Nadia Lochard, coordinator of Haiti's Civil Protection agency, confirmed on Sept. 25 that five people had died and 57 were injured the day before when a violent storm hit Port-au-Prince and areas to the south, including Petit Goâve and Îles Cayimites. Lochard said most of the injuries and damage took place in the camps where some 1.3 million local residents have been living since they were displaced by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake on Jan. 12.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner and Haitian prime minister Jean-Max Bellerive met in New York on Sept. 20 to discuss international efforts to help Haiti recover from the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated much of the capital and nearby areas. About 1.3 million Haitians continue to live outdoors, mostly in some 1,300 improvised encampments, more than eight months after the quake and almost six months after international donors pledged $9.9 billion in aid.

After three days of meetings at the Distinction Night Club in a suburb north of Port-au-Prince, on Sept. 16 four Haitian political coalitions announced their opposition to the general elections scheduled for Nov. 28. The four coalitions--Alternative, Liberation, Rasanble ("Assemble") and the Union of Democratic Haitian Citizens for Development and Education (UCCADE)— said they were forming a "United Political Front" and expressed their lack of confidence in the current Provisional Electoral Council (CEP). Instead of elections, the coalitions called for a "government of public safety" to take power after President René Garcia Préval's term ends on Feb. 7 and carry out a transition to full democracy.

Much as been made of a brief quip by Fidel Castro in his recent set of interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. To wit: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore." These nine somewhat ambiguous words, offered without any further elucidation from the Bearded One, have sparked a voluble reaction across the political spectrum...

Latin America solidarity activist Rev. Lucius Walker, 80, died of a heart attack on Sept. 7 at his home in Demarest, New Jersey. Walker, a Baptist minister, was also active in the US civil rights movement; in 1967 he founded the New York-based Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO).

On Sept. 10, Puerto Rican politicians from across the spectrum praised leftist independence activist Juan Mari Brás, who died earlier that day at 82 of lung cancer in his home in Río Pedras, San Juan. Mari Brás was a "legendary leader who fought for his ideals," according to Gov. Luis Fortuño, of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP). Héctor Ferrer, president of the centrist Popular Democratic Party (PPD), called Mari Brás "an example for all of us who believe in an ideal and seek the best for Puerto Rico," while Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) president Rubén Berríos Martínez said: "Thank you, Juan, for your life and your example."

We just had to call out Cuban elder statesman and global rad-left icon Fidel Castro for his recent embrace of right-wing conspiracy theory (which nearly always has strong undertones, at least, of anti-Semitism). So we are particularly vindicated to see this. Jeffrey Goldberg interviews El Barbudo for his blog on The Atlantic this week. Amid a discussion of the threat of nuclear war arising from the West's showdown with Iran (a recent obsession of interviewer and interviewee alike) Goldberg writes that Fidel offered the following advice for his pal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Students at the Faculty of Ethnology at the State University of Haiti (UEH) in downtown Port-au-Prince said on Sept. 4 that they are planning to file complaints with international agencies about a May 24 incident involving soldiers from the 9,000-member United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). The soldiers invaded the campus and arrested a student, Frantz Mathieu Junior, for allegedly throwing rocks. MINUSTAH released the student the same day, and the force's acting head, Edmond Mulet, apologized on May 25, but the students asked why more than three months later no soldiers have been disciplined. Various groups are planning a demonstration against the UN force on Oct. 15, the date on which the UN Security Council is expected to renew MINUSTAH's mandate for another year.