Tag: Haiti

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – Mad Hatters and Tea Parties

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

Steve Sack

Steve Sack, Comics.com

Haiti: Ripples

Conditions are improving, slowly, steadily, 3 weeks after the earthquake but we have a really long way to go. The rainy season is coming in a other month and there is a need to provide shelter and sanitation needs that must be addressed quickly.

After enduring delays in receiving urgent medical supplies and equipment, as well as continuous aftershocks that threatened already-damaged facilities, MSF staff are now treating patients inside an inflatable hospital.

Originally the plan was to keep the Inflatable Hospital open for 3 months. It was then extended to 6 months, now, the plan is to keep it open indefinitely and expand it from 100 beds to 200 beds by adding 4 more sections to the already existing 9.

Now cross posted at The Wild Wild Left

Limited “humanitarian parole” for earthquaked Haitians.

The concept of “humanitarian parole” strikes me as emblematically American, albeit excessively witty.   Does it mean that a person is emancipated and discharged of being Human or Haitian?  Parole certainly suggests, if not exactly prior guilt, e.g., Original sin, at least some form of previous incarceration or imprisonment.  Most likely, it means that Haitians are provisionally granted the status of humans on the grounds that their captors have humanitarian sentiments towards the beasts.  Who knows.  Like I said, excessively witty.

In any case, it seems few Haitians are granted this esteemed status.

MIAMI – The United States has suspended its medical evacuations of critically injured Haitian earthquake victims until a dispute over who will pay for their care is settled, military officials said Friday…

Only 34 people have been given humanitarian parole for medical reasons, said Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. The National Disaster Medical System, if activated, would cover the costs of caring for patients regardless of their legal status.

I hope they at least have ankle bracelets.

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – In Corporations We Trust

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::



John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Buy this cartoon

Overnight Caption Contest

Time Magazine on Haiti

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.

OTW:: Gauze Not Guns, Haiti Relief

OTW = Off The Wall, this being the third of a series.

MSF

The entrance of Choscal Hospital, in Cite Soleil, which houses one of the ten operating theaters MSF has established in Haiti since the earthquake hit. source MSF

With Haiti Earthquake stories falling off the top headlines, except for stories of US Governors taking in 53 orphans and such, my heart and mind is with the Haitian people and our own MomCat who continues her work there with MSF.  CNN and NPR have had some of the best coverage, as have several other of the non-mainstream and online sources. MSF’s own press releases are some of the most informative. (There’s also have a Facebook group, and Twitter of course).  I’ll share some info and excerpts from Democracy Now below the crease.

15 Minutes




Watch CBS News Videos Online

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

Today, Americans are engrossed in earthquake coverage.  The tremor in Haiti bought unimaginable death and destruction just south of our borders.  Events related to the recovery and rescues emerge as banner headlines.  Haitians Seek Solace Amid the Ruins. For a week now, the struggle to survive, revive the injured, and retrieve the bodies strewn on the streets of Port-au-Prince was also the central theme of most every broadcast.  In the midst of the misery, many Americans, felt desperate for a reprieve from the devastation that emotionally drained them. Millions took time to escape in a welcome distraction.  Sassy, former Governor and Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin Made Her Debut appearance on Fox.  Tomorrow another reality will replace these stories, just as each superseded the hoopla over Harry Reid’s reference to race.  Metaphorically, the tales provide persons, policies, and, or practices fifteen minutes of fame.  In actuality, these  fade from our mind quickly.  

Shake, Rattle and Operate (Up Dated)

From MSF

Photobucket

Haiti: Treatment Continues Through Powerful Aftershock

On Wednesday morning, as Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams in Haiti continued to work through long queues of patients waiting for treatment and surgery, the country was shaken anew by a powerful aftershock. In Choscal hospital, where MSF has been running two operating theaters, patients were so alarmed by the tremors that they had to be relocated into tents outside the building. The surgeons stayed in the hospital, however, rotating in regular shifts, performing one operation after another.

In the week since the January 12 earthquake, MSF has established 10 operating theaters in the battered country. Seven are in Port-au-Prince hospitals-Choscal, Trinité, Carrefour and Chancerelle-and three others are outside the capital, in the towns of Leogane and Jacmel. Overall, MSF surgical teams have been carrying out an average of 130 operations per day. Simultaneously, logisticians are racing to find new facilities or rehabilitate damaged ones. Additional operating theaters are being prepared in Leogane and Grand Goave, west of the capitol, and inside Port-au-Prince, where a team expects to complete the construction of an inflatable hospital with two operating theaters by Friday.

Cross posted at The Wild Wild Left

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – Sarah Palin’s Brilliant FOX Debut

Crossposted from Daily Kos.  I didn’t have the time yesterday to post it here.

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

The Teabaggers’ Intellectual

Clay Bennett

Clay Bennett, Comics.com

Call It Democracy: Haiti Open Thread

Padded with power here they come

International loan sharks backed by the guns

Of market hungry military profiteers

Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared

With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality

Who render rage a necessity

By turning countries into labor camps

Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument

Who makes the gun into a sacrament

The only response to the deification

Of tyranny by so-called “developed” nations’

Idolatry of ideology

North South East West

Kill the best and buy the rest

It’s just spend a buck to make a buck

You don’t really give a flying fuck

About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF

Takes away everything it can get

Always making certain that there’s one thing left

Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders

Passing themselves off as leaders

Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows

Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy

And they call it democracy

And they call it democracy

And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too

Trying to make the best of it the way kids do

One day you’re going to rise from your habitual feast

To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast

They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF

Takes away everything it can get

Always making certain that there’s one thing left

Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt


Haiti: US Profiting From Disaster With Conditional Aid?

As aid trickles into Haiti and news trickles out, and as the extent of the horror unfolding there following the earthquake becomes more widely known, decisions are already being made that will affect the kind of country surviving Haitians will live in that emerges from the disaster.

In this video from The Real News today independendent journalist Ansel Herz reports live from Port-Au-Prince on the role that the deployed US troops are playing, while author Peter Hallward weighs in on the role that the US has played in Haiti’s recent history and shares his concerns that post-earthquake Haiti will further cement the domination of the Haitian people by foreigners.



Real News Network – January 19, 2010

Transcript here


Haiti: Guns or food?

Presence of US troops provides both hope of relief, and fear of continuing legacy of US domination

Ansel Herz is an independent journalist and web designer originally from the United States but currently based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. His personal website can be found at www.mediahacker.com.

Peter Hallward is a Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in England. In 2007 he published the acclaimed historical account of post-1990 Haitian politics, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. He is the editor of the journal Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

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