Klementyna blog

Haiti president appeals for calm in cholera riots

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haiti's president appealed for calm amid fears that riots aimed at U.N. peacekeepers over a cholera epidemic could spread to the capital Wednesday, saying the violence has hurt efforts to fight the disease.

In a national address after health officials announced that the death toll from cholera had risen above 1,000, President Rene Preval said barricades were keeping people from getting needed care and admonished protesters that looting would not help stem the epidemic.

The U.N. canceled flights carrying 3 metric tons of soap along with other medical supplies and personnel to Cap-Haitien because of violence in Haiti's north, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. Flights were also canceled to Port-de-Paix.

Oxfam suspended water chlorination projects and the World Health Organization halted training of medical staff, the U.N. humanitarian office added in its news release. A U.N. World Food Program warehouse was looted and burned.

The capital, Port-au-Prince, was calm Tuesday but there were worries that protests could erupt in the city, which was devastated by last January's earthquake.

The Haitian government sent top officials to the north Tuesday in hopes of quelling the unrest. Haiti's police chief, the health minister and other Cabinet officials headed to Cap-Haitien, the country's second largest city, where protesters erected barricades of flaming tires and other debris and clashed with U.N. troops.

At least two demonstrators had died, one of them shot by a member of the multinational peacekeeping force that has been trying to keep order since 2004.

During a second day of rioting, local reporters said a police station was burned in Cap-Haitien and rocks were thrown at peacekeeping bases.

U.N. peacekeepers found themselves in the difficult job of quelling unrest aimed at them. The violence has combined some Haitians' long-standing resentment of the 12,000-member U.N. military mission with the internationally shared suspicion that a U.N. base could have been a source of the infection.

U.N. officials deny responsibility. The mission charged Tuesday that the protests were politically motivated to affect or disrupt national elections scheduled for Nov. 28.

The cholera outbreak that began last month has brought increased misery to the entire country, still struggling with the aftermath of the earthquake. But anger has been particularly acute in the north, where the infection is newer, health care sparse and people have died at more than twice the rate of the central region where the epidemic was first noticed.

The health ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll hit 1,034 as of Sunday. Figures are released following two days of review.

Aid workers say the government's numbers may understate the epidemic. While the health ministry says more than 16,700 people have been hospitalized nationwide, Doctors Without Borders says its clinics alone have treated at least 16,500.

Health experts have called for an independent investigation into whether Nepalese peacekeepers introduced the South Asian strain of cholera to Haiti, where no case of cholera had ever been documented before late October.

Cholera is transmitted by feces and can be all but prevented if people have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.

But sanitary conditions don't exist in much of Haiti, and the disease has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country's major population centers, including Port-au-Prince. There are concerns it could eventually sicken hundreds of thousands of people.

As the barricades burned, the disease continued spreading across Haiti and potentially the island of Hispaniola. Authorities in the neighboring Dominican Republic reported their country's first confirmed case of cholera in Higuey, near the tourist mecca of Punta Cana.

The man was a Haitian citizen who had recently returned from a 12-day vacation in Haiti. The news alarmed Dominicans, but the patient was in a hospital and in stable condition, officials said. No locally originated cholera cases have been reported.

Sara Paretsky publishes 14th Warshawski mystery

CHICAGO – Sara Paretsky's latest installment in her series about feisty, female private detective V.I. Warshawski opens with the heroine outside a Chicago nightclub, the bloody body of a woman who was just shot to death in her arms.

An Iraqi war veteran is charged with the crime and his parents hire Warshawski, setting off a chain of crime and corruption that links Warshawski's investigation from Chicago to Baghdad. From there, the mystery unfolds.

"The person who is arrested in the opening chapter is never guilty of the crime," Paretsky says during an interview in the upstairs study at her home on Chicago's South Side, her golden retriever Callie curled up on the floor nearby.

"Why do the police continue to doubt V.I.'s judgment on these matters, I don't know," she says.

"Body Work" came out Tuesday. It is the 14th novel in the Warshawski series. The plot focuses on a performance artist who sits nude on a nightclub stage and allows people to paint on her.

As hinted in the title, Paretsky says a major theme is the way both men and women's bodies are objectified, whether for sex or war.

"When do we get away from that?" she asks.

Also highlighted is Paretsky's focus on the Iraq war. Her book was released the same day President Barack Obama announced the official withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq. It's a conflict she says she was against before it started.

"I feel really strongly about the people whose bodies are on the line. And I think we've thrown them into this rock crusher and then we're ignoring them," she says.

That social activist stance is nothing new for Paretsky, who left her native Kansas at age 19 in 1966 to do community service on Chicago's South Side. She has worked with groups that focus on issues such as reproductive rights and the mentally ill homeless.

Augie Aleksy, owner of Centuries and Sleuths bookstore in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park, says moral values come through in Paretsky's writing.

"She doesn't hide her opinions about social events that are happening at this time," Aleksy says. "She's not shy about bringing some of her sense of where the world is going or where she thinks it should be going and using it in her fiction."

At the center of this world is Warshawski, who Paretsky says started as a pioneer and "brash, young thing," when she debuted in 1982 in "Indemnity Only."

"She also was really in your face about, 'Yes I have the right to do this job and I can do it as well as any guy,'" Paretsky says. "It would be ludicrous for her to be saying that now."

Other things have changed for the private detective, including her personality, which Paretsky says "used to be much more distinctive than mine but with time the two get merged. I feel that if I were a more sophisticated writer I would be able to solve that problem."

And V.I. (Victoria Iphigenia) has stopped aging.

"For a long time, I had her aging in real time, but I've lost my courage to make her old — so she's kind of hovering around 50," the silver-haired 63-year-old says. "When we started out, she was a year younger (than Paretsky). Now she's 10 years younger.

"Time has been kinder to her than to me," says Paretsky, surrounded by mementos in her study, a photo of her husband in his military uniform, a Rosie the Riveter picture that says, "We Can Do It," and a pillow embroidered with a crossword puzzle.

Another pseudo-character in Paretsky's series is the city of Chicago. Paretsky says she will often spot locations for scenes in her books while walking around the city. Or she'll dream up a sequence in a real Chicago place and go there to research before writing.

Like Warshawski, the city also has changed since 1982.

"If you go downtown everything is getting homogenized. ... It's boring. We've lost a lot of our uniqueness," Paretsky says. "But in the neighborhoods, they're still very unique and local. It's not the cookie-cutter stuff. In that way, I think this city remains its own rich place to be in."

And Warshawski will continue to be in those Chicago neighborhoods, Paretsky says, because there are more books on the way. In the next installment, Paretsky hints that there's a vampire-obsessed group of girls.

"It may be that someone will end up dead with a spike through his heart in the backyard of a high-profile woman," Paretsky says. "I would love for that to happen, but I'm not sure if I can fit it in."

She has, though, pretty much fit in everything else: V.I. has tangled with corrupt Chicago politics, the Vatican Bank, Great Lakes shipping and malpractice, and more.

Despite literary success — her novels are published in 30 countries — Paretsky remains humble.

"I think my work was a game changer for women in the mystery field," she says. "It wasn't what I set out to do, but I think it had that effect. ... Whether it's a lasting effect and whether I'm a good enough writer to survive in the long haul, I hope so, but how can I know?"

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Online:Soriani Bros featuringLady Violet

US rights group urges release of Iranian activist

UNITED NATIONS – A U.S. human rights group urged U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to secure the release of a prominent Iranian journalist and activist who goes on trial Saturday on charges that carry the death penalty.

It said Shiva Nazar Ahari, founder of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters in Tehran, faces "trumped-up charges" including "actions against national security" and "propaganda against the regime" for her participation in demonstrations and other human rights activism.

Ahari is also charged with "waging war against God" for her alleged membership in the exile Mujahedeen-e Khalq Organization, which carries the death penalty. She has denied any connection to the organization, which is the militant wing of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran.

The Mujahedeen-e Khalq fought alongside Saddam Hussein's forces during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and carried out a series of bloody bombings and assassinations in Iran during that decade, though it says it renounced violence in 2001.

The American Jewish Committee's Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights said Ahari's case "exemplifies the sorry state of human rights in Iran."

According to the human rights group, Ahari was arrested on Dec. 20, 2009, and has been detained ever since at Tehran's Evin prison with little access to her lawyer and family members. She reportedly spends long periods in solitary confinement.

"U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon can help protect this remarkable advocate of justice, whose life is in danger," institute chair E. Robert Goodkind said in a statement. "He should insist that Iran respect the concerns of U.N. human rights bodies by promptly releasing Nazar Ahari from prison."

U.N. associate spokesman Yves Sorokobi said the secretary-general's office received the letter but the point person for this issue is U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

Since Iran's June 2009 disputed presidential election, journalists have become a prime target in an Iranian government crackdown on the opposition. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in a report in March that at least 52 journalists are now in Iranian jails.

Last December, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution urging Iran to halt the persecution of political opponents following the election and release those still detained. It cited the "harassment, intimidation and persecution ... of opposition members, journalists and other media representatives" and many others exercising their rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.