PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- John Travolta has landed his own jet in Haiti carrying relief supplies and a team including doctors and Scientology ministers.
The 55-year-old actor flew the Boeing 707 from Florida on Monday carrying 4 tons of ready-to-eat military rations and medical supplies for earthquake victims. Among those accompanying Travolta is his wife, actress Kelly Preston.
The Church of Scientology says the pair planned to return home after unloading their passengers and supplies.

Families search for missing; food distribution becomes riot

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- In what's left of one family's home, in what remains of one destroyed neighborhood, Jean-Rene Lochard has retrieved the bodies of his mother, brother, sister-in-law and nephew, and buried them beside the ruins, one by one and with a priest's blessing.

On Monday, he dug deeper, searching for his brother's 5-year-old son. Only when he finds the boy will he rest. "I need the body to bury him," he said. "It's important to bury the bodies."

With 150,000 bodies already in mass graves, international teams, grieving families, sympathetic neighbors and sometimes even strangers were pulling at the rubble with tools or bare hands in countless corners of this devastated city.

Thirteen days after the killer earthquake, they were desperate to recover some of the thousands of Port-au-Prince's lost dead -- to close each tragic circle, to lay loved ones in the earth to rest in peace.




» Portland-area fundraisers, events For the living -- the homeless spread across empty lots, parks and plazas in the hundreds of thousands -- there was little rest as aid agencies struggled to fill their needs for food and water, and to get them tents to shelter their families against the burning tropical sun.

In front of the wrecked National Palace, people's desperation boiled over. Uruguayan U.N. peacekeepers had to fire pepper spray into the air to try to disperse thousands jostling for food. The overwhelmed soldiers finally retreated, and young men rushed forward to grab the bags of pinto beans and rice, emblazoned with the U.S. flag, pushing aside others -- including a pregnant woman who collapsed and was trampled. Thousands were left without food.

In the surrounding Champs de Mars plaza, a sea of homeless covered the open ground, many with nothing more than a plastic sheet to protect them from sun and rain. The global agency supplying tents said it already had 10,000 stored in Haiti and at least 30,000 more would be arriving.

Haitian President Rene Preval, who lost his house in the disaster, plans to move into a tent on the lawn of the destroyed National Palace, said Patrick Delatour, the tourism minister and official in charge of planning reconstruction.

Meanwhile, the Haitian government and international groups were preparing a more substantial tent city on Port-au-Prince's outskirts. Brazilian army engineers with the U.N. peacekeeping force here have cleared and leveled 12 acres north of the city, planned as the first of more than a half-dozen that officials hope will shelter the displaced before the onset of spring rains and summer hurricanes.

"There's still hope. We think that people could still be alive," Mexican search team chief Hector Mendez said outside the ruins of the Montana Hotel, where dozens of Americans and many other foreigners were believed buried.

But, almost two weeks after the quake, Mendez was realistic. "There are many, many bodies," he said. There are 54 confirmed American dead in Haiti, and U.S. officials were seeking to confirm 36 other possible deaths, State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said Monday.

Haiti recovery plan remodeled after earthquake

MONTREAL -- Aid groups will work off of an existing plan for Haiti's development to help the country recover from a devastating earthquake, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday. Clinton said that international donors and organizations had been mapping out a plan for the country's development for months before the quake.

She spoke while en route to a conference in Montreal on how to channel aid into Haiti, and indicated this could be the basis for a revised plan now. "I don't want to start from scratch, but we have to recognize the changed challenges that we are now confronting," she said.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said his government needs to rely strongly on its partners but he asserted that Haiti is able to lead the rebuilding effort after the Jan. 12 earthquake.

"Haitians continue to work in precarious conditions but it is in the position to assume the leadership expected of it by its people in order to relaunch the country on the path to reconstruction," Bellerive said in opening remarks.

Haiti's magnitude-7 earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and left the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere virtually without a functioning government. It wrecked the presidential palace, parliament, government ministries and the U.N. headquarters, among thousands of other structures.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and foreign ministers from more than a dozen countries, eight international bodies and six major non-governmental organizations are meeting at the conference. Governments have pledged nearly $1 billion in aid to Haiti, according to an Associated Press estimate, including $575 million from the European Union's 27 nations.

Monday's meeting comes as a global army of aid workers was delivering more food into people's hands in Haiti, but the efforts were still falling short. International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally, speaking from Geneva and just back from Haiti, said there was a growing need to bring in heavy equipment to take down damaged buildings, some of which could collapse at the slightest aftershock.

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