"The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections that have permitted hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti and Syria..."

"... to live and work legally in the United States. President Trump has pushed to terminate the program, known as Temporary Protected Status, as part of his broader crack down on immigration. The program was created by Congress with bipartisan support in 1990 to provide temporary legal status to people whose home countries were deemed unsafe because of war, natural disasters or other crises."

The NYT reports in "Supreme Court Lets Trump End Deportation Protection for Haitians and Syrians/President Trump has pushed to rescind Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of people from countries convulsed by humanitarian crises."

Here's the full opinion: Mullin v. Doe. Excerpt from the majority opinion, written by Justice Alito:

None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications. For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race. And a person without racial bias can provide a harshly unfavorable description of living conditions in some of the countries with TPS designations....Political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago.... But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people....

From the dissenting opinion by Justice Kagan:

The evidence [the Haiti plaintiffs] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print....

"Like other immigrant groups, [Haitians] hear about opportunities by word of mouth.... In this case, they were drawn by the availability of well-paying jobs."

"And they also heard that the cost of living was pretty low in Springfield. So soon, more and more Haitians arrived. And they were very attractive to employers because they had authorization to legally work in the United States. And what they have is something called temporary protected status. It’s a designation given to people from countries in turmoil, like Haiti.... So a city that had a population just under 60,000, now possibly has 80,000.... By most accounts, Springfield benefits from this influx of Haitians. They have come to work. I heard... that Haitians are coming to work on time. They’re reliable. They’re drama-free. ... They’re sending their kids to schools, schools that actually had been losing students because the city had been shrinking. And they’re leasing homes and apartments.... [N]ewly refurbished homes are sprucing up the neighborhood. They have manicured gardens, and they look a lot more cheerful than blocks where homes are still boarded up...."

From "The Story Behind 'They’re Eating the Pets'/A false claim made by Donald Trump in the presidential debate has its origins in an Ohio town," yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily." Transcript and audio at the link (which goes to Podscribe). I'm excerpting one aspect of the story — how a city in decline revived itself by attracting businesses, which had labor needs beyond what could be supplied by the residents of the city.

But please listen to the whole thing (or at least skim the transcript) to see how the NYT presents the entire complicated problem of Springfield, Ohio, the small city that fell into the meat grinder of the American presidential election.

"Residents who dare leave their homes stumble across bodies that have been left where they fell."

"Port-au-Prince reached a high of 92 degrees on Friday. The smell of decaying corpses, human rights activists say, has driven some people from their homes.... One morgue director said he has received 20 calls in the past week from residents asking him to pick up bodies. Four calls came in on Friday, Lyonel Milfort said. He has refused all of them. With gangs barricading the streets, Milfort said, venturing out has been impossible.... 'What I’m witnessing today is unprecedented. It’s been too long,' he said. 'It’s heartbreaking to go around and see bodies being eaten by dogs and see the corpses covered with sheets.'..."

From "Haitians shot dead in street and there’s no one to take the corpses away" (WaPo).

"Almost all of the estimated 4,000 inmates escaped, leaving the normally overcrowded prison eerily empty on Sunday with no guards in sight and plastic sandals, clothing and furniture strewn across the concrete patio...."

"It was unclear how many inmates were on the run but Arnel Remy, a human rights lawyer whose non-profit organisation works inside the national penitentiary, said on X that fewer than 100 of the nearly 4,000 inmates remained behind bars. 'I’m the only one left in my cell,' one unidentified inmate told Reuters...."

 
From "Haiti declares state of emergency after double jailbreak allows thousands of inmates to escape/Attack on two prisons comes amid outbreak of violence as PM in Kenya trying to salvage UN-backed security force" (The Guardian).

"In a nation of twelve million people, there have been at least a dozen massacres by gangs fighting over turf, killing more than a thousand Haitians last year alone."

"Women are routinely raped and men murdered; many of the victims are burned alive in their homes. Since the beginning of the year, according to a U.N. report, another thousand people have been kidnapped, and at least two thousand killed, including thirty-four police officers. Last fall, a gangster known as Barbecue took over the city’s main fuel port for nearly two months, causing devastating shortages of gas, food, and water, with half of Haiti’s population afflicted by acute hunger...."

Writes Jon Lee Anderson, in "Haiti Held Hostage Gangs control the capital. Foreign help is scarce. Can the embattled island nation save itself?" (The New Yorker).

"In June... news began to spread among the Haitian community in South America that crossing to the United States had become easier under the Biden administration...."

"It seemed that there was a window of opportunity.... 'Lots of people I knew had made it across. I spoke to them. They were in Florida. Some were making the same in an hour that I was earning in a day'.... The most horrific part of the journey, all agreed, was the Darien Gap, a six-day trek through the mountainous jungle between Colombia and Panama, an area stalked by bandits and rapists.... At night the travellers, about 100 people including children, would sleep together in a circle so the whole group would be alerted to any threats from wild animals or criminals. Arriving, exhausted, at the Del Rio bridge and seeing the United States for the first time, Edouard convinced himself that all the effort he and Maricia had made would somehow be rewarded. 'I honestly thought the Americans were going to welcome us,' he said...."

From "Joe Biden treats us like slaves say deported Haitian refugees/At least 1,400 have been sent back to a country facing the most desperate times in its troubled history, writes Stephen Gibbs, Port-au-Prince" (London Times). 

Top-rated comment over there: "Well run democratic countries cannot take in the worlds poor. The countries these people come from must change. Illegal immigrants should all be sent back."

"But the assumption that these tactics would go unchallenged when deployed by a Democratic administration, as was often the case in the past, appears to have been a serious miscalculation."

"The spotlight that Trump shined on the southern border for four years is still plugged in. The public is still paying attention. And images that evoke the era of slavery—with fair-skinned men on horseback rushing Black migrants, whiplike reins flailing behind them—have added to a long-simmering push from the left to consider immigration policy not simply in terms of economics or national security, but also in terms of race.... Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were whisked to the White House for a meeting this week, and Al Sharpton, who traveled to the border recently, told The Washington Post that, like thus-far-unsuccessful efforts toward police reform, the treatment of Haitian migrants was an example of how Biden was failing Black Americans. Biden 'said on election night: Black America, you had my back, I’ll have yours,' Sharpton said. 'Well, we’re being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the stabbing—from Haiti to Harlem.'"

 
From "Democrats’ Free Pass on Immigration Is Over/As he extends Trump-era policies, President Biden discovers that many voters are no longer willing to give him the benefit of the doubt" (The Atlantic).

ADDED: Biden resorted to attacking the agents. BBC reports:

"I take responsibility," Mr Biden told reporters at the White House on Friday. "It was horrible to see, to see people treated like they did, with horses nearly running them over. People being strapped. It's outrageous.... I promise you those people will pay. They will be investigated. There will be consequences."

Will pay... will be consequences... That sounds completely unfair. As the Atlantic article points out, horses have been used in this function for over a century and the agents were doing what they were ordered to do by supervisors who serve under the power of the President. Let the President take responsibility for everything that is going on at the border, not blame others and vow to punish them. 

"There are four warring factions of the police. There is no security. There are 100 gangs with guns. There is no way we can have elections. The people are too scared to vote."

Said Ralph Chevry, board member of the Haiti Center for Socio Economic Policy in Port-au-Prince, quoted in "In Haiti, rivals claw for power as crisis escalates after assassination" (WaPo).

The caption on the top photograph at the link is: "Haitian citizens hold up passports as they gather in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tabarre, Haiti, on July 10, asking for asylum after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse."

How Trump "took the heat" for all of them: The "shithole" timeline.

January 9: With the "Fire and Fury" frenzy raging and the mainstream media pushing the Trump-is-nuts narrative, Trump convened a Meeting with Bipartisan Members of Congress on Immigration in the White House. Modeling sanity, he humorously acknowledged the craziness of politics and his ability to help the "traditional politicians" "take the heat."

Thank you, Lindsey.... you know, when you talk about comprehensive immigration reform, which is where I would like to get to eventually — if we do the right bill here, we are not very far way. You know, we’ve done most of it. You want to know the truth, Dick? If we do this properly, DACA, you’re not so far away from comprehensive immigration reform. And if you want to take it that further step, I’ll take the heat, I don’t care. I don’t care — I’ll take all the heat you want to give me, and I’ll take the heat off both the Democrats and the Republicans. My whole life has been heat. (Laughter.) I like heat, in a certain way. But I will. I mean, you are somewhat more traditional politicians. Two and a half years ago, I was never thinking in terms of politics. Now I’m a politician. You people have been doing it, many of you, all your lives. I’ll take all the heat you want. But you are not that far away from comprehensive immigration reform....

January 11: The 2 Senators he named in his I'll-take-the-heat remark, Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin, came to meet with Trump in private, and immediately afterwards there was a report from an unnamed source claiming that Trump had said "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" Whoever chose to drop this bomb — Durbin? Graham? — delivered the heat. It wasn't quite the heat Trump had asked for. He'd offered to take the heat on the way to bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform, but it seemed that Trump had resisted the Graham-Durbin proposal, which would have given special priority to Haitians. We don't know for sure exactly how Trump expressed what seems to be his preference for a "merit" system, but the quote was very exciting and, the frenzy of "Fire and Fury having died out, the media jumped at what they needed to fan anti-Trump fires once again. Trump is a racist was at least as hot as the previous week's Trump is crazy. Trump got the heat. And he likes heat, in a certain way. Does he like it that way? Who knows? Saying "shithole" over and over while deploring the man who said it had far more energy than the underlying policy question, but maybe on some level we were forming opinions about whether we prefer immigrants based on "merit" or from the places people have the most reason to want to leave.

January 14: Various persons from the January 11th meeting say different things about what Trump really said and whether they could "recollect" anything specific, and then Trump himself spoke up. NYT:

After three days of denunciations from around the world, President Trump declared that he is “not a racist”.... Mr. Trump also insisted that he had not made the inflammatory comments in a White House meeting on Thursday.... “I’m not a racist,” Mr. Trump said... “I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed, that I can tell you.”...

Trump was backed up by 2 other Senators who'd been in the room:

“I didn’t hear that word either,” [Tom] Cotton said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And I was sitting no further away from Donald Trump than Dick Durbin was.” Mr. Cotton said Mr. Durbin “has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings,” an assertion that [David] Perdue made in his own interview Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week.”

January 15: It's Martin Luther King Day. Where do we want to go with this? Fan the flames again? Do we want to believe we have a crazy or racist President or a crazy and racist President? Or does it seem that Trump has taken the heat, taken all the heat they wanted to give him. His whole life has been heat. He likes heat, in a certain way. That doesn't mean we all like heat. Some of us would like to get to normal, including normalizing immigration policy, with real legislation that we actually believe is the right solution and that we want to see enforced.

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?"

Said Donald Trump, according to unnamed sources who heard about a meeting Trump had to with some members of Congress in the Oval Office, WaPo reports.

In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said.

“Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. “Take them out.”...

The remarks were quickly met with scorn from Democrats and some Republicans and could throw another wrench into bipartisan discussions on immigration, which had shown promise in recent days, according to legislators.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said the comments “will shake the confidence that people have” in the ongoing immigration policy talks.

I agree with Gutierrez, so I wonder who it was who chose to break the confidence of the meeting to serve the important goal of breaking people's confidence in the immigration policy talks, which had shown promise in recent days. Who would want to "throw another wrench"?

But also, why would Trump talk like that? Did he think it was funny and that it signaled to the people at the meeting that they were insiders, close to him and able to see him in an especially casual, chummy mode? But that would be just a trick, wouldn't it? I suspect that Trump put that word in there and even picked on Haiti intentionally. Not that I can figure out why!

ADDED: Scott Adams explains:

Scott Adams teaches you how to translate Trumpspeak. Today’s lesson: Genius, wedges, shitholes, clean https://t.co/AQllLPhY56

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 12, 2018

On the new "Roseanne," Roseanne and her husband Dan will be Trump supporters.

Roseanne Barr reveals. It's “a true reflection on the society we live in... half the people voted for Trump and half didn’t, so it’s just realistic.... I’ve always attempted to portray a realistic portrait of the American people and the working class people. And, in fact, it was working class people who elected Trump. So I felt like, yeah, that was very real, and something that needed to be discussed.”

What does Barr, the nonfictional character, think about Trump? He "says a lot of crazy shit." And: “I’m not a Trump apologist. There are a lot of things he’s said and done that I don’t agree with.” And: "It’s always a lesser of two evils," but she "could not vote for Hillary Clinton is because of Haiti."

I can't tell if that means Barr voted for Trump. And what did Hillary Clinton do to Haiti? I don't remember a Haiti issue in the campaign, but I see — from a BBC article from November 2, 2016, "US election 2016: What really happened with the Clintons in Haiti?" — that Donald Trump brought it up in the last debate:

"I was at a Little Haiti the other day in Florida. And I want to tell you, they hate the Clintons, because what's happened in Haiti with the Clinton Foundation is a disgrace."

From the BBC article:

A US Government Accountability Office report discovered no hint of wrongdoing, but concluded the IHRC's decisions were "not necessarily aligned with Haitian priorities".... Jake Johnston, an analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonpartisan group that has studied the quake reconstruction, told the BBC "it's hard to say it's been anything other than a failure". But he believes the State Department and IHRC simply replicated the mistakes of the whole foreign aid industry by chasing short-term gains instead of building longer-term capacity on the ground. "They relied too much on outside actors," Mr Johnston says, "and supplanted the role of the Haitian government and domestic producers."...

"PHOTOS: The Sidewalk Pill Peddlers Of Port-Au-Prince."

NPR dispenses PHOTOS.

Because I think the NYT is terribly slanted toward helping the Clintons, I read everything with an eye toward getting to normal.

I think: How would the equivalent material be presented in an article about Trump? And then I try to average it out, back to the middle. It's annoying, but it's possibly a good mental exercise, not unlike what I do when I read what I have to read for my job: judicial opinions. I don't have to read The New York Times, but where else am I going to get the news? Everything else is also bad in its own way, and I'm accustomed to the bad that is The New York Times.

This morning what I'm reading is "Chelsea Clinton’s Frustrations and Devotion Shown in Hacked Emails," by Amy Chozick. I assume the damaging material — which would be right up front in a Trump article — begins to appear many paragraphs down. I'm not going to tarry at the mushy beginning. (The first paragraph reads like a children's book: "Chelsea Clinton was alarmed.")

So let's skip ahead:

Though her housecleaning role had Hillary Clinton’s tacit approval (“My mother strongly agreed,” Ms. Clinton said in one email laying out proposed changes at the foundation)....

Ugh! Not far enough! (But let me just say that language-oriented feminists would chide Chozick for that "housecleaning" metaphor.)

Ms. Clinton, 31 at the time, had held various jobs, including positions at McKinsey & Company and Avenue Capital, a hedge fund owned by a major Clinton donor. She had degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Columbia but had not quite found a way to harness all of her academic wherewithal...

Translation: Chelsea was at loose ends, drifting, unable or unwilling to make anything out of her long and very elite education. The word "wherewithal" is particularly silly, especially with the mixed-metaphor verb "harness." "Wherewithal," the noun, is usually a polysyllabic way to say money. The unnecessary reaching for polysyllabic words is an old-fashioned form of humor. H.W. Fowler cautioned against it all the way back in 1908. What is this urge, suddenly, to write like George Eliot or Charles Dickens? They were not bullshitting us. Are you?

And the funny thing is, Chozick sees that Chelsea Clinton is dipping into inane polysyllababble*:

Ms. Clinton often gravitated to weighty policy discussions and interspersed statistics and SAT words into casual conversations.

Hours after the 2012 attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, she mused about the unrest in Egypt and Libya in a late-night email to her mother. “Such anathema to us as Americans — and a painful reminder of how long it took modernism to take root in the U.S., after the Enlightenment, the 14th, 15th, 16th, 19th amendments,” she wrote. “Much to discuss when we talk, hopefully tomorrow?”

In another email addressed to “Dad, Mom,” Ms. Clinton seemed apologetic, writing, “I hope this mini-behemoth is not rife with grammatical errors or inadvertent gaps; I am sorry if either true.”

"SAT words" is putting it kindly. Why would a 31-year-old woman who went to Stanford, Oxford,** and Columbia use words like "anathema" and "behemoth"*** so badly, and why would the only offspring of Bill and Hillary Clinton even feel the need to try to impress her parents in the first place? What did they do to deserve it? Does it have anything to do with why Chelsea was at loose ends so late in her privileged life and why they installed her in their charitable operation?

Now, the meat of the Chozick piece is the "cascade of grievances, gossip and infighting" that the installation of Chelsea unleashed at the foundation:

Ms. Clinton had already started to fret about the intermingling of foundation business with Teneo, the corporate consulting firm co-founded by Douglas J. Band, one of her father’s closest aides. She suggested an audit of the charity and wrote that she was concerned that Teneo’s principals had been “hustling” business at foundation gatherings....

Band fought back with a 13-page memo about all the millions he'd raised for the foundation and Bill Clinton:

“We have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the president and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,” Mr. Band wrote.

The subtext was clear: Where Ms. Clinton saw a messy overlapping of business and charity that could haunt both of her parents, Mr. Band saw an ungrateful daughter who was naïve about how what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.” made its money, and how her own expensive lifestyle was funded.

“I just don’t think any of this is right and that we should be treated this way when no one else is, only because CVC has nothing better to do and need justify her existence,” he wrote in one email, using the initials for Chelsea Victoria Clinton. Mr. Band, who had already planned to leave the foundation to focus on Teneo, often expressed frustration at the global charity’s nepotism, pointing to Ms. Clinton’s installing her friends in central roles....

That is buried in the center of Chozick's piece, which proceeds into some fluff about a note "from the Bon Jovis" and Bill Clinton "buying clorox wipes" and Chelsea's feeling "profoundly disturbed" about the Haitian earthquake. Remember the headline: The idea is to leave you with an amorphous, generalized empathy for Chelsea with her frustrations and daughterly devotion.

But the story from the leaked emails is about the inner workings of the Clinton foundation — how the Clintons got rich finagling in a way that Band justified and Chelsea seems to have been able to see was quite wrong.
_____________________________

* I just coined that word, polysyllababble. But Google tells me it has been used twice before in the history of mankind as revealed by the internet, so let's just say I discovered it independently and I'm surprised I'm in a group as small as 3.

** Note that I, unlike Chozick, use the Oxford comma after "Oxford."

*** The Oxford English Dictionary defines "behemoth" as "An animal mentioned in the book of Job; probably the hippopotamus; but also used in modern literature as a general expression for one of the largest and strongest animals."

"Mr. Beauvoir was in his mid-30s and planning a career in biochemistry when his grandfather, on his deathbed, stunningly anointed him his successor as a houngan..."

"... one of the 6,000 or so healers, soothsayers, exorcists and therapists who outnumbered doctors and Roman Catholic priests in Haiti. The 17th-century mystical traditions imported by slaves from West Africa and known in Haiti as Vodou coexist there with Christianity."

“Just as a carnival band went by the house,” Mr. Beauvoir recalled in a 1983 interview with The New York Times, “grandfather turned to me and said, ‘You will carry on the tradition.’ It was not the sort of thing you could refuse.”...

“My position as supreme chief in voodoo was born out of a controversy,” he said. “Today, voodooists are at the bottom of society. They are virtually all illiterate. They are poor. They are hungry. You have people who are eating mud, and I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.”

From the obituary of Max Beauvoir, who lived to the age of 79. If you read far enough into this piece, you'll find:

In 1975 he staged a ceremony for Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton on their honeymoon. In his memoir “My Life” (2004), Mr. Clinton recalled, “The spirits arrived, seizing a woman and a man.... The man proceeded to rub a burning torch all over his body and walk on hot coals without being burned. The woman, in a frenzy, screamed repeatedly, then grabbed a live chicken and bit its head off.”

Mr. Clinton did not elaborate on whether the man and woman benefited from the ceremony, except to say, “Haitians’ understanding of how God is manifest in our lives is very different from that of most Christians, Jews or Muslims, but their documented experiences certainly prove the old adage that the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Did you know that a chicken's head was bitten off in a Bill and Hillary Clinton honeymoon ceremony?!

"Julien Fédon, a mixed race owner of the Belvedere estate in the St. John Parish, launched a rebellion against British rule on the night of 2nd March 1795..."

"... with coordinated attacks on the towns of Grenville, La Baye and Gouyave. Fédon was clearly influenced by the ideas emerging from the French Revolution..."

... especially the Convention's abolition of slavery in 1794: he stated that he intended to make Grenada a "Black Republic just like Haiti." Fédon and his troops controlled all of Grenada except the parish of St George's, the seat of government, between March 1795 and June 1796. During those insurgent months 14,000 of Grenada's 28,000 slaves joined the revolutionary forces in order to write their own emancipation and transform themselves into "citizens"; some 7,000 of these self-liberated slaves would perish in the name of freedom. Fédon's forces were defeated by the British in late 1796, but Fédon himself was never caught and his fate is unknown.

Grenada is the next "History of" country, as we resume our alphabetical progression the the "History of" Wikipedia pages for the 206 countries of the world.



IN THE COMMENTS: bagoh20 said: "Is that outfit ever appropriate in Grenada near the equator?" And Anniella said: "That's an amazing painting, but there's a very good reason he's so bundled up," linking here.

In 1819, Charles Willson Peale headed down to Washington to paint portraits of President James Monroe, Henry Clay, and other dignitaries for exhibition in the famed Peale museum located in Independence Hall. But there was another sitter the painter wanted to snare on his trip.

"I heard of a Negro who is living in Georgetown said to be 140 years of age," Peale wrote in his diary. "He is comfortable in his Situation having Bank stock and lives in his own house."

The man was Yarrow Mamout, a free African, a Muslim who indeed held bank stock, purchased with great effort to secure a comfortable old age - after a life of abduction and bondage...

So... it's not Julien Fédon. I had my doubts, and I won't take advantage of the lame excuse — though I thought of it when I decided to use that picture — that I never actually say that's Julien Fédon. I'm glad to hear of Yarrow Mamout and I love the painting.

"Yarrow owns a house & lotts and is known by most of the Inhabitants of Georgetown & particularly by the Boys who are often teazing him which he takes in good humour," Peale confided in his diary. "The acquaintance of him often banter him about eating Bacon and drinking Whiskey - but Yarrow says it is no good to eat Hog - & drink whiskey is very bad."

World Toilet Day is today... and it's no joke.

"Haiti is in the throes of a cholera epidemic. The disease is easily treated, and can be prevented outright if people have access to good sanitation and purified water, health experts say. But the country, debilitated by the earthquake, poverty and hurricanes, lacks access to clean water, toilets or health care. Lack of sanitation is the leading cause of infection in the world...."

This reminds me of a passage in the truly engrossing Bill Bryson book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life," describing the sanitary conditions in England in the 19th century:

[C]esspits in poorer districts were seldom emptied and frequently overflowed... In St. Giles... 54,000 people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, 1100 people lived in 27 houses along one alley; that is more than 40 people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found 63 people living in a single house. The house had 9 beds — one for every 7 occupants....

Such masses of humanity naturally produced enormous volumes of waste — far more than any system of cesspits could cope with. In one fairly typical report an inspector recorded visiting 2 houses in St. Giles where the cellars were filled with human waste to a depth of 3 feet. Outside the inspector continued, the yard was 6 inches deep in excrement. Bricks had been stacked like stepping-stones to let the occupants cross the yard.

At Leeds in the 1830s, a survey of the poorer districts found that many streets were "floating with sewage"; one street, housing 176 families, had not been cleaned for 15 years. In Liverpool, as many as one-sixth of the populace lived in dark cellars, where wastes could all too easily seep in.

Haiti's constitution rules out a Wyclef Jean presidency.

He's Haitian, but the constitution requires presidential candidates to have lived in the country for the past 5 years.

The musician had argued that his appointment as a roving ambassador for Haiti in 2007 exempted him from the residency requirement.

Apparently, textualism beat out fancier notions of interpretation. No "active liberty" or whatever?

Wipergate.

Hmmm.

Crying Haitians spliced with bellowing pop stars...

... heartrending outreach or charity porn?

"If you're not a doctor, step away!" "We're all doctors!"

In Haiti, too many doctors! (The quotes above occurred as 12 individuals crowded around a tiny baby.)