Monday, August 25, 2008

London Free Press - Local News- Samaritans jilted

London Free Press - Local News- Samaritans jilted:
"The officials wanted the women's paperwork explaining what they'd be doing, but they had no documents, even though they had approvals from Habitat for Humanity.

Officials said they also needed a letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) saying they were volunteers."
HUH?

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Television - Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? - NYTimes.com

Television - Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? - NYTimes.com:
"MR. STEWART describes his job as “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room and points out that “The Daily Show” mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — “the stuff we find most interesting,” as he said in an interview at the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most “agita,” the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his “morning cup of sadness.” And they’ve done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious."

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Why Africa Is Still Starving - TIME

Why Africa Is Still Starving - TIME:
"In the six weeks to mid-July, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treated 11,800 Ethiopian children for severe acute malnutrition. At a tented hospital in the town of Kuyera, 50 out of 1,000 died, double the rate MSF expects for a full-fledged famine. 'It's very bizarre,' says Jean de Cambry, a Belgian MSF veteran of crises from Sudan to Afghanistan. 'It's so green. But you have all these people dying of hunger.' The verdure around Kuyera is misleading. It is the product of rains in June, too late for the first of two annual crops. From January to May, the fields were parched and brown. And one failed harvest is enough to turn Ethiopia, a nation of 66 million farmers, into a humanitarian catastrophe."