Latin America

Medical personnel in Haiti, which includes several hundred Cuban doctors, are now facing a cholera outbreak in several regions including the capital Port-au-Prince with 73 confirmed cases. The following is a report from the Haitilibre.com website.

The beauty of the Mexican Caribbean resort city of Cancun may have been one reason for choosing it to host the upcoming global summit on climate change. But Cancun has little to recommend it as a model for adapting to the challenges posed by climate change.

Over-exploitation of jack mackerel, the main commercial species of fish caught in Chile, has caused the decline of the Pacific ocean species and a crisis in the fishing industry. Scientists recommend halving the catch in 2011.

A quick evaluation of people affected by floods related to Hurricane Tomas was posted today by the Haitilibre.com website. Here is their report.

Aldeci “Nenzinho” Cerqueira Maia was 18 years old and already married when his mother died. A rubber tapper or “seringueiro” from the age of nine, he still keeps a rubber ball he made himself when he first started working, as a kind of good luck charm.

Haiti is on Red Alert on Friday as Hurricane Tomas approaches from the south, already extending its winds and rain towards the country still trying to recover from the January earthquake and the recent cholera outbreak. Here is the latest report from Haitilibre.com.

Humanitarian agencies try to displace a maximum of people of the zones threatened by the Tomas tropical storm. “The situation is difficult, because getting people to move again is tricky,” said Doyle, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), many fear to lose the few possessions they have left.

While foreign policy issues played almost no role in Tuesday’s election results, the historic Republican landslide will almost certainly make Barack Obama’s vision of a more positive U.S. role in international affairs more difficult to pursue.

The Haitian government, humanitarian agencies and the Mission of the UN Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) put in place a contingency plan for dealing with Hurricane Tomas, which is close to the island and may affect up half million people.