PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The tale seems dubious: that a rice vendor survived 27 days trapped under the rubble of a flea market following Haiti's devastating earthquake.

Skeptical health workers said no one could live that long without water and the last confirmed survivor found was a 16-year-old girl removed from rubble 15 days after the Jan. 12 quake. The only sources for the story were the two Haitian men who showed up at a clinic carrying the vendor, dehydrated and malnourished with rail-thin legs.

MONTREAL — As Canadians continue to donate tens of millions of dollars to relief efforts in Haiti, aid organizations are scrambling to ensure as much money as possible finds its way into the devastated country.

With the federal government’s window to match donations set to close Friday, charities and NGOs are hoping the incentive will give one final push to their fundraising campaigns.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The battered bodies may be mending, but the minds still struggle.

As many as one in five Haiti earthquake victims have suffered trauma so great with the multiple shock of lost homes, jobs and loved ones that they won’t be able to cope without professional help, doctors say.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Bernice Chamblain keeps a machete under her frayed mattress to ward off sexual predators and one leg wrapped around a bag of rice to stop nighttime thieves from stealing her daughters’ food.

She’s barely slept since Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake Jan. 12 forced her and other homeless women and children into tent camps, where they are easy targets for gangs of men.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A half-million Haitians who fled their shattered capital after the earthquake are starting to return to a maze of rubble piles, refugee camps and food lines, complicating ambitious plans to build a better Haiti.

Haitian and international officials had hoped to use the devastation of Port-au-Prince — a densely packed sprawl of winding roads and ramshackle slums that is home to a third of Haiti’s nine million people — to build an improved capital and decentralize the country.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Ten members of a U.S. missionary group who tried to take 33 chil­dren out of Haiti after the na­tion’s devastating earthquake were charged with child kidnap­ping and criminal association on Thursday, their Haitian lawyer said.

Edwin Coq said after a court hearing that a judge found suffi­cient evidence to charge the Americans, who were arrested Friday at Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic. Coq at­tended Thursday’s hearing and represents the entire group in Haiti.

HUNGER turned to anger in Haiti’s capital on Wednesday as hundreds of protesters marched through the streets accusing local officials of demanding bribes for donated food.

Aid workers say that food and other supplies are now flowing into the country three weeks after the Jan. 12 quake, but red tape, fear of ambush, transportation bottlenecks and corruption are keeping it from many people who need it.

CALLEBAS, Haiti — Desperate parents in this struggling village perched above Haiti’s earthquake-flattened capital said they gave their children away willingly, trusting the American missionaries who promised to take them to a better life.

The stories the villagers told The Associated Press on Wednesday contradict claims by the Baptist group’s leader that the children came from orphanages or were handed over by distant relatives. But they also attest to the misery of a nation that was the hemisphere’s poorest even before the Jan. 12 earthquake struck.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — TWENTY ARMED MEN blocked a road and tried to hijack a convoy of food for earthquake victims, but were driven off by police gunfire, UN officials said Tuesday as they warned of security problems in a still-desperate nation.

The attack on the convoy as it carried supplies from an airport in the southern town of Jeremie underscored the shaky safety in the streets that has added to Haitians’ frustration at the slow pace of aid since the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Pamela Porodo knows what happens in a country like Haiti once the money dries up following a disaster.

She and her husband Jerry, now of Bridgewater, were living in Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck in 2004. They pitched in to help, working alongside the United Nations and other groups to do what they could.

HAITI’S prime minister said Monday that 10 Americans who tried to take a busload of undocumented Haitian children out of the country knew that “what they were doing was wrong” and could be prosecuted in the United States.

Prime Minister Max Bellerive also told The Associated Press that his country is open to having the Americans face U.S. justice, since most government buildings — including Haiti’s courts — were crippled by the monster earthquake.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The 79-year-old woman with a 25-kilogram bag of rice perched on her head gingerly descended concrete steps Sunday and passed it off to her daughter-in-law — who quickly disappeared behind the faded leopard-print sheets that are the walls of their makeshift home on the crowded turf of Haiti’s National Stadium.

MONTREAL — By all accounts, Haitian earthquake victims Georges and Mireille Anglade were polar opposites. He had a flamboyant personality while hers was quiet and unassuming.

At funeral services for the couple Saturday, both were remembered for their intellect, strength and dedication to helping others.

MIAMI — The U.S. military has halted flights carrying Haitian earthquake victims to the United States because of an apparent cost dispute, and a doctor warned that some injured patients faced imminent death if the flights don’t resume.

The evacuations were temporarily suspended Wednesday, said Capt. Kevin Aandahl, spokesman for U.S. Transportation Command. The flights were halted a day after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist asked the federal government to help pay for care.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Relief officials are scrambling to confront a sanitation crisis that could spread malaria, cholera and other deadly diseases throughout the chaotic camps packed with hundreds of thousands of Haitian earthquake survivors.

Shortages of food, clean water, adequate shelter and latrines are creating a potential spawning ground for epidemics in a country with an estimated one million people made homeless by the Jan. 12 quake.

NEW MINAS — Nova Scotians are answering the call to send temporary shelters to homeless people in Haiti.

By Thursday morning, money for 53 ShelterBoxes had been raised by Rotary Clubs, more than doubling their goal of 25, said Greg Coldwell, assistant district governor for Rotary Clubs in the western end of the province.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Doctors and aid workers are running dangerously low of supplies in Haiti’s capital and in the countryside, complicating efforts to treat 200,000 people in need of post-surgery care following the earthquake and increasing the potential of many more deaths due to infection and disease.

As days turn to weeks, doctors struggling to keep up with demand in devastated hospitals and improvised clinics are warning of a looming public health calamity as earthquake survivors with untreated injuries fail to get proper attention, Elisabeth Byrs, of the UN’s humanitarian co-ordination office said Friday in Geneva.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A 16-year-old girl pulled from the rubble more than two weeks after a deadly earthquake was in stable condition Thursday, able to eat yogurt and mashed vegetables to the surprise of doctors, who said her survival was medically inexplicable.

Hundreds of thousands of other survivors hoped for a breakthrough of another kind — the delivery of badly needed food aid.

“Hello mama, hello papa” were the first words that a Lower Sackville couple heard Wednesday as they were united with two Haitian children they are adopting.

LEOGANE, Haiti — When the sailors from HMCS Athabaskan first came ashore a week ago at the village of Ca-Ira, outside Leogane, they were greeted on the garbage-strewn beach by villagers standing next to the skeletal frame of a sailboat.

Jeudy Jeudy, 37, is in the process of building a boat here.

DAVOS, Switzerland — Former President Bill Clinton, at a meeting of world business leaders, urged private investment in Haiti after its devastating earthquake.

“We have to build them a private economy. They do not want to live on aid forever. They want to go to work and have a chance to build their own dreams. And we need private sector investment to do that,” he said at the World Economic Forum in this Swiss ski resort Wednesday.

THE DUSTY SOCCER field lined with spacious tents is an oasis for earthquake survivors among Haiti’s homeless sheltering by the hundreds of thousands in squalid camps.

Competition for the canvas homes has boiled into arguments and machete fights, a sign of the desperation felt by the hundreds of thousands of people without homes struggling for shelter in this wrecked city. Haiti’s president has asked the world for 200,000 tents and says he will sleep in one himself.