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Americans contribute to relief effort

Friday, December 31, 2004

While complaints about the 'miserly' generosity of the Bush Administration have surfaced in recent days, donations and actions at the grassroots level have quietly illustrated the concern and sympathy felt by ordinary Americans.

On Monday of this week, Jan Egeland, the UN's chief of emergency relief, said that rich nations like the U.S. were being "stingy" by making small contributions. Egeland later recanted his statement, adding that America's contributions to Asia's tsunami relief was "one of the most generous pledges so far."

The Bush administration has pledged $350 million in aid for the relief effort. Critics have been quick to compare this to the $177 million spent every day in Iraq to conduct war in that country. In comparison, there was a $500 million pledge made recently by the government of Japan.

Independently of the government, individual Americans have been directly contributing money to aid organizations. Amazon.com placed a link for the American Red Cross, collecting more than $8 million from 100,000 people as of Friday, December 31st. 12,000 donors have donated over $1.2 million to the Red Cross through Yahoo.com.

Scores of International aid organizations are accepting donations for helping victims of the earthquake and tsunami. Many major companies including Apple Computer, Microsoft, Cisco, eBay, Google, and AOL are helping enable donations through the web.

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  This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
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