Angry voters flood streets as several candidates reject Haiti election - Christian Science Monitor

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Frustrated voters flooded the streets and several presidential candidates called for the government to annul Sunday’s Haiti election due to problems at polls throughout the country.

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Scores of voters said they were prohibited from voting because their names did not appear on rolls at the polling places. Angry voters threw rocks and bottles at United Nations peacekeeping forces and shut down polling places.

Twelve of the 19 presidential candidates held an afternoon press conference calling for the vote to be canceled. They accused the Inite party, backed by President Rene Preval, of "massive fraud."

RELATED: In Haiti election, voter confusion, apathy loom large

As polls closed at 4 p.m. peaceful demonstrations clogged the streets of Petionville, a neighborhood in the hills above downtown Port-au-Prince.

“We are not going to stand for an election that is not the will of the people,” says Abner Jean, who could not vote despite holding a valid registration card. His name did not appear on rolls. “If they put in a candidate that we did not choose, we’ll use whatever means necessary to kick them out.”

Observers said problems were reported throughout the country. Many voters who’d been displaced by the earthquake did not know where to vote, resulting in frustration and confusion.

The electoral commission held a press conference urging calm and reassuring the public that the vote was on track.

Representatives for the commission, CEP, said voters tried to use out-of-date cards or were going to the wrong polling places. They urged voters to call a toll-free number or go to the commission’s Web site to find their polling place.

“There are places where bandits shut down polls, shots were fired, and stones were thrown,” said Opont Pierre, director general of the CEP. “But it is only a small percentage of the polling areas and it won’t stop us from voting and getting a valid result.”

By that time, however, Haitians had already taken to Port-au-Prince streets. They rushed to the candidates’ press conference.

Michel Martelly, a popular musician considered one of the leading candidates in a field of 19, said the meeting was held "to denounce today's massive fraud all over the country."

Rapper Wyclef Jean appeared moments later with Martelly, who is known as “Sweet Mickey.” The crowd that formed erupted as Jean hugged Martelly.

Song broke out with lyrics like “Oh Mickey, now we’ve been delivered,” and “They gave us cholera, they call it poison,” a reference to the cholera epidemic that has killed more than 1,600 and continues to spread.

Nearby, blue helmeted UN soldiers and Haitian police in riot gear lined street sides.

The crowd followed Martelly and Jean, who were joined by Charles Henry Baker, a white-haired businessman who also complained that the vote was unfair.

It was a raucous end to a voting day that began quietly with teenagers playing soccer on traffic-free streets, using earthquake rubble as goal markers as women and children filtered to church.

Tensions grew as the day unfolded and more people complained they’d been prohibited from voting.

Laurent Yvone, who lives in a camp for people displaced by January’s earthquake, lined up with thousands of early this morning. The polling place for the camp, known as Camp Corail, had just 39 registered names, however.

“There are more than 5,000 people here and the [Interim Electoral Commission] sent us less than 40 names. We don’t have enough ballots,” says the polling place’s supervisor, Elizer Fritznel.

Mr. Fritznel fled before the polls were supposed to close at 4 p.m. Only a handful of voters cast ballots there.

“If we can’t vote, these ballots are not going to leave here,” Mr. Yvone said. “This is corruption.”

RELATED: In Haiti election, voter confusion, apathy loom large

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ADB, World Bank assess Pak flood damage at $9.7 billion - The Hindu

AP Pakistani flood affected people wait to get national identity cards near Peshawar in Pakistan on Tuesday. The floods, that swept across Pakistan since July, has caused an estimated $9.7 billion damage to infrastructure, farms, homes, as well as other direct and indirect losses, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB) have said.

The estimate was presented in the Damage and Needs Assessment (DNA), a survey conducted nationwide by ADB and the World Bank to assess the extent of the flood damage.

The survey was submitted to Pakistan Government and today was made public at Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FoDP) meeting in Brussels.

“$ 9.7 billion is almost double the amount of damage caused by the 2005 Pakistan earthquake,” said Rune Stroem, ADB Country Director for Pakistan.

Rachid Benmessaoud, World Bank Country Director for Pakistan said that now the DNA has been completed “our job as friends of Pakistan is to help the country respond to this enormous reconstruction challenge.”

In carrying out the assessment, ADB and World Bank teams examined the extent of the damage in 15 key sectors across Pakistan, also the direct damage, indirect losses and reconstruction costs.

The DNA found that the agriculture and livestock sectors have been the worst hit, followed by complete or partial damage to a large number of houses.

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Hungary sludge flood called 'ecological disaster' - The Associated Press

Hungary sludge flood called 'ecological disaster'By BELA SZANDELSZKY and PABLO GORONDI (AP) – 43 minutes ago

KOLONTAR, Hungary — A lethal torrent of toxic red sludge from a metal refinery engulfed towns in Hungary, burning villagers through their clothes and threatening an ecological disaster Tuesday as it swept toward the Danube River.

The flood of caustic red mud triggered a state of emergency declaration by Hungarian officials. At least four people were killed, six were missing and 120 injured, many with burns.

Hundreds were evacuated in the aftermath of the disaster Monday, when a gigantic sludge reservoir burst its banks at an alumina plant in Ajka, a town 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Budapest, the capital. The torrent of sludge inundated homes, swept cars off roads and damaged bridges.

Named for its bright red color, the material is a waste product in aluminum production that contains heavy metals and is toxic if ingested.

In Kolontar, the town closest to the plant, Erzsebet Veingartner was in her kitchen when the 12-foot-high wave of red slurry hit, sweeping away everything in its path.

"I looked outside and all I saw was the stream swelling like a huge wave," the 61-year-old widow said Tuesday as she surveyed her backyard, still under 6 feet of noxious muck.

"I lost all my chickens, my ducks, my Rottweiler, and my potato patch. My late husband's tools and machinery were in the shed and it's all gone," sobbed the woman, who gets by on a $350 monthly pension. "I have a winter's worth of firewood in the basement and it's all useless now."

Emergency workers wearing masks and chemical protection gear rushed to pour 1,000 tons of plaster into the Marcal River in an attempt to bind the sludge and keep it from flowing on to the Danube some 45 miles away. Nearby, desperate villagers waded through the toxic mud trying to salvage possessions with little more than rubber gloves as protection.

The 1,775-mile-long Danube passes through some of the continent's most pristine vistas from its origins as a Black Forest spring in Germany to its end point as a majestic stretch of water emptying into the Black Sea.

Now a murky green — not blue as immortalized in the Strauss waltz — the river flows through four former communist nations. One of the continent's greatest treasuries of wildlife, it has been the focus of a multibillion dollar post-communist cleanup. Cormorants, swans and other birds are now common sights on the river.

Still, high-risk industries such as Hungary's Ajkai Timfoldgyar alumina plant are still producing waste near some of its tributaries, posing a threat to the waterway.

By Tuesday, about 35.3 million cubic feet of sludge had poured from the reservoir, flooding a 16 square mile area, Environmental Affairs State Secretary Zoltan Illes told the state news wire MTI. He called the spill an "ecological catastrophe."

Dozens of villagers were burned when the caustic material seeped through their clothing. Two women, a young man and a 3-year-old child were killed, and health officials said two of the injured were in critical condition.

Because chemical burns can take days to emerge, seemingly superficial injuries can turn deadly as they penetrate deeper tissue, Dr. Peter Jakabos of Gyor Hospital told state TV.

In nearby Devecser, the sea of muck in Tunde Erdelyi's house was 5 feet high Tuesday and rescue workers had to use an ax to cut through her living room door to let it flow out. Her car had been swept into the garden and her husband's van straddled a fence.

"When I heard the rumble of the flood, all the time I had was to jump out the window and run to higher ground," she said tearfully, adding that she was grateful the family's pet rabbit and cat were safe.

Her husband, Robert Kis, said his uncle was flown by helicopter to Budapest after the sludge "burned him to the bone."

Firefighters and soldiers wearing masks, rubber boots and other protective gear waded through the stricken area Tuesday, flushing away the sludge with hoses, aided by dozens of bulldozers, their loaders scraping the polluted ground.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban acknowledged that authorities were caught off guard by the disaster, telling reporters the alumina plant and reservoir had been inspected two weeks earlier and no irregularities had been found.

Red sludge is a byproduct of the refining of bauxite into alumina, the basic material for manufacturing aluminum. Representatives from industry organizations in the U.S. and London could not explain why the Hungarian victims were burned by the material, saying if it is properly treated it is not hazardous.

It is common to store treated sludge in ponds where the water eventually evaporates, leaving behind a dried red clay-like soil, the officials said.

However, Hungarian environmentalist Gergely Simon said the sludge involved in the disaster had been accumulating in the reservoir for decades and was extremely alkaline, with a pH value of about 13 — nearly equivalent to lye — and that is what caused the burns.

MAL Rt., the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company that owns the Ajka plant, said that according to European Union standards, red sludge is not considered hazardous waste.

The company also denied that it should have taken more precautions to shore up the reservoir, a huge structure more than 1,000 feet long and 500 yards wide, and high enough to dwarf trees that survived the torrent.

Clearly angered by the company's suggestions that the substance was not hazardous, Interior Minister Sandor Pinter, snapped: "They should take a swim in it and then they'll see."

This week's spill threatened to eclipse the environmental damage caused 10 years ago, when huge amounts of cyanide poured from a gold mine reservoir in a Romanian town near the Hungarian border into the Danube and four smaller rivers, destroying plant and animal life. Romania, what was then Yugoslavia and Ukraine also were affected.

___

Gorondi reported from Budapest. Associated Press Writer George Jahn in Vienna and Business Writer Jon Fahey contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS New approach. Corrects spelling of Kolontar. AP Video.)

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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