Tag: Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Bank payback plan faces failure as Iceland votes

by Marc Preel, AFP

45 mins ago

REYKJAVIK (AFP) – Icelanders headed to the polls in drizzling rain Saturday in a referendum set to reject a bank repayment deal worth billions that many here consider a foreign diktat, but a “nei” vote is expected to plunge the country deeper into crisis.

“I will vote ‘no’ simply because I disagree very strongly with us… having to shoulder this burden” from the 2008 collapse of the online Icesave bank, Ingimar Gudmundsson, a 57-year-old truck driver, told AFP.

The issue is whether Iceland should honour an agreement to repay Britain and the Netherlands 3.9 billion euros (5.3 billion dollars).

Go Vikings!

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Now with 30 Top Stories.

(Off to work on my early evening update for Olympic Alternatives VI.  I’ll try to get back to this when I have a chance.)

Update Complete.  Now on Late Evening Update.

40 Top Story Final.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 AP finds all Baptist group’s ‘orphans’ had parents

By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press Writer

Sun Feb 21, 8:24 am ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Although a U.S. Baptist group said it was trying to rescue 33 “orphans” by taking them out of earthquake-ravaged Haiti, all the children have close family still alive, The Associated Press has found.

A reporter’s visit Saturday to the rubble-strewn Citron slum, where 13 of the children lived, led to their parents, all of whom said they turned their youngsters over to the missionary group voluntarily in hopes of getting them to safety.

Similar explanations were given by parents in the mountain town of Callabas, outside Port-au-Prince, who told the AP on Feb. 3 that desperation and blind faith led them to hand over 20 children to the Baptist group.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Haitians return to find family as commercial flights restart

by M.J. Smith, AFP

Fri Feb 19, 4:00 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Haitians arrived Friday on the first commercial flight into their country since last month’s earthquake, desperately hoping to find family members alive and their homes still standing.

“I want to see my wife,” said Jean Felix as he waited to board the plane before takeoff in Miami.

“She’s living in the street and she’s told me by phone that we lost everything… I’m going there with my heart broken.”

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Now with 36 Top Stories.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Emotional gatherings mark one month since Haiti quake

by Andrew Beatty and M.J. Smith, AFP

Fri Feb 12, 10:23 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Haitians gathered at tearful ceremonies in sprawling homeless camps, churches and alleyways to mark one month since a huge quake shattered their country and killed more than 200,000 people.

President Rene Preval, who has rarely appeared in public since the January 12 disaster, spoke emotionally in memory of the victims on Friday, declaring Haiti “will not die” and acknowledging he could not find words to express his pain.

Throughout Port-au-Prince and beyond, Haitians dressed in white or their Sunday best raised their hands in prayer at countless ceremonies, many in camps where more than a million people now live after losing their homes.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Early Puppy Bowl VI Edition

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 US vows to stay course as Haiti battles hunger

by Andrew Beatty, AFP

Sat Feb 6, 4:15 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – The battle-stretched US military Saturday vowed to help Haiti as long as needed, as the Caribbean nation struggles to feed up to a million people left destitute by a huge quake.

Colonel Gregory Kane, the US Joint Task Force Haiti operations officer, said US involvement in the earthquake-shattered country would last as long as their presence was required.

But he said military operations could end as little as 45 days after they began in the aftermath of the January 12 quake.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Bill Clinton apologizes for slow Haiti aid effort

by Andrew Beatty

Fri Feb 5, 10:11 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Former US president Bill Clinton pledged to try to get aid flowing as he was met by angry Haitians protesting the slow arrival of help since last month’s quake.

Clinton said he was sorry that the aid efforts had been so slow, adding he also wanted to understand why more than three weeks after the January 12 quake supplies were still not getting through to desperate Haitians.

“I’m sorry it’s taken this long,” Clinton said, adding he and other relief workers were working hard to ease the suffering.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Now with World News and Time Magazine Haiti Supplement.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 US airlift halt sparks fears for Haiti victims

by Alex Ogle, AFP

Sat Jan 30, 6:55 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Haiti’s injured earthquake victims suffered a potentially deadly setback Saturday after the US military suspended evacuation flights because of a dispute over medical care costs.

Flights that have carried more than 500 people with spinal injuries, burns and other wounds ended Wednesday after the governor of Florida asked the government to share the financial burden on his state’s hospitals.

“Apparently, some states were unwilling to accept the entry of Haitian patients for follow-on critical care,” US Transportation Command spokesman Captain Kevin Aandahl told AFP.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Haiti faces long, difficult road to recovery

By Patricia Zengerle, Reuters

Sat Jan 30, 10:52 am ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – Haiti’s leaders can point to progress since a powerful earthquake devastated the country but just surviving the first weeks’ chaos, hunger and overwhelming loss may be the easiest part of a long recovery.

Since the January 12 catastrophe killed up to 200,000 people and left around 1 million homeless in the nation of 9 million, authorities and aid workers have cleared tens of thousands of bodies from the rubble, provided water supplies for makeshift refugee camps and developed a system of food distribution.

Some police are back in the streets, schools in unaffected areas will open on Monday, communications are working and some businesses have reopened their doors.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Between Games Edition.

Colts 30 – 17.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Bulldozers move into Haiti capital as victims pray

by Jordi Zamora and Charles Onians, AFP

2 hrs 35 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Thousands of Haitian voices rose in prayer from ruined churches Sunday, as recovery teams began to bulldoze the capital’s devastated centre and a French ship carrying supplies arrived.

Twelve days after a catastrophic earthquake razed much of the city, hundreds of thousands of Haitians remained in desperate need of food, water and shelter, despite a large-scale US military intervention and UN-run aid program.

In Port-au-Prince, morning prayers and song gave way to apocalyptic scenes as earthmovers cleared downtown rubble, spewing rotting corpses into the streets and opening new routes for looters to swarm through the ruins.

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.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Haiti calls off search for trapped quake victims

by Clarens Renois, AFP

2 hrs 21 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Haiti officially abandoned earthquake search and rescue efforts on Saturday as survivors gathered in a ruined cathedral to mourn the country’s archbishop and 110,000 other victims of the disaster.

The government’s decision came despite the rescue on Friday of two people who spent 10 days buried in the rubble, but officials said it was aimed at letting aid workers focus on getting supplies to hundreds of thousands of people.

The United Nations warned meanwhile that Haiti’s upcoming rainy season — a source of other disasters that have plagued the country in recent years — could pose a new threat to beleaguered survivors of the 7.0-magnitude quake.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Haiti tensions mount amid scramble for last survivors

by Deborah Pasmantier, AFP

42 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Rescuers pulled three survivors from the rubble Sunday five days after the Haiti earthquake, but tensions were growing among a desperate population as police opened fire on looters, killing one man.

After hours of painstaking digging through the ruins, a team from Florida unearthed a seven-year-old girl, a man aged 34 and a 50-year-old woman in the ruins of a store as dawn broke in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Later hundreds of rioters ransacked Hyppolite market in the heart of the devastated city as survivors besieged hospitals and make-shift field clinics, some carrying the injured on their backs or on carts.

Load more