Historian-activist Zinn dies
By Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard, Boston Globe
Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist whose books such as “A People’s History of the United States” prompted a generation to rethink the nation’s past, died yesterday in Santa Monica, Calif., where he was traveling. He was 87, and lived in the Newton village of Auburndale. His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he had a heart attack.
“He’s made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture,” Noam Chomsky, the activist and MIT professor, said last night. “He’s changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can’t think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect.”
Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn’s writings “simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation.”
“He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant,” Chomsky said. “Both by his actions and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement.”
For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers - many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out - but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.
As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994): “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”
Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and John Silber, former president of Boston University. Dr. Zinn, a leading critic of Silber, twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.”
Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped.
In 1997, Dr. Zinn slipped into popular culture when his writing made a cameo appearance in the film “Good Will Hunting.” The title character, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns when growing up.
“Howard had a great mind and was one of the great voices in the American political life,” Ben Affleck, Damon’s longtime friend and his costar in “Good Will Hunting,” said in a statement. “He taught me how valuable, how necessary dissent was to democracy and to America itself. He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites. I was lucky enough to know him personally, and I will carry with me what I learned from him - and try to impart it to my own children - in his memory.”
Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, “The People Speak,” which ran on the History Channel in 2009, and he narrated a 2004 biographical documentary, “Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”
“Howard had a genius for the shape of public morality and for articulating the great alternative vision of peace as more than a dream,” said James Carroll, a columnist for the Globe’s opinion pages whose friendship with Dr. Zinn dates to when Carroll was a Catholic chaplain at BU. “But above all, he had a genius for the practical meaning of love. That is what drew legions of the young to him and what made the wide circle of his friends so constantly amazed and grateful.”
Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he met Roslyn Shechter.
“She was working as a secretary,” Dr. Zinn said in an interview with the Globe nearly two years ago. “We were both working in the same neighborhood, but we didn’t know each other. A mutual friend asked me to deliver something to her. She opened the door, I saw her, and that was it.”
He joined the Army Air Corps, and they courted through the mail before marrying in October 1944 while he was on his first furlough. She died in 2008.
During World War II, he served as a bombardier, was awarded the Air Medal, and attained the rank of second lieutenant. After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman. He worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.
Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and a lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were novelist Alice Walker, who called him “the best teacher I ever had,” and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children’s Defense Fund.
During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.
Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.
The focus of his activism became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at many rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, another leading antiwar activist, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.
Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience and ” (1968). He had previously published “LaGuardia in Congress” (1959), which had won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Prize; “SNCC: The New Abolitionists” (1964); “The Southern Mystique” (1964); and “New Deal Thought” (1966).
In addition to his daughter, Dr. Zinn leaves a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaughters; and two grandsons. Funeral plans were not available.

From The London Times
Death is not the last thing on their minds
Leo Lewis
A Korean investment banker friend of mine died recently, but only for ten minutes. He’s a very busy man, you see, and a coffin leaves frightful creases in a good suit.
Since his fake death and elective entombment Kang Dae has been insufferable. He jabbers about how much he adores his daughter, sees the outlines of animals in shapeless clouds, smacks his lips over the “sweet, sweet taste” of Hite lager (think of Kestrel without the class). I hope this wears off soon. I found myself nostalgic for the days when all Kang Dae did was obsess about his bonus.
His temporary demise was organised by one of the many “coffin academies” that have sprung up across Korea. The ten-minute taste of death is tailored to Koreans’ loony blend of masochism and sentimentality. You write saccharine letters of farewell to loved ones. You craft a pithy eulogy. You blub about the cruel waste of a life. You sit through a drab sermon on the preciousness of the soul. You pay your 20 quid. They box you up.
The idea — and it has been tediously successful in Kang Dae’s case — is to make you think deeply about the important things in life. Tragically, the Korean corporate sector has bought into this claptrap: Kyobo, a large insurance company, now stipulates that all of its staff must “die” at some point in their careers.
The moment when the coffin lid is nailed into place is, for aficionados, an exquisite agony. Others burst into tears and hammer for release from the suffocating darkness. There is even a whiff of competitiveness: Kang Dae felt that his self-penned epitaph (“In this tomb lies a true Korean”) outshone those of the other fake corpses in his group. “More ... well, you know, sort of cool and noble,” he says, taking a swig from his tankard of Hite and looking dreamy.
Or, as Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula put it rather more elegantly as he clambered into his coffin: “To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious!”
Mobile messaging
I take a swift tour of the showroom at Samsung’s gleaming new headquarters in Seoul. The old place was guarded by chisel-jawed commandos with black flak jackets, mirror sunglasses and a smouldering hatred of the world. But they have evidently gone for a slightly softer image, and the visitor is now greeted by smiling lovelies and a screen full of ghastly brand values like “friendship” and “togetherness”.
What has not changed, however, are the desperately silly mock-ups of future technologies. It is unfair to single Samsung out: all electronics companies will, at some stage of the tour, direct you to “the living room of tomorrow”, where clean, well-behaved children thoughtfully bring their mothers a cup of tea on an anti-gravity tray before the family collapses in hysterics at some joke the janitor-bot has told.
Samsung’s version includes a “café of tomorrow” where, for reasons that are not explained, everyone wears white and neither customers nor waiters have any sleeves. But the star attraction is the future driving experience: a man is told that his wife is going into labour (apparently they don’t have a gadget for that). He rushes to his Minority Report-style car and screeches off to the maternity ward. Disaster! Even in the future, the Seoul traffic is a bitch. Sweating with nerves, he types out a text message saying “wife having baby!” and presses “send”. The words instantly appear on the internal displays of all the other cars in the immediate vicinity. The traffic parts like the waters of the Red Sea and he speeds off to fatherhood. Ahh!
I’m no futurologist, but I’m pretty sure that if the next decade gives us the ability to send a terse verbal message directly to the windscreen of fellow road-users, things could get out of hand. If I were driving in Seoul in 2020, I would almost certainly have “Michinnom!” on speed-dial.
Double bonus
It turns out that Kang Dae’s newfound love of planet Earth is not only caused by his mind-bending brush with the afterlife. He works for one of those Wall Street banks that required a mighty wodge of taxpayers’ money to stay in business and is now cheerfully paying out bonuses to scoundrels like him.
But, Kang Dae tells me with a glint of triumph, he has somehow convinced his eagle-eyed wife that bonuses this year will not be paid. Along with a like-minded gang of schemers from the trading floor, he has persuaded her that the bank is holding back the money “for sensitive political reasons”.
She watches the news, and can perfectly grasp why her husband’s firm might want to be a little humble and circumspect.
Kang Dae, meanwhile, has readied a secret account into which he plans to funnel the loot. I have never seen him so happy. For the first time since he married, the entire pot will be his to squander alone.
He was careful not to tell me what he was getting in the way of cash, but I imagine it will cover the cost of a weeping squadron of professional mourners bewailing his next phony death.

The London Times
Can Apple’s Jesus Tablet deliver a miracle?
Next week’s launch is creating more than the usual buzz. That’s because it may be the potential saviour of the written word
Antonia Senior
Some techheads are calling it the Messiah Machine; others the Jesus Tablet. On Wednesday, Apple will unveil its new gizmo, a tablet computer. The world will be watching — and not just the black polo-necked, thick-specced, champagne-tech crowd who normally weep sycophantic tears of idolatry every time Steve Jobs appears in public. Even those normal beings who think that God v Darwin is a rather more important philosophical question than Mac v PC will be watching — or should be.
This is the most eagerly awaited product launch of the millennium so far: perhaps the most anticipated technological advance in history. The wheel, the axe and the printing press may have remade human society, but all the buzz came with hindsight.
The atmosphere on the tech blogs is febrile. The agnostics are awash with rumours about names and capabilities: will it be iSlate, or iPad; will there be a keyboard dock as well as a virtual keyboard; how will Apple finesse the problem faced by e-readers that if you strip out the back-lighting, the screen is readable in daylight, but only in black and white? Meanwhile sites such as the influential techcrunch.com are issuing plaintive cries for an end to the chatter until the thing is launched.
Apple’s obsessive secrecy is grist to the extraordinary rumour mill. It’s the most brilliant no marketing, marketing campaign. In any other company, the silence and the hype would be irritating hubris. Not in this case. The Apple tablet will be transformative. Succeed or fail, on Wednesday, Apple will be making cultural history.
Failure, despite Steve Jobs’ Midas touch, is a real possibility. Tablet computers have been around for aeons. In the early 1990s, tech- visionaries speculated that we would all have migrated to tablets by the millennium. In 2001, Bill Gates predicted tablets would be the future within five years. We are still waiting.
There is little doubt that Apple’s tablet will be a thing of loveliness: sleek, thin and covetable, like a battery-powered haiku. It is likely to leave first-time users with that sense of open-mouthed awe at technology that combines cleverness with simplicity, that sense of being a South Sea islander seeing a mirror for the first time. It is Jobs’ new baby.
But why do we need a tablet? OK, it will compute, play moving pictures, display still ones. You will be able to read on it, write on it and listen to music. But already, in my two-and-a-half person household, we have two televisions, three radios, two laptops, one notebook, three iPods of differing sizes, one Kindle e-reader, one digital photo frame, subscriptions for two magazines and one newspaper and double-stacked, groaning bookshelves. We are digitised to the eyeballs and sated by media. Why do we need more? Apple is trying to create a craving for a product we don’t need. But we didn’t know we needed an MP3 player, either, until the iPod taught us differently.
There is a reason for the biblical tinge in the tablet’s nicknames. This device is seen as a potential saviour of the written word. Traditional print media — newspapers and magazines — are struggling. Readership online is thriving, but proving hard to monetise; readership of traditional, paper-based media is falling, threatening sales and advertising revenues.
Readers currently expect to get their online content free. The battle to persuade them otherwise is just beginning — The New York Times this week became the latest paper to announce that it would extend charging for content online. This newspaper intends to start charging for a digital version from the spring.
No one expects this to be an easy transition. As Chris Anderson says in his book on internet economics, Free, the gap in the consumer’s mind between 0p and 1p is infinitely greater than the gap between 1p and £1. The beauty of the tablet model is that it is likely to follow Apple’s previous ground-breaking inventions by embedding within it the notion of paying for stuff. Tunes are not free; neither are many apps.
So why do we pay? In part, because apps for the iPhone are covetable, functional and sexy. Trapped in a lift-shaft in Port-au-Prince this week, Dan Woolley used a medical app to look up treatment for his wounds. A very modern medical miracle.
The iPhone and iPod are portable, but they are also highly personal bits of kit. Apple has created a virtuous circle — it creates toys we desire, and then uses our desire to personalise our toys to sell us more stuff. The more we love, the more we pay.
The written-word industry wants in on the Apple/consumer love-in. The publishing industry, spooked by e-readers, wants to break Amazon’s effective monopoly on the fledgeling industry. Everyone wants us to want a tablet, even Microsoft, which can flog its own cheaper version once Apple has created the desire. The spoke in this wheel of love is, of course, money. Apple has been in talks with the titans of the written word, including The New York Times, Condé Nast Publications and News Corporation, The Times’ parent company. They are trying to get in early to avoid Apple becoming too powerful a middleman between writer and reader. They already deal with a middleman on the internet, Google, and it has not been a comfortable experience.
On Wednesday, when the tech-heads are salivating over Apple’s tablet, there will be some gimlet-eyed types following the money trail. Apple may fail to make a market; Jobs may be more Job than God in this instance. But this in itself would be of huge significance. E-readers have so far failed to take off; books, newspapers and magazines are portable and cheap technology, and therefore hard to supplant. The problem is, people just aren’t buying. If Apple can’t shift us towards digital words, and a whole new source of cash, it is likely that no one can.
Like most people, I’m broadly in favour of being paid. And if you won’t pay for me online, maybe you’ll pay to tout me around in your handbag?

From The London Times
Greed and property boom were downfall of murdered Chinese official
Jane Macartney in Xiashuixi
Where orchards of apples and peaches once grew, orange concrete apartment blocks now stand. Where the villagers of Xiashuixi once tended corn and vegetables is an eight-storey tower built by the Communist Party official who converted this farmland into a modern town.
It is a transformation that is taking place not only in this remote corner of northwestern China but also across the land as the Government wrenches its people from poverty into citizens of one of the world’s most important economies. The price can be high: farmers become landless while the officials grow rich. Some pay with their lives.
Li Shiming, a party official, was so hated that more than 20,000 people in the district signed a petition begging for leniency for his killer, Zhang Xuping, 19.
Economic reform and profitable coalmines fuelled a construction boom for Xiashuixi, which is on the outskirts of a city. The land was a lure for local officials eager to cash in on their influence.
Mr Li barely stood out among the millions of petty party officials doing the same nationwide. He hired thugs to carry out his orders while he amassed power and wealth.
Li Haiqing sobs uncontrollably every time he hears the name of his childhood friend — not from sorrow at his death but from despair at the way Mr Li destroyed his life.
He looks ten years older than his age of 42. He can no longer talk and can barely walk. His wife is his voice. His offence, she said, was to refuse to work for Mr Li as one of his thugs.
She said: “Li Shiming said that if he beat someone to death and was sentenced to be executed he could use his influence to make sure he would be all right. My husband refused. And this is what happened to him.”
Li Haiqing has been arrested six times by the police and beaten. Whatever business he tried to start his former friend would find a pretext to close him down.
Since Mr Li’s murder in September 2008 no one has tried to harm Li Haiqing. His wife said: “We feel safe now. There’s no one to bully us. This fate should have come to him much earlier. Everyone is delighted.”
If anyone understands the power that Mr Li could wield it is Zhang Weixing. He was once the village chief of Xiashuixi and farmed vines and orchards. He could earn 20,000 yuan (£1,900) a year — a small fortune even ten years ago.
One morning in 2001 he found that his trees had been uprooted. Mr Zhang, 58, said: “I didn’t receive a penny, not one penny. Li Shiming took the land and sold it to developers. I accosted him in one of his car parks and he began to beat me. Then he set his thugs on me. They beat me with spades and kicked me to the ground.”
Mr Zhang pointed at rows of new flats. “These are all illegal,” he said. “Everything is built on land stolen from the farmers.”
After Mr Li was killed the Government sent teams to investigate. Mr Zhang said: “That’s how we know that they discovered that Li Shiming had illegally taken 400mu [27 hectares] of farmers’ land. Then they went away because more senior officials were involved. He gave properties to the police, the procuratorate, the courts, the Government, the banks. He made sure he had good relations with everyone with power.”
Mr Li’s feud with the family of his killer, Zhang Xuping, began when he took their land a decade ago. After locking up Zhang’s mother, Wang Hou’e, he used his connections to have Zhang expelled from school. He was 13. A farmer offered Zhang 1,000 yuan to kill Mr Li and when he saw him drive to a school without his bodyguards, the teenager stabbed him.
The villagers of Xiashuixi celebrated when they heard that he was dead. One said: “We set off fireworks.”
Zhang and the farmer, Zhang Huping, were given death sentences but his mother began to gather signatures. In six months she had gathered 20,699. She said: “People felt that he was so young and deserved leniency for killing such an evil man.”

The day I decided to stop being gay
Patrick Muirhead London Times

A minor incident in a barber’s shop last week has helped me to realise that I may no longer be gay. Not a fully fledged homo, anyway; perhaps not even a part-timer who helps the team out when it’s busy. It appears I may be going straight.
I was in Tenterden, the Kentish village where I was brought up and to which I have lately returned, working at a nearby aerodrome as a helicopter pilot. I was waiting my turn for a chatty Latvian to apply the hot towels and razor.
A handsome young dad entered with a small, fair-haired boy at his side. The man took a seat and hoisted the wide-eyed child proudly on to his knee. The first haircut, I speculated inwardly, as an unfamiliar fatherly glow and feeling of mild envy swept over me. I could not tear my attention away from the mirrored reflections.
From time to time, the dad leant forward as they waited and whispered close to his son’s ear, tenderly kissing his fair head. Touching stuff.
But then my eyes lowered and I became transfixed by the sight of the boy’s tiny pink fingers gripping his father’s huge, workman-like fist. And I almost wanted to burst into song.
I think my life changed at that moment.
That’s love, folks. Simple really. A proud dad, an adored little boy and a beautiful display of dependence and responsibility. It was the epiphany I had needed and I emerged with a dashing new haircut and a desire to procreate.
Gays have children these days, of course they do, and not always to accessorise an outfit. Some gay couples adopt; others follow twisting paths to biological parenthood, often quite expensively, with the involvement of test tubes and cash changing hands. It is, really, a sort of snook to the system of nature. Shooting for the net without the chore of running with the ball. It’s just not for me.
And lately I have, almost imperceptibly, been laying the groundwork to make parenthood happen in the old-fashioned way. I have been flirting with someone at my local pub, thinking about her at odd times, making excuses to call her and wondering if she likes me. It’s rather strange.
This will come as a shock to — among others — my male former partner of ten years, gay pals from my former media career, my rabidly heterosexual chums in the aviation industry and, not least, my family (who rather hoped I was going through a phase — albeit for about 20 years). Well, it’s come as a shock to me, too.
I once attended the nuptials of a gay male friend to a girl with whom he had unexpectedly fallen head over heels in love. It was a curious affair: the wedding party was peopled with his ex-lovers — including me, the best man and even the vicar. There is a risk that a wedding guest list of mine could have the same casting issues.
My sexuality was formed behind bike sheds and in school dormitories, a most unimaginatively clichéd pattern of pubescent fumbling. This propelled me into a lifestyle, reinforced by a social milieu of flamboyant media gays. At the BBC, where I worked for seven years, homosexuality was very nearly compulsory.
At these tidings, my sceptical buddies will splutter, “You what?! Miss Patsy, trouser-chaser extraordinaire, has decided she’s now dancing at the other end of the ballroom? Pur-leeeeeeeze!” They have seen little evidence of an interest in the opposite sex during my adult life, nor asked why. And that’s the clincher.
If there had been an interest, it became eclipsed by other more instant, carnal and deliciously taboo temptations, so it never gained light to grow. For 20 years, my life took a track that stifled the fragile stems of a family man that wanted to emerge.
So I will have to face down a tidal wave of doubt as I’m coming out in public. People will look at me strangely now — though I doubt they’ll mutter, “Well, of course, we always wondered. After all, he is interested in real ale and piston engines.”
For it is true: I quite like girls. But there is no pink meteor shower for this announcement; no glittered cabaret or niche community willing to clutch me to its bosom and claim me as a sister. Just a little whiff of suspicion.
Some will dismiss it as heresy. I have long argued that homosexuality is natural but abnormal, to a torrent of hostility from gay friends who refuse to acknowledge that what you are and what stake you hold in society are not the same.
Loving your own sex occurs in nature, without artificial triggers. But it is still not average behaviour. Homosexuality is an aberration; a natural aberration. Gays are a minority and minorities, though sometimes vocal, do not hold sway.
A 12th-century chronicler, quoted by the historian Christopher Hibbert in his History of England, wrote of the homosexual king William Rufus: “All things that are loathsome to God and to earnest men were customary in this land in his time.” In modern times, we have become accustomed to abnormality again.
But two decades of cavorting with my own sex has delivered little that is memorable, except one super-sized sexless friendship with the aforementioned ex-boyf, with whom I spent a decade of my life; numerous hours of internet dating; a dizzying number of casual couplings and a few trips to genitourinary medicine clinics.
I will spare you tales of exploits in the gloaming world of fast gay encounters. You would simply not believe what I have seen and done. You would not want to know.
I can however disclose that I was once pursued in a subterranean gay haunt by the homosexual rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. Scantily clad, he was quite resistible. Like Oscar Wilde, I have “feasted with panthers”. And survived.
In novels such as E. M. Forster’s Maurice, a seminal work of gay literature, the message was tolerance. It was never a charter for parity. Civil partnerships really are little more than theatrical shams involving men making a point in matching wedding cravats, of embarrassed grandparents and monstrously camp multi-tier cakes.
I wince when gays describe boyfriends as “husbands”, subverting a solemn institution created to provide stability for child-rearing. Besides, it seems highly perverse that gays should fight for freedom from the bonds of heterosexual morality and then set to copying their oppressors by creating similar contracts of their own.
I was never convinced of my sexuality. True, I never liked football or fighting and I do make a beautifully light Victoria sponge when the need arises. But I shamble like a bloke, I burp and fart without shame and I’ve never really got Barbra Streisand. There was a little voice, lost long ago in the drowning din of my homosexuality, that still called quietly; the smothered, smaller voice of a boy who liked girls.
And then, two summers ago, I met Olga. She was a knockout-looking Ukrainian, washed ashore as a waitress in a breakfast bar in Ocean City, Maryland, on the East Coast of America. I was working locally as a pilot. A group of aviators slouched in each morning for coffee, eggs and grits. She took a particular interest in my chopper.
We began an e-mail exchange and she would send me numerous pictures of the industrial city of Cherkassy, her hometown, where people who swim in its river find that they glow at night. I liked Olga. She was pretty. Nothing happened, though — I wanted more than a passport-hunter and children whose presence would send Geiger counters into a frenzy.
Pilots have a habit of attracting female attention, as the numerous airline captain/stewardess couplings attest. The phenomenon even has a name: pilotitis. So, when I became a helicopter instructor, I was ready for dilated pupils and blushes when I took female students skywards. OK, I must admit, I am still waiting . . .
But for the first time in my life, I’ve been getting to know girls. It’s been a blast. As a teacher, I find them naturally adept at flying helicopters. They listen and they are good at multi-tasking. They are fun to be around and sometimes they’re pretty.
I had a girlfriend once, 24 years ago, when I was in my late teens. It really wasn’t a great success, as the two decades of uninterrupted homosexuality that followed it possibly demonstrate. We lived together briefly and “did it”. But she wore striped pyjamas and it was confusing. What I’m saying is, I’m ready for another go. No pyjamas, though, this time.
I want a wife to love and a child to protect. And I want to look at them both and know that they are mine and I am needed by both and I can be like the workman’s fist, clutched tightly by the little pink fingers in the barber shop. The rock of the family.
Does this mean that I no longer like men? No, of course not, and I won’t pretend. But in the streets and avenues of this country there must be many husbands whose interests are divided but whose choices are determined not by sexuality but emotionality.
Would I be a good husband? I hope so. Would I keep faith? Well, I would try. The same siren voices to stray call to all men, all the time. I would be no different.
The late jazz singer, art critic and gay-straight convert George Melly was the first celebrity I interviewed as a young radio reporter in my previous career who told me about his Damascene transformation. He was 30 years old, on a country bicycle ride with a group of friends, when it happened. Floridly gay, he suddenly noticed that he was staring at the girls, rather than the boys, and declared to himself, “Oooh, you’re heterosexual now, dearie.” He went on to enjoy a long and happy marriage.
So anything is possible. With the right kind of understanding girl, who loves me and possesses pragmatism and patience, I can picture myself as a good husband and dad.
Next month, I will be embarking on the first step of catch-up, to acquire parenting skills by volunteering as a befriender for children in care via a local charity. After vetting, there is special training and then a two-year commitment to visit and take out a child who needs a friend and a new perspective on adults.
This may be time-consuming, thankless and possibly distressing on the one hand. On the other, I will get free entry to various local zoos and the fabulous children’s JCB digger driving centre near Maidstone — without looking like a weirdo.
How good will it feel to see a smile break across an unhappy child’s face? That is my goal. Surely that is the magic that only parents usually know. And one day perhaps I will see that smile on my own offspring’s face and it will be heaven-sent.
So there was symmetry in rediscovering myself last week in a barber shop in the village of my childhood, the place of my innocence, before life’s twisting turns. As the last line of The Great Gatsby says: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Sometimes, in the past, we rediscover ourselves and new paths to our futures.

Rapes of Elderly Women Terrify Central Texas Towns
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
YOAKUM, Texas (AP) -- With a serial rapist on the loose, Cassandra McGinty has developed a new routine when she arrives home: search room to room, a handgun or stun gun drawn.
The predator has been assaulting older women in central Texas over the past year, terrifying residents and frustrating investigators who have only a vague description of the suspect.
Pepper spray has been flying off the shelves in the towns where the attacks have occurred, and McGinty said her landlord in Marquez handed out stun guns as Christmas gifts. Nearly 200 miles away in Yoakum, elderly volunteers at the local museum have been locking its doors during business hours.
''I used to think I was too old for anybody to mess with,'' said McGinty, 55. ''I can't say that anymore.''
Beginning with the rape of a 65-year-old woman in Yoakum last January, authorities have linked eight sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults to the suspect, who has been dubbed the ''Twilight Rapist'' because most of the attacks occurred around dawn. They also believe he robbed or attempted to rob four other women.
The victims have all been women, ranging in age from 65 to 91. One rape victim played piano at her church on Sundays. An 81-year-old woman scared off an intruder with a gun, firing several rounds for good measure. A 66-year-old woman was attacked twice, despite having moved across town following the first assault.
The attacks occurred in seven rural towns, the largest of which has 6,000 residents.
Two women were attacked -- one of them twice -- in Yoakum, a quiet town surrounded by wide-open ranches about 100 miles east of San Antonio.
''It does make me sick,'' Yoakum Police Chief Arthur Rogers said. ''We all take it personal. We all visualize this could have been my mother or my grandmother.''
Mela Walker, who has a ranch in nearby Cuero, organized a community meeting last spring after the Yoakum attacks and handed out pepper spray as a door prize for the nearly 300 people who showed up.
''They're freaked out,'' Walker said. ''These elderly women are buying Mace and not knowing how to use it. They talk about buying guns, and they don't know how to use guns.''
Authorities say the attacks appear to have been planned -- phone lines were cut and porch lights were unscrewed outside some of the victims' homes. All the victims lived alone, and one had more than $10,000 stolen.
Yoakum residents say the two victims there had predictable routines that made them easy targets.
''Nobody opens the door for nobody anymore,'' said Armiro Gomez, 57, who lives across the street from one of the Yoakum victims. ''After midnight, people have no rights to be walking the streets anymore.''
Just across the interstate in Luling, where the last attack occurred in November, a neighbor said it's no coincidence the victim was the only woman in his retirement village with a job.
A year into the case there is still no sketch of the suspect, only a vague description of a thin, young and dark-skinned man who is between 5 1/2- and 6-feet tall. Authorities wrongly arrested one man early in their investigation, and he has since sued over it.
The assailant left behind DNA and other forensic evidence after some attacks, but authorities have not been able to link the DNA to anything in the state system, said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Tom Vinger. In addition to the difficult task of investigating attacks that happened as far as 200 miles from each other, authorities have found that some victims don't have the best memories.
''The fact that he is targeting elderly woman at night does make it a little more difficult (to investigate),'' Vinger said. ''It's a traumatic situation for any age. It's even potentially more traumatic for the elderly.''
Walker said a year since the first attack, the fear in Yoakum hasn't waned. Last week, volunteers took down Christmas decorations inside the Yoakum Heritage Museum.
It was the middle of the morning, but the doors were locked. Visitors were let in, one by one, and the door locked behind them.
''These are frail, elderly women. Tiny little things,'' Walker said. ''You just can't imagine why anyone would want to take advantage of them.''

latimes.com
Taking on America's 'nice guy'
With Jay Leno poised to return to late night, other TV hosts brand him a bully. Will NBC viewers do the same?
By Scott Collins and Matea Gold
Last year, the Harris Poll crowned Jay Leno as America's favorite TV personality. But amid NBC's messy late-night drama, the comedian who has painstakingly cultivated a "Mr. Nice Guy" image has suddenly found himself cast as a villain and become a national punch line.Breaking a long-standing tradition of avoiding personal attacks on one another, TV hosts have been unloading on Leno all week with a fusillade of acerbic potshot and pointed barbs usually reserved for philandering politicians and bonus-taking bankers. "Tonight Show" host Conan O'Brien, who notably refused to mock David Letterman months ago after he was the victim of an alleged extortion plot, took aim this week at the man who is poised to retake his current time slot, joking that kids should be inspired to do whatever they want in life "unless Jay Leno wants to do it too."Leno's other colleagues have been just as unsparing in their attacks. CBS' David Letterman, Leno's fabled nemesis for the "Tonight Show" slot back in 1992, proposed a new drama for NBC: "Law & Order: Leno Victims Unit." Even former daytime talk show host Rosie O'Donnell weighed in: "Shame on Jay Leno."Perhaps the most withering attacks came from ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, who struck up a friendship with the NBC host during the 2007-08 writers strike. But any remaining chumminess didn't stop Kimmel from savaging him Thursday during a remarkable guest appearance the ABC host made on "The Jay Leno Show."Kimmel suggested Leno had tricked O'Brien by handing off "The Tonight Show" to him and then taking back the time slot. When Leno, good-naturedly playing along, suggested he might make a move to ABC, Kimmel hit his everyman image: "You've got $800 million. For God's sake, leave our shows alone!"In moving Leno back to a time slot held by O'Brien, NBC effectively pitted the two hosts against each other and created a situation in which viewers were bound to take sides, said Jeffrey McCall, a communications professor at DePauw University in Indiana. The feud lit up Twitter, where many users labeled themselves "Team Conan.""Leno's image has been getting warped in public . . . from that of a fun-loving comedian to a guy who ends up looking like he has a more dark, selfish side," McCall said. "That can't be good for someone whose gig is to make people laugh."The larger issue is whether the wave of anti-Leno sentiment, which Time's television critic dubbed "the Jaypocalypse," will permanently taint Leno among not just colleagues, but ordinary viewers. That's a key concern for NBC as it contemplates returning Leno to the "Tonight Show" and tries to salvage what was for more than a decade TV's No. 1 late-night lineup."Whenever there's a loser and a winner and there's sympathy toward the loser, the winner" -- in this case, presumably Leno -- "is going to be looked upon potentially in a negative way," said Bill Carroll, vice president at Katz Media, which advises local TV stations. Carroll added that many affiliates were nevertheless pleased with the prospect of Leno's return to his old throne.Leno did not respond to a request for comment. But on his show Friday, he noted that Fox will premiere a series called "Human Target." "I thought it was about me," he joked.Meanwhile, NBC executives aren't laughing."There's a certain amount of kidding that goes on between these personalities which can often be funny. But this has definitely crossed the line," Jeff Gaspin, chairman of NBC Universal Television Entertainment said in a statement. "Jay is the consummate professional and one of the hardest-working people in television. It's a shame that he's being pulled into this."The network's sports overseer, Dick Ebersol, blasted Letterman and O'Brien in a New York Times interview published Friday, saying it was "chicken-hearted and gutless to blame a guy you couldn't beat in the ratings."(Meanwhile, NBC and O'Brien neared agreement Friday on a settlement that would pay O'Brien up to $35 million to end his employment with the network, according to people on both sides of the divide.)"Jay's not the bad guy -- the bad guy is NBC, really," said Bill Zehme, who co-wrote Leno's autobiography "Leading With My Chin" and is working on a book about Johnny Carson, Leno's predecessor on the "Tonight Show." "However, Jay has all the power now."Leno is believed to make more than $30 million a year in his current job. But the other hosts have not fared too badly either. Letterman, who owns his "Late Show" on CBS, earns well over $30 million annually. And O'Brien reportedly gets a $20-million paycheck for the "Tonight Show."Although Leno was the first to take on-air swipes at NBC in the current debacle (he joked the network's name stood for "Never Believe your Contract"), Zehme said it's getting tough for the host to portray himself as a victim -- especially when his bosses have apparently kept his 11:35 p.m. seat warm for him after a disastrous four-month experiment with the low-rated "The Jay Leno Show," which airs at 10 o'clock weeknights but will be canceled next month after pressure from local stations.Whatever the eventual result, it's clear that the current imbroglio is only the latest -- and probably the strangest -- chapter in a show-business saga brimming with runaway egos, corporate screw-ups and merciless one-liners. Comedians are paid to make fun of other people, after all, but when they turn their guns on each other, the bullets blast away the curtain that usually conceals backstage dramas.Viewers learned this 18 years ago, when Carson's retirement touched off a battle over the "Tonight Show" that pitted heir apparent Leno against Letterman, the critics' darling. The face-off was memorialized in a book, "The Late Shift," which was later turned into an HBO movie.The climactic scene found Leno, in a Machiavellian move, secreting himself inside a closet to eavesdrop on NBC executives as they pondered the future of the "Tonight Show." This week, Letterman gleefully reminded viewers of the incident and joked that he would let Leno stay in a closet at the "Late Show."Indeed, Letterman has been particularly venomous in recent days toward his onetime pal from the comedy-club circuit of the late 1970s, ridiculing him as "Jay 'Big Jaw' Leno," patronizing his 10 p.m. show and mimicking Leno's high-pitched voice.Before the latest incident, the pair had seemed to have patched up some of their old wounds. In a 2008 interview with Rolling Stone, Letterman said he wondered why NBC had at that time decided to push Leno out of his "Tonight Show" chair "after the job Jay has done for them" and added: "I think he has greater appeal for more people than I do."But on Friday night's show, Leno lashed back at Letterman for "taking shots" at him. He joked that he was surprised by Letterman's actions because the CBS host usually just takes "shots at the interns."At least publicly, Leno presented the image of a regular guy unspoiled by show business. He has been married to the same woman, Mavis Leno, for 30 years, and loves cars and motorcycles so much that he's developed a sideline with his auto enthusiast website, jaylenosgarage.com. Unlike Letterman, he's never been accused of sleeping with members of his staff and enjoys work so much that he spends weekends honing material at comedy clubs.What remains to be seen now is whether Leno's millions of old fans will now return to his corner.Doug Spero, a former TV news director and NBC employee who is now an associate professor of mass communication at Meredith College in North Carolina, predicted the bad feelings stirred by this episode will quickly blow over for Leno. "This is going to solidify him at 'Tonight Show' for as long as he wants," Spero said.But Zehme, Leno's onetime coauthor, isn't so sure. He said he understands Leno's desire to remain in the limelight: "For Jay, life is a parade, and he is a float." But the situation over the last week has grown so nasty that it contains very few rewards for Leno, he believes."The thing Leno should do is walk, period," Zehme said. "He's got everything to lose in terms of public popularity by going back. People will look at him differently. He'll be viewed as the bad guy."scott.collins@latimes.commatea.gold@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

SUFFERING

by George PackerThe New Yorker

The night after the earthquake, Haitians who had lost their homes, or who feared that their houses might collapse, slept outdoors, in the streets and parks of Port-au-Prince. In Place Saint-Pierre, across the street from the Kinam Hotel, in the suburb of Pétionville, hundreds of people lay under the sky, and many of them sang hymns: “God, you are the one who gave me life. Why are we suffering?” In Jacmel, a coastal town south of the capital, where the destruction was also great, a woman who had already seen the body of one of her children removed from a building learned that her second child was dead, too, and wailed, “God! I can’t take this anymore!” A man named Lionel Gaedi went to the Port-au-Prince morgue in search of his brother, Josef, but was unable to find his body among the piles of corpses that had been left there. “I don’t see him—it’s a catastrophe,” Gaedi said. “God gives, God takes.” Chris Rolling, an American missionary and aid worker, tried to extricate a girl named Jacqueline from a collapsed school using nothing more than a hammer. He urged her to be calm and pray, and as night fell he promised that he would return with help. When he came back the next morning, Jacqueline was dead. “The bodies stopped bothering me after a while, but I think what I will always carry with me is the conversation I had with Jacqueline before I left her,” Rolling wrote afterward on his blog. “How could I leave someone who was dying, trapped in a building! . . . She seemed so brave when I left! I told her I was going to get help, but I didn’t tell her I would be gone until morning. I think this is going to trouble me for a long time.” Dozens of readers wrote to comfort Rolling with the view that his story was evidence of divine wisdom and mercy.

The earthquake seemed to follow a malignant design. It struck the metropolitan area where almost a third of Haiti’s nine million people live. It flattened the headquarters of the United Nations mission, which would have taken the lead in coördinating relief, and killed dozens of U.N. employees, including, reportedly, the mission chief, Hédi Annabi. In a country without a building code, it wiped out whole neighborhoods of shoddy concrete structures, took down hospitals, wrecked the port, put the airport’s control tower out of action, damaged key institutions from the Presidential Palace to the National Cathedral, killed the archbishop and senior politicians, cut off power and phone service, and blocked passage through the streets. There was almost no heavy equipment in the capital that could be used to move debris off trapped survivors, or even to dig mass graves. “Everything is going wrong,” Guy LaRoche, a hospital manager, said.

Haitian history is a chronicle of suffering so Job-like that it inevitably inspires arguments with God, and about God. Slavery, revolt, oppression, color caste, despoliation, American occupation alternating with American neglect, extreme poverty, political violence, coups, gangs, hurricanes, floods—and now an earthquake that exploits all the weaknesses created by this legacy to kill tens of thousands of people. “If God exists, he’s really got it in for Haiti,” Pooja Bhatia, a journalist who lives in Haiti, wrote in theTimes. “Haitians think so, too. Zed, a housekeeper in my apartment complex, said God was angry at sinners around the world, but especially in Haiti. Zed said the quake had fortified her faith, and that she understood it as divine retribution.”

This was also Pat Robertson’s view. The conservative televangelist appeared on “The 700 Club” and blamed Haitians for a pact they supposedly signed with the Devil two hundred years ago (“true story”), advising people in one of the most intensely religious countries on earth to turn to God. (Similarly, he had laid the blame for the September 11th attacks and Hurricane Katrina on Americans’ wickedness.) In Robertsonian theodicy—the justification of the ways of God in the face of evil—there’s no such thing as undeserved suffering: people struck by disaster always had it coming.

At the White House, President Obama, too, was thinking about divine motivation, and he asked the same question implied in the hymn sung by Haitian survivors under the night sky: “After suffering so much for so long, to face this new horror must cause some to look up and ask, Have we somehow been forsaken?” But Obama’s answer was the opposite of Zed’s and Robertson’s: rather than claiming to know the mind of God, he vowed that America would not forsake Haiti, because its tragedy reminds us of “our common humanity.”

Choosing the humanistic approach to other people’s misery brings certain obligations. The first is humanitarian: the generous response of ordinary Americans, along with the quick dispatch of troops and supplies by the U.S. government, met this responsibility, though it couldn’t answer the overwhelming needs of people in Haiti. But beyond rescue and relief lies the harder task of figuring out what the United States and other countries can and ought to do for Haiti over the long term, and what Haiti is capable of doing for itself. Before the earthquake, Hédi Annabi declared that the U.N. had stabilized Haiti to the point where its future was beginning to look a little less bleak. Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, has sounded even more optimistic about investment and growth, and after the earthquake he pointed to Haiti’s new national economic plan as a sound basis for rebuilding.

Yet Haitian political culture has a long history of insularity, corruption, and violence, which partly explains why Port-au-Prince lies in ruins. If, after an earthquake that devastated rich and poor neighborhoods alike, Haiti’s political and business élites resurrect the old way of fratricidal self-seeking, they will find nothing but debris for spoils. Disasters on this scale reveal something about the character of the societies in which they occur. The aftermath of the 2008 cyclone in Burma not only betrayed the callous indifference of the ruling junta but demonstrated the vibrancy of civil society there. Haiti’s earthquake shows that, whatever the communal spirit of its people at the moment of crisis, the government was not functioning, unable even to bury the dead, much less rescue the living. This vacuum, which had been temporarily filled by the U.N., now poses the threat of chaos.

But if Haiti is to change, the involvement of outside countries must also change. Rather than administering aid almost entirely through the slow drip of private organizations, international agencies and foreign powers should put their money and their effort into the more ambitious project of building a functional Haitian state. It would be the work of years, and billions of dollars. If this isn’t a burden that nations want to take on, so be it. But to patch up a dying country and call it a rescue would leave Haiti forsaken indeed, and not by God. ♦

Haiti’s Government Is in Ruins, Too, but Struggles to Exhume Itself
By SIMON ROMERO and MARC LACEY NY TIMES
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — It did not take very long for Edwin Paraison, a member of Haiti’s cabinet, to take stock of his losses and deliver a thorough assessment of what remained of his government ministry.
“This is it,” he said, pointing to the laptop computer he was carrying. “My offices are gone.”
The Haitian state seemed close to ruin on almost every level on Friday. President René Préval’s palace had been crushed. Tourism Minister Patrick Delatour’s mother and father were both killed in this week’s earthquake. Civil servants who were lucky enough to survive the earthquake were now picking up the pieces of their own lives. Those who even thought of going to work often had no ministry building to work from.
“Not one ministry is operational today,” said Mr. Paraison, the minister for Haitians living abroad. “Five of our ministries have had their headquarters destroyed completely.”
Haiti has long been known for its political tumult, for its coups d’état, years of authoritarian dictatorship and looting of the national treasury for personal gain.
But recently, the country was on a comparatively stable path. President Préval was elected and re-elected, and has made no move to hold onto power when his final term comes up after elections this September.
Now the nation’s leaders are facing a set of challenges that would stymie any government, even the richest and most stable ones. Millions need food and water, but only thousands have begun receiving it, according to the United Nations, fueling a frustration that is slowly building in the streets.
Then there is the bigger question lurking in the background: What will it take to rebuild this rattled country once the immediate crisis has passed, and is the government up to the task?
“It is a completely depressing sight,” said Marco Maceo, one of the volunteers delivering emergency medical supplies from the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, describing his shock upon seeing Haiti’s presidential palace in ruins. “The dome has collapsed, and the president is gone.”
At the nondescript police building near the airport that has been converted into Mr. Préval’s de facto headquarters, the disarray was clear. Luxury S.U.V.’s were parked at the entrance, which was guarded by members of an elite police unit that seemed, with a glance and a shrug, to let anyone with a heartbeat inside.
Ministers in the lobby of the building compared notes, trying to figure out the extent of the destruction of recent days. Some lamented that Digicel, the private telecommunications company offering BlackBerry service in Haiti, had not yet restored its network, keeping senior officials from communicating with a semblance of efficiency.
Before the disaster, the country’s politicians were known for their distance from the people. Leaders wore expensive suits, flying first class to Miami and driving around in luxury S.U.V.’s. There was a stiff formality among them, in their use of French, their bearing, their sheltered lives in the hills overlooking the slums.
And even with the increasing stability under Mr. Préval, the country’s dozens of political parties remained as raucous as ever, turning Parliament into a form of political theater. A series of prime ministers, named by the president, had been sacked by the legislature in what most observers considered an excessive exercise of its power.
But if there is a benefit in the neglect that the Haitian people have experienced for so many years, it is that they are far more resilient than most. Although protesting is a national custom, so is surviving on little. That national ethos, the Haitians’ ability to scrounge to find enough to fight their hunger pangs, is being tested in full by the current crisis.
The state was scrambling to exhume itself Friday. Within what remained of the presidential palace, a security officer said the situation was dire. “Two of our colleagues are still stuck in the rubble, and we are desperately trying to find them,” the officer said.
It takes a die-hard optimist to see the bright side amid such despair. In Mr. Préval’s government, that person would be Mr. Delatour, the tourism minister, who had a difficult job even before the earthquake struck: attracting visitors to Haiti, despite its reputation for poverty.
In the last few days, however, he has endured the unthinkable: the death of his parents, the hospitalization of three grandchildren and the virtual destruction of the home where he lives.
Yet in an interview here, Mr. Delatour said he found ample hope in the fact that there had been relatively few reports of post-earthquake looting and violence.
“How many countries could have their population in the streets and still avoid strife through self-policing?” he asked.
Ever the optimist, Mr. Delatour went further in his explanation of why he thought the earthquake might give Haiti a chance to rebuild itself in a more sustainable way.
“This is bad today, but one must remember that we have the historical memory of slavery here,” he said. “What can be worse than that?”

Earthquake Stories: Haiti Jan 2010

Times of London

Redjeson Hausteen Claude, 2
It was being described as a miracle. After two days trapped beneath the rubble, two-year-old Redjeson Hausteen Claude was plucked from the wreckage of a collapsed building against all the odds.
The shocked toddler´s face turned from fear to joy when he came face to face with his parents Daphnee Plaisin and Reginald Claude.
Dramatic photographs captured the moment when Félix del Amo, a Spanish mountain rescuer and diver, is seen pulling the terrorised child from a collapsed house. Óscar Vega Carrera, another Spanish firemen, was also helping to get Redjeson out of the rubble.
Salvador Blanco, a member of Fire Brigade Rescue Team from Castilla y Leon in northern Spain, told Spanish television Haiti was the Spanish team´s their first foreign mission.
The three-man team, which is specially trained to rescue people from collapsed buildings, arrived on Haiti on Wednesday. They took sniffer dogs to help ind people still hidden in the wreckage.
Mr Blanco said: "I spoke with them shortly before they left and they were very keen to help. Felix has worked for 14 years as a fireman. He is very nice but also discplined."
The Spanish team, from Valladolid, are part of Gebocyl, a professional firemen´s organisation which is on 24-hour standby to help with rescue missions around the world.
Report by Graham Keeley of The Times in Madrid
Susan Westwood, British nurse in an orphanage
“I was in the intensive-care room looking after a nine-month-old baby girl when the earthquake hit. The floor started shaking violently and the whole building shook from side to side. It lasted about 45 seconds.
“After that, there was a constant shuddering. The babies were really frightened and started to cry. Other staff and carers were screaming, they were so terrified. It was very upsetting.
“I was able to keep hold of the baby girl and I grabbed hold of another baby. Objects were falling from shelves, there was debris crashing all around. I clung on to the babies and shielded them as best I could. Then came the aftershocks. It was impossible to even move,” she told the BBC.
“We spent the whole night outside. It was chilly but we were OK. Some children are dehydrated now because we couldn’t get any medical supplies out of the building.
“Thank goodness our building is all right as is our other home up the road. I can’t believe there’s no damage and that we are all safe.
“We have 85 children under two years old here at the God’s Littlest Angels home. We also run another orphanage up the road. The age group there is from 2 to 11. There are 65 children there. Most of the children in our care aren’t orphans but they are here because their families can’t afford to look after them. Haiti is very poor. I see a lot of children who are malnourished. Often it is too late by the time they come to us.
“When I look around the area and see that other buildings have just crumbled to the ground, I know that soon we will have lots more babies and young children to care for.”
Told to the BBC website
Sophie Perez, Country Director of Care International Haiti
“It was terrifying. The quake lasted for more than a minute. We were at the office when it happened, and the whole office was shaking really hard. People were screaming, crying, running. Everything was moving. I saw a building of nine floors completely collapse right in front of me. A bank collapsed. Even if a building isn’t totally destroyed, you can’t access the area because of the danger.
“Last night, people were sleeping outside because they were afraid to go back inside their homes. Many of the houses are destroyed anyway. There were eight aftershocks last night. Thousands of people were sleeping in the streets.
“We’re particularly worried about the children, because so many schools seem to have collapsed. In Haiti, children go to school in the afternoon. Children were still in school when the earthquake hit, so there are many children trapped. It’s horrifying. The slums on the hills have also completely collapsed. We’ve heard of landslides, with entire communities being wiped out.”
Account released by Care International
Troy Livesay, American missionary who lives in Port au Prince with his family
There is no way to even begin to share the things we’ve heard and seen since 5pm yesterday. To do so would take hours that we don’t have to give right now. Some of them feel wrong to tell. Like only God should know these personal horrible tragedies.
The few things we can confirm – yes the four story Caribbean Market building is completely demolished. Yes it was open. Yes the National Palace collapsed. Yes Gov’t buildings nearby the Palace collapsed. Yes St Josephs Boys home is completely collapsed. Yes countless countless - countless other houses, churches, hospitals, schools, and businesses have collapsed. There are buildings that suffered almost no damage. Right next door will be a pile of rubble.
Thousands of people are currently trapped. To guess at a number would be like guessing at raindrops in the ocean. Precious lives hang in the balance. When pulled from the rubble there is no place to take them for care Haiti has an almost non existent medical care system for her people.
I cannot imagine what the next few weeks and months will be like. I am afraid for everyone. Never in my life have I seen people stronger than Haitian people. But I am afraid for them. For us.
From his blog
Chris Rollings, Canadian director of the organisation Clean Water for Haiti
Yesterday was absolutely terrible. . . I think I’m going to have nightmares for a long time.
I’m ashamed of the first thought that went through my mind, which was “Cool, I’ve never been in a big earthquake before!” As the quake rolled on, though, I remembered the conversations I’ve had with the other missionaries about what an earthquake would mean for Haiti. Of course, it would be devastating. Construction materials and methods aren’t just shoddy, they’re suicidal, but now isn’t the time to rampage, just to tell you about my experiences.
I didn’t actually fall on the ground, but I stumbled around quite a bit. When the tremors ceased, a large dust cloud was rising from the building a few doors down. A 3 story [sic] school full of teenage girls had collapsed. I stood around looking stupid for longer than I’d like to admit. I looked at the truck from Toyota, tried to call my wife (the service was out) and looked around me at people’s reactions. Virtually everyone reacted in strange ways. Eventually, I went to the school and started working to pull trapped students from the wreckage.
The work was very hard because I was working by myself. People would come up and shout into the wreckage, “Is so-and-so inside?” at the top of their lungs repeatedly. I would ask for help in moving rubble and they would say they have to find their own people. One guy stayed and helped, on and off. I got one girl out, who was very frantic. I told her to stop shouting and pray for help. She was about 10 feet deep under the collapsed cement roof of the building. At one point I went and borrowed a hammer from someone to break up the large piece of cement that she was trapped behind. The aftershocks scared the crap out of me, and I really didn’t like being under that cement slab. There was an obviously dead woman under the slab with us.
From his blog
Cris Bierrenbach, Brazilian photographer
“We don’t know how long we’ll have the communication.
“The situation is delicate. We are feeling small tremors. A lot of people in the street, houses down, injured and dead people.
“Things are really bad here. The palace fell down, the hospital, the cathedral, everything. “The city is dark and the people keep singing for Jesus and saying ‘Hallelujah’.
“We are marooned in the house trying to find out what is happening and preparing to go out without putting people at risk. The news that we get is bad — neighbourhoods destroyed. It is a real catastrophe.
“The big problems and worries are of violence and looting, and the food and water beginning to run short.
“I went out in search of food and water. The situation is very tense. There is looting, everybody is very nervous. There is no food anywhere near. Luckily we managed to buy some bottles of water ... We need help.”
Writing on Facebook (In Portuguese)
Andre Davila Brazilian, aid co-ordinator
“Things are very crazy here. I arrived in Haiti one hour before the earthquake hit. I came home and I was starting to unpack my bag when the house starting dancing. I was thrown from one side of the room to the other. We went out on the street, there were so many people running, there was a big cloud of smoke, a gas station had exploded, it was like a movie scene. After that we stayed in the house to try and understand what was going on. Other small shocks happened, so we went outside. I started getting phone calls from Haitians, many problems, people that couldn’t get to their house, people whose family were stuck, even people that died.
“Right now I just came back home. I went to find some water. We need to stock up. There is a lot of chaos in this city. All the major buildings have collapsed, including the palace, the main church, the other churches, there is a university with more than 1,000 students, most of them dead or trapped.
“We don’t see anybody doing anything. The police don’t have enough men. What I saw was cars going in every direction, people stealing from stores, people walking with dead family members in their arms, people asking for help in the hospital, everywhere destroyed.
“Apparently the prison collapsed, so many bandits escaped and many are dead.
“For 20 minutes I was out, I saw four or five situations where looting was going on. One of them I was passing, because I am a foreigner, they became a little aggressive, and I had to drive away because they were coming after me.”
Told to Dom Philips of The Times via Skype
Marcus Antonio da Silva, UN peace mission worker
“I am here in Haiti on the UN peace mission. I arrived two days ago.
“After getting lost we decided to return to the military base. Arriving near there, at around 17.00 local time, the vehicle stopped at a traffic light. We heard an enormous noise and thought it must be a gas explosion or a car crash. When I looked to my right, I saw a building falling down. When I looked to my left, I saw the same scene.
“Two weeks ago I saw the film 2012. I simply felt that I was in the middle of that scene. People shouting, and running desperately to save themselves. I felt the ground moving in waves. A lot of dust came up. We got back in the car and rapidly went back to the base around 2km (1.2 miles) away. On the way, we saw houses coming down, people coming out in desperation, cars stopped, people in the street, totally lost.
“It was an experience I will never forget.”
Translated from Globo website by Dom Philips
David Wimhurst, the UN spokesman in Haiti
“I was in my office [at the UN building] and the event happened. It accelerated with extreme violence. The entire building was shaking violently and I was hanging on to furniture just to stop myself being thrown around the room and praying that the big concrete pillar in the middle of my office would not break and bring the whole building down on me."
“When it subsided the hotel had collapsed and had blocked off access to the outside from my office. So all of the people in my office had to get out of my window and go down three storeys on a rather rickety ladder.
“It was being propped up on a wall. We were being guided by staff down below. I think we got about 15 staff out on that ladder.”
Told by video link to James Bone of The Times
Kim Bolduc, acting head of the UN mission
“I was in my office, sitting on the second floor of the UNDP main building. I didn’t have time to seek cover. I was sitting on my chair and holding on to the table.
“Everything collapsed around me. I saw the wall in front of me opening up with a very large crack. I was just hoping it would stop. It lasted a long time.
“The moment it stopped, I came out of the room and saw my staff all around and got out. The UNDP main building is still standing, although no longer operational and extremely damaged. Then I saw across the street the other UNDP building. It had gone down completely. We spent the night sitting in a parking lot, as there were many aftershocks.”
Told by video link to James Bone of The Times
Tweets from Port-au-Prince
I see bodies in the street, I see bodies buried in rubble
RAMhaiti
Please don’t be the end of the world
IsabelleMORSE
People on the street asking for help — but no one knows who’s supposed to give it
bhatiap
Dead bodies are everywhere. I haven’t seen one ambulance
Fredodupoux
Thanks for the prayers! It’s crazy here
MarkStuart

O’Brien Won’t Host ‘Tonight Show’ After Leno
By BILL CARTER NY TIMES
NBC may control its airwaves, but apparently it does not control Conan O’Brien.
Less than a week after NBC told him it intended to move his “Tonight Show” to a new time, 12:05 a.m., Mr. O’Brien said he would not agree to what he considered a demotion for the institution of “The Tonight Show” — and his own career — by going along with the network’s plan to push him back a half-hour to make room for his most recent predecessor, Jay Leno.
Mr. O’Brien’s statement Tuesday said that he so respected the institution of “The Tonight Show” that he could not participate in what “I honestly believe is its destruction.”
Pointedly, Mr. O’Brien did not resign or indicate he would not show up for work. But an executive at the network who declined to be identified because of continuing negotiations said that Mr. O’Brien would leave once a financial settlement was reached.
By Hollywood standards, Mr. O’Brien’s letter was an extraordinary gesture — releasing a statement to make public his anger at the company paying him tens of millions of dollars before he even reached a settlement.
The closest episode in history may be when Jack Paar walked off the set of “The Tonight Show” in a huff over corporate censorship.
Mr. Paar returned to the show within a month in 1960, but few are predicting a reconciliation between Mr. O’Brien and the network.
NBC executives continued Tuesday to work toward a financial settlement, though some indicated increasing impatience with Mr. O’Brien’s effort to blame the network for the three-car pile-up in late night.
The host, who saw his brief run as host of “Tonight” cut short when NBC decided to restore Mr. Leno to the 11:35 p.m. time period, has been increasingly upset about how he believes he was treated by NBC’s management.
A representative of the host said Tuesday that Mr. O’Brien finally reached the point on Monday where he “sat up all night drafting the statement.”
The statement also took NBC to task for not giving the show more time or supplying stronger lead-in audiences, which could be interpreted as a shot at Mr. Leno’s poor performance at 10 p.m. (Though Mr. O’Brien mentioned Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon in his statement, he never referred to Mr. Leno by name, only by the title of his show.)
“After only seven months,” Mr. O’Brien wrote, “with my ‘Tonight Show’ in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime time by making a change in their long-established late-night schedule.”
He hosted the show Tuesday night, even as negotiations, which one participant described as intense, continued throughout the day. But Mr. O’Brien did not hold back on criticizing NBC during his performance.
“Welcome to NBC — where our new slogan is, ‘No longer just screwing up prime time,’ ” he said.
He was also self-effacing in his jokes. “Hello, my name is Conan O’Brien, and I may soon be available for children’s parties.”
Though some rumors appeared saying NBC might be lining up guest hosts, NBC quietly dismissed that notion. Indeed, such a move could have legal implications because it might be interpreted as NBC firing Mr. O’Brien, which could lead to a bigger settlement for him.
Jeff Gaspin, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, who broached the idea last week of shifting the late-night lineup, said he was motivated by trying to retain both stars, not to drive Mr. O’Brien away. But other NBC executives indicated privately that they would be satisfied with a new late-night lineup with Mr. Leno back at “The Tonight Show” at 11:35 and Mr. Fallon settling in at the “Late Night” show at 12:35.
Those executives will apparently get their wish. But questions will linger about whether Mr. Leno will return automatically to his former position of dominance at 11:35 against Mr. Letterman’s show at CBS.
“You have to wonder if Jay is damaged goods after all this,” said one former longtime network programmer who did not want to be identified criticizing the network. “But if they give him ‘The Tonight Show’ back, maybe it ends up all right after a while. But it just seems so unfair to Conan.”
The release of Mr. O’Brien’s statement complicated an already messy legal and programming situation. NBC executives have quietly complained for at least a month that Mr. O’Brien himself was responsible for declining ratings on the show because he had not broadened his appeal from his days hosting NBC’s 12:35 a.m. show, “Late Night.”
NBC has also made it clear that it does not believe it breached Mr. O’Brien’s contract in any way because it offered him the chance to continue on “Tonight.” NBC executives said that Mr. O’Brien’s contract did not include any language that guaranteed the show had to begin at 11:35 p.m.
The counterargument from Mr. O’Brien’s representatives has been that no such language was necessary in this case because “The Tonight Show” has followed the late local news in cities across America for 60 years.
Plenty of money is involved. Mr. O’Brien is owed about two and a half years on a contract that pays him $10 million to $20 million a year.
Mr. O’Brien expressed hope in his statement that the issue could be resolved so “that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.” But though the Fox network has made its potential interest in Mr. O’Brien public in comments this week, Mr. O’Brien said, “I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next.”
There would be questions, too, about Mr. O’Brien’s potential at another network after the disappointment at “Tonight.”
Mr. O’Brien’s future could also be complicated by how his contract is settled. Even if NBC settles with him, it could enforce a clause that keeps him off television for a year or more.

Palin And The Kids
A reader writes:

From Andrew Sullivan
I teach in a well-off suburban public high school in the midwest. My students excel; they're hardworking and ambitious. My class is a demanding elective. The subject matter includes lots of critical thinking. Politics is a common topic. We have frequent opinionated political discussion which usually feeds rich, committed writing. These kids are well above the average high school student in nearly every way--communication skills, experience, close reading, careful pessimism, involvement. They are mature enough to balance the value of strong personal or family opinions with the value of balance in public discussion or their school research and writing. They can evaluate an audience. They succeed and come off as smart, articulate, mature, and balanced.
Except when it comes to Sarah Palin.
My conservative students can't discuss or write about Palin to my satisfaction. These conservative kids can be intelligently critical of Obama and his policies; of the wars; of Bush and torture and the Constitution, and so on. They can make arguments that touch on religion and social issues they care strongly about without sliding into emotion or fallacy. They can dispute with the other students in a thoughtful and orderly way over most issues.
But when Palin enters the conversation, they become adamant, unthinking partisans. The eyes go blank. They seem starstruck and smile a lot (girls and boys.) They do not dispute evidence that she was unqualified or ill informed; they just ignore it. When they returned from an appearance Palin made nearby, four of my students behaved like they'd seen Miley Cyrus, not a potential leader of the free world. When it comes to Palin 2012, they tend to nod knowingly with a little secret smile and say "You'll see."
And any political argument that flows from or around Palin becomes empty, uncompromising, and irrational. Suddenly they say "believe" or "trust" or "faith" a lot. They are suddenly uninterested in reading or checking claims, or even discussing issues. It's all personality and emotion all the time. This is a real problem. I don't think it's me. I am a very experienced teacher and I've always had good success in maintaining a challenging neutrality for these students. They usually can't even figure out how I vote. I've never had any trouble before keeping them in a productive path while respecting their opinions. But when Palin appears, their writing becomes unsatisfactory, their arguments become vague, their logic becomes spotty, their evidence contradictory or false.
I've happily worked with writers who idolized Brigham Young and Jesse Helms (and Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader, too.) In these classes I usually find conservative students very good at polishing arguments, making cases, and improving their writing. But Palin seems to suck the logic out of the room. The factual basis of claims is integral to my kids' work, and Palin--maybe just her, maybe her phenomenon, I don't know--makes that difficult, and worse every week as her wild discrepancies mount.
I risk parent trouble and the imputation of bias if I do as my teacher's experience, training, and conscience dictates. I fear that this is a true break from the already tenuous connection to reality represented by the American far-right. I'll say this--it is the first time I can remember that I had real trouble helping students write well when they were already engaged enough to care about politics