Searth, storm and floods: the endless ordeal of Haitians

Wenched, exhausted residents with no choice but to urinate and defecate in streets threatened with flooding: southwestern Haiti plunges hour by hour into chaos, the victims of its recent earthquake being helpless in the face of the violent weather of a new tropical storm. In the city of Les Cayes, more than 200 people are starting to build precarious shelters on a flooded football field under persistent wind and rain. All are affected by Saturday's magnitude 7.2 earthquake, which in a matter of seconds reduced tens of thousands of homes to dust. 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, rescuers have rescued 34 people alive in the past 48 hours, authorities said. To the ordeal of the victims who sleep outside are added the showers carried by tropical storm Grace. Rainfall is likely in places to cause "major flooding," according to the Miami-based U.S. Hurricane Center.

An American laboratory says it has made a "historic breakthrough" in nuclear fusion

An AMERICAN public laboratory on Tuesday welcomed a "historic breakthrough" after producing more energy through nuclear fusion than ever before, causing the enthusiasm of many scientists around the world. The experiment, which took place on August 8 at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), california, "was made possible by the concentration of laser light," no less than 192, "on a lead-sized target", explains a press release. This had the effect of "producing a hot spot the diameter of a hair, generating more than 10 quadrillions of watts by fusion, for 100 trillionths of a second." This is eight times more energy than in the last experiments carried out in the spring. Nuclear fusion is considered by its defenders as the energy of tomorrow, especially 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 journalist from France Télévisions was attacked Sunday in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray while covering the aftermath of a shooting that occurred the day before in this city of the Rouen agglomeration (Seine-Maritime, Normandy), reports Tuesday the National Union of Journalists (SNJ).

Quarante-seven West African migrants likely died at sea, as they tried to reach Europe aboard a boat that drifted for two weeks before being recovered off Mauritania with seven survivors, the Coast Guard and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).