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A Weekend News Digest Supplement
I apologize for not maxing out on my news pieces recently, but I’ve been busy with Administrative issues and creating other content.
Not to mention real life.
I’ve looked at Time Magazine for the first time in a while and I discovered a backlog of pieces on Haiti that I thought I’d present as a supplement for you.
As always, this is not all the pieces, just the ones I think long enough to quote and of interest to my readers.
| From Yahoo News World |
1 Could the Haiti Earthquake Have Been Predicted?
By JEFFREY KLUGER, Time Magazine
Wed Jan 13, 4:10 pm ET
| The tragedy of the earthquake that struck Haiti Tuesday, Jan. 12, is easy to measure in the lives lost, homes destroyed and infrastructure wrecked. The paradox of the quake is equally evident: when a natural disaster so devastating hits, oughtn’t we have some way of predicting it? Hurricanes, blizzards, even volcanoes can be forecast well before their arrival, after all, allowing governments and people to make lifesaving preparations. Earthquakes, however, are stealth disasters, geological phenomena largely undetectable until just seconds before they occur. What scientists have long wanted to know is why quakes are so sneaky and what, if anything, can be done to read their warning signs better. |
2 U.S. Military Readies Disaster Response to Haiti Quake
By MARK THOMPSON / WASHINGTON, Time Magazine
Wed Jan 13, 8:10 pm ET
| When an earthquake ravages a country as poor and urbanized as Haiti, it produces the cruelest kind of synergy, as poverty breeds cramped living quarters that are left even more vulnerable by substandard construction work. While U.S. officials weren’t issuing estimates of casualties from Tuesday’s strong 7.0 earthquake, there was growing concern that pancaked buildings in Port-au-Prince, home to some 2 million people – and Haiti’s inability to quickly rescue those who are trapped – could lead to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of fatalities. |
3 In a Moment of Hope, Haiti Is Plunged Again into Despair
By TIM PADGETT, Time Magazine
Thu Jan 14, 2:10 am ET
| What makes the apocalyptic earthquake that ravaged Haiti on Jan. 12 especially “cruel and incomprehensible,” as U.S. President Barack Obama put it, is that it struck at a rare moment of optimism. After decades of natural and political catastrophes – including the violent 2004 overthrow of then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and four deadly hurricanes in 2008 – a U.N. peacekeeping force and an international investment campaign headed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton had recently begun to calm and rebuild the Caribbean nation, the western hemisphere’s poorest. “We were hearing more positive things from Haiti for once,” says Danielle Romer, a Miami social worker with family in Haiti. “Things were coming around.” |
4 What Haiti Needs
By BILL CLINTON, Time Magazine
Thu Jan 14, 9:20 am ET
| Hillary and I went to Haiti for the first time in December 1975. A banker friend of ours had some business down there. He had built up a lot of frequent-flyer miles and called and said he was giving us a delayed honeymoon. We were married in October, and we went down there in December. Both of us just kind of fell in love with the country, and I have kept up with it ever since. |
5 Haiti’s Agony: What It Will Take to Rebuild
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT, Time Magazine
Thu Jan 14, 9:55 am ET
| Tragedy has a way of visiting those who can bear it least. Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, a place where malnutrition is widespread and less than half the population has access to clean drinking water. At 4:53:09 p.m. on Jan. 12, at a point 15 miles southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince, the Caribbean tectonic plate pushed against the neighboring North American plate along a line known as the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault system. On the earth’s surface, the enormous energy created by that tremor – an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale – tossed the car that Bob Poff, the Salvation Army’s director of disaster services in Haiti, was driving down the hill from the suburb of PÉtionville to Port-au-Prince “to and fro like a toy.” When the shaking stopped, Poff wrote on a Salvation Army blog, “I looked out of the windows to see buildings ‘pancaking’ down … Thousands of people poured into the streets, crying, carrying bloody bodies, looking for anyone who could help them.” |
6 After the Destruction: What Will It Take to Rebuild Haiti?
By BRYAN WALSH, Time Magazine
Mon Jan 18, 5:05 am ET
| At 7.0 on the Richter scale, the earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12 was strong, but hardly record-breaking – very similar, in fact, to a 7.0 temblor that hit the San Francisco Bay area in 1989. But that’s where the similarities end. The 1989 San Francisco quake left up to 12,000 people homeless and killed 63. The 2010 Haiti quake, however, will likely make over a million people homeless, and its death toll could be 50,000 or much higher. |
7 With the Military in Haiti: Breaking the Supply Logjam
By TIM PADGETT/PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine
Mon Jan 18, 5:05 am ET
| When I arrived at Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint L’Overture International Airport on a U.S. Navy relief helicopter Saturday morning, the first glimpse of Haiti I caught below was what greets every flight into the western hemisphere’s poorest country: the vast Cite Soleil slum. But from a bird’s-eye view, at least, the cataclysmic earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12 seemed to actually spare the shantytown’s humblest dwellings, the kind made of pallet-wood walls and corrugated tin roofs. The houses that took the worst beatings appeared to be newer ones built of more upscale concrete blocks, many of which had been reduced to gravel pits. |
8 Haiti Tries to Go From Rescue to Recovery to Relief
By JAY NEWTON-SMALL / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine
Tue Jan 19, 3:30 am ET
| Michaud Jonas, 27, came to the flattened Palm Apparel factory in part to see if he could find his little sister’s body – and in part to find work. Jonas’ sister was one of hundreds trapped beneath the rubble of the t-shirt plant, perhaps the largest loss of life in a single building in a country full of death. By some employee accounts, the factory employed 2,000 people and about half were pulled from the rubble right after the earthquake that has claimed tens of thousands of Haitian lives since last Tuesday. Palm’s death toll may be several hundred, but there is no practical way to come up with an accurate count. |
9 Haitians See Aid Distributed Unequally in Port-au-Prince
By JAY NEWTON-SMALL / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine
Tue Jan 19, 4:50 am ET
| All they wanted was some help. Some water, a little food, maybe some medical supplies. But what had started out as an interview with an earthquake victim turned into scary scuffle in downtown Port-au-Prince, the area worst hit by Jan. 12’s earthquake. Desperate Haitians clamored for my card on the misapprehension that somehow my Washington, D.C., office number might be the magic pill to alleviate their suffering. I gave out my cards, then produced scraps of paper when I ran out of them, writing down the numbers. |
10 Haiti Rescue: Saving the Man Who Saved My Life
By BENJAMIN SKINNER, Time Magazine
Wed Jan 20, 2:25 pm ET
| I was in Haiti in October 2005 researching my book on modern-day slavery when I contracted a severe case of malaria. A young Haitian man named Bill Nathan, then 21, who manages a shelter for homeless boys in Port-au-Prince, took me in and attended to me daily as I lapsed in and out of consciousness. He found the chloroquine that kept me alive. |
11 Aftershock
By BRYAN WALSH, JAY NEWTON-SMALL AND TIM PADGETT, Time Magazine
Thu Jan 21, 2:35 am ET
| Michaud Jonas returned to the ruins of the Palm Apparel factory to see if he could find his little sister’s body – and, possibly, a job. Hundreds of workers were buried under the rubble of this T-shirt-manufacturing plant in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour, and Jonas’ sister, 22, was one of them. The scent of decay around the neighborhood was overpowering. Yet though he mourned his loss – his brother and mother also died, when the family’s home collapsed – he looked ahead. “Here was the worst place hit, so maybe it’ll be the first place to recover,” he said. “I need to find a job so I can help what’s left of my family. They are depending on me.” |
12 Haiti’s Medical Crisis: Treating Crushed Survivors
By JAY NEWTON-SMALL / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine
Thu Jan 21, 10:35 am ET
| Jean Marc Loremas, 46, carried his niece more than a mile from their home in the La Plaine area of Port-au-Prince to a sparsely populated industrial zone. There he nodded to two foreign guards in olive green fatigues and about a dozen semi-ambulatory earthquake victims already lined up on various pallets, crutches and canes before pounding on a metal sliding gate. “Shalom?” came the response as the eyehole shot back. Loremas explained his needs and soon an Israeli doctor came out to examine niece’s broken femur. |
13 Haiti’s Orphaned Kids: How the Quake Is Speeding Adoptions
By SIOBHAN MORRISSEY / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine
Thu Jan 21, 10:35 am ET
| Dressed in an orange floral pinafore with her hair neatly pulled back into cornrows, 7-year-old Marie Guerline Clerge Bryditzki could serve as the poster child for increased efforts to place Haiti’s orphans in adoptive homes following the devastating earthquake. |
14 Medics Scramble to Save Quake Survivors
By SIOBHAN MORRISSEY / PORT-AU-PRINCE, Time Magazine
Fri Jan 22, 1:10 pm ET
| In his Thomas the Tank Engine buttoned-down shirt, Graddensky LaPlante of Carrefour looked like a typical five-year-old. But two gaping wounds in his scalp that cut clean to his skull and a bandaged right leg easily identified him as one of thousands of earthquake injured “When the earthquake happened, the roof just collapsed on him,” said his father Jean-Robert LaPlante, who had brought the child to the Admiral Killick Naval Base in Carrefour district of Port-au-Prince. |
15 The Coast Guard in Haiti: First Responders, in for the Long Haul
By SIOBHAN MORRISSEY / ON THE U.S.S. TAHOMA OFF HAITI, Time Magazine
Fri Jan 22, 1:10 pm ET
| When the U.S. Coast Guard arrived in Haiti on Day 3 of the Jan. 12 earthquake, they were overwhelmed by people needing medical attention. Their supplies were low and their equipment rudimentary. As first responders to the disaster they had a lot of improvising to do. “The first few days we were taking tree branches and breaking them for splints,” says OS1 James Sweetman, who originally was assigned to help out with security at a makeshift medical clinic at the Admiral Killick Naval Base in the capital’s Carrefour district. “We cut wool blankets for slings and made backboards out of doors.” |
16 The Distant Memories of Haiti Before the Quake
By AMY WILENTZ, Time Magazine
Sat Jan 23, 11:05 am ET
| When I went down to Haiti for the first time in 1986, it was for no good reason. It’s true I had a sneaking suspicion that there was a political crisis there, that the dictator-President Baby Doc Duvalier – was being forced out of power. But at the time, I was not a news rat. I’d read Graham Greene’s dark novel The Comedians, about a hotelier in Haiti under the rule of Duvalier’s brutal father Papa Doc, and it painted a picture of a country both alluring and disturbing – and conveniently nearby! I wanted to see the Tontons Macoute, the Duvaliers’ silent secret police, in their blue jeans, floppy hats and sunglasses, wielding their waistband pistols and billy clubs. I wanted to see chubby Baby Doc and his skinny-scary wife Michele Bennett. I spoke French, but otherwise I was very green as a foreign correspondent. I was both innocent and romantic, and that’s probably why I had the nerve to go there. |
Too Short
- Haiti Earthquake Was the ‘Big One’ Says Top Seismologist
- After the Quake Comes the Disease. Can Haiti Cope?
- Haiti Donations by Text Message: Fundraising Goes Viral
- Haiti Earthquake: Will Criminal Gangs Exploit Chaos?
- Haiti Tries to Dig Out as Corpses Pile Up
- After the Quake: Should Haitian Refugees Be Given Special Status?
- The U.S. Military in Haiti: A Compassionate Invasion
- Haiti’s Earthquake: Are the Death Estimates Accurate?
- Haiti: After the Devastation, the Emotional Wreckage
- Haitians Anxious for U.S. Troops’ Aid in Port-au-Prince
- The Post-Quake Water Crisis: Getting Seawater to the Haitians
- Haiti and the Dominican Republic: A Tale of Two Countries
- Q & A: How to Rebuild Haiti Stronger
- For Taiwan, Helping Haiti Offers Rare Moment on World Stage
- Haiti and China: A Tale of Two Earthquakes
- Haiti: Returning to Work Helps Survivors Deal with Grief
- Haiti’s Signal FM: The Little Radio Station that Could
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Finally.
Bad Characters.
All Time Magazine. All Haiti. All the time.
Who would ever have thought that Popular Mechanics would have a reason to write an article about MSF. Well, they did
How Doctors Without Borders Set Up Field Hospitals in Haiti