Haiti quake more destructive than 2004 tsunami: study

by M.J. Smith M.j. Smith

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – The scale of devastation in Haiti is far worse than in Asia after the 2004 tsunami, a study has said, estimating the cost of last month's earthquake at up to 14 billion dollars.

The report released Tuesday from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) raised the possibility that the quake could be the most destructive disaster in modern history.

Its stark assessment comes with Port-au-Prince still lying in ruins more than one month on, while the bodies of more than 200,000 dead pile up in mass graves outside the capital.

The study's release coincided with what would normally be Haiti's annual carnival, an explosion of pulsing music and colorful parades. But this year, the events have been cancelled as no one is in the mood to party.

The preliminary IDB report estimated the damage at between eight and 14 billion dollars in what was already the poorest country in the Americas before the catastrophe.

Factoring in Haiti's population and economic output, the upper estimate would make it the most destructive natural disaster in modern history, the bank said. Related article: Haiti gang turf wars

"Indeed, in this respect the Haiti earthquake was vastly more destructive than the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and the cyclone that hit Myanmar in 2008," an IDB statement said.

"It caused five times more deaths per million inhabitants than the second-ranking natural killer, the 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua."

Haiti officials say more than 217,000 people were killed in the quake, or about 2.4 percent of the country's population of nine million.

The 14-billion-dollar figure is the Washington-based bank's upper estimate for the cost of reconstructing homes, schools, streets and other infrastructure in Haiti following the January 12 quake.

The IDB said a more detailed accounting of the situation would come in the following months but that its preliminary study showed that the reconstruction cost was likely to be far higher than anticipated.

Meanwhile, Haiti's carnival celebrations, usually the culmination of weeks of parties, were replaced by mourning.

"Everybody's sad," said Nanotte Verly, a 48-year-old mother of nine who lost her home in the quake and sells jewelry and wooden plaques praising Jesus on a roadside. "All the buildings are still collapsed on the ground."

More than a million Haitians are still homeless following the earthquake, living in squalid camps in and around the capital.

Related article: Haiti's raucous carnival replaced by mourning

The traditional center of carnival celebrations, the Champ de Mars park across from the collapsed National Palace, is now a sprawling homeless camp housing some 16,000 people in a maze of tents made of scrap wood and sheets.

Lemaire Sicard, 37, lives at the site and spoke of how the Champ de Mars would be filled with revelers and partying in years past.

"But now there's nothing," he said. "It's not possible. There are people from this area who were hurt -- deaths also."

While aid workers rush to distribute tarpaulins before the rainy season starts, the United Nations says only about 272,000 people have been provided with shelter materials so far.

On his second day in Haiti to give a boost to the relief effort, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Canadian troops in Leogane, a town largely wiped out by the quake where the soldiers are helping set up a hospital.

Harper had earlier said Canada would set up a semi-permanent, 11-million-dollar headquarters for the Haitian government, which currently operates out of a police building because the palace and many government ministries were destroyed in the quake.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to arrive here on Wednesday.

In a positive sign for the quake-torn country, American Airlines said it would resume the first commercial flights to Haiti on Friday.

from http://news.yahoo.com/
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Obama's latest bipartisan outreach: nuclear energy

By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer Ben Feller,

WASHINGTON – Prodding Republicans, President Barack Obama on Tuesday championed nuclear energy expansion as the latest way that feuding parties can move beyond the "broken politics" of Washington that have imperiled his agenda and soured voters.

His call came as he dispatched Vice President Joe Biden and Cabinet secretaries nationwide to tout the economic stimulus plan against Republican criticism, reflecting that until bipartisanship comes, the White House will remain aggressive in selling its own case to the public.

Since a January special election in Massachusetts, when Democrats lost the 60th vote they need in the Senate to overcome Republican delays on legislation, Obama has recalibrated his strategy to advance his agenda. His plan includes reaching out to Republicans on tax breaks, on health care and on energy, but also putting them on the spot for any refusal to help.

With a host of new goals — rebuilding public confidence, keeping Obama in charge of the debate, halting deep Democratic losses in this year's elections — the White House is now infusing its communications strategy with more of the discipline that it famously used in Obama's presidential campaign.

The president cast his push for more nuclear energy as both economically vital and politically attractive to the opposition party. He announced more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to build the first nuclear power plant in nearly three decades, part of a nuclear initiative that could draw essential backing from Republicans.

At the same time, he asked Republicans to get behind a comprehensive energy bill that expands clean energy sources, assigns a cost to the polluting emissions of fossil fuels so that nuclear fuel becomes more affordable, and gives both parties a rare chance to claim common ground.

"The fact is, changing the ways we produce and use energy requires us to think anew. It requires us to act anew," Obama said during a stop a job training center outside Washington. "And it demands of us a willingness to extend our hand across some of the old divides, to act in good faith, and to move beyond the broken politics of the past. That's what we must do."

That mission, however, remains in doubt.

A White House built on the long view also has gotten sharper about responding to daily criticisms from emboldened Republicans. This week, senior administration officials are scheduled to visit 35 communities to counter Republican claims that the massive, deficit-spending economic stimulus program has failed. In Saginaw, Mich., on Tuesday, Biden insisted the stimulus is working even as he acknowledged "it's gonna take us a while to get us out of this ditch."

Michigan's unemployment rate is among the highest in the country. The chronic joblessness there and elsewhere is driving an anti-incumbency fever, even as the economy by most other measures appears to be rebounding.

Democrats, as members of the party in power, are most likely to feel that anti-incumbency heat at the polls in November when House and Senate seats are on the ballot. Obama will head west later this week to raise money for two vulnerable Democrats who face the voters this year, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader.

On Tuesday, an Obama ally and moderate Democrat, two-term Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, said the frustrations of gridlock drove his decision not to run for re-election. "There's just too much brain-dead partisanship," Bayh said in a nationally broadcast interview.

Obama is working to change that system while, for now, he is required to work within it.

He made his pitch for nuclear energy by saying nothing less than the economy, the security of the United States and the planet's future were at stake.

"We can't continue to be mired in the same old stale debates between left and right, between environmentalists and entrepreneurs," the president said.

Obama aides say there's no formal reevaluation of the administration's communications strategy as the president embarks on his second year in office.

But the White House is taking an approach that is at once more aggressive and more streamlined.

It includes more direct, rapid response to criticism; more events at which the president speaks directly to the public without the filter of the media; and more carefully choreographed interactions with the press. The intended narrative is one in which Obama hears people's frustrations and is working directly to end them.

There's little doubt the public is angry. A CBS News/New York Times poll in early February found 81 percent saying it's time to elect new people to Congress.

That affects Obama, who is not up for re-election until 2012 but needs allies and votes on Capitol Hill to usher in the domestic change he has promised.
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New clip shows JFK arriving in Dallas in 1963

DALLAS – New color video footage showing President John F. Kennedy's arrival in Dallas the day he was assassinated is the best home movie ever made of the event, the curator of the Dallas JFK museum said.

The short clip, shot on 8mm film by a 15-year-old student, provides a rare, high-quality color close-up of John and Jackie Kennedy as they arrived in Dallas. The Sixth Floor Museum put the film on display for public viewing on Presidents Day.

Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963, as his motorcade made its way through downtown Dallas. The footage shot earlier that day by William Ward Warren mainly shows Air Force One and Air Force Two arriving, and briefly features the Kennedys making their way through the crowd at the airport.

"Viewing this footage makes you feel as though you're standing next to Warren as he's filming it on that very day," museum curator Gary Mack said Monday. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza chronicles Kennedy's life and death and is located in the old book depository building from where Lee Harvey Oswald fired at the president's motorcade.

Warren, now the 61-year-old owner of a freight brokerage business, was at the airport because Dallas students were given the day off for Kennedy's visit. He told The Associated Press on Tuesday that when he realized he'd be close enough to Kennedy to shake his hand, he made the quick decision to film the president instead. He got his footage, and ended up shaking Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson's hand.

He said he transferred the footage to a VCR tape about 15 years ago but largely forgot about it, keeping it hidden on top of his grandfather clock.

"Only recently did I feel like things like this just seem to disappear so I called the museum to see if they had any interest in it," Warren said.

The final few seconds of the three-minute film show JFK passing through the crowd, smiling at cameras. Jacqueline Kennedy follows, carrying a bouquet of red roses given to her by local officials. She's walking alongside Johnson. A smiling Lady Bird Johnson appears briefly. She's followed by Gov. John Connally, who was wounded in the shooting later in the day.

The clip offers interesting historical perspective, showing the suits and dresses of the day and the old-style TV cameras. It briefly cuts to a shot of students flying a Texas flag and a Confederate flag.

The event was captured by local black-and-white TV cameras. There were numerous other cameras at Dallas' Love Field that day, but most of that footage hasn't been released to the public, Mack said.

Warren, of Dallas, said that when he heard later that day of the president's assassination, he was "floored."

"I say it's like getting the wind knocked out of you when you're playing soccer. You just don't know how to react," he said.

On the Net:

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza: http://jfk.org/
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Gasoline prices hit a new low for 2010

By MARK WILLIAMS, AP Energy Writer Mark Williams, Ap Energy Writer – 2 hrs 41 mins ago

Motorists are still getting a break at the pump, as gasoline prices continued their monthlong slide on Tuesday, dropping to a new low for 2010.

Oil prices spiked above $77 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, spurred by upbeat economic news. Today's rise may not translate into higher pump prices immediately. Although there have been price swings of 4 or 5 percent in oil from time to time, crude prices per barrel have lingered mainly in the $70s over the last few months.

Retail gasoline prices hit a nationwide average of $2.61 per gallon and fell below $2.40 in parts of the country; including Ohio, Oklahoma and Missouri, according to AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service.

The Energy Information Administration said Monday that gas prices averaged $2.608 per gallon on Monday, down 4.4 cents from a week ago. Prices in the Midwest and Gulf Coast states had the cheapest prices at $2.503 and $2.482 per gallon, respectively.

Prices are now 16 cents below the Jan. 15 peak, but still 64.5 cents above year-ago levels. Motorists spend about $953 million per day on fuel, down from about $1 billion per day last month, according to OPIS' Tom Kloza. The typical motorist uses about 50 gallons of fuel per month, which would cost about $130 at current prices.

Prices have been particularly cheap in the Midwest where weak consumption coupled with less expensive winter gasoline blends pushed wholesale prices to a range of $1.75 to $1.85 per gallon last week, Kloza said.

Wholesale gasoline prices jumped 5 to 7 cents per gallon Tuesday. Prices could move higher as the spring driving season approaches.

Oil prices jumped on Tuesday as the dollar weakened and stock markets climbed on news the economy may be improving. The Empire State manufacturing index rose to 24.91 this month, compared with a forecast of 18, according to economists polled by Thomson Reuters. Reports on housing starts, jobless claims and inflation are due out later this week.

Benchmark crude for March delivery rose $2.88 to settle at $77.01 a barrel on the Nymex.

Because crude is traded in dollars, it becomes more expensive when the dollar falls and allows investors holding other currencies like the euro to get more oil for less.

Natural gas prices fell, even as another winter storm dumped as much as a foot of snow on the Midwest and the forecast called for cold temperatures for much of the nation for the rest of the month. The U.S. is awash in natural gas, with 2.1 trillion cubic feet in storage, according to the Energy Department.

Natural gas lost 15.8 cents to settle at $5.310 per 1,000 cubic feet.

In other Nymex trading in March contracts, heating oil rose 7.74 cents to settle at $1.9963 a gallon, and gasoline climbed 5.87 cents to settle at $1.9882 a gallon.

In London, Brent crude was up $3.17 to settle at $75.68 on the ICE futures exchange.

from http://news.yahoo.com/
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Iran says will respond to any new sanctions

TEHRAN (Reuters) – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday any country that tried to impose new sanctions on Iran would regret its actions, as the United States and Russia voiced shared concern about Tehran's nuclear program.

Ahmadinejad was speaking a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought oil giant Saudi Arabia's support to help win Chinese backing for additional sanctions. Clinton said a new round of sanctions should target Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

"Iran will retaliate ... of course, if somebody acts against Iran our response will definitely be firm enough ... (to) make them regretful," Ahmadinejad told a news conference, without elaborating. "Sanctions will not harm Iran."

In Washington, the White House on Tuesday would not rule out any options -- including a military option -- for dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions.

"I wouldn't rule out anything," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told a news briefing, adding that Iran's refusal to engage on its nuclear program was proof that the program "is not of the means and type that they have tried to convince others that it's for."

A joint letter from the United States, Russia and France expressed concern about Tehran's nuclear work and said its decision to escalate uranium enrichment -- rather than implement a nuclear fuel swap -- was unjustified.

Ahmadinejad said talks were still under way on the proposed fuel exchange and the issue was not yet closed.

He did not give details, but Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was visiting Tehran on Tuesday to try to salvage the U.N.-brokered uranium exchange deal amid growing calls for new sanctions against Iran.

"We have passed our own original proposals. We have brought up some ideas to unlock the impasse," Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Burak Ozugergin told Reuters in Ankara.

The State Department said it was not aware that any talks were under way, and repeated that any negotiations would have to take place with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which brokered the fuel swap proposal.

"That is what is on offer. There are no new offers out there," State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid told a news briefing.

Western powers had hoped the IAEA proposal would result in Iran sending most of its low-enriched uranium abroad for processing and ease their concerns that it might build a nuclear bomb.

Iran, the world's fifth-largest crude exporter, says its nuclear program is solely to generate electricity so it can export more of its oil and gas.

"The case is not yet closed ... we have already announced that we are ready for a fuel exchange within a fair framework. We are still ready for an exchange, even with America," Ahmadinejad said. But he added that such a swap should take place inside Iran, a likely non-starter for the West.

His order last week to start production of higher-grade uranium, rather than agree to the U.N.-brokered swap proposal, exposed Tehran to new calls for U.N. sanctions.

"WHOLLY UNJUSTIFIED"

The Kremlin said on Tuesday Iran could face sanctions if it failed to allay international fears about its nuclear program, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on a visit to Moscow, called for "paralyzing sanctions" on Iran.

The joint letter from the United States, Russia and France, obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, said Iran's move to escalate uranium enrichment was unjustified because the draft nuclear fuel deal lists guarantees for Tehran's benefit.

"(This) is wholly unjustified ... If Iran goes forward with this escalation, it would raise new concerns about Iran's nuclear intentions," the letter to the IAEA said.

It said the plan for Iran to swap enriched uranium for nuclear medicine fuel had legal assurances it would be fulfilled, contrary to Iran's assertions.

Ahmadinejad said Iran had been willing to send its uranium abroad rather than enrich it further at home, but that it had "found that there is no goodwill in this regard."

He dismissed Clinton's accusations that Iran was moving toward a military dictatorship. The U.S. military budget was 80 times larger than that of the Islamic Republic, he said.

"We don't take her comments seriously," Ahmadinejad said.

He said Iran was not worried about sanctions targeting its gasoline imports as the country could become an exporter of the fuel. "There are several refineries under construction ... and as soon as they become operational we can even export gasoline."

"They (the United States) imagine that they can prevent Iran's oil exports and it is just dreaming. They are not able to do that," he said, saying the United States should instead cooperate constructively with Iran. "The only opportunity they have is to use Iran's capabilities."

(Additional reporting by Fredrik Dahl and Hossein Jaseb in Tehran, Mark Heinrich in Vienna, Zerin Elci in Ankara, Steve Holland and Ross Colvin in Washington; Editing by Dominic Evans and Eric Walsh)
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