The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: haiti
Jose Andres

Chef Andrés Mobilizing Relief For Ida And Afghan Evacuees

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

World-famous chef and humanitarian José Andrés says that his World Central Kitchen organization has three kitchens set up in Louisiana and is prepared to distribute 100,000 meals in Ida's aftermath. The hurricane—one of the strongest to ever hit the mainland U.S.—has left more than one million residents without power.

"Tomorrow morning as soon as it is safe our teams will go out, will start making meals, will start delivering to the different places that will be in need to do that," the chef told CNN on Sunday evening. "But more important: we need to be planning ahead, not only for days, but for weeks." The chef said a focus of World Central Kitchen would be to ensure both residents in New Orleans and across the state are fed.

A tweet from World Central Kitchen early Sunday morning showed relief workers and volunteers preparing hundreds of sandwiches at the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute. "Entering the storm with more supplies," replied Kyle Pounders, chef and owner of Excaliburger in Arkansas. That same morning, José Andrés said that "after the storm passes, we can do what we always do: go to other cities and very quickly fire up the kitchens that we have in position there."

The chef traveled to New Orleans following humanitarian efforts in Haiti, where an Aug. 14 earthquake killed 2,000 people and left thousands more homeless. "WCK's roots began in Haiti in 2010," the group's website said. "In January of that year, the country was hit with an absolutely devastating earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people—and a decade later communities in Haiti are still recovering."

Much of that sentence could have easily have been written today, as the nation struggles to recover from both political instability following President Jovenel Moïse's assassination in July, and the 7.2 earthquake last month. "With a team already in Haiti, additional WCK relief workers began arriving in the country the day after the quake," the Miami Herald reports. A kitchen set up in Les Cayes has been feeding more than 10,000 people daily. The report said the organization hopes to soon double that number.

"This is really tough; it's tough in a different way than from the 2010 earthquake, which caused such massive devastation in Port-au-Prince," World Central Kitchen CEO Nate Mook told the Miami Herald. "Here, the impact is spread so far out in these rural communities that are very hard to reach with small pockets of people in need … But we are going to be here as long as we're needed."

World Central Kitchen has also been providing meals to newly arrived Afghan refugees at Dulles Airport in Virginia. Mook told WJLA on Friday that some refugees evacuated from Afghanistan haven't eaten for as long as two days. "It's a very long journey as they've gone from a number of bases, getting processed and then finally arriving at Dulles Airport," he said in the report. In a tweet, José Andrés said that "[w]hat's happening in Afghanistan breaks my heart … but the outpouring of support from people across America helps glue it back."

‘Fair And Balanced’ Wallace Parroted Lies About Clinton Foundation

‘Fair And Balanced’ Wallace Parroted Lies About Clinton Foundation

While many news organizations and websites checked the utterances of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in real time and after their final debate on Wednesday night — finding her more accurate than him by an order of magnitude — nobody checked moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel.

That was unfortunate because despite his widely praised performance, Wallace badly needed fact checking (and perhaps a slap upside the head) concerning several of his pat assumptions — and most of all, a challenging assertion he made about the Clinton Foundation:

Secretary Clinton, during your 2009 Senate confirmation hearing, you promised to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest with your dealing with the Clinton Foundation while you were Secretary of State. But emails show that donors got special access to you, those seeking grants for Haiti relief were considered separately from non-donors, and some of those donors got contracts – government contracts, taxpayer money. Can you really say that you kept your pledge to that Senate committee and why isn’t what happened and what went on between you and the Clinton Foundation, why isn’t what Mr. Trump calls “pay to play”?

Nearly everything the Fox anchor said in framing that question was wrong.

There is no evidence that Clinton Foundation donors “got special access” to her at the State Department, as the debunking of the Associated Press “big story” on that subject proved. Nor is there any evidence that “donors seeking grants for Haiti were considered separately from non-donors.? And his claim that “some of those donors got contracts – government contracts, taxpayer money” is likewise damning but incorrect.

To understand the context for Wallace’s false charge, it is useful to know what Bill Clinton was doing in Haiti both before and after the 2010 earthquake, a story I recount in Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton. The short version is that in 2009, the United Nations asked him to serve as the Secretary-General’s special envoy to Haiti, an exceptionally poor country that had already suffered gravely from devastating hurricanes.

Immediately after the January 2010 earthquake, Clinton agreed to take on another post as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, working with the Haitian government and international donors. (He did so against the advice of his top aides.) The Clinton Global Initiative was very active in Haiti by then as well.

So in the aftermath of the earthquake, it was not surprising that State Department officials who knew about his deep involvement in Haiti would pay close attention to his friends and associates, several of whom were already working on projects there. Those relationships are reflected in the emails that formed the basis of sensational false charges, spread by the Republican National Committee — and for Wallace’s question.

Contrary to the RNC press release, the notion that any Friend of Bill (or Hillary) got “taxpayer money” because they had donated to the Clinton Foundation is entirely untrue. When Mike Pence made the same accusations, using far more inflammatory language, both Politifact and Factcheck.org investigated the claims — and both found Pence’s assertions to be false.

The truth is simpler and somewhat more uplifting: Several Clinton friends, mentioned in State Department email traffic, participated robustly in the post-earthquake relief effort. Among them was Denis O’Brien, a billionaire telecom entrepreneur whose contributions included $10 million to rebuild the iconic Iron Market in Port-au-Prince; another was Rolando Gonzalez Bunster, an executive who spent an untold amount to help restore electric power to the beleaguered island. Neither of them received a dime in “taxpayer money” and to date there is no evidence that any other Clinton friend or donor did, either.

So contrary to Mike Pence, there was no “pay to play” in Haiti. For Pence to lie about the Clinton Foundation is unsurprising; this was not the first time and it probably won’t be the last. He and his sources at the RNC perpetrated a vile slur on decent people who sought to help relieve human suffering.

Now Pence is clearly deficient in both conscience and intelligence. (So is the RNC leadership.) But Wallace should know better and do better. He ought to correct himself and apologize.

Meanwhile, the efforts of the Clinton Foundation, its allies, and the Clinton Global Intitiative’s Haiti Action Network will continue. Because that’s what they do.

How The U.S. and U.N. Created A Major Cholera Outbreak In Haiti

How The U.S. and U.N. Created A Major Cholera Outbreak In Haiti

Scientists say the warming of the ocean due to human-made climate change has intensified mega-storms like Hurricane Matthew, which recently tore through the Caribbean and parts of the United States, killing more than 1,000 people in Haiti alone, according to some estimates.

Now, with 1.4 million Haitians in need of emergency assistance, Haiti is bracing for another human-made disaster: a resurgence of its cholera outbreak, which dates to the aftermath of the catastrophic 2010 earthquake.

It took six years for the United Nations to publicly acknowledge what the scientific community has long known: the cholera epidemic was introduced to Haiti by U.N. peacekeepers, originating at one of the global organization’s camps in the upper Artibonite River valley, and from there, spreading through the country’s crumbling water system. The global failure to swiftly acknowledge the source of the outbreak and take aggressive action to eradicate it, has left the country vulnerable to the new uptick in infections.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said last week that it expects “an important upsurge in cholera cases in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew, given the context of flooding and the storm’s impact on water and sanitation infrastructure.”

“Water and sanitary conditions are expected to worsen due to the effects of Hurricane Matthew,” said Ciro Ugarte, the head of PAHO’s Program on Health Emergencies. “Efforts were already being directed to control the current epidemic of cholera and the high levels of vector-borne and water-borne diseases, but there is a limited capacity to respond to those challenges.”

Dominique Legros, cholera expert for the World Health Organization, told reporters Tuesday that there have been roughly 200 new cases after Hurricane Matthew. “It is more than usual. I know it is a sharp increase compared to [the] usual figures,” he said.

While cholera is preventable and easily treated under the right conditions, it has torn a devastating path through Haiti. Since October 2010, there have been more than 790,000 reported cases, and more than 9,300 people have been killed by the disease, according to PAHO. At its worst point in 2011, the epidemic was infecting 6,766 people every week. While cases continue, they have declined significantly, from 300,000 in 2011 to roughly 36,000 in 2015.

An expert panel convened by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon concluded in a 2011 report that cholera spread from a U.N. peacekeepers camp in the upper Artibonite River valley to the Meye Tributary system, which is used by “tens of thousands” of people for “washing, bathing, drinking and recreation.” Poor sanitation infrastructure caused human waste to contaminate the river system, leading to Haiti’s first cholera case in more than 100 years.

Numerous other scientific studies also pointed toward the role of the peacekeepers. Julianna LeMieux, senior fellow in molecular biology at the American Council on Science and Health, recently wrote, “The scientific community has known for years that the U.N. brought cholera to Haiti.”

Yet it was not until six years after the U.N. report came out—in August 2016—that the global institution made a nod to responsibility for its role in spreading the outbreak in Haiti, with spokesperson Farhan Haq proclaiming that “the U.N. has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera.”

This statement fell short of a full apology for the years that the U.N. spent denying its role in introducing the outbreak. Meanwhile, the U.N. continues to fight legal efforts by Haitian victims to win restitution, claiming immunity from a complaint filed on behalf of 5,000 victims of cholera. According to the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, the victims are demanding that the United Nations, “Install a national water and sanitation system that will control the epidemic; compensate individual victims of cholera for their losses; and issue a public apology from the United Nations for its wrongful acts.”

Dan Beeton, international communications director for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told AlterNet that the new wave of cholera infections could have been avoided “had there been a serious effort to eradicate cholera. What we’ve seen since the epidemic started six years ago is a focus on treatment during the rainy season when infections go up, but during the dry season people back off, so the epidemic remains.”

In a prescient warning, CEPR researchers Jake Johnston and Keane Bhatt wrote in 2011 that “health interventions launched to fight cholera have been hobbled by the initial missteps made in the wake of the epidemic. The international community underestimated the virulence of the outbreak; the U.N. initially denied responsibility for its introduction; and there was hesitation in investigating the circumstances surrounding its appearance.”  At the same time, the U.N.-backed National Plan for the Elimination of Cholera in Haiti, 2013-2022, remains woefully under-funded, with the medium-term plan only 22 percent pledged and under 11 percent disbursed.

Some U.S. lawmakers are directing criticism toward the U.N., with 158 members of Congress who wrote a letter to John Kerry in June calling on the State Department to “immediately and unreservedly exercise its leadership to ensure that the United Nations take concrete steps to eliminate the cholera epidemic introduced to Haiti in 2010 by waste from a U.N. peacekeeper camp, and to comply with its legal and moral obligations to provide cholera victims with access to an effective remedy.”

However, this finger-pointing deflects from the central role that the U.S. played in setting the stage for the post-earthquake crisis, by undermining efforts to improve the country’s public water infrastructure. A paper published 2013 by the journal of the National Institutes of Health found that “Haiti has the lowest rates of access to improved water and sanitation infrastructure in the western hemisphere. This situation was likely exacerbated by the earthquake in 2010 and also contributed to the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic that started later that same year.”

The U.S. government bears responsibility for keeping Haiti’s water system in a state of disrepair. According to a report released in 2008 by Partners In Health, Zanmi Lasante, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center, the U.S. government clandestinely undermined a $54 million loan granted in 1998 by the Inter-American Development Bank to the Haitian government to improve its outdated water system. According to the report, the U.S. was motivated by the desire to destabilize Haiti’s elected government under then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

However, the report notes that the root causes date back further. “Continual requirements to pay its debilitating debts—which date back to its early days of independence, when Haiti was essentially forced to purchase its freedom from the French for an exorbitant sum, and which has further amassed during two centuries of political turmoil, foreign occupation, and corruption—have left the Haitian government unable to funnel its limited resources into social infrastructure programs like water and sanitation systems, with catastrophic effects on the health and well-being of the Haitian people,” the report states.

Reprinted by permission from Alternet. Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, she coedited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.

IMAGE: People are treated at a cholera treatment center at a hospital after Hurricane Matthew passed through Jeremie, Haiti, October 11, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia 

Hurricane Matthew Closing In On Florida As Haiti Death Toll Rises

Hurricane Matthew Closing In On Florida As Haiti Death Toll Rises

ORLANDO, Fla./MIAMI (Reuters) – Matthew, the first major hurricane threatening a direct hit on the United States in more than 10 years, closed in on Florida on Thursday night after killing at least 283 people in Haiti on its destructive march north through the Caribbean.

Carrying extremely dangerous winds of 140 mph (220 kph), the storm pounded the northwestern part of the Bahamas en route to Florida’s Atlantic coast, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Matthew’s top sustained winds had dropped to 130 mph by Thursday night. But it remained a Category 4 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity as it neared Florida, where it could either plow inland or tear along the Atlantic coast through Friday night, the Miami-based center said.

Few storms with winds as powerful as Matthew’s have struck Florida, and the NHC warned of “potentially disastrous impacts.” The U.S. National Weather Service said the storm could be the most powerful to strike northeast Florida in 118 years.

Hurricane conditions were expected in parts of Florida late on Thursday or early on Friday and a dangerous storm surge was expected to reach up to 11 feet (3.35 meters) along the Florida coast, Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the Miami-based NHC, said on CNN.

“What we know is that most of the lives lost in hurricanes is due to storm surge,” he said.

Some 283 people were killed in Haiti, local officials said, and thousands were displaced after the storm flattened homes, uprooted trees and inundated neighborhoods earlier in the week. Four people were killed in the Dominican Republic, which neighbors Haiti.

Damage and potential casualties in the Bahamas were still unclear as the storm passed near the capital, Nassau, on Thursday and then out over the western end of Grand Bahama Island.

It was too soon to predict where Matthew might do the most of its damage in the United States, but the NHC’s hurricane warning extended up the Atlantic coast from southern Florida through Georgia and into South Carolina. More than 12 million people in the United States were under hurricane watches and warnings, according to the Weather Channel.

The last major hurricane, classified as a storm bearing sustained winds of more than 110 mph (177 kph), to make landfall on U.S. shores was Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

Jeff Masters, a veteran hurricane expert, said on his Weather Underground website (www.wunderground.com) that Matthew’s wind threat was especially serious at Cape Canaveral, which juts into the Atlantic off central Florida.

“If Matthew does make landfall along the Florida coast, this would be the most likely spot for it. Billions of dollars of facilities and equipment are at risk at Kennedy Space Center and nearby bases, which have never before experienced a major hurricane,” Masters wrote.

NASA and the U.S. Air Force, which operate the nation’s primary space launch site at Cape Canaveral, have already taken steps to safeguard personnel and equipment.

A team of 116 employees was bunkered down inside Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Control Center to ride out the hurricane.

“We’ve had some close calls, but as far as I know it’s the first time we’ve had the threat of a direct hit,” NASA spokesman George Diller said by email from the hurricane bunker.

Roads in Florida, Georgia and North and South Carolina were jammed, and gas stations and food stores ran out of supplies as the storm approached early on Thursday.

Florida Governor Rick Scott warned there could be “catastrophic” damage if Matthew slammed directly into the state and urged some 1.5 million people there to evacuate.

“If you’re reluctant to evacuate, just think about all the people … already killed,” Scott said at a news conference. “Time is running out. This is clearly either going to have a direct hit or come right along the coast.”

Scott, who activated several thousand National Guard troops to help deal with the storm, warned that millions of people were likely to be left without power.

Florida, Georgia and South Carolina opened shelters for evacuees. As of Thursday morning, more than 3,000 people were being housed in 60 shelters in Florida, Scott said.

Those three states as well as North Carolina declared states of emergency, empowering their governors to mobilize the National Guard.

President Barack Obama called the governors of the four states on Thursday to discuss preparations for the storm. He declared a state of emergency in Florida and South Carolina, a move that authorized federal agencies to coordinate disaster relief efforts.

“Hurricane Matthew is as serious as it gets. Listen to local officials, prepare, take care of each other,” Obama warned people in the path of the storm in a posting on Twitter.

Hundreds of passenger flights were canceled in south Florida, and cancellations were expected to spread north in coming days along the storm’s path, airlines including American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines said.

At 8 p.m. EDT, Matthew was about 75 miles east of Florida’s West Palm Beach, the hurricane center said. It was heading northwest at about 13 mph and was expected to continue on this track through Thursday and early Friday.

In Florida, fuel stations on Thursday afternoon posted “out of gas” signs after cars waited in long lines to fill up. At a Subco gas station in Orlando, the pumps had run dry on Wednesday.

The shop was a stopping point for coastal residents seeking shelter inland. Among them was Jonas Sylvan, 44, of Melbourne, Florida, who planned to hole up in a hotel with his wife, two daughters and dog. “We’re just trying to get away from the coast,” he said. “It’s safer here.”

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee, Neil Hartnell in Nassau, Rich McKay in Atlanta, Nick Carey in Chicago, Harriet McLeod in Charleston, S.C., Doina Chiacu in Washington, Joseph Guyler Delva in Haiti, Irene Klotz and Laila Kearney; Writing by Frances Kerry and Tom Brown; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Peter Cooney)

IMAGE: Drivers make their way on an empty highway prior to the arrival of Hurricane Matthew in Miami Beach, Florida, U.S. October 6, 2016.  REUTERS/Javier Galeano