Thousands of Haitians sought refuge in the United States after last year’s devastating earthquake in Haiti. Many are young people, now enrolled in U.S. schools, surrounded by a new language and culture. VOA’s Alex Villarreal tells us how one high school in Florida is helping the students adjust.
Cuba’s government has given its citizens the right to buy and sell their homes for the first time since the 1959 revolution.
The long-awaited reform, published on Thursday in the government’s Official Gazette, is one one of the most substantial reforms introduced by Raul Castro, Cuba’s president, to liberalize the island’s Soviet-style command economy while maintaining the communist system..
Phil Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia, said the move could have broad
ramifications for the Cuban economy, where the cash-strapped government is encouraging the growth of self-employment as it attempts to cut a million jobs from its bloated payrolls.
“The ability to sell houses means instant capital formation for Cuban families. It becomes a source of capital at the
grassroots level,” Peters said. “It is a big sign of the government letting go.”
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere and the poverty has fuelled restavek, a system of domestic servitude of hundreds of thousands of children that is tantamount to modern-day slavery.
The country’s government acknowledges that child slaves exist but says it is part of the culture. (2008)
Most of the prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay were either innocent or posed little threat, according to official US documents leaked by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.
The files show that about 220 of the detainees were classed as “dangerous terrorists”, While 150 Afghan and Pakistani prisoners were later determined to be innocent.
Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari takes a closer look at just who these men are.
Al Jazeera cameraman ‘interrogated’ about network
Sami al-Hajj was working as an Al Jazeera cameraman when he was arrested in late 2001 and sent to Guantanamo Bay.
One file in the newly released trove of leaked US military documents shows that al-Hajj, held at Guantanamo for six years, was detained partly in order to be interrogated about the news network.
He speaks to Al Jazeera’s Nick Clark about the documents.
