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Most Virginians say they approve of the job that first-term GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell is doing, suggesting he'd have a good shot at re-election when his term expires at the end of this year.

But it's one-and-out for governors in Virginia, the only state that doesn't allow its chief executive to serve consecutive terms.

That's left the state with a governor's race that has many voters shaking their heads and asking, "How did we end up with these two?"

"These two" are Democrat Terry McAuliffe, 55, a Clinton-era fundraiser extraordinaire and former Democratic National Committee chairman who got walloped in a party primary for governor in 2009; and Republican Ken Cuccinelli, 44, the state attorney general whose conservatism far outflanks most on the right of the political spectrum.

"We've got Bill Clinton's big-money man versus a social issues extremist," says the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato. The frank assessment may offend true believers, but resonates with a wide swath of Virginia voters.

There may be a third candidate. McDonnell's pick as his successor, Republican Lt. Gov. Bob Bolling, 55, suspended his campaign after the party decided to choose its candidate at a convention instead of holding a primary. The move favored Cuccinelli.

But Bolling has kept everyone guessing about whether he'll run as an independent.

This all in a state that President Obama has won twice, where changing demographics have created a true swing state, but where voters in recent history have picked a governor of the opposite party of the president.

"There's a history that the party that loses the White House wins the governor's race," says Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "And the electorate this year will be older and whiter than it was last year."

"That's why Cuccinelli has a shot," Brown says.

Disenchanted Voters

The results of two polls released this week reflected Virginia voters' current ennui, if not enmity.

Both early surveys found a close race — and something else: Voters don't much like Cuccinelli, and they don't know McAuliffe.

A Quinnipiac University poll had the two candidates essentially tied; a Public Policy Polling survey had McAuliffe up by 5 percentage points, but with 13 percent undecided.

Here's Cuccinelli's problem: Forty-five percent of those surveyed by PPP, a Democratic firm, said they had an unfavorable opinion of Cuccinelli.

As for McAuliffe, just over a quarter of those surveyed told PPP that they had an unfavorable opinion of him, but half said they weren't even sure what they thought of the guy, though this is his second run for governor.

The Quinnipiac poll found that 61 percent of those surveyed hadn't heard enough about McAuliffe to form an opinion.

McAuliffe Remains Mystery

"Nobody knows who he is," says Brown, the Quinnipiac pollster. "Activists might know McAuliffe, but Joe and Jill Sixpack don't."

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Lantagne says comparison of the Haitian cholera strain with one circulating in Nepal, around the same time, shows the two differed in only one out 4 million genetic elements.

"That's considered an exact match – that they're the same strain of cholera," she tells Shots.

Most scientists now think Nepalese soldiers unwittingly brought cholera to Haiti when they joined a U.N. peacekeeping force there in 2010. The outbreak started just downstream from their camp. Sewage from the camp spilled into a nearby river.

Lantagne was one of four scientists appointed by the U.N. to look into the matter. Their report, issued in May 2011, implicated the U.N. camp as a likely origin, but it concluded that the outbreak was caused by "a confluence of circumstances."

She tells Shots that the report would come out different today.

"If we had had the additional scientific evidence that's available now, we definitely would have written the report in 2011 differently, to state the most likely source of introduction was someone associated with the peacekeeping camp," Lantagne says.

That's important because the U.N. insists that whatever way cholera got to Haiti, terrible sanitary conditions and lack of clean water were responsible for its remarkably fast spread.

But lawyer Brian Concannon doesn't buy that.

"It's like lighting a fire in a dry field on a windy day, and then blaming the wind or the drought for the fire," says Concannon, who directs a Boston-based group called the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.

More than a year ago, the group filed a legal claim against the U.N. demanding that it accept responsibility.

“ Haiti has done some great things with vaccination. They've eliminated measles, rubella and polio, and you can't say that in many countries in Europe.

Fears, however, that cholera would spread rapidly through the overcrowded settlements never materialized. Aid workers say this was probably because of the treated water distributed in the camps.

When the earthquake struck in January 2010, Jacqueline Syra was nine months pregnant with her third child. Her house near the sprawling slum of Cite Soleil collapsed, she says, killing her husband.

Syra, along with tens of thousands of other people, moved on to an abandoned military airport known as La Piste.

Syra never expected that three years later, she'd still be living on the runway.

"We are not living well in the tents," she says. "Sometimes men get in here and attack me or rob my things."

Her shack is a patchwork of fraying tarps that are tied together with blankets and strung over a skeleton of mismatched sticks. Two motorcycle tires on the roof keep the cloth from flapping in the wind. She uses the front of an old portable toilet as the door to her shelter. There's no electricity, and she cooks on the dirt floor.

Syra shares this shelter with her three children.

"I don't sleep well, I don't eat well," says the rail-thin, 49-year-old mother. "I was a fat woman, and look at me now. I lost a lot of weight because I cannot sleep or eat well here."

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Father Kevin Mullins steers his old Chevy pickup up a steep road to a hilltop dominated by a large statue of the virgin. She has a commanding view of this troubled corner of Christendom.

Here, the states of Texas, New Mexico and and Chihuahua, Mexico, intersect amid barren hills freckled with ocotillo plants and greasewood.

Getting out of the truck, the graying Catholic priest with the kind, ruddy face squints north. "From up here you can see across the I-10 there into El Paso. Also, you see the border fence down there. And then, further to the south, you have Ciudad Juarez."

Australian-born Mullins is a member of the Columban Fathers, who are committed to social justice. His Corpus Christi church is in Rancho Anapra, a hardscrabble barrio on the west side of Juarez that stares at El Paso across the sluggish Rio Grande.

It's been a tough four years in Ciudad Juarez, once the epicenter of Mexico's cartel war. Massacres, beheadings and disappearances became as commonplace as dust storms in the Chihuahua Desert. As the cartels took over and security vanished, packs of freelance thugs roamed the city, extorting at will. No one was spared.

"I heard on one occasion that a priest was threatened," Mullins says. "His parents would be shot, if the priest didn't pay up with the Sunday collection."

Giving last rites to bleeding bodies became as common as reciting the rosary. Father Mullins grew afraid, but he stayed. He says he wanted to be a witness to the suffering in his parish.

"On average, we'd have one or two murder funerals a week for ... at least three years," he says. "Mainly young people — males between the ages of 15 and 25."

New Life In The 'Murder City'

But Ciudad Juarez has gotten a reprieve. Violence is down sharply across the city: Children are playing outside again, shops and cafes have reopened, and some residents are moving back.

In 2010, there were more than 3,000 murders in Juarez — about one every three hours. It came to be called "Murder City."

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