Nearly 23,000 Massachusetts residents – legal immigrants who have been in the country for fewer than five years – are scheduled to lose their health insurance before the New Year, and lawmakers are keeping silent about whether they’ll intervene.

House Speaker Robert DeLeo has declined repeated requests for comment on the matter, and Sen. Richard Moore, co-chair of the Health Care Financing Committee, also declined comment Tuesday.

Cholera Prevention: A sound-truck spreads the word about dangers of cholera earlier this month. Image courtesy of Let Haiti Live(Port-au-Prince)— No one was surprised to hear that Haiti is confronting an epidemic of cholera, because to date, neither the government nor the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been successfully executing programs to help the population in Haiti. The cholera epidemic is a clear sign of failure and evidence of the way the United Nations system and NGOs function – or rather don’t function.

It was already well known that the Government of Haiti lacks adequate resources and has more interest in holding elections than in the lives of the people, but now we are beginning to see the stark contradiction between the mission statements of the international humanitarian community and their actions.

Martelly campaigns in BostonWe know him best as “Sweet Micky”, a talented musician whose wild stage antics brought an element of shock to Haitian entertainment. In the late 1980s, he started out as any one of a number of notable Haitian talents and went simply by his name, Michel Martelly. Michel’s career began with the success of early releases with fun titles like, “Woule, Woule”, “Anba Rad La”, “The Sweetest” etc. However, real fame and international success came with the creation of a sub-identity “Sweet Micky”. It was the wild and uninhibited Micky that became a household name among Haitians. Sweet Micky’s irreverent style, controversial albums and frequent feuds with rival bands, made Michel Martelly wealthy and famous.

Martelly came into the Haitian music industry during turbulent times. In the early 1990s, the Island was in political free-fall after the ouster of the Duvalier regime. The populace had democratically elected a progressive yet controversial former priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide and within a year he was exiled by Haiti’s military. Haiti’s popular music Konpa, was struggling as a new generation preferred the sound of Zouk, which had its origins in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Michel Martelly’s act was one among a new generation of artists that met the challenge of Zouk by using technology to reduce the man-power it took to man live Konpa shows and moved its sound into the new digital format.

PORT-AU-PRINCE — The first portion of U.S. reconstruction money for Haiti is on its way more than seven months after it was promised to help the country rebuild from the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The U.S. government will transfer $120 million – about one-tenth of the total amount pledged – to the World Bank-run Haiti Reconstruction Fund in the next few days, U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

``Having completed the process as outlined in the appropriation, we are now moving aggressively to commit that money to Haiti's reconstruction,'' Crowley said.