UN peacekeeper in Haiti. Photo: Robert Miller (CC)

As if Haiti didn’t have enough problems already… From ABC News:

Compelling new scientific evidence suggests United Nations peacekeepers have carried a virulent strain of cholera — a super bug — into the Western Hemisphere for the first time.

The vicious form of cholera has already killed 7,000 people in Haiti, where it surfaced in a remote village in October 2010. Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that, despite UN denials, there is now a mountain of evidence suggesting the strain originated in Nepal, and was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as UN peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010 — two years ago today. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their base.

“What scares me is that the strain from South Asia has been recognized as more virulent, more capable of causing severe disease, and more transmissible,” said John Mekalanos, who chairs the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. “These strains are nasty. So far there has been no secondary outbreak. But Haiti now represents a foothold for a particularly dangerous variety of this deadly disease.”

More than 500,000 Haitians have been infected, and Mekalanos said a handful of victims who contracted cholera in Haiti have now turned up in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and in Boston, Miami and New York, but only in isolated cases.

How cholera landed in Haiti has been a politically charged topic for more than a year now, with the United Nations repeatedly refusing to acknowledge any role in the outbreak despite mounting evidence that international peacekeepers were the most likely culprits…

[continues at ABC News]

To put things in perspective, upping the hourly wage to 62 cents would have cost Hanes an additional $1.6 million each year. Hanesbrands turned $211 million in profit last year and CEO Richard Noll personally was paid $10 million.

Overall, Haiti has become one of the greatest money laundering operations in history, an island engine turning public funds into private profits.

What’s more, U.S. taxpayer dollars are, against Presidential directive, being funneled from the United States Agency for International Development to Billy Graham’s charities for use in Christian proselytizing—all while building Sarah Palin’s 2012 campaign army.

“At that time, they were not open to the Gospel, and now they are,” said “Festival of Hope” director Sherman Barnette, of the difference in Haiti before and after the earthquake. Our research into the hush-hush tag team efforts of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and Samaritan’s Purse found millions of USAID dollars going to Samaritan’s Purse aid stations in Haiti. Their mission: a coordinated effort by BGEA chaplains to evangelize to and convert the trapped, weak and suffering.

Monsanto donated tons of corn and vegetable seed to Haitian farmers and has committed to donating hundreds of tons more in the coming months. But these seeds are hybrids, engineered not only so that they cannot naturally reproduce, but to assure Haitian farmers remain in hock to Monsanto in the future. Of this donation, Monsanto had the unbelievable balls to claim “There are no contractual obligations between Haitian farmers and Monsanto since this is a donation.” Responding to whether or not the donated seeds will force farmers to need “additional inputs” (i.e., trademarked Monsanto products), the company said “technically, it can be planted without any additional inputs.”

But here’s the best part. Monsanto added that it contacted NGOs in Haiti and that those organizations will “support farmers with recommendations and resources [including] helping farmers decide whether to use additional inputs (including fertilizer and herbicides).” Two of the NGOs Monsanto identified are the WINNER organization and World Vision, both heavily funded by USAID. This means your tax dollars will be used to purchase any “additional inputs” from Monsanto.

Former Haitian leader Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier has been questioned by judicial officials and was later led out of his hotel by police.

He was questioned over claims he stole from the country’s treasury. It is not clear whether he has been arrested.

Haiti’s chief prosecutor and a judge were seen arriving at his hotel in Port-au-Prince earlier on Tuesday.

Mr Duvalier, who ruled the country for 15 years before being ousted in 1986, made a surprise return to Haiti Sunday.

“He will be questioned and he will remain at the disposal of the judicial system,” a senior government official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters news agency earlier.

[Continues at BBC News]

Photo: Francios Duvalier and Jean-Claude Duvalier shortly before Francios' death and Jean-Claude's presidency

Shortly after Haitians remember the one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake, Haiti is struck with another surprise. The return of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who took over the country at the age of 19, continuing his father’s dictatorship of fear and torture. His arrival gave rise to mix emotions: some are questioning if his crimes will finally be tried, some remember the time of his dictatorship as the last time of stability in Haiti, some wonder if this will encourage exiled former President Jean-Bertrande Aristideto visit the country. One thing is for certain, he returned out of the concern of his homeland and it’s people. Can a man and his country put aside differences to help his people in a time of need? Forbes reports:

Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, a once feared and reviled dictator who was ousted in a popular uprising nearly 25 years ago, has made a stunning return to Haiti, raising concerns he could complicate efforts to solve a political crisis and the stalled reconstruction from last year’s devastating earthquake.

Duvalier’s arrival at the airport Sunday was as mysterious as it was unexpected. He greeted a crowd of several hundred cheering supporters but did not say why he chose this tumultuous period to suddenly reappear from his exile in France – or what he intended to do while back in Haiti.

[Continues at Forbes]

The Haitian National Palace after the earthquake on January 12, 2010

A year after tragedy hit Haiti, survivors are marking the anniversary of the devastating earthquake. A year later and hundreds of thousands of people are living in shelters, communities are slowly being rebuilt and there is a constant battle against cholera. BBC News reports:

Haitians are preparing to mark the anniversary of the earthquake that devastated their country and left some 250,000 of their fellow citizens dead.

Church services are due to be held around the nation, including at the ruined cathedral in Port-au-Prince.

There will also be a minute’s silence at 4.53pm (2153 GMT) – the exact moment when the 7.0 magnitude quake hit.

Traffic stopped as the streets of Port-au-Prince turned quiet and businesses were closed.

People walked in solemn processions to prayer services marking the anniversary of the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. Many people wore white, a colour associated with mourning in Haiti, and sang hymns as they made their way to the services.

One year on, some 800,000 people are still living in temporary shelters.

[Continues at BBC News]

They are the real heroes of the Haitian earthquake disaster, the human catastrophe on America’s doorstep which Barack Obama pledged a monumental US humanitarian mission to alleviate. Except these heroes are from America’s arch-enemy Cuba, whose doctors and nurses have put US efforts to shame.

A medical brigade of 1,200 Cubans is operating all over earthquake-torn and cholera-infected Haiti, as part of Fidel Castro’s international medical mission which has won the socialist state many friends, but little international recognition.

Observers of the Haiti earthquake could be forgiven for thinking international aid agencies were alone in tackling the devastation that killed 250,000 people and left nearly 1.5 million homeless. In fact, Cuban healthcare workers have been in Haiti since 1998, so when the earthquake struck the 350-strong team jumped into action. And amid the fanfare and publicity surrounding the arrival of help from the US and the UK, hundreds more Cuban doctors, nurses and therapists arrived with barely a mention. Most countries were gone within two months, again leaving the Cubans and Médecins Sans Frontières as the principal healthcare providers for the impoverished Caribbean island.

Read More in the Indepedent

In 1982, Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled to Port-Au-Prince to investigate the ethno-biological base of the Haitian zombie. Davis left the island convinced that zombies were not fictional creations, but in fact real monsters that roamed the rural villages of Haiti. Inspired by Davis’ work, VBS correspondent Hamilton traveled to the Haitian capital last year to conduct his own zombie investigation under the guidance of a man who survived fourteen bullets to the face.

Haitian hip-hop star Wyclef Jean has said he will appeal against a ruling that he cannot run in Haiti’s presidential election.

Haiti’s electoral commission said that Mr Jean was ineligible to stand as the Haitian constitution requires candidates to have lived in the country for five years prior to an election.

The 40-year-old singer lives in the US.

But he argues that his role as a roving ambassador for Haiti since 2007 exempts him from the residency requirement.

The country is still recovering from January’s earthquake, which killed an estimated 230,000 people and left more than one million homeless.

Following the ruling on Friday, Mr Jean issued a statement saying he respectfully disagreed with the electoral panel’s decision, but accepted it and urged his supporters to do the same.

However, on Sunday Mr Jean told reporters that he was refusing to give up and that he would challenge the decision in court.

Speaking to the Associated Press news agency from his house in the Haitian town of Croix des Bouquet, Mr Jean said he had documentation about his candidacy “which shows everything is correct” and that he and his aides “feel that what is going on here has everything to do with Haitian politics”.

In a message on the micro-blogging site Twitter, Mr Jean said: “Tomorrow our lawyers are appealing the decision of the CEP. We have met all the requirements set by the laws. And the law must be respected.”

Hip-hop, more than most pop genres, is something of a pulpit, urban fire and brimstone garbed in baggy pants and backward caps. So it’s little wonder that one of the music form’s icons, Haitian-American superstar Wyclef Jean, is the son of a Nazarene preacher — or that he likens himself, as a child of the Haitian diaspora, to a modern-day Moses, destined to return and lead his people out of bondage. Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake, which ravaged the western hemisphere’s poorest country and killed more than 200,000 people, was the biblical event that sealed his calling. After days of helping ferry mangled Haitian corpses to morgues, Jean felt as if he’d “finished the journey from my basket in the bulrushes to standing in front of the burning bush,” he told me this week. “I knew I’d have to take the next step.”

That would be running for President of Haiti. Jean told TIME he is going to announce his candidacy for the Nov. 28 election just days before the Aug. 7 deadline. One plan that was discussed, loaded with as much Mosaic symbolism as a news cycle can hold, called for him to declare his candidacy on Aug. 5 upon arriving in Port-au-Prince from New York City, where he grew up after leaving Haiti with his family at age 9. “If not for the earthquake, I probably would have waited another 10 years before doing this,” Jean says. “The quake drove home to me that Haiti can’t wait another 10 years for us to bring it into the 21st century.” Jean sees no contradiction between his life as an artist and his ambitions as a politician. “If I can’t take five years out to serve my country as President,” he argues, “then everything I’ve been singing about, like equal rights, doesn’t mean anything.”…

[continues at Time]

“A new earthquake” is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto’s seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation’s presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.

In an open letter sent of May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the Executive Director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds…, and on what is left our environment in Haiti.”[1] Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to agribusiness imports of seeds and food, which undermines local production with local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

For now, without a law regulating the use of GMOs in Haiti, the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto’s offer of Roundup Ready GMO seeds. In an email exchange, a Monsanto representative assured the Ministry of Agriculture that the seeds being donated are not GMO.

Elizabeth Vancil, Monsanto’s Director of Development Initiatives, called the news that the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture approved the donation “a fabulous Easter gift” in an April email.[2] Monsanto is known for aggressively pushing seeds, especially GMO seeds, in both the global North and South, including through highly restrictive technology agreements with farmers who are not always made fully aware of what they are signing. According to interviews by this writer with representatives of Mexican small farmer organizations, they then find themselves forced to buy Monsanto seeds each year, under conditions they find onerous and at costs they sometimes cannot afford…

[continues at Huffington Post]

Haiti’s earthquake on 12 January this year has been a lucky business break for some. The transnational firm Monsanto is offering the country’s farmers a deadly gift of 475 tonnes of genetically-modified (GM) seeds, along with associated fertiliser and pesticides, which will be handed out free by the WINNER project, with the backing of the US embassy in Haiti. Do Haitians know Monsanto made the “Agent Orange” defoliant sprayed over Vietnam by US planes during the war there, poisoning both US soldiers and Vietnamese civilians?

Do Haitians know that these GM seeds have been declared dangerous by many countries? They often come in kits along with a Monsanto herbicide called “Roundup,” which contains glyphosate. In my native Brittany, it has already polluted the water table. But Monsanto insists its product is biodegradable. It is being sued for this by anti-frauid officials in Lyon.

A former employee of Monsanto, Linda Fischer, has just been named to head the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which monitors environmental issues. It’s like giving a cat the job of looking after a mouse’s welfare.

Monsanto has already begun distributing its GM maize seeds around Gonaïves, Kenscoff, Pétionville, Cabaret, Arcahaie, Croix-des-Bouquets and Mirebalais. Soon there will be only Monsanto seeds in Haiti. Then it will be goodbye to farmers’ independence. Monsanto recently invested $550 million in Brazil to manufacture the Roundup herbicide in the northeastern state of Bahia. But the country seems to be fighting back against the firm.

Monsanto is publicising the seeds as a generous gift. But Haitian farmers wishing to use them for future harvests will have to pay royalties to Monsanto. The Monsanto representative in Haiti is Jean- Robert Estimé, who served as foreign minister under the Duvalier family’s 29-year dictatorship.

No one really knows why, but for an open wound, simply applying suction dramatically speeds healing times. (The theory is that the negative pressure draws bacteria out, and encourages circulation.) But for almost everyone, that treatment is out of reach — simply because the systems are expensive — rentals cost at least $100 a day and need to be recharged every six hours.

No more. Danielle Zurovcik, a doctoral student at MIT, has created a hand-powered suction-healing system that costs about $3. The device is composed of an airtight wound dressing, connected by a plastic tube to a cylinder with accordion-like folds. Squeezing it creates the suction, which lasts as long as there’s no air leak. What’s more, where regular dressings need to be replaced up to three times a day — a painful ordeal — the new cuff can be left on for several days.

Zurovcik originally intended to field-test the device in Rwanda, but then the Haiti Earthquake struck. At the request of Partners in Health, an NGO, she traveled to Haiti with 50 of the pumps.

Currently, Zurovcik is verifying the healing benefits of the device, and developing a new model that can be readily carried and concealed. The one technical hurdle that remains is ensuring the bandage seals tightly — but after that, the device could benefit a huge portion of the 50–60 million people in the developing world that suffer from acute or chronic wounds.

Read More: MIT News

The financial crisis started as a housing bubble with the financial industry convinced that home values never fall. How wrong they were even as they leveraged and securitized their investments to create a global crisis.

Now brace yourself, because not only isn’t it over until it’s over, but in some respects it’s only just begun. There will be more foreclosures this year than last and as a result more suffering for American families

Ed Harrison who monitors this industry for a website called Credit Write Downs sees a “second wave coming”—like a new tsunami in a industry that All of Obama’s horses and all of Obama’s men have not been able to do anything about. The idea of challenging fraud and deception with a debt relief plan goes a bit too far for these self-styled centrists. Writes Harrison:

When the crisis first developed, in February of 2007, it was subprime where the worries were, with the lion’s share of write downs coming from mark-to-market losses in the securitization market.  However, subprime was a relatively small part of the overall market, making up 14% of loans outstanding at that time. Alt-A loans were 27% and prime loans were 57% respectively of loans outstanding according to a Bank of America Securities report.

As the 2004-2007 cohorts of Alt-A option ARM mortgages have started to reset and prime borrowers have come under stress, we have started to see defaults in markets which are an order of magnitude larger than subprime.

I love phrases like “order of magnitude” because they make problems seem too big to do anything about. As we aggregate the losses we lose sight of the individuals whose lives are at risk even as financial websites carry more and more articles about how to profit from foreclosures.

Today, it’s not just that prime loans are about to go belly up but more and more tenants living in private homes are at risk—with no one looking out for them because they don’t own anything and so are considered disposable.

Mounting foreclosures is an issue I have been writing and railing about. Protests against them are featured in my forthcoming film PLUNDER: The Crime Of Our Time.

There is a macro dimension to this crisis but also a far more personal micro one.

Here’s a story I was told about a middle class woman on Long Island, who happens to be Haitian. I am sure it’s not the worst case—and certainly not the best outcome. Read it and weep—but as you do remember this bell may toll for more of us.

At the same time, as a reporter, I find myself personally exposed to people experiencing these problems. One is a close friend of a close friend who found herself on the street last week.

I offered to help her write an op-ed about her situation based on what she told me. She really liked it,  but then had second thoughts about having it appear under her name. It is intimidating if you are not used to challenging powerful institutions even after you have been terribly mistreated. There is always a hope that some deal might save you, or get your home back. I have to respect her right to anonymity, but I can vouch for the accuracy of this sad account implicating a predatory bank and their servicer, the County Sheriff, and a moving company that makes money off of people’s misery.

Here is the account:

MY HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE (BANKQUAKE?) IN NASSAU COUNTY

Almost two months ago, the country I was born in suffered a natural calamity. Hundreds of thousands died in the Haitian earthquake, members of my own family among them. Our family home was destroyed. It was heartbreaking and traumatizing. I am still grieving. I was happy to know that so many people who live here on the Island responded with an outpouring of donations and concern. No homeowner would ever want to share the same experience of sudden forced homelessness.

Less than a week ago, I stood outside a home that I have lived in for 14 years and watched the Nassau County Sheriff’s office and a team of movers (from Network Moving & Trucking )that they hired, evict me, crudely packing up all my possessions, throwing precious belongings in boxes and somehow also stealing my grand daughter’s laptop in the process before physically pushing her into the street.

My family had just been dispossessed in Haiti, and now I was having a similar (but far less deadly) experience in Nassau County. Only this calamity was not due to a natural disaster, but to a well-proven chain of fraud and abuse by banks. The FBI has confirmed we have been living through a “fraud epidemic” since 2004.

No big name musicians are raising money for the victims of this disaster. So far, the government agencies that have promised to curb an out of control foreclosure crisis have been ineffectual. The big banks have paid lip service to helping their customers, but, as study after study documented, they make more money throwing people out of their homes and reselling them than modifying mortgages so residents can stay where they are. They are in the game for profits, not to help people.

In my case, I persistently reached out to the bank with emails and calls to try to negotiate. No one would take my calls or respond. There was no there there. I have been experiencing disdain and insensitivity at every turn.

I reached out to legal agencies which Nassau County itself advises people facing eviction to go to. What happened?  They told me there was nothing they could do.

In my case, I wanted to buy the house I lived in with my grandchild—I am nearly 65—but the mortgage broker and the REMAC realty agency and the courts were less than helpful. No one would assist me. The Administration has stopped deportation orders for Haitians convicted of crimes, but seems uninterested in helping law abiding people like myself.

Was it my accent, my Haitian background? I am an American citizen and a former civil servant with a long history of public service and employment. Ethnicity may be a factor but they treat people of all races this way–with contempt!

Compounding the problem for me is that I wasn’t even the homeowner but a tenant whose landlord had disappeared leaving the home with all sorts of major structural problems and unpaid bills. I tried reaching him and the bank for months on end with no success.

The bank in this case was HSBC, one of the most notorious subprime lenders, which has written off billions of dollars because of its irresponsible lending policies, and been subject to investigations and reprimand. Their servicer is part of the scheme. It is no wonder that the public calls these people banksters. That is who they are.

I went to Court and had my appeal to stay the eviction denied without any reasons given. The Sheriff told me the eviction could be stopped if I applied for bankruptcy. I did so, and when I tried to call him with the file number, as instructed, before his office carried out the eviction, no one would take my call. His secretary told he would not talk to me. A bankruptcy filing should have stopped the eviction. It didn’t. These are the bureaucratic games they play with people’s lives.

And then to add insult to injury, the moving company had the nerve to yell at me for trying to stop my own eviction claiming that I was trying to cheat them out a $2000 fee for doing the job during which my grandchild was pushed physically and “lost” her computer.

I am appealing to my Nassau neighbors to express concern about this outrage like they did for the victims of the quake.

Please help me call for an investigation and reversal of this rushed eviction without a fair hearing or recourse. Will someone look into the actions by the Sheriff of Nassau County who did the bank’s bidding, and Judge Scott Fairgrieve who callously signed the order without an ounce of compassion.

I am now, as a senor citizen homeless and personally at risk. I fainted on the day of the eviction and had to be hospitalized. I don’t know what will happen to me, and if something does, what will happen to my grandchild? For me, this calamity was like an earthquake destroying my life. Call ita bak quake if you will. I need help now.

Will someone stand up for me as I have for years for people all over the world?

If you live on Long Island and can help, write to me and I will pass on your message.  Please circulate this appeal.

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and directed the forthcoming film PLUNDER: The Crime Of Our Time.

In a whirl of limbs and with eyes bulging, the woman is helped to a squat in the ramshackle shed and starts cackling maniacally like a terrified chicken.
“Kaaaa! Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka,” she screams and stutters, her right arm bent in front of her.

Around her, the other Voodoo worshippers look on, unsurprised but expectant as their ceremony reaches its climactic mid-point. Someone ties a red cloth to her arm, which stops shaking.

In their eyes, she is possessed by a spirit of the dead – one of the 220,000 estimated to have perished in Haiti’s January quake perhaps – and is thus, in a way, blessed.

When she picks up a rusty knife and swings clockwise around the room, gulping from a bottle of cherry-flavored alcohol, they do not draw away.

Instead they embrace her, even kiss her. And in that way they are blessed, too.

But for all the fervor and favor being shared in this back-alley corner of Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince slum that was badly smashed in the quake, the practitioners of Voodoo are feeling under seige.

Their cult, a form of west African polytheism that came to Haiti with the slave trade, is being blamed by some followers of the rapidly growing Christian denominations – evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Baptists – as the cause of God’s anger in smiting their country.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Members of a Baptist congregation…were charged Thursday with abduction and criminal association, according to prosecutors.

The Americans were arrested as they tried to take 33 Haitian children to what they had said was an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. A Web site for the orphanage said that children there would stay in a “loving Christian environment” and be eligible for adoption.

But several of the 33 children had at least one living parent, and some of those parents said that the Baptists had promised simply to educate the youngsters in the Dominican Republic and said the children would be able to return to Haiti to visit their families.

We saw this type of Iraq-style disaster profiteering in New Orleans, and you can expect to see a lot more of this in Haiti over the coming days, weeks and months. Private security companies are seeing big dollar signs in Haiti thanks in no small part to the media hype about “looters.”

Among the services offered are: “High Threat terminations,” dealing with “worker unrest,” armed guards and “Armed Cargo Escorts.”

150,000 is a big number by anyone’s standards, but for a small country like Haiti, it is unfathomable. This is what America would look like if we lost a proportionate number of our citizens to a natural disaster…

Read More: Rasmussen College website

Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.

Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another — the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.

A relevant Texas geological project

Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major ‘rescue’ players — the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world’s largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.

Read More: Global Research

Orphans in Haiti are being offered for sale to foreigners for as little as £30 amid warnings that up to one million children in the country have been left vulnerable to abuse and trafficking in the wake of the earthquake.

In a remote area north of Port-au-Prince, a man was reported to have offered to sell a young boy to a Canadian man for just $50.

The first confirmed case of a child being offered for sale since Haiti was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan 12 took place near Gonaives, 150km north of Port-au-Prince.

It was reported by Noel Ismonin, a Canadian pastor who rescues orphans in the area. A man offered to sell him the boy but the pastor refused.

Meanwhile, in camps around the capital there were several reports of men being lynched after being accused by earthquake victims of trying to steal infants from tents.

The incident near Gonaives raised fears that child trafficking gangs could move into desperately poor rural areas that have yet to be properly reached by aid agencies. The gangs are also be less likely to be picked up by authorities there.

Abduction of children by child traffickers was already a chronic problem in pre-earthquake Haiti, where thousands were handed by their families into lives of domestic servitude.

“There are an estimated one million unaccompanied or orphaned children, or children who lost one parent,” said Kate Conradt, a spokesman for Save the Children. “They are extremely vulnerable.”

[continues in the Telegraph]

“Knock, knock journalists? Many of you have done a great and compassionate job of documenting this tragedy and showing the pain of the victims. Now let’s investigate how and why this relief operation imploded and became worse than Katrina. Who is responsible and who should be held accountable? Why can?t we have more international cooperation of the kind the Cubans are asking for? Why is the focus on military security–is France right that the US is acting like an occupying power? If the Haitian government isn’t working, why not allow Aristide to come back and re-energize it? It is sickening to watch all this pain compounded by incompetence. The relief operation needs relief and it needs”–Danny Schechter, director of Plunder: The Crime of our Time.

From MSNBC:

Attendees bid online for tickets to show, some paying as much as $4,000.

Radiohead raised more than $500,000 for Haiti earthquake relief at a special weekend concert that attracted celebrities and die-hard fans.The band performed for more than two hours Sunday at the Henry Fonda Theatre. The star-studded crowd included Justin Timberlake, Jessica Biel, Charlize Theron, Anna Paquin and Daniel Craig.

Attendees bid online for tickets, with proceeds going to Oxfam International, a group that works with developing countries. Prices went as high as $4,000 for a pair of tickets. The closing minimum bid was $475.

[Read more at MSNBC]

I know there are a lot of people out there who are upset about some of the things I’ve been saying on my radio program lately. My comments about the situation in Haiti have hurt and angered many Americans who genuinely care about the plight of the Haitian people, and that hurt and anger will likely never go away. Many of you are probably wondering, “What would compel a human being to say things like that?” Well, here’s your answer: I am a very bad person. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t really want to be alive anymore.

Try to look at it from my point of view. I have no reason to live. In my 59 years, I’ve made millions of dollars, built a veritable media empire, and accomplished virtually everything that a man of my limited imagination and worldview could possibly accomplish. And yet, at this point, in no way could you refer to what I’m doing as “living,” exactly. I just sort of exist. I derive no real pleasure from life. Oh, sure, I talk a big game about what a golf nut I am and how much I enjoy the taste of a fine cigar, but it’s all horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit.

I don’t enjoy that stuff. I don’t enjoy anything. I don’t even want to be here. The sadness and regret I feel every waking hour of my life is absolutely unbearable. I am a miserable pig and I do not want to exist.

Read More: The Onion

There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil had dried up. This is detailed by Dr. Georges Michel in an article dated March 27, 2004 outlining the history of oil explorations and oil reserves in Haiti and in the research of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin.

There is also good evidence that these very same big US oil companies and their inter-related monopolies of engineering and defense contractors made plans, decades ago, to use Haiti’s deep water ports either for oil refineries or to develop oil tank farm sites or depots where crude oil could be stored and later transferred to small tankers to serve U.S. and Caribbean ports. This is detailed in a paper about the Dunn Plantation at Fort Liberte in Haiti.

Ezili’s HLLN underlines these two papers on Haiti’s oil resources and the works of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin in order to provide a view one will not find in the mainstream media nor anywhere else as to the economic and strategic reasons the US has constructed its fifth largest embassy in the world – fifth only besides the US embassy in China, Iraq, Iran and Germany – in tiny Haiti, post the 2004 Haiti Bush regime change.

The facts outlined in the Dunn Plantation and Georges Michel papers, considered together, reasonably unveil part of the hidden reasons UN Special Envoy to Haiti, Bill Clinton, is giving the UN occupation a facelift so that its troops stay in Haiti for the duration…

[continues on the Pakalert Press blog]

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology “volunteer ministers”, claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.

Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital.

A wealthy private donor provided his airplane to fly in 80 volunteers from Los Angeles, along with 50 Haitian-American-doctors, in a gesture worth 400,000 dollars, said a Parisian volunteer who gave her name as Sylvie.

“We’re trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called ‘assist’ to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication,” she said.

“When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch.”

Read More: AP via Yahoo News

The head of a Christian child sponsorship program says Haiti is a nation “that you can literally feel the evil in.”Dr. Wesley Stafford, president and CEO of Compassion International, told Focus on the Family that Haiti was a disaster before the earthquake ever struck.

Haiti … has been a disaster in almost every way long before this ever struck. And it is a nation, between you and me, I guess, that Satan has had absolutely free reign in that nation. And while the missionary effort and the church effort has been enormous, this is a nation that you can literally feel the evil in it.

But then as the church lives out its faith, having come through this deep, deep valley, my great prayer is that there will be a great wave of healing and change in the nation of Haiti … that could only come about through an interruption like this and only happen through the glory of God.

Compassion International collects money, in $38 increments, to help children in impoverished parts of the world. According to its Web site, the “child advocacy ministry” tends to more than one million children in 25 countries.

[Read more at The Raw Story]

Haiti was hit on January 12th 2010 with a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that caused a great deal of “devastation” to close to 3,000,000 of Haiti’s population.

Whether this earthquake was caused by the government using HAARP or whether it was a natural disaster is not the question here. If we look in the right places, away from the mass manipulating that’s going on, we will see what is actually going on in Haiti.

Disaster strikes and the first on the scene is the world police themselves, THE UNITED STATES. They jump in and take control of the airport in Haiti, supposedly assisting with aid. No aid here, only military with lots of guns to make sure those fallen concrete bricks don’t try to steal any of the food they are supplying. You are seeing what looks a lot more like a war than a natural disaster.

Let’s flash back to hurricane Katrina quickly. The population in the area was largely African American, it took help quite a few days to show up and assist these people with some form of aid. Many were absolutely disgusted with how long it took for the US to send aid to ITS OWN COUNTRY. Flash forward, Haiti, again a black population, instead of waiting a long time to show up, they come right away to make people happy then do NOTHING to aid them. All they have done is set up a military that patrols the streets in tanks trying to hunt down them dangerous concrete blocks from getting away with the food. Very little aid has actually been brought to the Haitians at this point.

View the video clip below, I will allow it to speak a lot about what is happening. Notice how the Haitians themselves are saying they do not appreciate the military being there. They do not need guns, they need food, medical supplies, and help looking for those under the rubble. Instead, whose moving all the rubble and searching? The Haitians themselves. You are seeing the absolute lack of aid they are receiving, why?

The US military has taken over the airport and decides who lands in Haiti. This is obviously because they know best as the world police. They have turned back Mexican planes with life saving supplies on them because they can. Are they really doing a good job here?

The Haitians are looking for “action, not words” and yet we continue to see nothing more than words and military.

Then of course we have the overwhelming bid for the rest of the worlds support in the form of CASH specifically. Just the right kind of thing that could go missing and land in the pockets of certain people should they collect a favorable amount. You can thank George W. for giving that one away…

[continues at Collective Evolution]

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A powerful aftershock sent Haitians screaming into the streets on Wednesday, collapsing buildings, cracking roads and adding to the trauma of a nation stunned by an apocalyptic quake eight days ago.

The magnitude-5.9 jolt matched the strongest of the aftershocks that have followed the huge quake of Jan. 12 that devastated Haiti’s capital.

The new temblor collapsed seven buildings in Petit-Goave, the seaside town closest to the epicenter, according to Mike Morton of the U.N. Disaster Assessment and Coordination agency, but there were no reports of people crushed or trapped, perhaps because the earlier quake frightened most people into sleeping outside.

Wails of terror erupted in Port-au-Prince, where the aftershock briefly interrupted rescue efforts amid the broken concrete of collapsed buildings, and prompted doctors and patients to flee the University Hospital.

Hundreds of thousands of Haitians remain homeless, hungry and in mourning — most still waiting for the benefits of a nearly $1 billion global aid campaign that has brought hundreds of doctors and thousands of troops to the impoverished Caribbean nation.

Read More: AP via Yahoo News