Haitians clean up after deadly storm; deaths at 25 (AP)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haitians cleaned up homes and streets Wednesday as rains let up and rivers receded following an early summer storm that caused flooding, wrecked homes and killed more than two dozen people.

Haiti's Civil Protection Department said the death toll from seven days of rain climbed to 25 and was likely to increase as Haitians searched for relatives feared dead.

Two deaths were added to the list Wednesday after residents found the bodies of a man and woman at the bottom of a ravine, said Edgar Joseph, a spokesman for the Civil Protection Department. He said six people were still missing.

Days of steady rain turned into a violent storm Monday that triggered widespread mudslides and floods in Haiti.

The storm system also caused flooding in the neighboring Dominican Republic and in Jamaica, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. A total of four people died in those places.

On Wednesday, crews cleared roads and repaired damaged homes throughout Haiti's capital while some families found a sorrowful ending to their search for loved ones missing since the storm.

Cherline Henry had been looking for Edgar Toussaint, her boyfriend of 18 months, when a stranger told her that two bodies were found at the bottom of a ravine in Nerette, a hillside slum southeast of downtown Port-au-Prince.

The bodies were found after an elderly woman walked through the trash-strewn valley to feed her pig. She noticed a swarm of flies hovering above a pile of debris and saw a leg, residents told The Associated Press.

People later pulled on plastic gloves and grabbed pick axes to pry free Toussaint's body and the corpse of a woman wedged under a fallen tree. Relatives identified her as Venette Morin, 46.

The two bodies were covered with one of the blue tarps that aid groups passed out after the devastating earthquake in January 2010. The sheets of plastic are used to cover flimsy shelters that house tens of thousands people left homeless by the quake.

Henry, 21, took a peek at the corpse of her boyfriend. "I just lost half my life," she said.

Temporary shelters in Thomazeau, a town northwest of the capital, continued to receive people as the United Nations' World Food Program handed out food rations. Michelet Lesly Dorce, a local representative for the Civil Protection Department, said a total of 800 people had arrived since Sunday.

That morning, Haiti's largest lake, Azuei, overflowed and flooded homes. Several hundred people left the area as a precaution because the lake has a long history of flooding.

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Obama's weekly address: Sticking to clean energy

President Obama stuck to a familiar subject for his weekly address today: the need to develop clean energy sources to combat rising gas prices.

Ignoring the chance to "spike the football" by recounting the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. special forces at the beginning of the week, the president instead reprised a theme he has used the past two weeks.

"The only way we can avoid being held hostage to the ups and downs of oil prices is if we reduce our dependence on oil," Obama said. "That means investing in clean, alternative sources of energy, like advanced biofuels and natural gas. And that means making cars and trucks and buses that use less oil."

The speech was taped Friday at Allison Transmissions in Indianapolis, Indiana, a manufacturer of hybrid technology. The visit was part of Obama's effort to invest in his priorities, including energy, education and innovation, even while working with Republicans in Congress to reduce budget deficits.

Democrats in Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, also have focused on energy lately as a potential winning issue for their party. They want to eliminate the tax breaks enjoyed by oil and gas companies, something House Speaker John Boehner has said Republicans might consider.

Hi. I'm speaking with you today from the Allison Transmissions plant in Indianapolis, Indiana. I came here because this is a place where American workers are doing some big and impressive things.

The hybrid technology they manufacture here already powers nearly 4,000 buses all over the world -- buses that have already saved 15 million gallons of fuel. Soon, they'll expand this new technology to trucks as well. That means more vehicles using less oil, and that means jobs -- more than 200 new workers at this plant alone.

That's important because even as the economy is growing after one of the worst recessions in our history; even as we've added more than 2 million new private sector jobs over the past 14 months; I still meet and hear from Americans struggling to get out of their own personal recessions.

A lot of folks are still looking for work. And many folks who do have jobs are finding that their paychecks aren't keeping up with the rising costs for everything from tuition to groceries to gas. In fact, in a lot of places across the country, like Indiana, gas is reaching all-time highs.

So although our economy hasn't been the focus of the news this week, not a day that goes by that I'm not focused on your jobs, your hopes and your dreams. And that's why I came here to Allison Transmissions.

The clean energy jobs at this plant are the jobs of the future -- jobs that pay well right here in America. And in the years ahead, it's clean energy companies like this one that will keep our economy growing, create new jobs, and make sure America remains the most prosperous nation in the world.

Allison Transmissions is also part of the ultimate solution to high gas prices. We know there are no quick fixes to this problem. In the short term, we're doing everything we can to boost safe and responsible oil production here at home -- in fact, last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003.

But over the long term, the only way we can avoid being held hostage to the ups and downs of oil prices is if we reduce our dependence on oil. That means investing in clean, alternative sources of energy, like advanced biofuels and natural gas. And that means making cars and trucks and buses that use less oil.

Other countries know this, and they're going all in to invest in clean energy technologies and clean energy jobs. But I don't want other countries to win the competition for these technologies and these jobs. I want America to win that competition. I want America to win the future.

Now, I know that in a difficult fiscal climate like the one we're in, it's tempting for some to try and cut back our investments in clean energy. And I absolutely agree that the only way we'll be able to afford the things we need is by cutting the things we don't and living within our means. But I refuse to cut investments like clean energy that will help us out-innovate and out-compete the rest of the world. I refuse to cut investments that are making it possible for plants like this one to grow and add jobs across America.

We can do this. I don't just believe that because I see it happening in plants like this. I believe that because I believe in the Americans making it happen in places like this. I'm optimistic about our economic future, because for all the challenges we face, America is still home to the most entrepreneurial, most industrious, most determined people on Earth. There's nothing we can't accomplish when we set our minds to it. And that's what we'll keep doing as long as I have the privilege of being your President.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.

USATODAY.com

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Homeless addicts get help without getting clean, sober

By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Pathways to Housing helped Rachelle Ellison after finding her sleeping in a D.C. alley.

EnlargeCloseBy Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Pathways to Housing helped Rachelle Ellison after finding her sleeping in a D.C. alley.

Four years ago, Ellison, now 42, says she was a crack cocaine and alcohol addict who slept on park benches. Today she has a place to live and has taken classes at Everest College, in Arlington, Va., in a medical assistants program.

Ellison received her apartment through Housing First, a controversial nationwide initiative to house chronically homeless people without first requiring them to get treatment for their addictions.

A roof over a person's head is the first step to solving a person's problem says Sam Tsemberis, a clinical-community psychologist who started the program in 1992 in New York City.

"We had spent years trying to get people rehabilitated before giving them housing, while there's a lot of people who live on the street who already have survival skills that they can take with them when they are given an apartment," he says.

Some experts and housing facilities workers disagree with the idea of providing housing for homeless people with drug and alcohol addictions without emphasizing treatment.

"Dependency ... doesn't stop just because they have a roof over their head and food on the table," says Jesse Washington, director of affordable housing for Samaritan Inns, a housing facility for the homeless in Washington that does not follow the Housing First philosophy.

Samaritan Inns follows a 28-day social detoxification program for individuals, who are then given four- to six-months temporary residence and are required to look for a job and stay sober. The individual then has a one- to three-year stay in one of its apartments.

Housing First programs — including Pathways to Housing, an offshoot of Housing First that operates in Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Burlington, Vt. — are structured more loosely.

PHOTOS: A new place, a new lifeA person is provided with an apartment right away, Tsemberis says, and residents are not required to go to treatments or rehabilitation. They are required to meet once a week with a counselor. He says that residents can and do choose to go more often.

Elizabeth Epstein, research professor at the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, disputes that approach. She says alcoholism is an addiction that is not irreversible and that putting people together in a drinking environment makes it much harder for them to quit.

"Honestly, the idea doesn't make any sense to me," she says. "I think that money would be better spent by providing them treatment and not allowing them to drink in their living quarters."

Funded in part by federal grants Seattle has a Housing-First-type building, 1811 Eastlake, which opened in 2005 and houses the city's 75 most chronically homeless individuals under one roof.

Bill Hobson, executive director of Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center says that housing the chronically homeless with addiction problems makes sense to him. "There are people that for whatever reason can't stop drinking," he says. "For me, it was clear that the alternative treatment methods were not getting through to them."

Both the Seattle building and Pathways apartments are funded in part by federal grants and local governments. Each requires that its residents pay 30% of their income from disability or unemployment checks or a job.

Tsemberis says that most people who are homeless are eligible for either welfare or disability benefits, and if they don't have either, Pathways helps to obtain them.

Hobson co-authored a two-year study, conducted between November 2005 and March 2007, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2009, that found that housing chronically homeless alcoholics decreased the amount of taxpayer money spent on trips to emergency rooms and jails for these individuals.

The study found that public spending for the 95 people housed at the time dropped from roughly $8.1 million to about $4.1 million after being housed at 1811 Eastlake, Hobson said.

Finding the chronically homeless Pathways uses three methods to find the chronically homeless: street outreach by its workers, referrals from mental health agencies and the cities' departments of human services, says Christy Respress, director of programs and development for Pathways to Housing in Washington.

Ellison was a chronically homeless person sleeping in an alley near the Pathways D.C. office when counselors told her there was housing for her. At first she says she didn't believe it, but several days later, staff members took her to look at apartments.

Ellison says that she has a team of seven to eight people assigned to her. The group includes a psychiatrist, a family planning specialist, a drug counselor, and a team leader from the organization who talks to her by phone at least twice a week. Ellison says she used to meet with them every day but has progressed and become more independent.

She has reconnected with her three children — ages 18, 23, and 24 — and has a place to call home.

Ellison says she still drinks but is down to two or three times a week and "can control it now."

"It makes you not want to mess up so much when you have so much that you didn't have before," Ellison says of the Pathways program. "But you got to be given the opportunity to have this to know what it's like to make you want to get clean."

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