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Haiti

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — A devastating earthquake struck Haiti late Tuesday afternoon, causing the collapse of the National Palace, leveling countless shantytown dwellings and bringing even more suffering to a nation that was already the hemisphere’s poorest and most disaster-prone.




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Post a Comment »The earthquake, the worst in the region in more than 200 years, left the country in a shambles. As night fell in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, fires burned near the shoreline downtown, but otherwise the city fell into darkness. The electricity was out, telephones were not working and relief workers struggled to make their way through streets blocked by rubble.

In the chaos, it was not possible for officials to determine how many people had been killed and injured, but they warned that the casualties could be substantial.

The physical toll was easier to assess. The headquarters of the United Nations mission collapsed, the United Nations said in a statement, and many employees were missing.

“The main building that was the headquarters building has collapsed,” Alain Le Roy, the chief of U.N. peacekeeping forces said in New York. “We know there will be casualties but we cannot give figures for the time being,” The Associated Press quoted him as saying.

A hospital collapsed in Pétionville, a hillside district in Port-au-Prince that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians, a videographer for The Associated Press said. And an American government official reported seeing houses that had tumbled into a ravine.

Tequila Minsky, a photographer based in New York who was in Port-au-Prince, said that a wall at the front of the Hotel Oloffson had fallen, killing a passer-by. A number of nearby buildings had crumbled, trapping people, she said, and a Unibank bank building was badly damaged. People were screaming.

“It was general mayhem,” Ms. Minksy said.

The earthquake, with a magnitude estimated at 7.0, struck just before 5 p.m. about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, the United States Geological Survey said. Many aftershocks followed and more were expected, said David Wald, a Geological Survey seismologist.

“The main issue here will probably be shaking,” he said, “and this is an area that is particularly vulnerable in terms of construction practice, and with a high population density. There could be a high number of casualties.”

Oxfam, the antipoverty group, said that Kristie van de Wetering, a former employee based in Port-au-Prince, had described houses in rubble everywhere.

“There is a blanket of dust rising from the valley south of the capital,” agency officials said Ms. van de Wetering had told them. “We can hear people calling for help from every corner. The aftershocks are ongoing and making people very nervous.”

The earthquake could be felt across the border in the Dominican Republic, on the eastern part of the island of Hispaniola. High-rise buildings in the capital, Santo Domingo, shook and sent people streaming down stairways into the streets, fearing that the tremor could intensify.

Haiti sits on a large fault that has caused catastrophic quakes in the past, but this one was described as among the most powerful to hit the region. With many poor residents living in tin-roof shacks that sit precariously on steep ravines and with much of the construction in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in the country of questionable quality, the expectation was that the quake caused major damage to buildings and significant loss of life.

Haiti’s many man-made woes — its dire poverty, political infighting and proclivity for insurrection — have been exacerbated repeatedly by natural disasters. At the end of 2008, four hurricanes flooded whole towns, knocked out bridges and left a destitute population in even more desperate conditions.

The United States and other countries have devoted significant humanitarian support to Haiti, financing a large United Nations peacekeeping mission that has recently reported major gains in controlling crime. International aid has also supported an array of organizations aimed at raising the country’s dismal health and education levels.

Emergency meetings were being held in Washington, and President Obama issued a statement saying that administration officials were closely monitoring the situation.

“We stand ready to assist the people of Haiti,” Mr. Obama said.

The Caribbean is not usually considered a seismic danger zone, but earthquakes have struck here in the past.

“There’s a history of large, devastating earthquakes,” said Paul Mann, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, “but they’re separated by hundreds of years.” Most of Haiti lies on the Gonave microplate, a sliver of the earth’s crust between the much larger North American plate to the north and the Caribbean plate to the south. The earthquake on Tuesday occurred when what appears to be part of the southern fault zone broke and slid.

The fault is similar in structure to the San Andreas fault that slices through California, Dr. Mann said.

Such earthquakes, which are called strike-slip, tend to be shallow and produce violent shaking at the surface.

“They can be very devastating, especially when there are cities nearby,” Dr. Mann said.

Victor Tsai, a seismologist at the National Earthquake Information Center of the United States Geological Survey, said the depth of Tuesday’s earthquake was only about six miles and the quake was a 9 on a 1-to-10 scale that measures ground shaking. “We expect substantial damage from this event,” he said.

Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, said in an interview on CNN that he had little information about the extent of damage but said the suffering inflicted on the was likely to be “catastrophic.”

Mr. Joseph said that the one official he had reached — identified by The Associated Press as President Rene Preval’s chief of staff, Fritz Longchamp — told him that houses had crumbled “on the right side of the street and the left side of the street.”

Elsie St. Louis-Accilien, the director of the Haitian Americans United for Progress in Queens, N.Y., said that she was able to reach the director of Ofatma hospital, in Port-au-Prince. “They are trapped inside,” Ms. St. Louis-Accilien said in a telephone interview. “They were pretty shaken, but they were relieved to be alive.”

She said that the director said that there was “a lot of smoke, a lot of dust,” and that her phone has been ringing nonstop. “People are calling me, elected officials are calling, asking what we can do.”

Iran

'Iran will find assassins who killed nuclear scientist'
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:19:33 GMT
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An Iranian cabinet meeting
The Iranian cabinet has condemned the assassination of a nuclear scientist in Tehran and declared that the Islamic Republic is determined to arrest the culprits behind the terrorist attack.

"In line with the president's decree, intelligence and security bodies are using all their capabilities to identify and arrest those behind the crime and to reveal their foreign supporters to world public opinion," IRNA quoted the cabinet as saying in a statement issued on Tuesday, referring to a decree issued by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

An Iranian nuclear physicist was killed by a remote-controlled bomb attack in the Iranian capital on Tuesday.

Dr. Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, a lecturer at the University of Tehran and a staunch supporter of the Islamic Revolution, was killed when a booby-trapped motorbike exploded.

The professor was killed in front of his home in the Qeytariyeh neighborhood in northern Tehran.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that Iran has found traces of US and Israeli involvement in the assassination of Massoud Ali-Mohammadi.

NBC/Conan

Conan O'Brien's manager says statement not about points or strategy
January 12, 2010 | 5:52 pm
Conan O'Brien's statement to the "people of Earth" about his thoughts on being asked to move "The Tonight Show" to 12:05 a.m. so NBC can put Jay Leno back at 11:35 p.m. was not a negotiating ploy, according to his manager.

"This came from the heart," said Gavin Polone, the veteran producer and manager who is responding to calls about O'Brien's missive, in which the host wrote NBC has not given him a chance to establish himself at "The Tonight Show" and that he is the victim of the network's prime-time woes.

"It's him expressing his feelings; there is nothing else behind it," Polone said, adding, "it's not about strategy and contracts." That won't stop people from reading O'Brien's statement to NBC as him saying he won't quit "The Tonight Show" but he won't play ball if it moves to 12:05 a.m., either of which would force NBC into firing him. NBC is declining to comment on his statement.

Regardless of how this all plays out, it is the latest in a series of public relations misfires for NBC. The network was caught by surprise last week when its plans to move Leno back to late night and bump O'Brien were leaked and today it also didn't know what to say in response to O'Brien's remarks.


While O'Brien notes that he was only given seven months to prove himself in late night, so far this season he trails CBS's "Late Show With David Letterman" by 65% in viewers. The shows are tied in the key 18-49 demographic, but O'Brien has squandered a 15% lead in that group that Leno left him.
O'Brien supporters argue that Leno struggled for almost two years against Letterman before passing him in the ratings. Of course, the media landscape has changed dramatically since the mid-1990s and for better or for worse, networks just don't have that kind of patience anymore. If they did, NBC would stand tall behind Leno in prime time instead of deciding to end that show less than four months after its premiere.

Some NBC affiliates agree that one can't blame O'Brien alone for the performance of "The Tonight Show."

“It’s difficult to point your finger at 'The Tonight Show’ and say it is doing well or poorly,” said Ray Heacox, president of NBC affiliate KING-TV Seattle. NBC’s prime time is struggling and that hurts late news, which then hurts O’Brien. “It is tough to separate what is cause and what is effect.” Heacock thinks “the best of all worlds is to get them all to play happily together because that would be the best possible lineup.”

That may be wishful thinking.

-- Joe Flint

Aubade wrote:CBH

The shows are tied in the key 18-49 demographic, but O'Brien has squandered a 15% lead in that group that Leno left him.