Rescuers on Wednesday dragged a Haitian girl alive from the rubble 15 days after a devastating quake, in a rare moment of joy for a country where victims still face a desperate shortage of aid.
A French search team saved 16-year-old Darlene Etienne after neighbors heard a voice in the debris of a house in Port-au-Prince, ending what appeared to be the longest ordeal of any survivor so far following the Jan. 12 disaster.
“She just said ‘thank you,’ she’s very weak, which suggests that she’s been there for 15 days,” Commander Samuel Bernes of the rescue team said.
Colonel Michel Orcel, a doctor at the field hospital where Etienne was treated, said the girl was happy after her dramatic rescue.
“She is 16 years old, she is alive and she has her whole life ahead of her. She was speaking, she said that she was happy,” Orcel said. “She was worried about her friends, but we weren’t able to answer all her questions.”
International rescue teams have saved around 135 people who were buried alive when the 7.0-magnitude quake laid waste to the capital and several other towns in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
The last was a 31-year-old man rescued by a US team on Tuesday, although he was thought to have been entombed by a powerful aftershock around two days after the initial tremor struck.
Haitian President Rene Preval said “nearly 170,000” bodies had now been counted since the quake, significantly higher than previous estimates of 150,000.
“In 15 days many efforts have been made. The National Equipment Company has made great efforts in removing nearly 170,000 dead from the streets and clearing the roadways to facilitate traffic,” Preval told a press conference.
Preval suggested Haiti’s legislative elections due next month would have to be postponed because of the quake.
“I don’t think the time is right to hold elections now given the conditions in which people are living,” Preval said. “However, we must speak to the other protagonists and reach a consensus on this issue.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
RSS