Word: tsunamis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...EGELAND, emergency-relief coordinator for the U.N., criticizing the amount of money Western nations initially allocated for disaster relief in Asian countries devastated by the tsunami...
...there is a more subtle message as well in the life-and-death arithmetic of last week's disaster. Undeniably, most of the people who died--and most who now struggle to survive--are poor. If the tsunami had hit rich regions instead, the loss of life would have been vastly lower. While all of us are vulnerable to the furies of nature--earthquakes, droughts, floods, epidemic diseases, blights and pests--these scourges systematically claim the lives of the poor in vastly greater numbers than they do the rich. Yet therein lies one key answer on how we should proceed...
After the Bush Administration's initial pledges of $15 million and then $35 million for tsunami relief were roundly criticized, the U.S. raised it to a more realistic $350 million. But at just $1.20 per American, even this increased number should be seen as simply a down payment on aiding the world's poor. Almost three years ago, the Bush Administration signed a pledge, the Monterrey Consensus, to "make concrete efforts" to provide 0.7% of national income in assistance to the world's poor. Currently, the U.S. provides less than one-fourth of that pledge, just 0.15%--a mere...
...Indonesian island of Sumatra, setting off through the oceans shock waves that were felt more than 3,000 miles away on the coast of East Africa, where at least 200 people died. Bustami, a fisherman from the Sumatran village of Bosun, is one who experienced the quake and tsunami and lived to tell about them. Sometime after 7:30 on the morning of Dec. 26, he says, he was on his boat just off the coast when he felt the sea moving around him. "That must have been when the earthquake hit," he says. (The precise time of the shock...
...combined effects of the earthquake and tsunami that Bustami survived has killed tens of thousands. The precise number is so far unknown and ultimately unknowable. On Dec. 30, the Indonesian government doubled the number of likely dead in that country alone to 80,000, though that was no more than a guess. The area most affected by the quake and tsunami is Aceh, at Sumatra's northern tip--difficult to get to in the best of times and a place where a long and bloody insurgency has made travel and the provision of emergency services desperately hard. Whole fishing villages...