Year: 2005

New blog Cheese and Crackers is the focus of a Wall Street Journal article out today about the explosion of video blogging as a result of the disaster in Southeast Asia. My Tsunami video bandwidth saga was mentioned in the story too.

North America:

American Red Cross

Canadian Red Cross

Save The Children


International aid organizations:
UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund)
United Nations’ World Food Programme
Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders (donate!)

CARE International

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

UK/Europe:
Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) – comprises a raft of aid agencies
British Red Cross
Save the Children UK

Anders Jacobsen:
Webloggers: Give to tsunami victims and I’ll give too!

BREAKING: March 28, 2005 – New Southeast Asia Quake, 8.2 Mag. Tsunami Threat, Evacuations.

Tim Blair provides Tsunami disaster stats.

While I applaud the effort, I have a funny feeling that this is going to end up like this did for the Democrats.

I love these.

With the help of Newsweek, John Kerry comes out of his post election funk to share the highs and lows. Here’s a sneak peak.

UPDATE: Full story available.

What happened? (via NYT, reg req)

With the exception of a few Democratic outliers in Ohio, few people dispute that the election for president is done and decided: President Bush won and John Kerry lost.

But as the new year begins, no such consensus exists among Democrats about why Mr. Kerry was defeated, and the party is locked in a battle of interpretation over just what went wrong. Was it values? Terrorism and Iraq? A better Republican get-out-the-vote operation or a rush of Hispanics to President Bush? A gawky candidate with little to say?

It’s hard to see where you’re going when you’re gazing at your navel.

Japan becomes biggest aid donor with $500 million dollars.

Japan pledged up to $500 million in grant aid for tsunami disaster relief today, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced, making the country the largest single donor to victims of the catastrophe.

The Japanese announcement came a day after President Bush increased the U.S. pledge tenfold to $350 million. Tokyo’s promise put Asia’s wealthiest economy at the top of the global donor effort to help countries recover from the disaster that has killed at least 123,000 people from Malaysia to Somalia and has left millions homeless.

This “one upsmanship” in amount of relief aid is a little weird. It’s hard to see the humanity in it now. It looks like a popularity contest. Not that the people in Southeast Asia won’t need every penny of it. I just think it’s becoming a little disingenuous.

Tourists return to the beaches and bars of Phuket.

Six days after one of the worst natural disasters in decades, foreign tourists were back on the beaches of this Thai resort island Saturday, frolicking in the gentle waves of the Andaman Sea, riding jet skis, posing for snapshots and sunbathing topless on the sand.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d feel awfully creepy having a BBQ on a beach in Phuket right now. I understand the need to “get back to normal” and all, but it does seem a little soon to be vacationing in an area where bodies and debris are washing ashore.