Media captionHaiti protesters blame the Clintons for a litany of ills in their mother countryDonald Trump has said the work of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Haiti was a 'disgrace'. What really happened?' The Clinton family, they are crooks, they are thieves, they are liars,' says Haitian activist Dahoud Andre.He has been leading protests outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign base in Brooklyn for the last two years.He said protesters from his small activist group, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, will continue to level their allegations - so far all unproven - if the Democratic candidate wins the White House.
Haitian Mud Cookies Snopes Free
Haiti honeymoon. Image copyright AFP Image captionThe January 2010 earthquake killed an estimated 220,000 peopleFew could have guessed the two young Americans touring the attractions that December would one day wield such influence over the impoverished Caribbean island nation.Mr Andre is not alone among his compatriots in blaming the once-and-perhaps-future first couple for a litany of ills in Haiti.Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberte newspaper, told the BBC: 'A lot of Haitians are not big fans of the Clintons, that's for sure.' Image copyright AFP Image captionBill and Hillary Clinton at the grand opening of the Caracol Industrial Park four years ago'The fact the Clintons kind of took over things after the earthquake and did a pretty poor job of it translates to why the Haitians have a pretty dim view of them,' he added. Replicated mistakesMrs Clinton was Secretary of State and Mr Clinton was UN Special Envoy to Haiti when the January 2010 earthquake struck, killing an estimated 220,000 people.Some $13.3bn (£10.9bn) was pledged by international donors for Haiti's recovery.Mr Clinton was appointed co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), along with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. A US Government Accountability Office report discovered no hint of wrongdoing, but concluded the IHRC's decisions were 'not necessarily aligned with Haitian priorities'.went to the Haitian government and 0.6% to local organisations.The bulk of it went to UN agencies, international aid groups, private contractors and donor countries' own civilian and military agencies.For example, the Pentagon billed the State Department hundreds of millions of dollars for sending US troops to hand out bottled water and keep order on the streets of Haiti's ravaged capital, Port-au-Prince. Image copyright AFP Image captionThe Clinton Global Initiative - a part of the Clinton Foundation - is billed as an annual gathering of 'foremost thinkers' and 'visionaries'Jake Johnston, an analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonpartisan group that has studied the quake reconstruction, told the BBC 'it's hard to say it's been anything other than a failure'.But he believes the State Department and IHRC simply replicated the mistakes of the whole foreign aid industry by chasing short-term gains instead of building longer-term capacity on the ground.' They relied too much on outside actors,' Mr Johnston says, 'and supplanted the role of the Haitian government and domestic producers.'
Mud Cookies Haiti Video
While the Clintons in their respective roles clearly had a say over where some of the quake relief cash flowed, their political enemies have wrongly claimed the family foundation directly controlled all the billions in funds.The foundation itself raised a relatively modest $30m for aid projects in Haiti.A spokeswoman for the charity told the BBC: 'Every penny of the more than $30m raised was deployed on the ground, with no overhead taken by the Clinton Foundation.' Image copyright AFP Image captionSince 2010, the Clinton Foundation has raised a total of more than $30m for Haiti'Most I can probably ID but not all.' Image copyright AP Image captionAn injured Haitian receiving medical care in Port-au-PrinceSae-A spokeswoman Karen Seo told the BBC: 'The rate of job growth depends both on the efficiency in building facilities, as well as customer demand - including the long tail of the recession.
Momentum is growing and we are optimistic.' In its defence, the Clinton Foundation - which has raised more than $2bn from over 330,000 donors since its 2001 launch - points to its A rating from philanthropic monitors.Charity Watch says 88% of the Clinton Foundation's budget was spent last year on programme expenses.But the watchdog's president, Daniel Borochoff, told the BBC the high mark was not intended to reflect whether Mrs Clinton kept donors to her family's foundation at appropriate arm's length, or provided favoured access as secretary of state. Questions 'fester'The Clinton Foundation rebutted any suggestion of special favours, saying that in the aftermath of the Haiti quake they worked with a 'wide range' of partners to mobilise relief efforts immediately 'and many people they had previously worked with responded to this call to help'.The charity's statement to the BBC continued: 'President Clinton and the Clinton Foundation's only goal in Haiti is to help the people of Haiti.' Since 2010, the Foundation has worked on the ground in Haiti with a range of partners - helping more than 7,500 farmers lift themselves out of poverty; improving the Haitian environment by planting more than 5 million trees and installing more than 400 KW of clean energy; and supporting women through literacy training and job skills for over 2,000 women.' Image copyright Reuters Image captionWill Donald Trump's pitch to Haitian-Americans work?' Instead of allowing these questions to linger and fester, why not come clean? The questions will not go away, they will continue.'
Global Warming Hoax: Haitians Eating Mud Cookies Due To Our Use Of Ethanol - Biofuels have caused food prices to rise so much that Haitians have had to resort to eating cookies made out of clay mud.
Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
Trending News.' When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,' Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. 'When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too,' she said.Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation.
Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.At the market in the La Salines slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 U.S. Cents, up 10 U.S. Cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples.
About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy. Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies.
Women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shanty town.Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun.The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue.
For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered. At left, a boy shows his tongue after eating one of the cookies.Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition.' Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it,' said Dr. Gabriel Thimothee, executive director of Haiti's health ministry.Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.