Free Republic

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Jean Peterson Estime was outside playing soccer when his home pancaked in last week's earthquake and killed his parents and five sisters. Now he sleeps with thousands in a Port-au-Prince park and forages in rubble for food and goods he can sell to survive. "I'm trying to get a little job so I can take care of myself," he says, attempting to look brave even as he shuffles his dirty feet in too-big sandals. What the 13-year-old really wants is someone to take him in. Tens of thousands of children have been orphaned by the magnitude-7.0 quake,...

THE number of people killed in last week's devastating Haitian earthquake has risen to 75,000, while 250,000 were injured and a million left homeless, the Haitian government said yesterday. The updated figures were contained in an statement issued by Haiti's civil defence department, which said the beleaguered Caribbean nation is in desperate need of temporary shelters, water, food, medical supplies and counselors. One week ago, Haiti was hit by a massive 7.0-magnitude quake which shattered homes and buried citizens under tonnes of rubble across a broad area around the capital Port au Prince. The statement said half of the buildings...

Amazing viedo of a woman rescued after six days of being buried alive....blurry screen alert as well as moron Olberdork alert at the end

SANFORD-- Thousands of Haitian evacuees are arriving in Central Florida this week. They have been flying into the Orlando-Sanford International Airport on military planes since the weekend and more are expected over the next few days. The Department of Children and Families and the American Red Cross said that although they do expect more flights, they don't get much notice on when the flights will land. So far, officials estimate more than 1,000 Haitian-Americans have flown into Sanford. Most of the evacuees are U.S. citizens who were visiting Haiti when the earthquake struck. Some are Haitian orphans. They were emotional...

JIMANI, Dominican Republic -- A teary-eyed woman, frozen with pain, sat quietly in a room. All around her lay people with screws poking out of their legs, children with cardboard splints on broken arms and legs, men with mangled limbs and swollen faces. Some are asleep, others rock back and forth in agony. IV fluid bags hang from light bulbs, fire extinguishers and edges of windows. Medical charts are a sheet of white paper either taped above patients' mattresses on the floor or on their chests. Wails and crying roll out of surgical rooms and faint Haitian hymns can be...

His country facing a veritable apocalypse, Wyclef Jean took time out Monday to make an impassioned plea for help and yet another emotional defense of his charitable motives. Days after The Smoking Gun posted financial records suggesting his Yéle Haiti Foundation may have enriched the former Fugee, Wyclef reiterated remarks from this weekend and insisted that all donations were going directly to help his homeland. "Have I made mistakes? Yes," Jean said a press conference Monday. "Did I use Yéle money for personal gains? Absolutely not. The books are open. We have a clean bill of health from an auditor."...

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Prayers of thanks and cries for help rose from Haiti's huddled homeless yesterday, the sixth day of a humanitarian crisis that was straining the world's ability to respond and igniting violence amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince. Haitian police struggled to scatter hundreds of stone-throwing looters in the city's Old Market. Elsewhere downtown, amid the smoke from bonfires burning uncollected bodies, gunfire rang out and bands of machete-wielding young men roamed the streets, faces hidden by bandanas. Aid groups complained of skewed priorities and a supply bottleneck at the US-controlled airport. The general in charge said the US military was...

Some Voodoo priests in Haiti, meanwhile, have expressed their dismay at the way in which bodies have been thrown into mass graves. “It is not in our culture to bury people in such a fashion,” said chief Voodoo priest Max Beauvoir at a meeting with President Rene Preval. “The conditions in which bodies are being buried is not respecting the dignity of these people.”

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - The U.S. military hopes to have Haiti's main port open in two or three days for shipments of emergency relief supplies to earthquake survivors, the American officer in charge of logistics said on Monday. The Port-au-Prince dock could not receive ships because it was badly damaged by last Tuesday's quake, which submerged the quay and smashed equipment, including the only container crane. "They have a phenomenal port, which we will get opened in two to three days, and we have a great airfield. My instructions are to move things in as fast as we can," Brigadier General...

Aid workers have already baptised the earthquake in Haiti a “historical disaster”. It will rate high in the annals of the humanitarian aid world because of the number of victims and scale of the destruction. But the rescue operation is also becoming notorious for the slowness with which aid is reaching the victims. Five days after the quake hit, many places are still largely bereft of international aid. Not through lack of funds, supplies or emergency experts. Those are all pouring in from dozens of countries. But most of the aid — and aid workers — seems stuck at the...

With the window of survivability still open for Haitians trapped in the rubble of last week's catastrophic earthquake, the UN and FEMA are telling search and rescue teams waiting to deploy to Haiti to forget about it.Reports out of Houston are saying that one of the premier search and rescue units in the world has been on standby since shortly after the quake but was never called.Texas TV station KTRK gave this description of Texas Task Force 1:The TX-TF1 team which was activated for this deployment was a Type I Urban Search and Rescue Team which is comprised of 80...

Desperate Haitians scrambled Sunday to find food and water and guarded their meager possessions against the advance of looters as the U.S. and other nations struggled to jump-start a sluggish relief effort. Even as Navy and Coast Guard ships arrived offshore, a round-the-clock airlift intensified and additional dignitaries appeared, the frantic victims of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake were growing more fearful as they pleaded for help and security in a lawless city.

Among the chaos and lack of law and order in Haiti since the earthquake that may have killed hundreds of thousands of people, the IDF medical and rescue team has seen a few points of light. Not long after their arrival in Port-au-Prince, the team members saved the life of a customs clerk who was trapped in his office for 125 hours by debris, and then treated him in the Israeli field hospital - by far the largest, most equipped and best organized in the country.

A leading aid group has complained of skewed priorities and a supply bottleneck at the US-controlled airport. The Geneva-based aid group Medecins Sans Frontiers said: "There is little sign of significant aid distribution." The "major difficulty," it said, was the bottleneck at the airport. It said a flight carrying its own inflatable hospital was denied landing clearance and was being trucked overland from Santo Domingo, almost 200 miles away in the Dominican Republic, delaying its arrival by 24 hours. French, Brazilian and other officials had earlier complained about the airport's refusal to allow their supply planes to land. A World...

The fact that Danny Glover is nuttier than elephant poop should surprise no one. But now, he's even topped himself, as the washed-up actor blames the Haiti earthquake on the response to the climate change conference. Check it out, check-it-outers: (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DANNY GLOVER, ACTOR/ACTIVIST: That means that other countries in the region — Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba and other countries have already accepted the point that this is a great moment for another type of internationalism, you know. And I hope we seize this particular moment because the threat of what happens in Haiti is the threat that can...

Amid the rash of appeals for Haiti donations has come a call from one of the most prominent voices on the American right for people to hang on to their cash because Barack Obama might steal it. Rush Limbaugh, the most popular radio talkshow host, who is sometimes described as the real leader of the Republican party, says Americans should not give a penny to a population struggling for survival after the earthquake. Limbaugh agreed with a caller suspicious that the White House website was being used to direct funds to the American Red Cross. "Would you trust the money's...

Why God Hates Haiti The frustrating theology of suffering. By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK Published Jan 15, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Jan 25, 2010 Haiti is surely a Job among nations. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere: half its population lives on less than a dollar a day. With 98 percent of its forests felled and burned for firewood, Haiti is uniquely vulnerable to flooding from hurricanes. In 2008 four storms in as many weeks left a million homeless. Haiti has an infant-mortality rate worse than that of many African nations, and its people are...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The old lady crawls in the dirt, wailing for her pills. The elderly man lies motionless as rats pick at his overflowing diaper. There is no food, water or medicine for the 85 surviving residents of the Port-au-Prince Municipal Nursing Home, barely a mile from the airport where a massive international aid effort is taking shape. "Help us, help us," 69-year-old Mari-Ange Levee begged Sunday, lying on the ground with a broken leg and ribs. A cluster of flies swarmed the open fracture in her skull. One man has already died, and administrator Jean Emmanuel said more...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — With their churches flattened, their priests killed and their Bibles lost amid the rubble of their homes, desperate Haitians prayed in the streets on Sunday, raising their arms in the air and asking God to ease their grief. Outside the city’s main cathedral, built in 1750 but now a giant pile of twisted metal, shattered stained glass and cracked concrete, parishioners held a makeshift service at the curb outside, not far from where scores of homeless people were camping out in a public park. The bishop’s sermon of hope was a hard sell, though, as many listening...

Five days after the catastrophic 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, a medical worker has sent an urgent plea/complaint that the hospital he is at outside Port Au Prince has only treated four quake victims from the destroyed Haitian capital while teams of surgeons have no patients to treat.Tim Traynor sent the following e-mail to Democracy Now!I am sitting at Hopital Sacre Coeur in Milot, Haiti, 75 miles north of PAP waiting for patients that have yet to arrive. I have a 7 member trauma/ general surgery team that arrived from the States earlier this afternoon and have received only 4 people...