Earthquake, storm and floods: the endless ordeal of Haitians

Soaked, exhausted inhabitants, with no choice but to urinate and defecate in streets threatened by flooding: Haiti's southwest is plunging hourly into chaos, as victims of its recent earthquake are left helpless in the face of violent weather from a new tropical storm. In the town of Les Cayes, more than 200 people are beginning to build, in the persistent wind and rain, precarious shelters on a flooded soccer field. All are victims of Saturday's 7.2 magnitude earthquake, which reduced tens of thousands of homes to dust within seconds. At least 1,941 people were killed, according to a still "very partial" assessment announced Tuesday by the Haitian civil protection. Some 9,900 people were injured by the tremors and their aftershocks. In the rubble, rescue workers have extracted 34 people alive in the last 48 hours, authorities said. In addition to the ordeal of the victims who are sleeping outside, there are showers brought by the tropical storm Grace. The rainfall may cause "major flooding" in some areas, according to the U.S. Hurricane Center, based in Miami.

U.S. lab says it has made a "historic breakthrough" in nuclear fusion

A U.S. government laboratory on Tuesday hailed a "historic breakthrough" after producing more energy from nuclear fusion than ever before, sparking excitement among scientists around the world. The experiment, which took place on August 8 at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California, "was made possible by concentrating the light of lasers", no less than 192, "on a target the size of a pellet" of hunting, explains a statement. This had the effect of "producing a hot spot the diameter of a hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts through fusion, for 100 trillionths of a second."That's eight times more energy than in the last experiments conducted in the spring. Nuclear fusion is considered by its advocates to be the energy of the future, particularly because it produces little waste and no greenhouse gases. It differs from fission, a technique currently used in nuclear power plants, which consists of breaking the bonds of heavy atomic nuclei to recover energy. Fusion is the opposite process: two light atomic nuclei are "married" to create a heavy one. In this case, two isotopes (atomic variants) of hydrogen, giving rise to helium.

IN BRIEF

A France Télévisions journalist was attacked on Sunday in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray while covering the aftermath of a shooting that took place the day before in this town in the Rouen area (Seine-Maritime, Normandy), the National Union of Journalists (SNJ) reported on Tuesday.

Forty-seven West African migrants probably died at sea while trying to reach Europe on a boat that drifted for two weeks before being recovered off the coast of Mauritania.The coast guard and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Tuesday that 47 West African migrants are likely to have died at sea while trying to reach Europe on board a boat that drifted for two weeks before being recovered off the coast of Mauritania with seven survivors.