Miguel County Sheriff's Office)
Abuse charges filed after 2 girls found dead on Colorado farm
HAITIANS INVOLVED
Five adults are behind bars after authorities found the bodies of two children in what they are calling a shocking case of child abuse.
The girls were between the ages of 5 and 10 and they were found dead Friday on a farm in rural southwestern Colorado. Investigators say they believe the girls were killed at least two weeks ago.
“In my 37 years as Sheriff, I have never seen anything as cruel and heartless as this,” San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters said.
A tip led deputies to the farm in Norwood, population 500. The town is about 35 miles west of the ski resort town of Telluride.
“This is a small, tight-knit community and understandably this kind of crime has sent shockwaves through it,” Susan Lilly, a spokeswoman for Masters, told Fox News.
Nashika Bramble surrendered to cops Saturday.
Authorities arrested the other four adults Friday. They were identified as Frederick Blair, 23, of Norwood, Madani Ceus, 37, of Haiti, Ika Edne, 53, of Jamaica and Nathan Yah, 50, of Haiti.
Lilly wouldn’t say if Ceus, Edne or Yah were in the country illegaly. She said they recently moved to the area, according to The Associated Press.
Bramble and the others have been charged with felony child abuse causing death.
Authorities weren’t saying how the girls were killed.
San Miguel County coroner Emil Sante told Fox News on Sunday that autopsy results are pending.
He said believes the girls were related and that they were related to one of the accused.
Sante said the bodies of the two girls were badly decomposed.
New US Charge d’Affaires meets President Moïse
Chargé d’Affaires Robin Diallo pays a courtesy call on President Jovenel Moise to discuss the broad range of U.S. – Haiti partnerships. The occasion gave the United States to confirm to Haiti that we stand by Haiti as Hurricane Irma approaches.
Lawmakers will ask Trump to extend TPS to Caribbean nations
WASHINGTON
A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Miami Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, are urging President Donald Trump to allow people in the United States but from Caribbean countries hit by Hurricane Irma to stay here for a temporary period.
Ros-Lehtinen, along with New York Democrat Eliot Engel and California Democrat Barbara Lee are circulating a letter to colleagues in Congress over the weekend asking them to support extending what’s known as Temporary Protected States to affected countries, including the Dominican Republic and Antigua and Barbuda.
On Monday, they will send the letter to Trump.
“While Congress and the Administration work to provide relief for those affected by devastation from Irma in our own country, we must also support our friends in the Caribbean,” the draft letter, obtained by Miami Herald, said. “As the storm moves away from the first-impacted islands, the casualty toll is slowly rising as deaths have been reported in Barbuda and Saint Martin. The economies of the affected areas have been completely destroyed and will take years to rebuild.”
Haiti: Hurricane Irma destroys a hundred houses
Express.fr with AFP
The eye of the hurricane skirted the Haitian coast last Friday. At least two people were hurt but there were no reported deaths, according to preliminary report estimates.
Its arrival was dreaded by the authorities and the population.
Nevertheless, the category 5 hurricane that decreased to a category 4, still brought strong floods, and destroyed about a hundred houses.
Irma caused a storm surge in the northeast of the island, where strong winds peeled off roofs, according to the disaster and emergency services. It also caused two people to be injured after a coconut tree fell on their home in a locality near Cap-Haïtien.
Waters levels rose of 30 centimeters in the municipality of Ouanaminthe, on the border with the Dominican Republic.
"The considerable deforestation" could have provoked landslides, explained Emile Martin to L’Express. Martin is in charge of emergencies for Care France. “Fortunately nothing of this kind was recorded. For once Haiti was fortunate!”
Barbuda declared uninhabitable after the passage of Hurricane Irma
The island underwent tremendous devastation with 95 percent of its homes destroyed or damaged.
Certain houses were totally demolished with destroyed roofs. The island is currently under water, and its public utilities have also been compromised.
Prime Minister Gaston Browne toured the island following Hurricane Irma and saw firsthand the damage the island experienced.
During an interview on Facebook Live, Browne declared that the island is practically uninhabitable because there is no water, electricity, or telecommunications.
He said that it would cost more than 150 million Euros to rebuild the island, and that the process will take years.
He declared that after having estimated the damage, the 1,800 people living on the island could be welcomed by relatives in Antigua, or for those who couldn’t, the government should rent private buildings. Sixty percent of the island’s residents are homeless, he revealed.
Browne praised the hurricane preparations in Antigua, which resulted in minimal damage. He said he wanted to cry when he saw the destruction in Barbuda. After noticing how much Antigua had been spared, he never thought there would be such a contrast.
"It was terrifying,” he said.
Browne’s visit of the island revealed a destroyed cellular tower. He reported that an emergency radio and a satellite radio were also destroyed during the storm.
The U.S. could learn a lot from Cuba about preparing for hurricanes
How can a small island in the Caribbean, with few resources, undertake the challenge of protecting its population from extreme weather conditions better than some of the richest countries?
Cuba is the largest and most populated island in the Caribbean yet it consistently experiences the lowest death tolls during hurricane season. According to the United Nations, it's not because Cubans are lucky but because they're prepared. According to Oxfam, from 1996-2002, only 16 people were killed by the six hurricanes that struck Cuba.
Cuba has a world-class meteorological institute, with 15 provincial offices. They share data with US scientists and project storm tracks. Around 72 hours before a storm’s predicted landfall, national media issue alerts while civil protection committees check evacuation plans and shelters. Hurricane awareness is taught in schools and there are practice drills for the public before each hurricane season.
State run television and the civil defense authority broadcast to the population with information and instructions about what measures to take. Each residential block has a person assigned to take a census on who is being evacuated to which shelter, with special attention paid to the elderly, and pregnant women, and as efforts are organized locally, compliance is increased.
Gail Reed is the editor-in-chief of Medic Review, a peer review publication that evaluates health and medicine in Latin America, the Caribbean and other developing countries. She is also a journalist who has lived more than thirty years in Cuba. She provided an overview of Cuba’s successful strategy for hurricane preparation.
"Hurricanes warn you several days in advance", explained Reed. “The Cuban government gives seven days of warning during which communities have multiple opportunities to get ready for the worst.”
Above all, Reed explained, "Cuba puts an enormous accent on the education of the population "to guarantee the safety of communities and families, in particular the most vulnerable.
"A taxi driver can tell you that it is a category 5 hurricane, and he will give you a complete conference on what to do to get ready," she explained.
The journalist also found that today Cuba speaks less of evacuation but concentrates rather on "protection," which includes the strengthening of a "local school" capable of welcoming the local communities and their pets.
She said that contrary to the populations of Texas and Louisiana affected by Hurricane Harvey, who have to ask for a federal help, the Cubans, in spite of their inferior economic resources, do not feel abandoned "come what may", nor subjected to excessive market prices for essential goods, as what people experienced in Texas recently.
The "low losses in lives and property" in Cuba, underlined Reed, are generally significantly less than what we saw in important disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey. And the reason is this level of preparation, said Reed.
According to Reed, the Cuban approach for a prevention policy demonstrates a thoughtful vision of the pure power of nature and the impact of climate change. The U.S. philosophy of help in case of disaster, on the other hand, is more of a reflection afterward which does not recognize human weaknesses.
Reed recalled how, in 2005, Cuba, which underwent more than half a century of U.S. economic blockade, offered to send 1,500 medical professionals from the “Henry Reeves” Brigade to help the population of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. However, former president George W. Bush quickly rejected the offer.
Information from Wikepedia contributed to this report
Irma mostly spared Haiti. But for struggling farmers, the damages are devastating
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
SAINT-LOUIS-DU-NORD, HAITI
The morning after Hurricane Irma skirted Haiti’s northern coast, Artis Esperance walked his farm land and tried to salvage what the menacing Category 5 storm — and thieves — hadn’t already claimed.
For the second time in 11 months, Mother Nature had dealt a crippling blow to Haiti. Last year, it was the slow-moving and powerful Hurricane Matthew, which made landfall on Haiti’s southern tip. It wiped out farms and livestock in the southwest and Grand’Anse and here in the northwest with its 145-mph winds and heavy rains.
Now, a record-breaking Irma, en route to the Turks and Caicos and Bahamas before turning toward Florida, had blown away what little produce he and other farmers in the region had managed to grow.
“This storm didn’t even leave one tree with food on it for us to eat,” said an exasperated Esperance, 41, holding a rusty machete in one hand and an overripe breadfruit in the other, not far from one of his farms. “This has taken food out of the mouths of my children.”
Though Haiti was spared a direct hit from Irma and the fallout is nowhere near the magnitude of Matthew’s 546 dead and $2.8 billion in washed-out roads, collapsed bridges and destroyed crops, the frustration and fears for some in its path are no less.
“We didn’t have people who died, but homes and farms were destroyed,” Esperance said. “Just because you don’t see a lot of damages, it doesn’t mean that we haven’t been left deeper in misery.”
The northwest, which was already one of the poorest regions of the poverty-stricken country along with the northeast, was overlooked after Matthew, with attention focused more on the harder-hit Grand’Anse and southwest regions. Northwest farmers, left to fend for themselves, struggled to rebuild, replanting banana, avocado and yam crops to make ends meet.
Then came the worst storm ever recorded in the Atlantic. Irma flooded northern villages from as far west as Môle-Saint-Nicolas to as far east as Ounaminthe on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border. In between, it ripped off roofs, damaged roads and cut off connections between major cities and farming communities.
“If this hurricane had come with a lot of rain, a good amount of people here would be dead,” said Neckson Joseph, 21, a motorcycle taxi driver. “There wasn’t a lot of rain, but there was this strong wind. We had this kitchen outside, covered with aluminum. It didn’t even leave a beam standing.”
Joseph was among scores of storm survivors standing near the banks of a swollen Rivière des Barres in Saint-Louis-du-Nord, a coastal village east of Port-de-Paix, the capital of the northwest. The rising river connects the northwest to the north. Seven communities in the northeast still remained flooded days after Irma’s passage.
Joseph said Irma had felled banana trees, thrown breadfruit and avocados to the ground and swallowed homes along the coast. It also left the coastal villages of Anse-à-Foleur and Côte-de-Fer, and Borgne in the mountains, inundated and cut off from Saint-Louis-du-Nord and Port-de-Paix. The storm also washed out the parts of the road that leads to Jean-Rabel and Môle-Saint-Nicolas in the far west.
“If you really want to see what this storm did, just go walk through the rural outskirts,” Joseph said pointing to the rural inlands on the other side of the Rivière des Barres.
But much closer than that, just west of the Riviere des Barres in Trois Rivières at the entrance of Port-de-Paix, entire banana fields lay in ruin, barely matured plantains strewn on the ground.
“We don’t have any farm,” Camelia Ambroz, 70, said as she and her husband, Charite Almeus, 78, tried to salvage what they could as they walked through soggy, fallen banana branches. “It took everything.”
The couple, who work the land for someone else, said the crops were new, planted shortly after Matthew destroyed the last crop, and had only needed two more months to mature.
“When you’re poor and you don’t have anything,” Almeus said, “this is what allows you to live. But what can you do? It’s God’s work and you have to accept it.”
Fritz Jean, an economist who was appointed as prime minister last year but forced to step down after parliament refused to ratify his governance plan for the country, said the vicious cycle of disaster upon disaster in Haiti is making Haitians poorer — and not just farmers.
In the case of farmers, it is leading to “uncertainty in regard to the agricultural production cycle,” he said. “The peasant knows less and less when to sow [and] less and less land becomes available.”
On Friday, when Irma’s red alert — Haiti’s highest level of threat — was finally lifted and a contingent of U.N. Brazilian peacekeepers, making the 200-mile trek from Port-au-Prince, rolled into the northwest, the non-profit group Action Against Hunger warned that a fair amount of the population living in the five regions affected by Irma will feel the impact.
The damages will be extremely difficult for vulnerable, small-scaled farmers in the northwest, the group said.