Multicultural Review says about The History of Haiti reviewed with The History of Vietnam.

Quick and valuable reference material, such as a timeline of historical events and a synopsis of notable people in the country's history, is available in the featured volumes. In addition, a brief glossary, a bibliographic essay, and an index end each book

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Poet Sunni Patterson is one of New Orleans' most beloved artists. She has performed in nearly every venue in the city, toured the US, and frequently appears on television and radio, from Democracy Now to Def Poetry Jam. When she performs her poems in local venues, half the crowd recites the words along with her. But, like many who grew up here, she was forced to move away from the city she loves. She left as part of a wave of displacement that began with Katrina and still continues to this day. While hers is just one story, it is emblematic of the situation of many African Americans from New Orleanians, who no longer feel welcomed in the city they were born in.

Patterson comes from New Orleans's Ninth Ward. Her family's house was cut in half by the floodwaters and has since been demolished. Despite the loss of her home, she was soon back in the city, living in the Treme neighborhood. She spent much of the following years traveling the country, performing poetry and trying to raise awareness about the plight of New Orleans. But her income was not enough--her post-Katrina rent was twice what she had paid before the storm, and she was also putting up money to help her family rebuild as well as preparing for the birth of her son Jibril. "I wound up getting evicted from my apartment because we were still working on the house," she said. "In the midst of it, you realize that you are not generating the amount of money you need to sustain a living."

Patterson's family had difficulty presenting the proper paperwork to receive federal rebuilding dollars--a problem shared by many New Orleanians. "We're dealing with properties that have been passed down from generation to generation," says Patterson. "The paperwork is not always available. A lot of elders are tired, they don't know what to do."

Blackwater, a corporation that specializes in providing military-style training and support to other businesses and governments, recently entered into a $42 million civil settlement with the State Department this month after the agency found that the company violated international arms trafficking and export regulations no less than 288 times.

The settlement is mainly focused on the company's business dealings in Iraq and Afghanistan, but within a 41-page document (PDF) of the State Department's findings on the case, the agency also claims that Blackwater provided at least 1 unauthorized military training in Colombia in 2005, allegedly in violation of International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

According to the findings, Blackwater (which changed its name to Xe Services in 2009 after earning an ugly reputation for its mercenary work in Iraq) provided “military training to foreign persons from Colombia” before “obtaining required authorizations” through the State Department.The company failed to get approval of what is called a DSP-5 license, which specifies key details (PDF) about trainings that are to be conducted abroad, the findings say. This fact was not confirmed by the State Department until the agency sent out "disclosure requests" to Blackwater in October 2008, according to the State Department document. Such a license would describe the location and subject of the training.

 http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1008/S00188/

blackwater-unauthorized-training-in-colombia.htm

Early in the morning of July 21 police stormed the offices of the Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union in Basra, the poverty-stricken capital of Iraq's oil-rich south.  A shamefaced officer told Hashmeya Muhsin, the first woman to head a national union in Iraq, that they'd come to carry out the orders of Electricity Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to shut the union down.  As more police arrived, they took the membership records, the files documenting often-atrocious working conditions, the leaflets for demonstrations protesting Basra's agonizing power outages, the computers and the phones.  Finally, Muhsin and her coworkers were pushed out and the doors locked.