On Surfari Haiti from Russell Brownley on Vimeo.
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Christopher Columbus is on the move again in the New World, after numerous rejections in a nearly two-decade quest to find him a suitable spot, the Associated Press reports. A towering statue of the explorer -- twice the height of the Statue of Liberty without its pedestal and shunned by several U.S. cities -- might be erected on Puerto Rico's north coast.
It would be the tallest structure in the U.S. Caribbean territory. The chosen spot is near the coastal town of Arecibo, José González, administrator of Holland Group Ports Investments, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "It already was inspected by the artist and approved by him," González said. He declined to identify the specific location. Although the site has been chosen, several permits must be approved before the project can go forward, Gonzalez said, declining further comment.
It was unclear who picked the site and authorized the statue's move. González's company runs the port where the colossal statue is stored. Arecibo Mayor Lemuel Soto did not return calls for comment.
The statue was created by Zurab Tsereteli, a controversial Russian sculptor. The nearly 300-foot (90-meter) bronze creation shows Columbus at the wheel of a tiny ship with three billowing sails behind him. It weighs 660 tons (599 metric tons). Tsereteli built it in 1991 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' 1492 arrival in the Western Hemisphere. It was given to Puerto Rico as a gift after New York, Miami, Baltimore and other cities refused to accept, for reasons ranging from cost to appearance. The Baltimore Sun called it "From Russia with Ugh."
After arriving in Puerto Rico, the statue drew more criticism. Some people said the arms are too long, the head too small and the one-handed greeting pose silly. The original plan was to erect the statue in Cataño, a suburb of San Juan. But residents protested because the plan called for demolishing several dozen homes to make room for it, and problems arose with airplane flight paths.
The statue was then proposed for Mayagüez, but an appropriate location was never found. It has been in storage there for two years, said González, whose company runs the Mayaguez port. Puerto Rico's government has estimated it would cost more than $20 million to assemble the statue's 2,750 pieces.
For the original Associated Press report go to http://www.google.com/
Image above: "The Inflatable Head of Columbus," 2006, parodies a failed Christopher Columbus monument in Puerto Rico. The statue, designed by Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli, was rejected by several U.S. cities before arriving in Cataño, Puerto Rico, costing the towns millions of dollars in shipping alone. However, finances collapsed, the Mayor of Cataño (Edwin "el Amolao" Sierra) resigned for psychological reasons and the controversial project was never erected. Today, Columbus lies fragmented in thousands of pieces of bronze, deteriorating in an outdoor lot next to the Bacardi Factory in Cataño. The only recognizable feature of the statue had been the giant Head. To commemorate the 500-year anniversary of the Death of Christopher Columbus (May 20, 2006), Miguel Luciano installed an inflatable replica in the Plaza Colón (Columbus Plaza) of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photo from http://www.vvork.com/index.
Image below: Model for Tsereteli's work from http://www.vanderkrogt.net/
Reposted from Repeating Islands: URL:http://wp.me/psnTa-4Oy |
Haïti, une traversée littéraire [Haiti, a Literary Voyage] is a new book by Louis- Philippe Dalembert and Lyonel Trouillot (Éditions Philippe Rey/Culturesfrance, Paris, 2010).
Description: Haiti is not only the country where "Négritude stood up for the first time," in the words of Aimé Césaire. The former French colony of Saint Domingue, which became independent in 1804, has since maintained an extraordinary flourishing of literary creation. Thus, from d'Anténor Firmin (De l'égalité des races humaines) to Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Amour, Colère, Folie), along with Jean-Price Mars (Ainsi parla l'oncle) and Jacques Roumain (Gouverneurs de la rosée), the dynamism of this literature is well documented. Today, it is written in both languages of the country, French and Creole, in Haiti as well as in its diaspora. French publishing houses tout, for example, the works of Georges Castera , Dany Laferrière , Yanick Lahens , Gary Victor, Kettly March, Edwidge Danticat, Evelyne Trouillot, and many others. Haïti, une traversée littéraire presents a journey through this literature as it was created, is created, and distributed today. An anthology of selected texts by Louis -Philippe Dalembert and Lyonel Trouillot, an audio CD, and a sound archive, complete the literary journey. The audio CD includes the voices of René Depestre, Frankétienne, Emile Ollivier, the sound archives of INA plus an excerpt from "Pierrot le Noir" by Jean -Richard Laforest, Émile Ollivier, and Anthony Phelps.
The anthology was published with the collaboration of Yves Chemla, teacher, researcher, and author of La Question de l'Autre dans le roman haïtien contemporain (Ibis Rouge éditions, 2003).
Image via Wikipedia
Louis- Philippe Dalembert is a writer. Besides Port- au-Prince, he has lived in, Nancy, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, Florence, and now, in Berlin. He has published numerous books of various genres including novel, short story, poetry, and essay. His most recent previous publication isRoman de Cuba (The Rock, 2009).
Lyonel Trouillot is a writer, poet, journalist, and professor of literature. Living in the Haitian capital and having spent part of his childhood and adolescence in the United States, he has also published extensively, including six novels. His latest novel is Yanvalou pour Charlie(2009).
The entire proceeds from the sale of this book will go towards rebuilding the National Library of Haiti, in partnership with the NGO "Library without Borders."
For more information (in French), see http://www.culturesfrance.com/
Representatives of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) based in Haiti and the Dominican Republic have reached agreement on the preparation of a binational project that will focus on the border region. The initiative will center on transboundary diseases that limit trade in agricultural products; the promotion of agribusinesses for generational change in the countryside; and agricultural technology to cope with climate change.
IICA and FAO have been laying the groundwork for this partnership for several months. During a recent meeting on the future of Haiti, held in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, IICA officials met with the Assistant Director General of FAO for Latin America, José Graziano da Silva. It was decided that the two institutions would work together on the design and implementation of projects in both countries, in areas that could contribute to agricultural development, especially along their common border.
The four representatives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are Alfredo Mena and Manuel Sánchez, respectively, and their FAO counterparts Ari Toubo Ibrahim and Deep Ford. In a meeting in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, held on July 21, they discussed projects of mutual interest in the two neighboring countries, especially rural communities. The final version of the proposal is expected to be ready in September. Their respective organizations, IICA and FAO, also formalized a partnership to coordinate their actions in the agricultural sector in the two countries.
For full article, see http://www.caribbeannetnews.
Reposted from Repeating Islands
The online whistle-blowing organisation Wikileaks has made public more than 90,000 reports, detailing the war in Afghanistan. The documents, extracts of which were published by the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, expose the unseen side to the Afghan war.
The New York Times writes on how these secret documents show a bleaker view of the war.
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.
The documents -- some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 -- illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.
As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.
The material comes to light as Congress and the public grow increasingly skeptical of the deepening involvement in Afghanistan and its chances for success as next year's deadline to begin withdrawing troops looms.
The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.
The reports -- usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives -- shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 -- a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives -- work from a "capture/kill list" of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.
• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone's weaponry.
• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan's spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.
Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements -- attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.
White House officials vigorously denied that the Obama administration had presented a misleading portrait of the war in Afghanistan.
"On Dec. 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on Al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years," said Gen. James L. Jones, White House national security adviser, in a statement released Sunday.
"We know that serious challenges lie ahead, but if Afghanistan is permitted to slide backwards, we will again face a threat from violent extremist groups like Al Qaeda who will have more space to plot and train," the statement said.
General Jones also decried the decision by WikiLeaks to make the documents public, saying that the United States "strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.""
"WikiLeaks made no effort to contact us about these documents - the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted," General Jones said.
The archive is clearly an incomplete record of the war. It is missing many references to seminal events and does not include more highly classified information. The documents also do not cover events in 2010, when the influx of more troops into Afghanistan began and a new counterinsurgency strategy took hold.
They suggest that the military's internal assessments of the prospects for winning over the Afghan public, especially in the early days, were often optimistic, even naïve.
There are fleeting -- even taunting -- reminders of how the war began in the occasional references to the elusive Osama bin Laden. In some reports he is said to be attending meetings in Quetta, Pakistan. His money man is said to be flying from Iran to North Korea to buy weapons. Mr. bin Laden has supposedly ordered a suicide attack against the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. These reports all seem secondhand at best.
The reports portray a resilient, canny insurgency that has bled American forces through a war of small cuts. The insurgents set the war's pace, usually fighting on ground of their own choosing and then slipping away.
Sabotage and trickery have been weapons every bit as potent as small arms, mortars or suicide bombers. So has Taliban intimidation of Afghan officials and civilians -- applied with pinpoint pressure through threats, charm, violence, money, religious fervor and populist appeals.
This article was written and reported by C. J. Chivers, Carlotta Gall, Andrew W. Lehren, Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, and Eric Schmitt, with contributions from Jacob Harris and Alan McLean.
Read more
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?hp
www.wikileaks.org
Deep in the ravine amid the narrow corridors and chaotic construction, workers in T-shirts push wheelbarrows up and down a newly carved dirt path as rubble-filled buckets are passed in a human chain. At the top of the steep hill, a clear view of the crumbled presidential palace and near-collapsed capital emerge as empty lots replace mounds of rubble.
]]>For two months, Haitian President René Préval has been quietly laying the foundation for his quake-wrecked nation's rebuilding, transforming Fort National, a densely populated slum, into ground zero of Haiti's recovery efforts. Often criticized for inaction, Préval has personally dispatched government top loaders and bulldozers to some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, asked international aid agencies to send displaced residents to clean up their own streets, and sat with neighborhood leaders and camp dwellers to determine their needs. ``Temporary shelters are not the solution,'' Préval told The Miami Herald this week. ``There just isn't enough space. They are a solution to help people get from underneath tents. But they are not a housing solution. We have to build up.''
A little more than six months after the worst natural disaster in the Western Hemisphere, reconstruction remains slow: Just 275,000 of an estimated 20 million cubic meters of rubble have been removed. But Préval said he's working on a three-prong reconstruction plan that includes using government heavy equipment to allow many of the estimated 1.5 million displaced quake victims to return to their neighborhoods, and having the government construct affordable multi-story apartments. At the same time, he's pushing an innovative plan to redevelop downtown from the waterfront to the Champ de Mars with the help of Central Bank financing, and by using rubble to extend the Port-au-Prince harbor.
The Central Bank would use $150 million to build about two dozen modern buildings. The buildings would be leased to the state, and be part of a new administrative and financial district that includes hotels, apartment complexes, 15 government ministries, the palace of justice, and parliament. The proposals are expected to go before the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission when it meets next month.
The initiatives come as many here speculate on who Préval will tap as his successor, Haiti struggles to get the United States and other donors to make good on $5.3 billion in promised aid, and U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, once more blasts Préval over his leadership in a report released Thursday. ``I don't have flashy leadership,'' he said. ``I have a leadership that is tranquil.''
For now, the progress of his efforts can be seen in Fort National, where government equipment with the words Ayiti Pap Peri -- Haiti Will Not Die -- emblazoned on the side work alongside residents. ``If someone had never visited Fort National . . . they would think nothing has been done,'' said Jean-Michel Olophene, a resident-turned-leader inside the Champ de Mars camp. ``But if you saw what it looked like before, you would realize that an immense amount of progress has been made.''
Last weekend, Préval made his first foray into the hard-hit community since the 7.0 earthquake.
``Everyone was happy, but I wasn't happy,'' he said. ``I did not see the solution for relocating people.''
So far, the idea of having residents travel several flights of stairs -- as opposed to several miles from the city -- for housing seems to have the support of the co-chairs of the commission, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former President Bill Clinton. ``If we can build multi-story housing, it would make the city less dense even with the same population,'' Clinton said in a meeting with foreign donors this week, adding that any future construction would have to be anti-seismic and meet code.
Préval says Haiti's ongoing challenges -- the lack of temporary shelters, the logistics of removing rubble from densely populated neighborhoods and bringing together different groups, make it clear, ``we have to provide the solutions.'' For instance, while outside government organizations ``worked on their own, did what they wanted, we are working with the people, bringing together leaders of the camps and of the popular neighborhoods and asking them what route should we take.''
So far the path appears to be winning fans among both foreign diplomats who laud the progress, and residents living in other hard-hit communities such as Avenue Poupelard, who recently asked for similar assistance as Fort National. To cope with the growing demand, a dispatching center was recently set up on the grounds of the palace to field calls. The government also cut a deal with the neighboring Dominican Republic to put 50 additional trucks at its disposal to clear and cart away rubble.
Préval will not say how much the pilot project is costing his cash-strapped government that received $35 million in donations. Meanwhile, faced with few dump sites for the rubble, Préval has asked one of his chief engineers to order up a study of the soil composition of the Port-au-Prince harbor as he considers using debris to extend the harbor. The vision of an extended, remodeled waterfront would not just offer unchartered territory for prime development, but also take it back from the anarchist development that has taken over the capital and led to a government-estimated 300,000 dead from the quake. ``While others are talking about recycling the debris for road construction and other things, we'll take it and do this instead,'' Préval said. ``We are better off enlarging the harbor for new development.''
For more go to http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/07/23/v-fullstory/1744737/preval-leads-the-way-for-a-new.html#ixzz0ueSKVyjY
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Ann Pote Kole Pou Nou Ka Reconstwi Ayiti
July 15th, 2010
Haiti held the first of what is expected to be a series of nationally televised "Town Hall" on 15 July 2010 with representatives of the Government, the international community, the Haitian civil society and the representatives of displaced communities taking centre stage to speak out about their plight. The debate was interactive with viewers and listeners sending in questions by SMS which were read out by the moderator Clarens Renois.
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Credit for photos: IOM
Mapping a Way From Disaster in Haiti from Leonard Doyle on Vimeo.
Since the January 12 earthquake Humanitarian Openstreetmap.org has completed three training courses to help volunteers map Haiti.
Recently the "HOT" team was hosted by IOM at its sub office in Gonaives. Its a city in the north of the country that has suffered terrible damage and loss of life from flooding. The city has been hit by two 100 year storms in the space of the last four years.
The 2010 hurricane season is predicted to be one of the wettest on record and the Government of Haiti and the International community are urgently working on disaster preparedness for hurricane prone areas of the country.
The city of Gonaives is the most vulnerable to Hurricane related destruction in Haiti, and has been hit by two 100-year floods within four years during which over 5,000 lives were lost. Due to chronic deforestation and soil erosion in the mountains surrounding the city, Gonaives is regularly inundated with rainwater and avalanches of mud.
