Globe Trot: Hurricane damage in Haiti ‘worse than expected and deteriorating’

HAITI: “The situation here is worse than anyone expected and deteriorating,” writes Joe Knittig, head of The Global Orphan Project, who joined a team to visit his group’s work in southern Haiti, hardest hit by Hurricane Matthew. Yesterday, the ministry’s Haiti team reached orphanages by helicopter to provide a week’s worth of food and water supplies. Those areas remain largely cut off and in dire need, as Haiti’s death toll from the storm today surpassed 300, while an estimated 350,000 people need assistance.

CHINA: The Chinese government’s human rights record is on “a downward trend,” highlighted by a crackdown on Christian worship, a bipartisan congressional panel concluded in its annual report. “The Chinese government took extraordinary steps to decimate the ranks of human rights lawyers, crush independent civil society, and expand control over the internet and the press,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who co-chairs the Congressional­–Executive Commission on China with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. The report also accuses China of “coercive” population control policies despite the adoption of a new “two-child policy” over the decades-old one-child policy last year. It called for “principled” U.S. leadership to advance “security and economic interests that benefit both the American and Chinese people.”

SYRIA: Media outlets this week championed the UN Security Council’s decisive selection this week of António Guterres, the former Portuguese prime minister, to become the next UN secretary-general. But Guterres, who served as UN high commissioner for refugees until last year, supervised a faltering response to the current refugee crisis—and opposed resettling Syria’s Christian refugees in the West.

Guterres’ position helps explain why the United States is showing an overwhelming imbalance in accepting refugees from Syria: 11,300 Muslims (98.33 percent) to 54 Christians (0.46 percent). The United States is relying almost exclusively on the UN agency Guterres once headed for refugee referrals, and a U.S. State Department spokesman told me, “Christians account for only slightly more than 1 percent of the approximately 2 million Syrian refugees in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon who are registered with UNHCR.”

COLOMBIA: The Colombian peace deal with FARC was always more popular abroad than it was at home (think Brexit), and voters rejected it on Sunday because of the leniency it showed to FARC leaders who exacted a nearly 50-year war on their country. Now negotiators must come up with a plan voters will endorse.