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Haiti quake survivors cry for help as death toll nears 2,000

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Survivors of the earthquake that killed at least 1,941 people in Haiti clamored for food, shelter and medical care on Tuesday as search and rescue efforts resumed after a tropical storm lashed the Caribbean nation with rain, causing dangerous flooding.

Quake damage to several major hospitals hampered humanitarian efforts, and doctors in makeshift tents outside battled to save the lives of the many injured, including young children and the elderly. But they could not help them all, Reuters reported. 

“There weren’t enough doctors and now she’s dead,” said Lanette Nuel, sitting listlessly next to her daughter’s body outside the main hospital of Les Cayes, one of the towns worst hit by both the tremor and the storm’s heavy rains and winds.

The 26-year-old deceased woman, herself a mother of two, had been crushed by debris during the magnitude 7.2 quake. Now she lay under a white sheet on the floor.

“We came in yesterday afternoon, she died this morning. I can’t do anything,” her mother said.

Saturday’s quake knocked down tens of thousands of buildings in the poorest country in the Americas, which is still recovering from a temblor 11 years ago that killed over 200,000 people. Aside from the dead, the latest quake also injured at least 9,915, with many people still missing or under the rubble, the civil protection service said on Tuesday afternoon, Reuters reported. 

Relief efforts were already complicated due to political turmoil and difficult road access from the capital to the south due to gang control of key points. Flash flooding and landslides in the wake of Tropical Storm Grace, which by Tuesday afternoon had continued on past Jamaica, exacerbated the situation.

“Countless Haitian families who have lost everything due to the earthquake are now living literally with their feet in the water due to the flooding,” said Bruno Maes, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) representative in the country.

“Right now, about half a million Haitian children have limited or no access to shelter, safe water, healthcare and nutrition.”

The United Nations said it had allocated $8 million in emergency funds to provide relief for affected people, Reuters reported. 

Latin America countries including Venezuela, Chile, Mexico, Panama, Colombia and the neighboring Dominican Republic sent food, medicine and supplies. The United States also dispatched supplies and search and rescue teams.

Although criminal gangs have been blocking access roads for months, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs said “successful negotiations” had made it possible for a convoy to reach Les Cayes.

The hospital in Les Cayes, about 150 km west of the capital Port-au-Prince, was even more overwhelmed on Tuesday than before as patients who had been camping outside moved indoors to escape the tropical storm.

Director Peterson Gede said medics were doing the best they could. “We couldn’t handle all the patients,” he said. “And we have been receiving supplies, but it’s not enough.”

At a tent city in Les Cayes containing many children and babies, over a hundred people scrambled to repair makeshift coverings made of wooden poles and tarps that were destroyed by Grace overnight. Some took cover under plastic sheets.

Mathieu Jameson, deputy head of the committee formed by the tent city residents, said hundreds of people there were in urgent need of food, shelter and medical care.

“We don’t have a doctor. We don’t have food. Every morning more people are arriving. We have no bathroom, no place to sleep. We need food, we need more umbrellas,” said Jameson, adding the tent city was still waiting for government aid.

Haiti’s latest natural disaster comes just over a month after the country was plunged into political turmoil by the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday it was too early to gauge the impact of the quake on Haiti’s political process and that the United States, the country’s main donor, had no current plans to deploy its military there.

Rescue workers have been digging alongside residents through the rubble in a bid to reach survivors. 

On Tuesday morning 16 people were recovered alive alongside nine dead, Haitian civil protection authorities said.

But hopes were fading, and a smell of dust and decomposing bodies permeated the air, Reuters reported. 

“We came from all over to help: from the north, from Port-au Prince, from everywhere,” said Maria Fleurant, a firefighter from northern Haiti.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who was sworn in less then a month ago after Moise’s assassination, vowed to disburse humanitarian aid better than in the wake of the 2010 quake.

Though billions of dollars in aid poured into Haiti after that quake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, many Haitians say they saw scant benefits from the uncoordinated efforts: government bodies remained weak, amid persistent shortages of food and basic goods.

“The earthquake is a great misfortune that happens to us in the middle of the hurricane season,” Henry told reporters. He said the government would not repeat “the same things” done in 2010.

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Japan allocates nearly $20 million in humanitarian aid for Afghanistan

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The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.

In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.

According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.

The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.

Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.

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Afghan border forces prevent illegal entry of hundreds into Iran

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Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.

Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.

Meanwhile, some sources said that a group of 70 people who were heading to Iran on Wednesday through areas of Kohsan district became stranded amid cold weather and snowfall, resulting in the deaths of two of them.

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US pauses green card lottery program after Brown University shooting

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President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.

Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.

Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.

The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.

Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.

Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.

Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.

While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.

 

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