News stories by Ansel Herz

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 07 (IPS) - Haiti is poised to enact major reforms to its penal code to make it easier for victims of rape to prosecute their attackers.

Seventeen-year-old Rose Mina Joseph says she is nine months pregnant. Her belly is swollen and she moves slowly, placing each step, as she walks around her family's dusty yard.

Tensions are running high in Haiti as dueling campaigns for the presidency enter overdrive in their final days, and Jean- Bertrand Aristide, a popular former president, returns from a seven-year exile in South Africa.

Furious demonstrations continued across Haiti on Wednesday following the Nov. 28 highly contested election in which thousands found themselves unable to vote.

'People are going to take the body to MINUSTAH to show them what they did,' Jean-Luc Surfin told IPS by phone as riots erupted against Haiti's U.N. peacekeeping force on Monday in the northern city of Cap-Haitien.

Standing on a raised piece of pavement across from the tent where she has lived for the past 10 months, Violet Nicola threw up her hands.

The man arrived from Arcahaie, near St. Marc in central Haiti where a cholera outbreak exploded last week, initially overwhelming the local medical grid. It was an hour's journey to a hospital in Lafiteau, near the capital, where he died on Sunday.

Some 1.3 million people have lived in makeshift camps throughout Port-au-Prince since the January earthquake devastated the city. Living conditions are 'appalling', according a recent report by Refugees International.

United Nations peacekeeping troops responded to a rock-throwing demonstration by university students Monday evening with a barrage of tear gas and rubber bullets in the area around Haiti's National Palace, sending masses of displaced Haitians running out of tent camps into the streets, according to witnesses.

On an empty road in Cite Militaire, an industrial zone across from the slums of Cite Soleil, a group of women are gathered around a single white sack of U.S. rice. The rice was handed out Monday morning at a food distribution by the Christian relief group World Vision.