The Midmorning Refill: Haiti still needs our help; and Nobel, shmo-bel
Today’s Flickr Photo
If you read one thing today . . .
It’s appropriate that on Columbus Day we turn our attention to one of the islands in the New World that the explorer “discovered.” Bill Quigley’s article in Truthout is a stark reminder that nine months after the earthquake in Haiti, there are more than a million people still living on the streets, many of them dying from starvation. Quigley writes:
There is no food. The children are terribly hungry. The food aid program was terminated in April and nothing took its place. The authorities cut off the food so people would leave the camps, but where is there to go?
Water is hard to find. For the people in Petion park, water is delivered by truck to a central site a block or two away in the middle of several camps. Thousands of people line up twice a day to get water before it runs out. In another camp we visited Sunday, Camp Kasim, there was no water at all for hundreds of families and none scheduled to be delivered until Monday at the earliest. Boys and girls surged around a pipe several blocks away trying to capture some water in Oxfam marked buckets.
Overheard:
Sen. Richard Shelby on why he is blocking the nomination of economist Peter Diamond to join the board of the Federal Reserve (That’s the same Peter Diamond who today won the Nobel Prize in economics):
“I do not believe he’s ready to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board,” Shelby said, “I do not believe that the current environment of uncertainty would benefit from monetary policy decisions made by board members who are learning on the job.”