NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Seventeen Haitian men are suing Fairfield University in Connecticut, the Society of Jesus and others alleging they failed to protect them from a man who sexually abused them when they were poor children or young adults attending a school he founded in Haiti.

The lawsuits bring to 21 the number of alleged victims suing Douglas Perlitz and the others. Perlitz was sentenced in 2010 to nearly 20 years in prison for sexually abusing children at Project Pierre Toussaint.

Haitian police get a few weeks of training, a uniform, handcuffs, a gun and 10 bullets to start their careers, said Vancouver police officer Charlie Ahn, who recently returned from a mission trip to the country. After that, they are pretty much on their own.

“I feel like they’re doing the same work we’re doing here, but it’s just way more dangerous for them,” Ahn said.

Santiago, DR.– A presidential adviser in Haiti, Damian Merlo, said late Friday that Minister of Haitians Living Abroad Daniel Supplice was attacked while visiting the Dominican city of Santiago de los Caballeros.

By Nikita Braxton-Benjamin
Dec 24, 2011

FORMER FIFA vice president Jack Warner has called the meeting of Caribbean football presidents in Zurich, Switzerland, days ago a plan by FIFA head Sepp Blatter to recolonise the Caribbean. A decision was taken during the meeting to form a Normalisation Committee to execute tasks on behalf of the Caribbean Football Union.

Recovery from the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 is excruciatingly slow, members and guests of the Carmi Rotary Club learned Thursday.

The speaker for the club's weekly luncheon meeting was local Rotarian Morris McCall, who (along with former President Jimmy and First Lady Rosalind Carter and a large group of volunteers with Habitat for Humanity) recently visited the Caribbean Sea nation.

McCall explained that even this long after the massive earthquake, which killed over 240,000 people, life in Haiti has not even started to recover. Although most of the earthquake debris has been cleared away, virtually no rebuilding has begun, he said. Most residents in the hardest hit areas are still living in tents, and sanitation conditions are virtually nonexistent.

The Habitat group set out to build as many homes as possible, to move some of the residents out of tents into their own homes. That is very hard to accomplish in a nation such as Haiti, which is still very shaky politically, McCall said.

The homes built were very basic by American standards. Each home is 15 feet square, with no electricity or running water. All cooking is done outside, so there was no space needed for kitchens. The residents use the structures to sleep in and spend the rest of their time elsewhere, McCall said.