Haiti: News roundup, one week after earthquake

(Photo: Two Haitian earthquake survivors at a hospital overseen by MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. Photographed by Catherine Lainé of AIDG, who was interviewed in this previous Boing Boing video episode.)

• Solar-powered "Proclaimers" (audio Bibles) sent to Haiti. They broadcast the holy scriptures in Creole. Maybe the folks there could use food more than bibles right now?

• But wait, there's more! "People of Haiti, your ordeal is at an end. John Travolta is bringing the healing power of Scientology."

• @baratunde posts an interesting series of text messages from Anil Menon, a doctor currently in Haiti who is a clinical instructor at Stanford School of Medicine (his focus is surgery and emergency medicine). Read: Update from Haiti: "Today was more hopeful."

• Wired Danger Room reports that aa controversial CIA contractor has found new work in Haiti, flying drones over the quake-devastated nation.

• Peter Haas, founder of AIDG.org, writes about the broader crises in Haiti: "After 9/11, how much did you have in your pocket? Could you live off of that for a week? What if you lived around LA and it got nuked? The port gone, no airport, no electricity, no cellphones, no atms, no gas, banks closed, dozens of people you know are dead, over a million people making their way into the streets of your home town bit by bit. How would you be feeling? How long till you got desperate? This is the current life in the rest of Haiti, in the big cities and the small towns, unaffected by the earth quake structurally but destroyed, spiritually and bit by bit unraveling at a staggering rate."

• "Haiti.com crowdsources the task of connecting real-time information from Haiti into a graphical information system that first responders use to find and respond to needs on the ground."

• AIDG is also mentioned in this NYT item about smaller, indie nonprofits that take new approaches to rebuilding after disasters like the one that just hit Haiti.

• How NASA satellite images help relief agencies locate landslide risks.

• Leave it to Loren Coleman to find a (sincere) cryptozoology angle in every possible news story (Sasquatch bless him). Behold, the cryptids of Haiti.

•Why are the images coming out of Haiti so graphic, as compared to what we see in news from Iraq or Afghanistan?

• "A Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) cargo plane carrying 12 tons of medical equipment, including drugs, surgical supplies and two dialysis machines, was turned away three times from Port-au-Prince airport since Sunday night despite repeated assurances of its ability to land there." And, guess what: apparently, the mighty Twitter played a role in helping the plane land. A related post on the NYT Lede blog, which has been an excellent source of news and updates on this story.

• Jeffrey Sachs, in the Washington Post: "To prevent a deepening spiral of death, the United States will have to do things differently than in the past. American relief and development institutions do not function properly, and to believe otherwise would be to condemn Haiti's poor and dying to our own mythology."

• An ABC News story on the evacuation to the US of a Haitian man who works with child slaves. He himself was a survivor of enslavement.

(some links via Ehrich Blackhound, Catherine Lainé, Instapundit, William Gibson, Gawker)