Stephen Lendman

Cholera cripples Haiti, two years after quake: A woman
suffering cholera symptoms is pushed in a wheelbarrow
to a hospital Wednesday in the Cite Soleil slum in Port-
au-Prince. (Ramon Espinosa / Associated Press)

Life in Devastated Haiti
Post-Quake Haiti: One Year Later
Misery and Despair Plague Haitians
Haiti's Cholera Epidemic Sparks Outrage
Haitian Suffering Under Imperial Occupation
Haiti's Cholera Outbreak: A Disease of Poverty
Haiti's Cholera Epidemic: Mounting Illnesses and Deaths, Inadequate Aid

On January 12, 2010, Haiti experienced a calamitous earthquake. Port-au-Prince was devastated. Property destruction and damage were extensive. As many as 300,000 or more died. Many others were injured. Impoverished Haitians enduring crushing hardships lost everything, including loved ones. Two years later, relief efforts belie unaddressed human needs.

A January 11 AFP article headlined, "Haiti quake victims stuck in a time warp," saying:

Port-au-Prince suburb Petionville symbolizes conditions. Around "2,500 people subsist in a crowded public park near open ditches flowing with human waste, a grim scene frozen in time two years after Haiti's earthquake disaster."

Homeless, half-clothed, barefoot children "chase a worn football across a filthy clearing, past puddles of putrid waste water."

Over half a million survivors endure appalling conditions in hundreds of makeshift camps. They remain homeless, struggling to survive.

Billions in promised aid never came. Grandiose visions proved pipe-dreams. Most rubble remains. Reconstruction is inadequate to meet enormous needs.

"The problems facing Haiti are vast, if not insurmountable, in the short term." Hundreds of thousands who lost everything live in legal limbo. Cholera's devastating thousands. Culpable UN Blue Helmets won't accept blame.

Understated reports show 7,000 deaths and over half a million infected. True figures may be double or more. UN Haiti chief humanitarian officer said:

"What we are looking at in Haiti is not just recovery from the earthquake. It's not just dealing with a cholera epidemic. Those came on top of a country which was structurally broken" by neglect, persecution, and exploitive US dominance.

One victim told AFP, "My hope is God, not the leaders of this country" who've done pathetically little to help.

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Nicole Valentini

Just after a few weeks after a bloody attack on Hazaras in Kabul and within new diplomatic dialogue between the Obama regime and the Taliban, the Norwegian authorities have decided to deport a young Hazara asylum seeker back to a perilous situation.

M. Mozamil Azimi is an eighteen year old Hazara boy, his home country is in the midst of an international crisis and public interest , ongoing now for more than a decade. This country is called Afghanistan, and one of the worst places in the world in which to be born according to Save the Children Fund. It is also a country with the lowest rate of human/economic development according to the United Nations.

Mozamil was underage when he chose to leave his country with the purpose to go to the other side of the world. To live in a part of the world in which the possibilities to live a peaceful and satisfying life are the same for everyone. After more than a year of travel, getting through eight states, risking life several times and suffering every kind of violence and harassment, he reached his destination: Norway, one of the most developed and democratic countries in the world. For two years Mozamil has been locked up in a refugee centre without the possibility to learn the language or to receive adequate protection, even if this would be a universal right of every child. His request for international protection under the Refugee Convention of the UN has been rejected for two times in Norway because his life has not been considered in danger enough to be granted refugee status. Good sense and morality would suggest that a young boy that risks his own life to flee from a country at war devastated by ethnic conflict should be worthy of protection, but unfortunately good sense doesn’t makes the law. What the objective criteria that has allowed the rejection of his request is not clear. Also his ethnic affiliation should guarantee a greater attention to his case regarding the Refugee Convention protecting the rights of minority groups.

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John Pilger

Photo: Funeral Pyres | Bathing at the temple stairs in Varanasi is believed to be decisive for salvation from the burden of reincarnation, as it is considered to be the most holy city in Hinduism. Leftovers from the funeral pyres are thrown into the sacred river, and those who cannot afford the ceremony often dump the bodies of the deceased directly into the water.

When the early morning fog rises and drifting skeins from wood fires carry the sweet smell of India, the joggers arrive in Lodi Gardens. Past the tomb of Mohammed Shah, the 15th century Munghal ruler, across a landscape manicured in the 1930s by Lady Willingdon, wife of the governor-general, recently acquired trainers stride out from ample figures in smart saris and white cotton dhotis. In Delhi, the middle classes do as they do everywhere, though here there is no middle. By mid-morning, children descend like starlings. They wear pressed blazers, like those of an English prep school. There are games and art and botany classes. When shepherded out through Lady Willingdon's elegant stone gateway, they pass a reed-thin boy, prostrate beside the traffic and his pile of peanuts, coins clenched in his hand.

When I was first sent to report India, I seldom raised my eyes to the gothic edifices and facades of the British Raj. All life was at dust and pavement level and, once the shock had eased, I learned to admire the sheer imagination and wit of people who survived the cities, let alone the countryside -- the dabbawallahs (literally "person with a box"), cleaners, runners, street barbers, poets, assorted Fagans and children with their piles of peanuts. In Calcutta, as it was still known during the 1971 war with Pakistan, civil defence units in soup-plate helmets and lungis toured the streets announcing an air-raid warning practice during which, they said, "everybody must stay indoors and remain in the face-down position until the siren has ceased to operate". Waves of mocking laughter greeted them, together with the cry: "But we have no doors to stay inside!"

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Paul Craig Roberts

Only the blind do not see that the US government is preparing to attack Iran. According to Professor Michel Chossudovsky, “Active war preparations directed against Iran (with the involvement of Israel and NATO) were initiated in May 2003.”

Washington has deployed missiles directed at Iran in its oil emirate puppet states, Oman and the UAE, and little doubt in the other US puppet states in the Middle East. Washington has beefed up Saudi Arabia’s jet fighter force. Most recently, Washington has deployed 9,000 US troops to Israel to participate in “war games” designed to test the US/Israeli air defense system. As Iran represents no threat unless attacked, Washington’s war preparations signal Washington’s intention to attack Iran.

Another signal that Washington has a new war on its agenda is the raised level of Washington’s rhetoric and demonization of Iran. Judging by polls Washington’s propaganda that Iran is threatening the US by developing a nuclear weapon has met with success. Half of the American public support a military attack on Iran in order to
prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capability. Those of us who are trying to awaken our fellow citizens start from a deficit that the minds of half of the US population are under Big Brother’s control.

As the International Atomic Energy Agency’s reports from its inspectors on the ground in Iran have made clear for years, there is no evidence that Iran has diverted any enriched uranium from its nuclear energy program. The shrill hype coming from Washington and from the neoconservative media is groundless. it is the same level of lie as Washington’s claim that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Every US soldier who died in that war died in behalf of a lie.

It could not be more obvious that Washington’s war preparations against Iran have nothing to do with deterring Iran from a nuclear weapon. So, what are the war preparations about?

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