No, not her. Real news today: the AP reported yes­ter­day on the flood­ing that fol­lowed in the wake of Hur­ri­cane Gustav and Trop­i­cal Storm Hanna (click here to help):

GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) — Enter­ing a flooded city on inflat­able boats, U.N. peace­keep­ers found hun­dreds of hungry people stranded for two days on rooftops and upper floors Wednes­day as the fetid car­casses of drowned farm ani­mals bobbed in soupy floodwaters.

Haiti seems cursed this hur­ri­cane season, with its crops ruined and at least 126 people killed by three storms in less than three weeks. Even as Trop­i­cal Storm Hanna edged away to the north, fore­cast­ers warned that a fourth storm — Hur­ri­cane Ike — could hit the West­ern hemisphere’s poor­est coun­try as a major storm next week.

“If we keep going like this, the whole coun­try is going to crash,” moaned Mario Marcelus, who was trying to reach his family in Gonaives but didn’t dare cross the floodwaters.

And:

The Gonaives area, where about 110,000 people live, accounted for most of the 2,000 vic­tims of Trop­i­cal Storm Jeanne in 2004. Some res­i­dents said the cur­rent flood­ing was at least as bad, and crit­i­cized the gov­ern­ment for fail­ing to imple­ment safety mea­sures in the past four years.

“This is worse than Jeanne,” said Carol Jerome, who fled from Gonaives on Tuesday.

About two-​thirds of Gonaives was cov­ered in mud, although it was dif­fi­cult to deter­mine the extent of the flood­ing from the air, U.S. Coast Guard spokesman Matt Moor­lag said after planes con­ducted fly­overs. Severe weather pre­vented the planes from assess­ing the sit­u­a­tion in the sur­round­ing moun­tains, and there was no way to reach the area.

In the chaos, there was no way of know­ing how many people might be dead in the area, or how many had been driven from their homes. People kept a wary eye on water levels, which appeared to be hold­ing steady on Wednes­day as Hanna moved far­ther offshore.

There’s also this news from Zanmi Las­ante, the Hait­ian part­ner orga­ni­za­tion of Boston’s Part­ners in Health:

”The sit­u­a­tion is very dire and cat­a­strophic and sad and frus­trat­ing,” writes Loune Viaud, Direc­tor of Oper­a­tions of Zanmi Las­ante (ZL), PIH’s part­ner orga­ni­za­tion in Haiti. She esti­mates that around 10,000 people have been dis­placed due to flood­wa­ters in the Art­i­bonite Valley, where PIH recently expanded oper­a­tions to six facilities.

…

Although these storms have con­tributed to the cur­rent dis­as­ter in Haiti, the ram­pant poverty and lack of infra­struc­ture through­out the region have exac­er­bated the impact of these and pre­vi­ous storms. Unlike New Orleans, there are no levees to hold back the water in many of the low-​lying com­mu­ni­ties served by ZL. Mud huts with­out solid foun­da­tions, walls, or roofs are easily swept away; unpaved streets quickly degrade into muddy holes, ham­per­ing evac­u­a­tion and relief efforts. Hos­pi­tals and health clin­ics lacked the infra­struc­ture to safely evac­u­ate patients, and ZL staff are wor­ried about the loom­ing public health prob­lems in the wake of the storms—the spread of water-​borne ill­ness, lack of access to clean water, malaria.

Learn more about PIH’s relief efforts here and sup­port them here.