11,000 Haitians are being paid 60 cents an hour by the UN to clear away the rubble of their capital city, and begin rebuilding. The UN plan to employ 90,000 more :

This devastated capital showed increasing signs of stirring back to life on Wednesday as Haitians restarted factory assembly lines, visited their barbers, sought replacement cellphones and even picked up their dry cleaning.

Nothing could be called business as usual. When the big Brasserie Nationale d’Haïti beverage manufacturing plant kicked back into action, it did not start with one of its best-known products, Prestige, the national beer that is a point of pride here. It began with the essential: bottled water.

The Full Story Is Here

The Haiti earthquake death toll is now beyond 150,000.

Mass Graves For The Victims Of Nature's Fury



The above photo, by Olivier Laban Mattei, is from 'Haiti : Six Days Later' at The Boston Globe's The Big Picture.

Do you really think it would be any different in your city if 200,000 people died an earthquake? They'd be digging mass graves in New York's Central Park and Sydney's Botanical Gardens if those cities suffered a similar fate as Port-Au-Prince.

But would American newspapers show graphic photos of the dead, if they were in the majority dead Americans?

A New York Times photo editor insists that they would, and did during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath :

....the contention that such pictures would not appear in the paper if the victims were somewhere in the United States. If such pictures existed, she said, she would run them. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, The Times did publish a front-page picture of a body floating near a bridge where a woman was feeding her dog. But despite Katrina’s toll, there were relatively few such images in the paper. Irby said that authorities in the United States are generally quick to cordon off disaster scenes.

This stunning image from the 2004 tsunami is also cited as an example that Haiti is not the first time the New York Times has run graphic photos of natural disaster dead on its front page :



And yet, they are so reluctant to run images of the human carnage left behind in America's wars.

A detail from Mathew McDermott's extraordinary photograph of a child set free from the rubble of the Haitian earthquake, having survived eight days with no food or water :



The Full Photo Is Here

Haiti : A Nightmare Beyond Comprehension

Appalling scenes, as bodies are piled in the street and moved by diggers and bulldozers into trucks for transportation to mass graves.



Hundreds of thousands homeless in a city with no water, no food, nowhere to go :


A two day wait at hospitals, few working toilets or showers. Now the mass cremations have begun.

New York Times photographer Damon Winter (here for his photo gallery) :

"People are out on the street at night...all night you could hear them singing prayers. It’s pretty amazing the ways that people are dealing with this tragedy. It says a lot about the Haitian character. They are an amazing people."

The death toll looks likely to rise beyond 50,000.

Haiti. The earthquake :



The aftermath :



The prime minister of Haiti worries that "hundreds of thousands may have been killed."