AU-PRINCE - The confirmed death toll from Haiti's devastating earthquake has topped 150,000 in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area alone, the communications minister said Sunday, with many more thousands dead around the country or still buried under the rubble. Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue told the AP that the figure is based on a body count in the capital and outlying areas by CNE, a state company that has been collecting corpses and burying them in a mass grave north of Port-au-Prince. It does not include other affected cities such as Jacmel, where thousands are believed dead, nor does it account for bodies burned by relatives. Meanwhile, retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro called on the UN to assume a monitoring role in Haiti, and he decried the US military “occupation” of the quake-ravaged Caribbean country. Castro, in an opinion article published in the local newspapers, said that neither the UN nor Washington have given a proper explanation of the US military role in Haiti.
