There, at this moment, a gigantic “supermaritime” cargo ship called the Sarine is off-loading more than five metric tons of rice that has just arrived from Miami.

If you think of the rice as post-earthquake assistance money — the individual grains as donated dollars — you might get some idea about what’s happened since the earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010. Not to mention a sense of where the individual rice grains (or the dollars) have gone.

And, like the grains of rice aboard, the dollars mount into the hundreds of millions; even billions. According to some reports, the United States government, American individuals, families and humanitarian groups donated approximately $3 billion. That’s just from America with a total of something like $12 billion coming from all donor nations for funds to be disbursed.

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Joe Mignon, senior program director for Jean's Yele Foundation, says Jean was shot in the hand after 11 p.m. local time Saturday in the city of Delmas, just outside Port-au-Prince.

Jean's brother, Samuel, confirmed the musician was shot. Neither he nor Mignon had additional details.

The shooting comes on the eve of presidential elections in Haiti. Jean is supporting fellow musician Michel Martelly.

A spokesman for the Haitian National Police could not be immediately reached for comment.

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Aristide, addressing reporters and a Haitian public that clustered around TVs and radios throughout the country, said the decision not to allow his Lavalas Family party disenfranchised the majority in a sharply divided nation.

"Excluding Lavalas, you cut the branches that link the people," he said in remarks that were otherwise largely devoted to thanking supporters who stayed loyal to him during his exile and helped engineer his return over the objections of the U.S. government. "The solution is inclusion of all Haitians as human beings."

Haiti's electoral council barred Lavalas from the elections for technical reasons that its supporters say were bogus. Many of its members are boycotting Sunday's runoff election. Still, several people affiliated in the past with the now-less prominent party ran in the first round of the election.

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On most days, I'd say they're all about the same. Your standard Trojan in the burnt orange package fits the same specs as the Durex, which is about the same as the Lifestyles, etc., etc. Unless you're allergic to latex, into contraceptives that glow in the dark, or like your rubbers to look like an ice cream cone, the basic condom is effective at least 90 percent of the time. But what consumers overlook in price and quality they find in marketing. Enter the cottage industry in luxury condoms.

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Defense attorney Gervais Charles says the case is now in the hands of a judge of instruction who will decide whether there is enough evidence to go to trial.

That process can take up to three months.

Duvalier left court after a day of questions Tuesday and is headed back to his hotel.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier is leaving court after spending much of the day answering questions before a judge.

Duvalier was not in handcuffs as left the court Tuesday with his longtime companion, Veronica Roy.

He is expected to head back to his hotel. Hundreds of people cheered him as he got into SUV with a police escort.

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A contingent of police led the former dictator known as "Baby Doc" through the hotel and to a waiting SUV. He was not wearing handcuffs.

Duvalier, 59, was calm and did not say anything. Asked by journalists if he was being arrested, his longtime companion Veronique Roy, laughed but said nothing. Outside the hotel, he was jeered by some people and cheered by others.

The SUV drove in a convoy of police vehicles to a courthouse, even as dozens of Duvalier supporters blocked streets with overturned trash bins and rocks to try to prevent the former dictator from going to prison.

The courthouse was thronged with spectators and journalists trying to get in to view the proceedings. It was not immediately clear whether the session would be open to the public -- or what, if any, charges had been filed against him.

His removal from the hotel came after he met in private with senior Haitian judicial officials met inside his hotel room amid calls by human rights groups and other for his arrest.

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Duvalier's arrival at the airport Sunday was as mysterious as it was unexpected. He greeted a crowd of several hundred cheering supporters but did not say why he chose this tumultuous period to suddenly reappear from his exile in France -- or what he intended to do while back in Haiti.

"I'm not here for politics," Duvalier told Radio Caraibes. "I'm here for the reconstruction of Haiti."

His longtime companion, Veronique Roy, told reporters at one point that he planned to stay three days, but gave no further details.

Spokesman Henry Robert Sterling said Duvalier was inspired by the earthquake to come back to Haiti and would discuss his reasons at a Tuesday news conference.

"He wanted to come back to see how is the actual Haitian situation on the people and the country," Sterling said outside the hotel in the hills above downtown where Duvalier and Roy were secluded.

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Immigration authorities had approved requests from 55,000 Haitians to join relatives in the United States before the earthquake. But because the U.S. caps the number of visas it grants per country annually, it can take a decade for an approved request to produce a visa.

Supporters want the State Department to waive the visa limit and thereby bolster the ranks of expatriate Haitians.

The argument is based on more than compassion: Haitians abroad already send more than $1 billion back home each year, about a sixth of the gross domestic product for the hemisphere's most impoverished nation.

"They'll be able to send money to help their families back in Haiti," said North Miami Mayor Andre Pierre, whose city of 57,000 is roughly a third Haitian and would anticipate absorbing thousands of the visa-holders if they were bumped to the front of the immigration line. "Then (their families) won't have to be constantly asking the United States government and other international communities for help, constantly trying to get aid from them when they can help themselves."

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Thousands of protesters took to the streets, erecting barricades and setting fires, furious that government-backed candidate Jude Celestin, the protege of unpopular President Rene Preval, apparently will go on to a runoff vote while carnival singer Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly finished third in official results and is probably eliminated. Protests have also broken out in Les Cayes, Cap-Haitien and other cities.

Associated Press journalists saw flames leaping from the roof of the Unity party headquarters, the center of Celestin's campaign. Witnesses said the building in central Port-au-Prince was on fire for an hour.

Protesters said security guards shot demonstrators as they assaulted the building, but there were no confirmed injures in the fire or demonstration. Several fire trucks tried to control the blaze -- an unusual scene in a city with few reliable public services.

Preval urged the candidates to call off the protests.

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Renaud Piarroux says in a report that the most likely explanation for the outbreak is that Haiti's Artibonite river was contaminated by a base of U.N. troops from Nepal.

The scientist conducted his research on behalf of the French and Haitian governments. The Associated Press obtained the report on Tuesday.

Cholera had not been detected in Haiti until late October. Nearly 100,000 people have been infected so far. The U.N. has denied that its peacekeepers were to blame for the outbreak.

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Dr. Thomas Torok of the Florida Department of Health said Wednesday the case involved a woman who had visited family near where the outbreak began last month. It has killed more than 1,000 people in Haiti.

Torok said the woman returned to Collier County and has recovered. Health officials said privacy laws prohibited them from releasing more information about her case.

The health department said other suspected cases of cholera were under investigation. Florida has a large Haitian community and doctors have been asked to report possible cholera in people who recently visited there.

But the department says the disease is unlikely to spread because of better sanitation in the U.S.

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Haiti's police chief, the health minister and other Cabinet officials headed to Cap-Haitien, the country's second largest city, where protesters erected barricades of flaming tires and other debris and clashed with U.N. troops. At least two demonstrators died, one of them shot by a member of the multinational peacekeeping force that has been trying to keep order since 2004.

The cholera outbreak that began last month has brought increased misery to the entire country, still struggling with the aftermath of last January's earthquake. But anger has been particularly acute in the north, where the infection is newer, health care sparse and people have died at more than twice the rate of the region where the epidemic was first noticed.

The health ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll hit 1,034 as of Sunday. Figures are released following two days of review.

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Hundreds of people suffered the cholera symptoms of fever and diarrhea in hospitals and shacks built along the putrid waste canals of slums like Cite Soleil and Martissant.

At least 73 cholera cases had been confirmed among people living in Port-au-Prince. Physicians with the aid group Doctors Without Borders reported seeing more than 200 city residents with severe symptoms at their facilities alone over the last three days.

Following Monday's confirmation that a 3-year-old boy from a tent camp near Cite Soleil had contracted the disease before Oct. 31 without leaving the capital, the Pan-American Health Organization said the epidemic's spread from river towns in the countryside to the nation's primary urban center was a dangeorus development.

Damage to Port-au-Prince's already miserable pre-earthquake sanitation and drinking water systems make the city "ripe for the rapid spread of cholera," Dr. Jon K. Andrus, the organization's deputy director, told reporters Tuesday.

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Seven others remain missing and dozens were injured. More than 30,000 people remain in shelters and Tomas left nearly 6,000 families homeless. Others, already homeless from the Jan. 12 earthquake, lost their tents.

The hurricane struck Haiti's southern peninsula on Friday and traveled up the coast, triggering floods and landslides. But its strongest winds and rain stayed far to the west of the capital, sparing most of the encampments where an estimated 1.3 million people have been living for nearly 10 months.

Officials are now turning their attention back to a worsening cholera epidemic that has killed more than 500 people and hospitalized more than 7,300. Flooding is expected to spread the disease while damage to roads and buildings could make it harder for those sickened to get medical care.

Authorities were monitoring the cholera-laden Artibonite River on Monday after engineers let through extra water to alleviate pressure on a dam on Haiti's central plateau. Initial reports from the area indicated that flooding was minimal.

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Driving winds and storm surge battered Leogane, a seaside town west of Port-au-Prince that was near the epicenter of the Jan. 12 earthquake and was 90 percent destroyed. Dozens of families in one earthquake-refuge camp took their belongings through thigh-high water to a taxi post on high ground, waiting out the rest of the storm under blankets and a sign that read "Welcome to Leogane."

"We got flooded out and we're just waiting for the storm to pass. There's nothing we can do," said Johnny Joseph, a 20-year-old resident.

The storm, once again a hurricane with 85 mph (135 kph) winds, was battering the western tip of Haiti's southern peninsula and the cities of Jeremie and Les Cayes.

One man drowned while trying to ford a river in an SUV in the rural area of Grand-Anse, said civil protection official Pierre Andre. The hurricane had earlier killed at least 14 people in the eastern Caribbean.

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The outbreak in the rural Artibonite region, which hosts thousands of quake refugees, appeared to confirm relief groups' fears about sanitation for homeless survivors living in tarp cities and other squalid settlements.

"We have been afraid of this since the earthquake," said Robin Mahfood, president of Food for the Poor, which was preparing to fly in donations of antibiotics, dehydration salts and other supplies.

Many of the sick have converged on St. Nicholas hospital in the seaside city of St. Marc, where hundreds of dehydrated patients lay on blankets in a parking lot with IVs in their arms as they waited for treatment.

Health Ministry director Gabriel Thimothe said laboratory tests confirmed that the illness is cholera. He said Friday morning that 142 people have died and more than a thousand infected people were hospitalized.

The president of the Haitian Medical Association, Claude Surena, said people must be vigilant about hygiene and wash their hands frequently to slow the spread of the disease.

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There is no question the tweets are horrific -- but some people were offended not only by the awful reality they revealed but also the way the story was told. As the San Francisco Chronicle's Phil Bronstein reported, soon after McClelland detailed her experiences with the 24-year-old rape victim, concerned tweeters began raising some critical questions: Had her interview subject given informed consent? Wasn't she putting the woman in danger by using her real first name? Is Twitter an appropriate medium for talking about rape? Instead of engaging in the uninformed -- albeit philosophically interesting! -- speculation, I decided to give McClelland a call to hear her side of the story.

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The Haitian-American hip hop star expressed disappointment at the late Friday ruling, but called on his followers to act "peacefully and responsibly."

"Though I disagree with the ruling, I respectfully accept the committee's final decision, and I urge my supporters to do the same," the former Fugees frontman said in a statement.

Haiti's electoral commission did not say why it had disqualified Jean, but the singer had faced a challenge to his candidacy in the Nov. 28 elections because he has not lived in Haiti for the past five years as required.

The electoral commission also rejected the candidacy of Jean's uncle, Raymond Joseph, who is Haiti's ambassador to the United States.

The commission approved 19 candidates and rejected 15, spokesman Richardson Dumel told journalists. While rejecting Jean, the board approved two leading contenders: former Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis and Yvon Neptune, who was the last prime minister under ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and has been active in helping to coordinate reconstruction efforts.

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Wrong.

The rap star’s declared candidacy and potential election would be a disaster for Haiti. Whether Jean’s intentions are sincere and pure, they reflect a deeply troubling phenomenon around the world: the unrelenting celebrity worship that ferments a trivialization of politics and a dismissal of complicated problems. The depressing thing about Jean’s candidacy is our deepening confusion of fame with virtue and celebrity with competence.

Though Jean’s humanitarian efforts after Haiti’s earthquake deserve some props, they hardly qualify him for the daunting technical tasks of effectively leading his crisis-prone nation.

First, we don’t know the details and depth of Jean’s inexperience. Why? The Florida Division of Corporations dissolved Yéle Haiti, Jean’s philanthropic organization, and its predecessor, the Wyclef Jean Foundation, several times. The offense? The organizations failed to file legally required state disclosure reports. However, the rap star’s foundation did collect $1,142,944 in total revenue in 2006, which presumably sheds light on the organization’s operating budget.

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The singer released a statement that he was resigning the chairmanship of Yele Haiti effective immediately Thursday.

The Haitian-born, Brooklyn-raised singer is expected to officially file his election papers Thursday afternoon at the provisional electoral council in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

The 40-year-old Jean said by running for president "my focus on helping Haiti turn a new corner will only grow stronger."

Yele came under criticism for alleged improprieties including that it paid Jean to perform at fundraising events and bought air time from a television station he co-owns.

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