Haitian Refugees Find Little Comfort in Brazil: The Ticker

It has been two years since a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated large swaths of Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. One consequence has been an exodus of people to points north and south. A rising number are heading to Brazil, whose booming economy makes it an appealing draw for Haitians seeking to escape.

Too often, though, rather than getting a fresh start, what Haitians encounter is nothing short of cruel and inhumane. This week, Brazil's TV Globo network did a long report on the Haitian migration. The conclusion: the conditions that many Haitians find themselves in are as bad, and perhaps worse, than in their own country.

From the very start of the Republican presidential contest last year, Mitt Romney was the most disciplined, best prepared and most articulate of the candidates. He experienced no loopy Michele Bachmann moments. He advocated no empty Herman Cain slogans. He had no Rick Perry bouts of stupefying ignorance or cringe-inducing "oops."

Romney's debate answers are sometimes astonishingly crisp. His stump speech rarely veers off message (and his message itself is usually on target). He has run such a highly professional campaign, and with such personal precision, that he is sometimes accused of being an automaton. I googled "Mitt Romney robot" this morning and got 2,170,000 responses.

Here's a fun game to liven up tonight's debate of Republican presidential hopefuls in South Carolina: Down a shot of some potent beverage each time one of the candidates mentions the need to return to the gold standard.

A word of warning: You might not make it through the evening.

Attention taxpayers: Pat yourself on the back. General Motors Co., one-third of whose shares are owned by you, sold 9,025,942 vehicles last year, up 7.6 percent from 2010. The accomplishment is probably enough to restore GM's place as the king of automakers.

And it's only been two years since you bailed the company out -- to the tune of $50 billion.

Depending on your view of the world, sense of adventure and love of life's creature comforts, it's the best job in journalism or the worst: Pyongyang bureau chief.

For now, The Associated Press is staffing international newsgathering's first full-time North Korea office with two locals. It may be a reach to think the Hermit Kingdom would welcome two foreigners so soon after Kim Jong Il's death.

The Obama administration's announcement that it will reject TransCanada Corp.'s application to build and operate the Keystone XL pipeline through the Great Plains may do nothing to slow the project. At least, it need not.

Two months ago, the State Department announced it would consider a new route for the pipeline, as Nebraska state lawmakers were about to demand, in order to skirt the wetlands and other sensitive ecosystems in their state's Sandhills region. The Obama administration said that it would take 14 months to devise a new route; Republicans in Congress demanded a decision by Feb. 21 and included the deadline in the payroll tax bill passed last month.

The impending departure of  H. David Kotz, inspector general of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, looks bad for Kotz. But his resignation, announced Tuesday, looks even worse for the SEC.

Kotz wound up with a bruised image after Bloomberg News reported that he’d purchased three hard-to-get football tickets from a Pennsylvania investment adviser who posted an interview with Kotz on his Web site. There’s a definite “What was he thinking?” aspect to this episode, and it’s a blunt reminder that regulators should always separate their business from their personal lives.

Hours after Wikipedia blacked out its 24-hour English-language site to protest legislation aimed at stopping online piracy, websites started publishing ways to get around it. Mashable offers tips for the tech savvy and the Atlantic has a new tool that lets users search Google’s cache of Wikipedia articles. The Washington Post, the Guardian and National Public Radio are responding to Twitter questions using the hashtag #altwiki.

Congrats to those who have figured out a way to bypass the blackout, but is the emphasis on avoiding the inconvenience helping the case of Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing, Craigslist and other websites blacking out their sites today? In the spirit of opposing the anti-piracy laws, alternative sites are highlighting what’s become inevitable online: the ease with which people can get around barriers to content.

The Republican Party's crisis of capitalism did not begin this month in New Hampshire.

Party loyalists from Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina to Rush Limbaugh are forming a defensive cordon, some around Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, others around capitalism itself. Newt Gingrich, who is under intense pressure from party leaders to halt his attacks on Romney's tenure as a private equity manager at Bain Capital LLC, is now trying to stigmatize Romney without criticizing the economic system that enabled his firm to thrive. Some of the things Romney did at Bain, Gingrich said, "don’t look like capitalism. They look like rich guys looting companies, taking all the cash and leaving behind all the unemployed.”

China and the U.S. have found something they can actually agree on: hoping President Ma Ying-jeou is reelected in tomorrow's Taiwan election.

Ma's opponent, Tsai Ing-wen, is viewed with suspicion by China, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan. China worries she will reverse Ma's efforts to improve ties with the mainland and perhaps even declare independence. The U.S. needs China's help in curbing nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. It fears any change to the status quo in cross-Taiwan Strait relations.