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By Megan Rowling
LONDON, England (AlertNet) – The United Nations said on Monday it will provide a $10.2 million rescue package for Haitian farmers, as high prices and food shortages in the wake of this year’s deadly storms threaten to worsen malnutrition.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) – a UN agency that aims to eradicate rural poverty in developing countries – will provide the financing to support more than 240,000 small farmers in Haiti. They will receive agricultural inputs including vegetable and cereal seeds, manioc, sweet potato and banana plants.
In August and September, four tropical storms and hurricanes battered the Caribbean nation, killing more than 800 people and leaving nearly 1 million homeless or in dire need of help. The fierce hurricane season has set back efforts to combat poverty in a country where people were already struggling with a sharp rise in food prices.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that, over the past four years, food prices have increased by an average of 18 percent annually, affecting staples like rice, maize, beans and oil.
Flights carrying Colombian cocaine on rise
By Bryan Bender
KEY WEST, Fla. – The number of flights transporting tons of Colombian cocaine from Venezuela, destined for the United States, has risen sharply, according to US and foreign intelligence reports, presenting a new challenge to drug enforcement authorities at a time when cooperation with the Venezuelan government is at a record low.
In 2007, authorities detected nearly 200 illegal drug flights taking off from Venezuela to interim delivery points on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and in Central America – more than twice as many as 2003, according to the Key West-based headquarters that polices drug trafficking.
“The situation continues to deteriorate,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral Joseph L. Nimmich, commander of the Joint Interagency Task Force-South, said in a recent interview about Venezuela’s emergence as a key source of cocaine trafficking.
Nimmich’s command comprises law enforcement and military personnel, as well as liaison officers from countries across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Most of the drugs heading to the United States were produced in Colombia, which has significantly stepped up its own efforts to crack down on drug traffickers with the help of billions of dollars in US aid and training, according to Nimmich. But Colombian traffickers appear to have found a safe haven in neighboring Venezuela, whose relations with the United States continue to worsen.
The McCain Family
In the rural Teoc community of Carroll County, Miss., where the ancestors of Sen. John McCain owned enslaved Africans on a plantation, black, white and mixed-race family members unite every two years for their Coming Home Reunion, on the land where the plantation operated.
Some of McCain’s black family members say they are not sure exactly where they fall on the family tree, but they do know this: They are either descendants of the McCain family slaves, or of children the McCains fathered with their slaves.
White and black members of the McCain family have met on the plantation several times over the last 15 years, but one invited guest has been conspicuously absent: Sen. John Sidney McCain.
“Why he hasn’t come is anybody’s guess,” said Charles McCain Jr., 60, a distant cousin of John McCain who is black. “I think the best I can come up with, is that he doesn’t have time, or he has just distanced himself, or it doesn’t mean that much to him.”
Other relatives are not as generous.
Lillie McCain, 56, another distant cousin of John McCain who is black, said the Republican presidential nominee is trying to hide his past, and refuses to accept the family’s history.
GONAIVES, Haiti (AFP): UN emergency relief coordinator John Holmes said Friday he is overwhelmed by the damage wrought on this seaside city in the north of Haiti when Hurricane Hanna struck last month.
“It’s depressing and moving to see this,” Holms told AFP after overflying the city, where he is paying a two-day visit to size up the humanitarian response to the summer of disaster. “After six weeks, there is still a lot of water and mud.”
Four big storms — Tropical Storm Fay and hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike — pounded Haiti in August and September, killing a total 793 people and leaving more than 300 others missing, according to government figures.
While in Gonaives, Holmes — a former British ambassador to Paris who is also UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs — toured the hard-hit Praville district and met representatives of UN agencies and non-governmental organizations in Haiti.
He was to meet Haitian President Rene Preval later Friday in the capital Port-au-Prince.
UN agencies issued an appeal in September for 107 millions dollars to cover the cost of humanitarian aid for the next six months, but the World Food Programme is warning that food aid could stop in November if the international community fails to act.
Source: CNN
(Reuters) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled measures on Tuesday to protect jobs and warned companies against unjustified layoffs as evidence mounted that many workers would fall victim to the financial crisis.
News of mass layoffs at household-name French companies from carmaker Renault to mail order retailer La Redoute has put pressure on Sarkozy to match his 360 billion euro ($450 billion) rescue package for banks with a plan to help ordinary people.
Sarkozy promised to ease restrictions on the use of short-term job contracts by small and medium businesses, fund an additional 100,000 subsidised work contracts in next year’s budget, extend the use of subsidised training programmes and make it easier for people to work on Sundays.
“This is the third stage in our global plan to respond to the crisis that France, along with the rest of the world, is facing,” Sarkozy said during a speech at a job centre in the northern town of Rethel, which has a very high jobless rate.
The first two stages were the bank rescue package and measures to help small businesses, announced last week.
With reports of voting problems rife in the media, and instances of vote flipping seen in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas, elections watchdogs are on their toes for any more foul play.
In spite of their activism, 50,000 voters have been lopped off Georgia’s rolls.
CNN’s Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein reported:
College senior Kyla Berry was looking forward to voting in her first presidential election, even carrying her voter registration card in her wallet.
But about two weeks ago, Berry got disturbing news from local election officials.
“This office has received notification from the state of Georgia indicating that you are not a citizen of the United States and therefore, not eligible to vote,” a letter from the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections said.
But Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a passport and a birth certificate to prove it.
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BY DOUG SAUNDERS
LONDON — Our eyes have been fixed in horror on the price of oil, the price of gold, the price of the Canadian dollar, the price of bank shares, the price of our house, the price of credit. Fair enough: These are the yardsticks of the economic crisis, the gauges of the world’s health.
But we ought to keep our eyes on the price of a loaf of bread. This, too, has been fluctuating wildly: The global price soared this spring to almost double what it was a year before, and then plunged over the summer and autumn by 40 per cent, along with most other food prices – proving, in a way we have never seen before, that food is a global commodity, completely linked to petroleum, metal and other tradable goods.
We’re aware of this, usually in a marginal way, when we go to the supermarket or look at our weekly spending, but its connection to the larger crisis is elusive.
We might know, on some level, that the world’s billion very poor people, who often spend up to 90 per cent of their household budget on food when it’s expensive, are dramatically affected by these undulating prices. Earlier this year, there were pasta protests in Italy, baguette uprisings in France and full-scale food riots in Haiti and Cameroon.
But what does it have to do with the price of a loaf of bitumen? In other words, why have food prices come to track oil prices?
Britain's Ministry of Defence
LONDON (AFP) — Britain’s Ministry of Defence on Monday made public its secret files on UFO sightings, with the dossier including a range of reports from a close encounter with a UFO over Kent and a letter from a woman claiming to be an alien warrior.
The 19 different incidents were recorded between 1986 and 1992, and published on the National Archives website.
Among the recorded incidents was a letter dated March 1990 from a woman who claimed she was an alien whose spaceship had landed during World War II and was recovered by the military.
“The crashed vehicle contained two males from Spectra, a planet orbiting the star Zeta Tucanae, and a female from one of the two inhabited planets in the Sirius system, Amazon the planet of warrior women,” she wrote in the letter, which also included sketches of herself and of Spectrans.
“That female was me,” she wrote.
Though the letter did not spark an investigation, another report from an Alitalia pilot did.
By Mike Thomson
More than six weeks after the fourth cyclone in three weeks hit Haiti the relief operation has almost ground to a halt according to a major aid organisation there.
Nearly 800 people died in the four storms that ravaged Haiti this year
Max Cosci, spokesperson for Medicins Sans Frontieres in Haiti, says that a mixture of red tape and a failure to properly coordinate the work of different aid agencies is to blame.
“There are a lot of organisations, especially NGOs and humanitarian organisations, international or national and there is not a clear coordination among them” he says.
Mr Cosci is particularly concerned about the lack of progress in helping the people of the badly hit town of Gonaives.
“The streets are full of mud, the houses are still destroyed. People are living on their roofs. If you went there you would say, oh my God, the cyclone was yesterday – not a month or five weeks ago.”
No coordination
At least 800 people are known to have been killed in the storms, the last of which hit Haiti in early September. Many people are still missing and hundreds of thousands are still homeless.
GOP made a foodstamp with obama in it with bucket of chicken. some ribs. kool aide and watermelon. It looks like its goin to get uglier as we get closer to election.
Source: YouTube.Com
