Colossal international relief effort
gears up as toll passes 119,00

As my friend Jennifer points out in Real Art comments, the death toll just keeps rising. From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Pilots dropped food to Indonesian villagers stranded among bloating corpses Thursday, while police in a devastated provincial capital stripped looters of their clothing and forced them to sit on the street as a warning to others. The death toll topped 119,000, and officials warned that 5 million people lack clean water, shelter, food, sanitation and medicine.

Click here for the rest.

And if you've been following the story, things are on the verge of getting worse: dirty water could very easily spawn massive epidemics of cholera and dysentery, and both diseases could be fatal. That's why it's ultra-important for the US to step up and hand out wads of cash, which we are, but...well, just read this:

Governments have so far donated some $500 million, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, adding that he was "satisfied" by the response, even though another U.N. earlier complained that the West had been "stingy" in the past.

Responding to persistent criticism that U.S. pledges have been slow to materialize and deliveries of aid not fast enough, Boucher ticked off a string of relief flights and declared: "Any implication we are not leading the way is wrong."

The truth is that the US is, indeed, being stingy. Just to put things into perspective, Atrios over at Eschaton has observed that the $35 million we've pledged pales when compared to the $2 billion sent down to Florida in the wake of last summer's intense hurricane season, and the US pledge looks downright absurd when compared to the $40 million being spent on Bush's inauguration. Stingy, plain and simple. Racist, too, when you consider that most of the region's inhabitants have dark skins.

Figures.

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