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Many leaving Haiti's earthquake settlement camps

Large numbers of Haitians are leaving the dirty, overcrowded camps that sprang up after last year's earthquake, some lured away by financial incentives from officials and others forced out by landowners.

Many more may be pushed out, with no safe place to go, just ahead of the rainy season that starts in May, the International Organization for Migration said in a report distributed Friday.

The overall camp population already has dropped by more than half in recent months, to an estimated 680,000, the IOM said, even though almost no new housing has been built and few repairs have been made to dwellings dwellings damaged by the magnitude-7.0 quake on Jan. 12, 2010.

Nearly two-thirds of those who left the camps have gone back to their old neighborhoods, and fewer than half of those are returning to undamaged homes. Many are back in houses that need repair or in makeshift shelters or tents on their property. Others have found new new areas, in houses or apartments, staying with friends or relatives or pitching new camps on their own.

"We came back to the house because we had no choice," said Francois Joseph-Ifanord, 62, who said security guards kicked him off the grounds of a private tennis club court where 30 families were living in shelters. "Now we're living day by day."

Aid groups say the biggest factor has been forced evictions by property owners. In dozens of places, from school yards to shopping plazas, owners already have made people move out.

The IOM said nearly a quarter of the remaining camp dwellers have received pressure from landowners to leave, with an eviction rate that outpaces the ability of Haitian officials and humanitarian workers to provide housing.

Still, government officials are trying to clear away the camps, the most visible symbols of misery in the battered capital.

The exodus is perhaps most evident in Place St. Pierre, a town square in Petionville, in the hills above downtown Port-au-Prince.

Hundreds of people have packed up their tents and tarps, freeing children to once again play soccer in the plaza, restoring a rare open space in a dense urban environment. Local officials paid families $500 — a year's wage for an average Haitian — to abandon the square.

While the checks had the desired effect, aid workers say such tactics may only lead people to move to other camps, precarious ravines, or back to houses damaged by an earthquake that the Haitian government says killed more than 300,000 people and left much of the capital in ruins.

"We can't say we support this kind of action," said Luca Dall'oglio, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration. "The return requires strategy. You have to work on the areas of return, not just in the camps."

Relief workers fear that the area's heavy tropical rains, hurricanes or new quakes could collapse some of the quake-damaged structures.

The ability to relocate quake survivors has been held up by a shortage of land and housing, questions over land titles and a spike in the cost of living. And some have opted to stay in the camps even if they have a home somewhere or relatives outside the capital, because they are living rent-free and they get clean water, health care and free schooling — all services the government rarely provided before the earthquake.

Relief groups have tried to scale back on free goods for the camps, only to find themselves called on again. When a deadly cholera epidemic broke out in October, humanitarian workers rushed to distribute chlorine tablets, clean water and hygiene kids. When Hurricane Tomas brushed Haiti weeks later, they rushed in again with more of the same.

Delays in the presidential election to pick a successor for outgoing President Rene Preval have also held up efforts to begin reconstruction of housing.

The camp sprawling over the arena-size Place St. Pierre popped up hours after the quake. Some people came from downtown Port-au-Prince, terrified by rumors a tsunami was coming. Others came from the hillside shanties that ring Petionville.

Now the square shows signs of clearing out. In January, Place St. Pierre housed 665 families, mostly sheltering under flimsy tents and tarps held together with seat belts and twine. Officials say only 116 families remain.

"We see it as our duty to move them out of the park," Deputy Mayor Francoise Michel said in her office, across the street from the plaza, which abuts a gingerbread hotel popular with tourists.

Michel says City Hall plans to distribute another round of $500 checks to encourage people to leave Place Boyer, a public square a few blocks away, and then a sports field down the street. The program could serve as a model for other cities in the Port-au-Prince area, she says.

Some humanitarian groups say that the grants are sufficient to pay rent, but not enough to help the homeless on a long-term basis. Relief workers worry that people will end up back in dangerous, damaged homes or camping out in ravines prone to flooding.

"Right now, it's '$500, here you go,'" said Giovanni Cassani, a camp coordinator with the IOM. "But if this project were a bit more fine-tuned and researched it could have a positive impact."

Some people still living at the Place St. Pierre admit they took checks only to move in with someone else at the camp because they needed the money for things other than housing, such as medical emergencies.

"I used the money to save my baby," said Joahanne Cenat, 22, a single mother who works as a vendor.

Others did leave, but not always to better conditions.

Joceline Alcide, a 39-year-old coffee merchant, returned to her Petionville neighborhood, and is using half of the $500 to invest in her business and saving the rest.

Housing? She pitched a tent on the roof of her rickety two-room home in Morne Hercule, a cinderblock slum the color of ash. Engineers tagged the cracked house as too unsafe to occupy.

"It was easier to do this than try to go find another room," Alcide said on the steep stairs leading to her home. "This spot isn't good but I have no choice. This is why I'm here."

Ireland: Banks need euro24B more, will be overhauled

Ireland's ailing banks need another euro24 billion ($34 billion) in cash in a move that will leave all of them under state control and facing a complete overhaul, officials announced Thursday in a long-awaited effort to cap a 3-year banking crisis.

The Central Bank of Ireland made that recommendation as it published pessimistic results for stress tests on four banks. The banks, whose losses the government insured early during the financial crisis, caused Ireland to need a bailout in the first place, so their fate is closely tied with that of the wider country.

The tests presumed that the country's real estate market would keep sinking for the next two years and produce tens of thousands of home foreclosures, a problem that is just starting to bite in a country committed to the idea of home ownership for all.

Central Bank Governor Patrick Honohan said all four banks would need enough money to cover mammoth write-offs of dud property loans and to boost their cash reserves to higher standards. He said these cash requirements can't be met by any of the banks, so each will have to receive funding from Ireland's emergency European Union-International Monetary Fund credit line.

The European Commission, European Central Bank and Washington-based IMF in a joint statement praised the Irish plans as "comprehensive" and "a major step toward restoring the Irish banking system to health."

And in a separate statement, the ECB said it now considered the four banks solvent and worthy of uninterrupted flows of short-term liquidity loans until Ireland's banks are restructured and able to borrow on open markets again. It also announced a lowering of lending conditions in the interim.

In recent months that funding, provided in tandem by the ECB and the Irish Central Bank, has soared to more than euro180 billion and raised tensions between Frankfurt and Dublin over when, if ever, Irish banks could be weaned off the funds.

Analysts sounded a skeptical note. They noted that Ireland now has produced three supposedly definitive stress tests on its banks since 2009 claiming to have found the bottom — only to produce even scarier numbers within months.

"Our initial impression is that the question of whether this is enough will continue to linger," said Marchel Alexandrovich, European financial economist at Jefferies International.

Ireland's 3-week-old government unveiled plans to shrink the country's financial sector through a series of mergers and asset selloffs.

Finance Minister Michael Noonan told parliament that Ireland intended to create "two pillar banks" based on the market leaders, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks. The other four Irish-owned banks would essentially disappear within the next few years by selling their good bits and transferring their bad to the two market survivors.

Noonan said the inadequacy of Ireland's previous stress tests and other bailout efforts meant that, this time, the new government had no choice but to embrace a financial Doomsday scenario — and show how Ireland could withstand it.

"The cost is huge. And it's huge because Ireland has very little credibility left," Noonan said in an interview. "So the policy ... is to overcapitalize the banks, to restore confidence and credibility. They're literally being stuffed with capital."

Noonan said this was necessary because "people don't believe Irish statistics anymore."

"They have been given assurances about numbers too many times before that have proven to be incorrect. So now we have had to undergo the most conservative stress tests anywhere in the developed world, and we've had to overdo it in terms of capitalization," he said.

The government plans to take majority control of Irish Life & Permanent, Ireland's biggest provider of private pensions and residential mortgages. Until now, it has been the only bank to avoid the process of creeping nationalization — but now it's going to be dismantled.

As part of the new plan, Irish Life & Permanent will sell off its profit-making units in pensions and investments in a public flotation. Its most vulnerable unit, retail bank and mortgage provider Permanent TSB, will be merged with one of the two survivors.

Noonan said the fourth and smallest bank targeted by Thursday's stress tests, Educational Building Society, will be merged into Allied Irish. Ireland already wholly owns ESB and has a 93 percent stake in Allied Irish.

The outside consultants who designed the stress tests, New York-based investment managers BlackRock, based their estimates of loan losses and cash needs on an Irish economy that falls deeper into recession over the coming two years. BlackRock based its projections on mortgage defaults, in part, on the housing-market implosion in Las Vegas.

BlackRock's hypothetical Ireland of the near future would suffer mortgage losses of up to euro17 billion, while average house prices would fall 17.4 percent this year and 18.8 percent next year. The economy would shrink 1.6 percent this year.

Honohan stressed he didn't think any of this would actually happen, but Ireland needs to demonstrate it can cope if it does.

The EU and IMF in November offered the government loans, worth up to euro67.5 billion ($95 billion), on condition that the banks be tested again to determine a worst-case scenario for funding. The EU-IMF bailout fund earmarked up to euro35 billion for bolstering the banks, so Thursday's figures come in well below that limit.

Nonetheless, the new figure would take the estimated total cost of Ireland's bank-bailout efforts since 2009 to euro70 billion ($99 billion) — some euro15,500 ($22,000) for every man, woman and child in Ireland.

Ireland has already put euro46 billion into its banks since 2009, when it began nationalizing them to prevent their collapse — and took the country to the brink of bankruptcy as a consequence.

The state already owns 36 percent of Bank of Ireland. It also fully nationalized and is shutting down two other banks, Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide, that were not targets of Thursday's stress tests.

Thursday's plan calls for Allied Irish to receive euro13.3 billion more; Bank of Ireland euro5.2 billion; Irish Life & Permanent euro4 billion; and EBS euro1.5 billion.

Jacksonville Roofing Contractors Find A+ BBB Rating Boosts Roof Requests

When it comes to installing high cost services in Jacksonville such as complete roof replacement or even roofing repair, thehas been priceless in terms of boosting consumer confidence.” Sorensen goes on to say that a few local Jacksonville roofing companies he has spoken with seem to be of the opinion that the Better Business Bureau has become obsolete or outdated in light of the newer third party online review sites, but Sorensen disagrees saying, “Gold star web ratings are too easily manipulated by for-profit marketing companies or directly by the business owners themselves to be of much real value to the consumer. However, the Better Business Bureau has a proprietary business rating system steeped in history that is completely unbiased while upholding high ethical standards equally for all its members.”

Excel has plans to reward both its residential roofing and commercial roofing customers who took a second to thoughtfully respond to the online request form, by gifting them with a $50 reward card of choice after their , new installation, or roof repairs are completed.

About Excel Roofing Contractors:

Excel Roofing Contractors are based in Jacksonville FL and actively serve the entire state of Florida. They hold certifications as Building Contractors, Roofing Contractors and have recently introduced professional Home Inspections, Mold Assessment and Mold Removal Remediation to their list of customer services. With over 50 years of combined roofing and construction experience in flat roofing, metal roofing, shingle roof systems and specialty roof coatings for military, industrial, residential and commercial roofing applications, Excel offers Florida consumers a wide range of services at competitive prices.

For further information, interested persons may contact Excel 7 days a week, 24 hours a day via telephone at (904) 631-7663 or request a free roofing estimate and evaluation through its corporate web site,

Company Contact InformationExcel Roofing Contractors Scott Sorensen 5722 Dunn Avenue Jacksonville, FL 32218

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Scott SorensenExcel Roofing Contractors(904) 631-7663Email Information

U.S. traffic deaths dropped to new low in 2010

U.S. traffic deaths dropped by 3 percent to a record annual low of 32,788 for 2010 even as motorists drove more in an improving economy, projected government figures showed on Friday.

Fatalities have dropped 25 percent over the past five years, which transportation officials and highway safety advocates partly attribute to increased seat belt use, better vehicle safety, and stronger regulations on teen driving.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said too many people are still killed in preventable crashes.

"We will continue doing everything possible to make cars safer, increase seat belt use, put a stop to drunk driving and distracted driving," LaHood said.

The fatality rate of 1.09 per 100 million miles traveled for 2010 also reflects a steadily declining trend since the middle of the last decade.

Total vehicle miles traveled last year increased by 20 million miles, or 0.7 percent compared to 2009, an indication of a strengthening economy.

Figures released on Friday represent totals submitted by the states to the U.S. Transportation Department for the first nine months of the year.

The agency projects totals for the final quarter, a calculation that is usually an accurate predictor of the full year figure.

A regional breakdown showed the greatest drop in fatalities occurred in Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska, where they fell by 12 percent.

Arizona, California and Hawaii had the next steepest decline, nearly 11 percent.

(Reporting by John Crawley)

Solar training online platform launched by Sunhive and Cleaner Air Solutions

The courses provide an excellent foundation for hands-on training or work experience. We will continue to improve it with our partner to meet the highest standards”, says Terry Skee who heads the , the training arm of Cleaner Air Solutions.

“The UK needs to generate more green jobs and we will do our bit to make sure that we provide the support needed to make high quality training cost-effective and accessible”, says Gbenga Kogbe, director at Sunhive Ltd.

The solar energy sector is one of the few areas of the UK economy experiencing high growth, as a result of the introduction of feed-in-tariffs introduced in April 2010 in the UK. The website’s objective is to improve access to the industry, for job seekers and entrepreneurs, by providing cost-effective learning tools that are essential to the development of the UK solar industry.provides online access to high quality courses with content that has been approved by leading industry actors, including Sharp and Mitsubishi in the UK.

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Terry SkeeRenewable Energy Academy0191 378 7493Email Information