Celebrity News

Sean Penn’s promise for Haitian earthquake victims

The government of Haiti is giving Sean Penn $8.75 million to move some 14,000 earthquake victims off the private golf course they’ve been occupying for the past three years. Up to 60,000 people lived there at one point in plywood shacks. The money, from the World Bank, will go to Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization, which will use it to subsidize rents and build new housing in the nearby Delmas 32 neighborhood, and those uprooted by the quake are to move there by early next year. Penn — who was just in Caracas for the funeral of his friend Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez — has spent less time in Haiti recently, reports The Post’s Richard Johnson. But his spokeswoman denied that his humanitarian efforts there were coming to an end. Penn’s charity will continue “to support the residents of Delmas 32 to demonstrate that something fundamentally different can come from a ‘slum’ in one of the poorest cities in the world,” she said. And finally, golfing can resume at the Petionville country club.