 21 August, 2021 Hello, All good wishes,
Jon Connell Editor-in-chief
Haiti  Jonathan Alpeyrie/Bloomberg/Getty Images Crisis for the West's poorest country "It is as if we are cursed," said one Haitian priest in the town of L'Asile as he prepared for yet another funeral. There have been many. The death toll from last weekend's 7.2 magnitude earthquake has risen to nearly 2,200 and 600,000 people need humanitarian assistance, says Anthony Faiola in The Washington Post. Days after the quake, Tropical Storm Grace lashed the nation with heavy rain and 35mph winds, hampering the reconstruction effort." Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, is used to pain. More than 220,000 people died in a "catastrophic" earthquake in 2010. Last month the country's president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated, allegedly by Colombian mercenaries. Since then Haiti has been "limping along" with an interim government, "racked by fractious warlords, soaring hunger and the coronavirus". International help is essential, says El País. The US and other countries in the Americas have rightly been offering aid. But that's a mixed blessing, says The Economist. As it flows largely through private networks, it has weakened and hollowed out the government. Worse, in the past decade UN peacekeepers accidentally introduced cholera, causing about 10,000 deaths. They have also been accused of sexually abusing Haitian girls. This stereotype that unlucky Haiti "can't catch a break" is rubbish, says Jonathan Katz in Slate. The country was "deeply lucky" that last week's earthquake, which was even more powerful than the one in 2010, struck on the southern peninsula, away from the bulk of the population. And the suffering Haiti does face "is the result of very intentional decisions". A decade ago Hillary Clinton, then the US secretary of state, jetted in to demand, in effect, that the results of an election be changed. The new leaders oversaw rampant corruption and authoritarianism. By the time of Moïse's death, he had dismissed all but 10 of Haiti's elected politicians. No wonder many Haitians fly to Brazil and "literally walk across the continent" to America. It's the members of this diaspora who can help their homeland prosper, says Fabiola Santiago in the Miami Herald. Haitian-American builders, entrepreneurs, and investors can "break through the poverty cycle", and Haiti's future "savvy leaders" may well be attending American universities right now. The least the US can do is offer citizenship and stop the deportation of Haitian migrants. No one can change the country's "geographic misfortune", sitting on a tectonic fault line and "in the path of ravaging hurricanes". But the manmade problems are up to us, not to chance.
Eating in The Queen has never lifted a dumbbell or taken part in intense physical exercise says Sajjad Choudhury in Medium. Yet she lives on and on, almost as active as ever. When she visited George Bush Sr at the White House in the 1990s, he was astonished by her ability to walk so briskly that it "left even the Secret Service panting". At 95 she still rides her horse without aid. Her secret? Long walks every day at about 2.30pm. And a simple, nutritious diet, with the occasional treat. There's nothing wrong with eating some of the bad stuff here and there, says Choudhury. Or even a little every day, as the Queen does. Everything in moderation. Breakfast Lunch Teatime Dinner
Long read shortened  Tiny dynamos of the sky Hummingbirds are "dying out at alarming rates", says Christopher Benfey in The New York Review of Books. His review of birdwatcher Jon Dunn's book The Glitter in the Green charts the history of this enchanting species. Demand for their "psychedelic feathers" left hummingbirds vulnerable to the "lucrative trade in feathers for women's hats" and the whims of sport hunters. At an 1887 auction in London, 400,000 dead hummingbirds were on sale. Today they're at risk from climate change, habitat loss, pesticides and collisions with reflective glass buildings. The rufous hummingbird saw its population decline by 62% between 1966 and 2014, and the habitat of the marvellous spatuletail is "shrinking with the rapid deforestation of the Amazon". It's a terrible loss: hummingbirds are "transfixing" creatures that require "enormous strength and energy" to hover in one place. Their hearts beat about 12,000 times a minute and they consume up to 7.6 calories a day – the equivalent of 155,000 calories for a human. Ruby-throated hummingbirds fly for 24 hours nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico every spring, shedding up to half their body weight. The hummingbird is "the most beautiful canary in the coalmine", says Dunn, signalling that "the clock of extinction is ticking loudly". Read the full review here. The Glitter in the Green by Jon Dunn is published by Bloomsbury at £20
Property  THE COTTAGE This renovated Cotswold cottage overlooks the village church in Snowshill, near Broadway, Daylesford and Stow-on-the-Wold. It has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two receptions, a terrace, a garden and a summerhouse. £895,000.
Life  Tarantino and his wife, Daniella. Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images Last week the Oscar-winning film-maker Quentin Tarantino said he refuses to give his mother any money because she mocked his writing when he was a teenager. "You will never see one penny from my success. There will be no house for you. There's no vacation for you," he raged on the podcast The Moment. "You get nothing. Because you said that." How gracious, says Tanya Gold in UnHerd. Tarantino, 58, is worth an estimated $120m. His mother, Connie, is 75 and works as a nurse in Tennessee. Raising him was exhausting. Connie was 16, single and broke when she gave birth to Tarantino. For years she worked 16-hour shifts, leaving the child in a trailer park with his alcoholic grandmother. So Quentin escaped through books and films – he watched movies over and over again, and reread chapters, analysing their structure. When he was nine he wrote Connie a Mother's Day story in which she died at the end. "I feel real bad about it," he told her. "But that's just the way the story turned out." No wonder she questioned his literary abilities. His father was the real villain. Tony Tarantino, a failed actor, left Connie before Quentin was born. I hate him, the director told Marc Maron on the WTF podcast. "He had 30 f***ing years to find me and he never did." Then, when Quentin became famous, Tony hunted him down at a cafe. "He's like, 'Hi. It's me.' And I look up, and I knew exactly who it was. And I go 'Ugh. I knew this day was going to come.'" Tony asked if he could sit down. Quentin didn't even make eye contact. "I just looked at the table, and I waved him away with my hand." They never met again. Sins of the fathers Like Tony Tarantino, Al Pacino's estranged father, Sal, piggybacked on his son's success. In fact, Tony and Sal made a film together in the 1990s. The movie, Holy Hollywood, was billed as starring Pacino and Tarantino. It was only ever released on video..
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August 21, 2021
Crisis for the West’s poorest country
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