Nearly a week after hurricane hit Haiti, UN appeals for aid
Nearly a week after hurricane hit Haiti, UN appeals for aid
MARFRANC, Haiti (AP) — At a cramped police station serving as a makeshift clinic, Darline Derosier fastened IV drips to jail cell bars, wiped the brows of cholera patients and tended to the wounds of those injured when Hurricane Matthew slammed into Haiti’s southwestern peninsula.
She was the only health worker helping about 40 patients Monday inside the station bereft of police as she waited for help to arrive in the hard-hit town of Marfranc nearly a week after the Category 4 storm struck Oct. 4.
Among the patients was an elderly woman lying unconscious on a jail cell floor with a leg bandaged in an old rag and a man with gashes around his neck, his eyes fluttering.
“People will die soon if we don’t get some aid,” an overwhelmed Derosier told The Associated Press.
The town is a 45-minute drive southwest from the coastal city of Jeremie, where food, medicine and fresh water are finally arriving but still slow to reach increasingly desperate communities.
After hurricane, chaos lingers in water-logged NC
LUMBERTON, N.C. (AP) — With floodwaters from Hurricane Matthew on the rise, at least one North Carolina city appeared near chaos Monday, its police station shuttered and sporadic gunfire in the air, and authorities worried that more communities could end up the same way.
The storm is gone, but it left behind a water-logged landscape where flooding was expected to persist for the rest of the week. At least three rivers were forecast to reach record levels, some not cresting until Friday. In many areas, the scene resembled a repeat of Hurricane Floyd, which caused $3 billion in damage and destroyed 7,000 homes as it skirted the coast in 1999.
Officials were concerned that other cities could suffer the fate of Lumberton, a community of 22,000 people about 80 miles from the ocean.
The Rev. Volley Hanson worried that stress from the lack of running water and electricity might push people over the edge. Robeson County, which includes Lumberton, had North Carolina’s highest violent crime rate in 2014.
“The cash is going to be running out. We’ve already got street vendors hawking water, Cokes and cigarettes. Cigarettes are at seven bucks a pack,” Hanson said. “It’s nuts here, and it’s going to get worse.”
Samsung changes Note 7 output schedule after fire reports
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Samsung’s crisis with its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone deepened Monday as the company confirmed it has adjusted its production following reports that newly released versions offered as replacements for recalled fire-prone devices have also overheated or caught fire.
The company, however, did not confirm or deny a report by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency earlier Monday that it has suspended production of the phones.
In a statement and in a regulatory filing, Samsung Electronics said it is “temporarily” adjusting the Galaxy Note 7 production schedule and production volume to “ensure quality and safety matters.” The company added that it will issue an update when more details are available.
Before the reports of a production suspension emerged, U.S. phone retailers AT&T and T-Mobile had already opted to stop giving new Note 7 replacement smartphones to consumers.
Samsung and U.S. authorities are investigating multiple reports of new Note 7 replacement smartphones catching fire, including a Samsung phone that emitted smoke and forced a Southwest Airlines flight in Kentucky to evacuate passengers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is investigating the incident.
For showing how contracts work best, 2 economists win Nobel
(AP) Let insiders easily cash in stock options, as Enron did, and you risk seeing executives abandon a failing company. Encourage contractors to sacrifice quality to cut costs and you might cause problems like those that led the U.S. Justice Department to phase out privately run prisons.
Designing contracts is a tricky business. For their groundbreaking work on how to make contracts fairer and more effective, Oliver Hart of Harvard University and Bengt Holmstrom of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the 2016 Nobel prize for economics Monday. They will share the 8 million kronor ($930,000) award for their contributions to contract theory.
For decades, the two men have studied practical problems involving the countless kinds of contracts that underlie modern commerce:
How should companies pay their executives? What types of tasks should government agencies outsource to private contractors? How best to write an auto insurance policy to protect drivers from financial loss without lulling them into carelessness?
Pay packages, Holmstrom’s work suggests, are best tailored to avoid either punishing or rewarding CEOs for happenings beyond their control.
Nancy O’Dell: Even the locker room no excuse for Trump
LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Entertainment Tonight” host Nancy O’Dell says women shouldn’t be objectified, even in the locker room.
In remarks Monday on the entertainment news show, O’Dell addressed crude comments made about her by GOP presidential contender Donald Trump on video in 2005.
O’Dell said the mention of her name threw her unwillingly into the middle of the political arena. Then, referring to a statement she issued Saturday, O’Dell repeated that “there is no room for objectification of women” or anyone.
She added, “not even in the locker room.”
Trump apologized for the crude remarks, which included talk of groping women and his assertion that he tried and failed to sleep with a married woman he identified as “Nancy.” ”Access Hollywood” identified O’Dell as the woman to whom Trump referred.