country of birth in 2006 to attend the inauguration of Haiti's president, Rene Preval, and again last year when Haiti was still recovering from powerful storms.

Fox News Wins Haiti Ratings: CNN Second, MSNBC Third

Fox News has won the ratings race for Haiti coverage thus far, often beating both CNN and MSNBC combined, but CNN has solidly upended MSNBC for the second place slot.

In total day coverage, Fox News averaged 1.501 million viewers Wednesday and 1.524 million viewers Thursday. CNN, meanwhile, averaged 942,000 total viewers Wednesday and 913,000 total viewers Thursday, significantly more than MSNBC's total day averages of 449,000 (Wednesday) and 434,000 (Thursday).

In the A25-54 demographic, the disparity is even more dramatic: Wednesday, Fox News averaged 426,000 A25-54 viewers and CNN averaged 337,000; MSNBC, meanwhile, averaged just 129,000. Thursday, Fox News averaged 411,000 A25-54 viewers and CNN averaged 328,000; MSNBC averaged 130,000.

In primetime, Fox News was more dominant (perhaps because its opinion programs haven't been all that Haiti-focused). Tuesday night the night the earthquake coverage was breaking Fox News averaged 765,000 A25-54 viewers in primetime and CNN averaged 343,000 A25-54 viewers; MSNBC, which was criticized for all but ignoring the developing coverage in primetime, averaged just 214,000 A25-54 viewers.

CNN's struggles in the primetime demographic particularly compared to MSNBC have been well-documented, but the past few nights of earthquake coverage have shown CNN solidly on top of MSNBC in the prime demo.

Wednesday night, while Fox News won with 799,000 A25-54 viewers, CNN (593,000 A25-54 viewers) crushed MSNBC (296,000 A25-54 viewers). Anderson Cooper's 10PM program, which has been one of CNN's most troubled hours, even beat Fox News' "On The Record with Greta Van Susteren" Wednesday in the demo, averaging 701,000 A25-54 viewers compared to 675,000 for "On the Record." But even at 8PM, CNN's "Campbell Brown" (540,000) solidly beat MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" (362,000); and at 9PM, CNN's "Larry King Live" (537,000) solidly beat MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show" (264,000). Of course, Fox News won both those hours, with Bill O'Reilly (and Sarah Palin's debut) averaging 982,000 A25-54 viewers at 8PM and "Hannity" averaging 741,000 A25-54 viewers at 9PM.

Thursday night, Fox News was particularly strong in the prime demo, averaging 878,000 A25-54 viewers (on the heels of Bill O'Reilly's whopping 1.085 million A25-54 viewers and Sean Hannity's 927,000 A25-54 viewers). CNN averaged 578,000 A25-54 viewers to MSNBC's 295,000. On the program level, Campbell Brown who herself has struggled in the ratings was the network's top program, averaging 619,000 A25-54 viewers and soundly beating Keith Olbermann's 351,000 A25-54 viewers. At 9PM, Larry King's 529,000 A25-54 viewers beat Rachel Maddow's 320,000. And at 10PM, where Greta Van Susteren (622,000) took back the lead from Anderson Cooper (587,000), the repeat of "Countdown" averaged just 215,000 A25-54 viewers.

President René Préval addresses the Haitian People on Jan. 13, one day after the earthquake.

Today is Wednesday, Jan. 13, the catastrophe happened yesterday. Yesterday it was unleashed. You see how long it took me to address you. Because when one is speaking, you have to say things and words that correspond to the truth. Since yesterday at 5 p.m. when this thing happened, until now, I can say that I, minister Bien-Aime, the prime minister, minister Varela, ex-minister Varela, we are on the ground evaluating the situation. If we had stayed in one location and did not go around Port-au-Prince, we would not have seen. Throughout the night we went to Bel-Air, downtown, we went up and down; lots and lots of damage. Why was it necessary as the president? There is an evaluation of the situation that is more or less correct. It’s because, when I am asking for international aid...I must be able to reflect the magnitude of the damages and hospitals are destroyed. The hospitals able to treat people, can’t admit anymore; the morgue is full; doctors no longer have any medications to dispense to people.
And, this is truly an awful catastrophe and I would like for anyone that is suffering and anyone with a damaged house and anyone who lost a family member — know that there are thousands and thousands of people in the same situation.
And if this catastrophe happened in any other country, any country would have difficulties satisfying everyone’s [needs] immediately.
The population is suffering, we must respect their pain. We must tell them the truth; because this is how we can help them in their grief.
If you live in Pétionville, you only see Pétionville; you live in Bel-Air and only see Bel-Air; you live in Musseau and only see Musseau.
But you must look at all the regions to see where the damages are, in Port-au-Prince and the countryside to do the evaluation. Up until now, [the quake] happened yesterday afternoon, there are still people dead on the street, in the hospital courtyards...
...and the police itself has trouble; for example the precinct of Delmas collapsed, officers died; the headquarters collapsed; even though there are difficulties [the chief of police] spent the whole night with me …
… the last place we were was in front of the Parliament at 6 a.m. because Senator Lambeur, [parliament] president Kelly Bastien and a lot of other employees are still under the rubble. Therefore even though he is with me, I know of his difficulties, I mobilized his officers in order to have them assist the population.
The same is true when I call CNE [Centre National des Equipements], CNE has problems, their building is damaged.
To get hold of CNE’s employees is something terrible because all the phones stopped working yesterday. Thus all these difficulties that we encountered forced a delay in assessing the situation...when they ask us what do we need? So we can come up with our exact needs. And Right now, I’ve been told that President Sarkozy [of France] is looking to speak to me...I’ve been told that Prime Minister Harper [of Canada] is looking to speak to me, but I’m not ready to answer them because I have to do the evaluation.
Thus I want to take this opportunity to express my sympathies to all the Haitians. A lot of deaths, a lot of injured, a lot of people without medical help. Until now, minister Delatour’s father and mother are under the rubble of their house. I want to offer my condolences to Marcus Garcia, a journalist who lost his wife and minister Bonnet who lost his child.
These are people I know personally. But, surely I don’t know all who’ve died yet.
Specially human lives, I’m not talking about material assets. It’s a terrible catastrophe, I ask everyone to do the best they can to help each other.
For example, the brothers of St. Louis de Gonzague opened their court yard to people so they don’t stay on the street where debris can fall on them.
The brothers of St. Louis have a beautiful yard and they opened it. The prime minister opened his courtyard too, too bad we can’t open the national palace’s yard, because it’s destroyed.
"Wouldn’t it be a good idea, Mr. President to ask the private sector for their solidarity and possibly come to the rescue of the population?"
The first priority is medical assistance and clearing up the streets. To clear up to street we will ask the businesses with truck, loaders and bulldozers to clear up the streets, cause a lot of people want to go to the hospital but can’t.
Many abandoned their cars on the streets. There is debris in the streets. Secondly, for medical care we need doctors. Any doctor who can assist at any clinic or hospital…whether private or public they are all soliciting for help because they are completely full. Anyone with medications, water, etc.
Minister Paul Antoine will contact them, since he is coordinating the rescue efforts. He will make an announcement and provide the information on how to reach him. He is establishing now the crisis center. He contacted the French ambassador, to whom I offer my sympathies because his residence collapsed. Now he is staying at the embassy. My sympathies to Ambassador Anabi and a lot of other officials at the MINUSTAH who died.
While we ask for the international community’s assistance we also offer our condolences to those in grief. We urge all Haitians to hang on, we are doing everything we can to do it on our own.
As we are aware of our limits, we will solicit international aid to bring some relief to those suffering.
"There’s been talk about potential aftershock following yesterday’s extremely violent earthquake. What can you say to the people when it comes to prevention?"
Well, engineer Preptit, a geologist, who’s been predicting an eventual earthquake in Haiti. He recommended we take precautionary measures.
Yesterday, no, the day before yesterday, engineer Vella just had a seminar with the emergency services on how to protect oneself during an earthquake.
The day before yesterday engineer Frantz Vella thought this class. I am not an expert in the area. You would have to address engineer Preptit, he’s always on TV, radio talking about this matter, what are the chances of new earthquake or aftershocks.
Because yesterday, at four past midnight there was a strong aftershock that reached 5 on the Richter scale while the earthquake was 7.1. Therefore I hope there won’t be anymore.
However, our main focus is to rescue those underneath the rubble and bring relief to those left unattended at hospitals. And then bury the dead. Unfortunately that’s how it is.
"How about a few words of encouragement for the population Mr. President?"
I can’t say there wont be any earthquakes, I won’t say there won't be another hurricane. Catastrophes happen. This was a natural catastrophe. We have to protect ourselves against these catastrophes. For example, build canals against flooding in a hurricane. We need to construct better buildings.
Some buildings were spared while others collapsed. As I’m at the airport, waiting for relief, there is too much noise. We won’t be able to continue…

Haiti relief gets $80M from Canada: Oda

The government of Canada is contributing $80 million for humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda announced Tuesday.

Oda said $60 million will go to help United Nations organizations deliver essential services to around three million people over the next six months. Of that amount, $39 million will go to food security needs through the UN World Food Programme.

She said the organization estimates it will need to provide over 100 million meals in the next 30 days.

How to help

To help those affected by the earthquake, here is a list of organizations accepting donations.

Oda said another $11.5 million will go to six Canadian non-governmental organizations to provide sanitation and water services, medical treatment, shelter and protection, particularly to women and children.

As well, $8.5 million will go to Red Cross societies to help provide water, sanitation and health services to around 300,000 people.

She said Tuesday's funding announcements add to the government's initial $5-million donation, which was used for supplies and essential services.

Foreign Affairs raised the number of Canadians known to have been killed in the Haiti quake by one to 13.

The government also reported that 665 Canadians are still unaccounted for, down from 699 on Monday. The number located and accounted for has risen to 1,641 from Monday's 1,433.

So far, 1,206 Canadians have been evacuated from Haiti back to Canada.

Voodoo - Haiti's misunderstood religion

The national palace, the cathedrals and the ministries have been destroyed. But Haiti’s culture - a mix of voodoo, mysticism and Catholicism – will help it survive. Filmmaker and anthropologist Anne Lescot talks about Haiti’s misunderstood religion and the paradox of a small, desperately poor country that has given the world many gifted artists.

France pledges 326 million euros in aid for Haiti

France has pledged to give Haiti 326 million euros in aid to rebuild the country after it was devastated in the 12 January quake, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced today on his visit to the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The 326 million-euro pledge includes cancelling a 56 million-euro debt that Haiti still owed to its former coloniser. Part of the package will also provide training to Haitian civil servants as part of a greater UN-led plan that will be launched in New York at the end of March.

"I have come to tell the Haitian people and their leaders that France, which was first on the ground after the catastrophe, will remain firmly at their side to help them pick themselves up again and open a new happy page in their history," said Sarkozy.

This is the first time a French president has visited the former French colony since gaining its independence in 1804 and becoming the first independent black republic.

Sarkozy was greeted by Haitian President Réne Préval when he arrived. He is slated to meet French rescue teams, NGO organisations, and visit a French-run field hospital.

Earlier, he took a helicopter trip over the capital to view the devastation from above.

The massive 7.1 quake killed 217,000 people and left another 1.2 million homeless.

Aid, especially medical aid, is still desperately needed, according to the World Health Organisation, as they made a plea on Wednesday.

"Our concern is to ask the biggest partners to leave aid there as long as possible, at least six months," said Henriette Chamouillet, WHO representative in Haiti. "It's absolutely necessary because we have to replace the hospitals which won't work," she added.

EU releases €100m in aid for Haiti

The aid will be used to help rebuild government buildings, schools, roads and pay the salaries of public sector workers. The initial 100 million euros is part of 300 million euros pledged by Brussels.

Haiti confronts a monumental disposal problem

By Ken Ellingwood
Los Angeles Times
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — When a city crashes to the ground, how do you dispose of it?

Six weeks after an earthquake reduced Port-au-Prince to ruins, Haitian and foreign officials who hope to build a new capital first have to confront the wreckage of the old one.

The capital is a panorama of rubble: collapsed and half-fallen stores, banks, apartment buildings and homes, hillsides covered by broken shacks that fell like dominoes. Gnarled steel rebar lies all over in massive tangles, like a thousand Medusas.

The amount of debris is stunning. Officials estimate they will have to clean up as much as 25 million cubic yards of material — enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome five times over. By comparison, detritus from the destroyed World Trade Center amounted to about 1 million cubic yards.

Haiti's leaders, working with officials from the United Nations and United States, last week approved a rubble-disposal plan that is expected to take at least two years to complete.

The initial phase focuses on clearing debris from drainage ditches and around the most congested encampments in order to help shift people away from areas prone to flooding before spring rains arrive at the end of March.

"We don't have the luxury of stepping back and doing this in a relaxed way," said Mike Byrne, a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official who co-chairs a multilateral committee on debris here.

The longer-term cleanup will involve an armada of front loaders, excavators and trucks. Haitian President Rene Preval has said the effort will require 1,000 dump trucks for 1,000 days — which U.S. planners say is fairly accurate.

"We're going to have to go 24-7 on this," said Byrne, who was the government's point man in the World Trade Center cleanup.

Haitian officials have identified a handful of possible disposal sites, which are to include facilities for hazardous materials, separating refuse and crushing the concrete chunks. Early assessments indicate 90 percent of the debris can be recycled into road-building material, melted or put to other uses, Byrne said.

Many Haitians are attacking the broken mounds on their own. Impatient homeowners and businesspeople with means have hired digging machines and workers to clear their properties. Concrete debris has been dumped hurriedly along the side of one of the main roads leaving the city.

Destitute Haitians have sought to turn rubble into opportunity. The destruction has spawned a new scavenging specialty in a city where jobs were already scarce. Around the city, residents clamber over the chalky piles with undersized hammers, shovels, hacksaws and, most often, bare hands.

"Everybody has to figure out a way to survive until things get back in place," said Demarseilles Nelson, who after half a day of scavenging with bare hands had piled his wheelbarrow with a 3-foot-high stack of metal scraps. His yield included a manual typewriter that appeared to date to the days of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the 1960s-era dictator.

Impromptu scrap markets have sprung up where enterprising young men with homemade scales buy steel rebar they drag away by hand or in shabby wheelbarrows.

In one forlorn corner of the city, amid dust and truck exhaust, 16-year-old Nahem Inora was offering 4 cents a pound for the metal. He said he planned to resell it to big-time traders for about 7 cents a pound. He had arrived that morning with $20 and had burned through half of it within hours.

"I would be more successful if I had more money to buy steel," Inora said. Waiting to sell their treasure were two boys who had carried and dragged a grimy sack loaded with 2-foot lengths of rebar.

The piles of rubble entomb an unknown number of dead — a reality that will require sensitivity when it comes to clearing. That could mean digging by hand in places where bodies are believed buried.

Why Haiti's quake toll higher than Chile's

By Colin Stark

Editor's note: Colin Stark, Doherty Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, is a geophysicist and geomorphologist whose research is focused on the effects of typhoons and earthquakes on the triggering of landslides and the erosion of mountain rivers.
Palisades, New York (CNN) -- About six weeks ago, a large earthquake devastated Haiti and killed over 200,000 people. Saturday, a huge earthquake releasing 500 times more energy, devastated Chile and killed hundreds.
So why did the smaller earthquake kill so many more people? And why the sudden spate of disastrous earthquakes in the Americas?
No, the apocalypse is not coming. No, the two earthquakes are not linked in any way. And no, Pat Robertson, you can't blame the Devil or the French. The real answers, for those comfortable with science and the Enlightenment, are tectonics and poverty.
Of the many revolutions of the 1960s, the one that really mattered to geologists was the revolution of plate tectonics. Tectonics is the word geologists use to describe the process by which mountains move and rocks squeeze and crunch.
In the sixties, new data from research cruises and from earthquake seismometers led to the realization that tectonics makes mountains slide sideways long distances. Earth scientists discovered that the Earth has a patchy skin of mobile plates a hundred miles thick and thousands of miles across, and that they move horizontally at a slow but irresistible pace. It's where they collide that our problems begin.
South America is a prime example of this process, one that geologists call "subduction." It's why we have the long chain of mountains called the Andes and it's why countries like Chile and Peru suffer giant, destructive earthquakes every few decades.
Off the coast of Chile is a tectonic plate called the Nazca Plate. Unseen by most, it has been inching its way towards the South American continent, and sliding underneath it, for well over a hundred million years. Since the day that Magellan first rounded Tierra del Fuego it has encroached by 130 feet in a roughly east-north-east direction.
The Nazca plate doesn't slide under the South American plate in an orderly fashion though. It moves in fits and starts, sometimes sticking and sometimes slipping, sometimes here and sometimes there. Along the coast of Chile, patches can get stuck for over a hundred years. When they do finally slip, they go with a bang. All that squeezing energy is released in seconds and an earthquake happens.
On Saturday a patch roughly the size of Maryland came unstuck, unleashing one of the most powerful tremors ever recorded. Fifty years ago, a patch four times bigger and with an area of about 50,000 square miles, the size of Louisiana, slipped and triggered the Valdivia earthquake. Its magnitude has been estimated as at least 9.5, making it the largest earthquake of modern times.
Over millions of years, this tectonic squeezing has formed the Andes and raised the high desert known as the Altiplano. Elsewhere it has created the Alps, the Rockies, the Himalayas, and Tibet. It has also created and distorted some of the islands of the Caribbean, including Haiti.
So that's why some parts of the world suffer from big earthquakes that strike with irregular frequency, while other regions are seismically quiet: it all depends on where the plates meet and how fast they are running into each other.
Knowing this helps us assess seismic risk and mitigate it. It helps us know where the strongest earthquake shaking will hit and roughly how often. Predicting when the shaking will hit is a much greater challenge, and geophysicists are working hard to reach that goal. In any case, prediction is not the real problem: poverty is.
Poverty is what ultimately kills most people during an earthquake. Poverty means that little or no evaluation is made of seismic risk in constructing buildings and no zoning takes place. It means that building codes are not written, and even if they do exist they are difficult, or impossible, to enforce. It means the choice between building robustly or building cheaply is not a choice at all.
Haiti is a tragic illustration of this. Weak building materials and poor construction standards share much of the blame for the grotesque numbers of fatalities, injured and internally displaced people.
Of course it's complicated. Earthquake shaking is a complex process and the chain of causation from earthquake source magnitude through infrastructural damage to human harm involves factors like the type of earthquake fault, its orientation, the hardness of bedrock or presence of wet soil, and so on. A lot also depends on the time of day the earthquake strikes in terms of how many people are inside buildings that could collapse. Population density, distance from the epicenter, and the depth of the rupture are the most important factors of all.
Nevertheless, those countries most at risk of seismic tragedy are not simply those on tectonic plate boundaries, but also those with the least money to spend on protecting themselves.

Haiti: Aid racket increases suffering - Part2

On January 22, the British Telegraph quoted British medical journal The Lancet as saying that NGOs are “jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the most for earthquake survivors ... the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating and anything but coordinated.

“Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavory characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts.

“Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile.

“Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive, with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grassroots charities that may have better networks in affected counties, and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief.”

The NGOs are businesses in their own right. They sport well-paid bureaucrats that raise money from the disastrous impact of neoliberalism around the world.

They are not accountable to the local populations they supposedly serve, but instead to the international donors that fund them — most often, corporate-backed formations like George Soros's Open Society Institute and capitalist governments.

Moreover, given that NGOs can pay local leaders more than either the government or social movements, they often recruit people who would traditionally lead leftist movements.

They play a role very similar to the one that missionary religious institutions played in the earlier history of empire. They provide moral cover — a civilising mission to help the hapless heathens — for the powers that are plundering the society.

And just as religious institutions justified imperial war, many NGOs, abandoning their traditional standpoint of neutrality in conflicts, have become advocates of military intervention.

Nowhere is this pattern clearer than in Haiti.

In the 1980s, the US convinced the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier to implement a neoliberal development plan that Haitians call “the plan of death”. This dropped tariffs on US agriculture, encouraged sweatshop development and opened tourist resorts for the international elite.

The plan increased absolute poverty by 60%.

But the Haitian poor rose up and overthrew the dictatorship in 1986. They elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in 1990 on a platform of anti-neoliberal reform.

Aristide was overthrown in a US-backed coup in 1991, with the coup regime carrying out a reign of terror against his supporters. Aristide was again elected in 2000, and overthrown by another US-backed coup in 2004.

Haiti now has the most neoliberal economy in the region.

The US, other powers and international donors responded to the subsequent collapse of the state by funding NGOs. Soon, the World Bank reported that there were 10,000 NGOs in the country, doing everything from trash collection to health care and food provision in a chaotic patchwork of services that have replaced the incapacitated state.

These NGOs are non-governmental only in name. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other similar government-funded agencies from other countries provide 70% of NGO funding.

The NGOs have proliferated in lockstep with the collapse in the Haitian standard of living.

When the “plan of death” was implemented in Haiti, undercutting peasant agriculture, it flooded the market with subsidised US products and caused a food crisis. Peasants became dependent on food aid.

USAID funded CARE International to feed the impoverished peasants. The NGO began to distribute US crops as food aid, during both bad and good harvests, further undermining Haitian peasants’ ability to compete for the market.

Often, the food aid was taken by local elites and sold on the market, with the CARE brand still affixed to the packaging.

The US also manipulated NGOs to build political opposition to any reform movement. In the run-up to its second coup against Aristide in 2004, the US enforced an embargo on Aristide’s government for alleged electoral manipulations and escalated funding for anti-Aristide NGOs.

Many, if not most, of the NGOs that supported the coup were on the US payroll.

By acting in these ways, the NGOs have undercut Haitian sovereignty, all under the banner of helping people overcome their poverty — which the NGOs themselves helped to create.

In 1935, retired US Major General Smedley Butler famously concluded that his role at the head of the US military had been to serve as a "racketeer for capitalism". The same could just as easily be said of many NGOs involved in humanitarian aid today — it is a racket for empire.