The staff crossing gang lines to battle malnutrition and cholera in Haiti capital
In a simple breezeblock and cement building, cholera patients are attached to drips as they lie sprawled on hard, wooden beds.
In one section, two young boys stare into the distance through listless eyes. They are very poorly, the staff tell us, but now they are here, they will survive.
Two boys at the Fontaine Hospital
Medical staff check on their patients in the relatively cool interior of the wards, while outside the sun beats down on the grounds of the rough and ready interconnected buildings of the Fontaine Hospital in Port-au-Prince.
The hospital is built amid the slums in an area of Haiti’s capital known as Cite Soleil – or Sun City.
‘All the infants are malnourished’ at the Fontaine Hospital, writes Sky’s Stuart Ramsay
This suburb is widely regarded to be the birthplace of the gangs of Port-au-Prince, and this section of the city has been violent and dangerous for decades.
Civil society doesn’t function here. Indeed, the Fontaine Hospital is the only medical facility still operating in the gang-controlled areas of Cite Soleil.
Without it, the people who live here would have no access to doctors or medical care.
How did gangs take over Haiti? Watch Q&A with Stuart Ramsay
I’m standing in the cholera ward with Jose Ulysse, the hospital’s founder. He opened the hospital 32 years ago. It’s a charity, run purely on donations.
Mr Ulysse explained that the increasing gang violence across the whole of Port-au-Prince, and the chaos it is causing, means people are herded into displacement camps, which in turn means that cholera outbreaks are getting worse.
Jose Ulysse, Fontaine Hospital founder
“Cholera is always present, but there’s a time when it’s more,” he told me.
“Lately because of all the displacement camps there is a great deal of promiscuity and rape, and we have an increase in cases.”
As we spoke, I asked him about the two young boys, and a small group of women on drips in the ward.
“Now they are here, they will be okay, but if they weren’t here and this hospital wasn’t here, they would be dead by now,” he replied when I asked him about their condition.
Jose Ulysse and Sky’s Stuart Ramsay
We left the cholera ward, cleaning our hands and shoes with disinfectant, before moving on to the next part of the hospital under pressure – the malnutrition ward.
“Malnutrition and cholera go hand-in-hand,” Mr Ulysse explained as we walked.
In the clinic, we meet parents and their little ones – all the infants are malnourished.
The mothers – and important to note – one father, are given food to feed their babies.
Read more of Stuart Ramsey’s reporting in Haiti:
Children going to school in Haiti dodge gunfire
Listen: Reporting from Haiti’s urban war zone
Soldiers face ‘raining bullets’ from Haiti’s gangs
Distended tummies are ‘giveaway signs’ of malnutrition
Those who are in the worst condition are also fed by a drip. One of the giveaway signs of malnutrition is a distended tummy, and most of these babies have that.
Poverty and insecurity combine to cause this, Mr Ulysse tells me. And like cholera, malnutrition is getting worse.
He explained that when the violence increases, parents can’t go to work because it is too dangerous, so they end up not being able to make a living, which means that they can’t feed their children properly.
The medics and hospital workers risk their lives every day, crossing gang lines and territories to get to the hospital and care for their patients.
Mothers and their children at the Fontaine Hospital in gang-controlled Cite Soleil
NICU unit at Fontaine Hospital
The reason why this hospital is so popular is because staff show up, even when the fighting is at its worst.
Despite their meagre resources, the Fontaine Hospital’s intensive care unit for premature babies is busy – it is widely regarded as one of the best facilities of its kind in the country.
A team of nurses, masked and in scrubs, tenderly care for these tiny children, some of whom are only hours old.
They are some of the most incredibly vulnerable.
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I asked Mr Ulysse what would happen if his hospital wasn’t there.
“Just imagine, there isn’t a place where they can go, everyone comes here, normally the poorest people in the country”, he told me.
But he stressed that the only way the hospital can keep going is through donations, and the cuts to the US government’s USAID programme has had a direct impact on the hospital’s donors.
The hospital is run by donations, which have been affected by cuts from the US government’s USAID programme
Attacks on hospitals and staff working in the toughest areas across Port-au-Prince have become common.
We filmed outside one of the two Médecins Sans Frontières facilities in the centre of the capital, where work has been suspended because their staff were threatened or attacked.
Medical personnel from the health ministry in Port-au-Prince tell us over 70 per cent of all medical facilities in Port-au-Prince have been shut. Only one major public hospital, the Le Paix Hospital, is open.
The Le Paix Hospital’s executive director, Dr Paul Junior Fontilus, says he is perplexed by the gang’s targeting of medical facilities.
“It makes no sense, it’s crazy, we don’t know what it is they want,” he said as we walked through the hospital.
The hospital is orderly and functioning well, considering the pressure it is under. They are dealing with more and more cases of cholera, an increase in gunshot wounds and sexual violence.
“We are overrun with demand, and this surpasses our capacity to respond,” he explained to me.
“But we are obliged to meet the challenge and offer services to the population.”
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Haiti: An eyewitness account
Gang violence is crushing the life out of Port-au-Prince, affecting all of society. And, as is often the case, the most vulnerable in society suffer the most.
Stuart Ramsay reports from Haiti with camera operator Toby Nash, senior foreign producer Dominique Van Heerden, and producers Brunelie Joseph and David Montgomery.
World
Thai prime minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra sacked for ethics violation after leaked phone call
Thailand’s prime minister has been sacked after a leaked phone call with a senior Cambodian politician caused outrage.
Paetongtarn Shinawatra, who was Thailand’s youngest PM, has been dismissed from office by the country’s Constitutional Court after only a year in power.
The court found Ms Shinawatra, 39, violated ethics in a leaked June telephone call, during which she appeared to kowtow to Cambodia’s former leader Hun Sen as the bordering countries were on the verge of an armed conflict.
She also criticised a Thai army commander – a taboo move in a country where the military is extremely influential.
Fighting erupted weeks later and lasted five days. At least 35 people were killed and more than 260,000 were displaced.
Ms Shinawatra, who was new to politics when she took office in August last year, apologised over the call and said she was trying to avert a war. She was suspended in July.
Ms Shinawatra arriving at Government House in Bangkok ahead of the verdict on Friday. Pic: Reuters
She is now the fifth Thai PM from, or backed by, the billionaire Shinawatra family to be removed by the military or the judiciary in 17 years, amid a battle for power between the country’s warring elites.
The ruling thrusts Thailand into more political uncertainty at a time of public unease over stalled reforms and a stuttering economy.
Speaking after the court’s decision, the exiting PM said “all sides” in Thai politics now “have to work together to build political stability and to ensure that there won’t be another turning point again”.
The focus will now shift to who will replace Ms Shinawatra.
Her influential, billionaire father, Thaksin Shinawatra, who also once served as Thailand’s PM, is expected to be at the heart of a flurry of bargaining to keep the ruling Pheu Thai party in power.
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
Read more:
What happened between Thailand and Cambodia
Drug epidemic sweeps Southeast Asia
The leader of the main opposition People’s Party has called for the next prime minister to dissolve parliament once they are installed.
The deputy PM, Phumtham Wechayachai, and the current cabinet will act as government caretakers until a new leader is elected by parliament. There is no time limit on when that must take place.
After all those raised hopes of peace, Ukraine has been hit by the second-worst night of Russian air attacks since the war began.
So much for diplomacy, despite the Alaska summit, then the Washington DC meeting.
The Kremlin says it was aiming at military targets, but yet again, the pictures tell a very different story.
Follow latest: UK summons Putin’s ambassador
Firefighters work at the site of a burning building after a Russian attack in Kyiv, Ukraine. Pic: AP
One civilian building after another was hit, more than a dozen people were killed, and British Council and EU buildings were also damaged.
So what’s going on? Why is Vladimir Putin doing it?
Because he can.
The Russian president thinks he’s winning this war, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he’s using diplomacy to play for time while he carries on beating down the Ukrainians’ will to win.
And at the moment, no one is stopping him
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At least 14 killed in Kyiv attack
Ukraine is hitting back, particularly at Russia‘s oil installations, more of them going up in thick black smoke, after being hit by long-range Ukrainian drones.
It is taking a heavy toll on Putin’s ‘Achilles heel’, but on its own, analysts don’t expect it will be enough to persuade him to end this war.
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British Council building hit in Kyiv
The West can wring its hands in condemnation.
But it’s divided between Europe that wants a ceasefire and much more severe sanctions, and Donald Trump, who, it seems, does not – strangely always willing to sympathise with the Russians more than Ukraine.
He’s back to blaming Ukraine for starting the war, saying earlier in the week that Kyiv should not have got into a war it had no chance of winning.
It is a grotesque perversion of history. Ukraine, of course, had no choice but to fight to defend itself when it was invaded in an act of unprovoked aggression.
Every time the US president has condemned Russia for these kinds of attacks, he has never followed through and done nothing to punish them.
Rescue workers carry an injured woman after a Russian strike on Kyiv, Ukraine. Pic: AP
More worryingly for the Ukrainians, the Russians are getting the upper hand in the drones war, taking Iranian technology and souping it up into faster-moving drones that the Ukrainians are having increasing difficulty bringing down.
They expect as many as a thousand drones a night coming their way by the winter, and many, many more innocents to die.
Next week, Putin will join Chinese and North Korean leaders in a summit in Beijing, both supporting his war in Ukraine.
(L-R) Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. Pics: Reuters
Read more from Dominic Waghorn:
Ukrainians warn they’re in danger of losing drone arms race
We are further away from peace now than we were two weeks ago
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
A war that began as one man’s mad idea has, in three and a half years, metastasised into a titanic struggle between east and west, fought increasingly with machines in a dystopian evolution of war.
If Mr Trump is not prepared to use his power to bring this war to an end, what will another three and a half years of his presidency bring?
It is a chilling question.
World
Boy, 8, and girl, 10, killed in US Catholic school shooting named – as father brands attacker ‘a coward’
The families of two children killed in the US Catholic school shooting have said their “hearts are broken” and branded the attacker a “coward”.
Fletcher Merkel who was eight and 10-year-old Harper Moyski were killed during mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Wednesday.
Eighteen other people were injured, including children aged between six and 15 and three adults in their 80s.
Police said Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman, opened fire with a rifle through the windows of the school’s church as children sat in pews.
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New details released of US school shooting
‘Our hearts are broken’
Harper’s parents, Michael Moyski and Jackie Flavin, remembered her as “a bright, joyful, and deeply loved 10-year-old whose laughter, kindness, and spirit touched everyone who knew her”.
“Our hearts are broken not only as parents, but also for Harper’s sister, who adored her big sister and is grieving an unimaginable loss. As a family, we are shattered, and words cannot capture the depth of our pain,” their statement said.
They urged leaders and communities to “take meaningful steps to address gun violence and the mental health crisis in this country.”
“Change is possible, and it is necessary – so that Harper’s story does not become yet another in a long line of tragedies,” the statement added.
The family of Fletcher Merkel said there was a ‘hole in our hearts’. Pic: Family handout/AP
‘Fletcher loved his family’
In a statement reported by Sky’s US partner network NBC News, Fletcher’s father Jesse Merkel blamed the “coward” killer for why the boy’s family can’t “hold him, talk to him, play with him, and watch him grow into the wonderful young man he was on the path to becoming”.
He said: “Fletcher loved his family, friends, fishing, cooking, and any sports that he was allowed to play.
“While the hole in our hearts and lives will never be filled, I hope that in time, our family can find healing.”
Mr Merkel also praised “the swift and heroic actions of children and adults alike from inside the church”.
“Without these people and their selfless actions, this could have been a tragedy of many magnitudes more. For these people, I am thankful,” he added.
Families and loved ones reunite at the scene after the shooting. Pic: Reuters
Mayor calls for assault weapon ban
It comes after Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey called for a statewide and federal ban on assault weapons, a day after the deadly school shooting.
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Minneapolis mayor urges assault weapons ban
“Thoughts and prayers are not going to cut it. It’s on all of us to see this through,” the mayor said at a news conference. “We need a statewide and a federal ban on assault weapons.
“We need a statewide and a federal ban on high-capacity magazines. There is no reason that someone should be able to reel off 30 shots before they even have to reload.
“We’re not talking about your father’s hunting rifle gear. We’re talking about guns that are built to pierce armour and kill people.”
Meanwhile, Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara gave an update on the investigation, saying the suspect had fired 116 rifle rounds into the church.
“It is very clear that this shooter had the intention to terrorise those innocent children,” he added, before saying the killer “fantasised” about the plans of other mass shooting attackers and wanted to “obtain notoriety”.
Read more from Sky News:
Man ‘who impersonated Michael Jackson’ was ‘unfairly dismissed’
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Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
Thomas Klemond, interim CEO of Minneapolis’s main trauma hospital Hennepin Healthcare, said at an earlier news conference that the hospital was treating nine patients injured in the shooting.
One child at the hospital was in a critical condition, he added.
Children’s Minnesota Hospital also said that three children remain in its care as of Thursday morning.
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