Disaster Relief // Current

Food Relief in Haiti

Residents of Haiti were already facing food shortages and rising inflation rates when triple natural disasters hit. Hurricanes... more

operationblessing
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Senate Lifts Offshore Drilling Ban In Huge Spending Bill

Senators have passed a spending bill that aids Gulf Coast disaster victims and subsidizes federal loans for automakers. President... more

Future_America
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Senate passes $600 billion spending bill

The Senate overwhelmingly passed a spending bill Saturday that allows a 26-year ban on offshore oil drilling to expire, subsidizes... more

TravG73
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Weather service warns of 'certain death' in face of Ike - CNN.com

People who are to be hit by Ike living in single family homes are strongly urged to leave thier home or face "certain... more

starr111
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Hurricane Gustav: Relief in Real Time

A day after Hurricane Gustav slammed into the Gulf Coast, Operation Blessing crews are out assessing the damage and the need. ... more

operationblessing
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August 31, 2008 (Computerworld) Nearly 100 domains related to Hurricane Gustav have been registered in the past 48 hours, security experts said Sunday, some of which may be used by bogus charity and relief scams after the storm strikes the U.S. Gulf Coast.

According to television station KTAL in Shreveport, La., the office of Louisiana's Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has warned residents of Gustav phishing attacks already in progress.

On Saturday, Marcus Sachs, the director of the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC), noted that numerous domains containing the word "gustav," "charity," "hurricane," and "relief" had been recently registered.

"On the day [Hurricane] Katrina hit New Orleans [in 2005] hundreds of donation sites appeared online, many if not most were scam sites," said Sachs in a post yesterday to the ISC research blog. "Well this time around it looks like the people who like to register domain names in anticipation of a storm's arrival have already started registering them for Gustav."

By Sunday, Sachs had listed almost 100 Gustav sites culled from the DomainTools' Web site. "Most of these sites are parked domains and many of them are for sale," he said. "They will be worth monitoring, particularly if 'donate here' messages appear."

Several of the domains, in fact, do appear to be parked, or registered but not fleshed out with content. Others, including helpgustavictims.com and helpgustavvictions.net, were for sale on eBay as of mid-day Sunday.

A few, however, led to legitimate charities. The domain gustavcharity.com, for example, redirected users to the Web site of the evangelical Christian organization "Samaritan's Purse," while contributegustav.org took users to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation's site.

Another security expert, Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, also posted a list of parked domains that may be used for scamming purposes. "Anytime we've seen a natural disaster, we've been on the lookup for domains which might be abused for fraud," said Warner Sunday on his blog. "It was only natural then that I retuned my settings at DomainTools yesterday to alert on Gustav domains."

Warner also pointed out a handful of domains that led to legitimate content.

Three years ago, before and after Hurricanes Katrina slammed into New Orleans, security researchers noted a similar run-up of domain registrations. Enough were used for phony relief scams, often by identity thieves hoping to trick consumers into divulging personal information, that the U.S. Department of Justice set up a Katrina anti-fraud task force.

More than a year later, two brothers were convicted on federal charges for running a fake Salvation Army site that solicited money, supposedly for Katrina relief efforts. The pair, Steven and Bartholomew Stephens, were sentenced to more than 100 months in prison for the scam last December.August 31, 2008 (Computerworld) Nearly 100 domains related to Hurricane Gustav have been registered in the past 48 hours, security... more

stantheman
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3 months ago

Obama to ask his donors to help victims of hurricane

"Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said Sunday he will tap his huge political network of donors and volunteers to... more

mirimysweet
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3 months ago

Three million displaced in India floods

Authorities struggling to provide aid after devastating floods in eastern India said on Sunday they needed more boats and rescuers... more

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8 responses

3 months ago

Myanmar's Condititions Are Far More Harsh Than Described

YANGON, Myanmar - A rare bird's-eye look at Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta shows the devastation still left from Cyclone Nargis — broken levies, flooded farm roads, the shattered remains of bamboo huts and trees strewn like matchsticks along the coast.

Conditions are far starker than reflected in the assessments from Myanmar's government and even in the recent optimism of some U.N. officials, The Associated Press has concluded from a review of data, a private flight over the delta and interviews with victims and aid workers.

Three months after a disaster that claimed nearly 140,000 lives, thousands of villagers are still getting little or nothing from their government or foreign aid groups.

"We lost everything — our house, our rice, our clothes. We were given just a little rice by a private aid group from Yangon. I don't know where the government or foreign organizations are helping people, but not here," said Khin Maung Kyi, a 60-year-old farmer who lost six children to the killer storm.

Some areas have received help in the delta, Myanmar's rice bowl set amid a lacework of waterways. During a fly-over, brand-new metal roofs atop reconstructed homes glittered in the tropical sunlight, farmers in cone-shaped hats worked in green rice paddies, and gangs of workers struggled to remove debris from canals and repair broken embankments.

But progress is slow and behind where it should be.

"The situation in Myanmar remains dire," said Chris Kaye, who heads relief operations for the U.N. World Food Program. "The vast majority of families simply don't have enough to eat."

Some grim recent statistics from foreign aid agencies working in the delta:

• A survey of families in 291 villages showed that 55 percent have less than one day of food left and no stocks to fall back on. Some 924,000 people will need food assistance until the November rice harvest, while around 300,000 will need relief until April 2009.

• The fishing industry, the delta's second-most-important source of income and food, remains devastated. More than 40 percent of fishing boats and 70 percent of fishing gear were destroyed and very little has been replaced.

• More than 360,000 children will not be able to go to elementary school in coming months because at least 2,000 schools were so badly damaged they cannot reopen anytime soon.

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Read the entire article for more. Share your thoughts on the slow progress in Myanmar.YANGON, Myanmar - A rare bird's-eye look at Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta shows the devastation still left from Cyclone... more

IndieArtist
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3 months ago

Animals new focus for disaster response

Christen Skaer remembers standing in the middle of the rubble of Greensburg listening to dogs bark. Only 12 hours after the... more

TravG73
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4 months ago

Burma fair to muddling in wake of savage blow

BOGALAY, Burma: Two months after a cyclone savaged the fertile Irrawaddy Delta, in Burma's south-west, the bones of drowned... more

Paul_Flynn
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4 months ago

Des Moines IA Clean-up Underway

Well, the damage has been done and the clean-up has begun. And it is going to be a long time until people's lives return to... more

BarefootMedia
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5 months ago

Doomsday Vault ...on 60 Minutes

the new area 51 zone lol

i007spy4u
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5 months ago

Sweden donated twice more relief money than US?

"Sweden is donating SEK 500 million (USD 75.6 million) in relief aid, reported the Swedish paper Aftonbladet. The US is... more

Freakna
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6 months ago

A heart-breaking video about the shakiest and deadliest earthquake in the century.

Less than two weeks after the monster earthquakes hit Sichuan, China, the Western media have significantly cut back on, if not forgotten, the disaster coverage. Many have seen the horrific images of dormitory buildings shaking, people running for lives and soldiers digging rubble for signs of life. But this earthquake, along with its thousands of aftershocks, is very very different, and so much more brutal than any earthquake in recent history.

To present the disaster's visual destructiveness and ruthlessness isn't the most difficult job, as there are thousands upon thousands of video clips and images available on English and Chinese portal sites, TV network web pages, among other online entities. But how to get the viewers to understand the full magnitude of the destruction and, more importantly, the extreme challenges for refugee resettlement and reconstruction in less than 10 minutes is no easy task. (Most people nowadays don't have more than 10 minutes online for things they don't care much about any more.)

I set out to tell the earthquake story in a powerful video in a few minutes to the English speaking audience. By picking through over a thousand photos and dozens of video clips found on Chinese web sites, I managed to weave out a narrative of some major highlights with the help of a few Chinese classic tunes in the background. Strong components of this presentation includes:

The opening factoids - babies becoming orphans, parents grieving souls, 7,000 school buildings collapsed and one survey in a school found 90% students lost their friends.

Images of an anchorwoman running away from studio scared of shaking, continuous sound a minute's worth of studio desk trembling, and a clip of a security tape capturing people fleeing the building and sunshade umbrella shaking.

An emotional short conversation of an intact family describing how the father saved the daughter and what the daughter was thinking in the three hours buried under rubble. The daughter was so grateful for her survival that she kept saying "thank you" to her father, and the father kept telling her "don't mention it, stop crying." (This may not be something unusual for most Western viewers, but for those who understand Chinese culture, people often don't express emotions explicitly and saying thanks to parents or children is something rarely heard.)

Contrast photos of communities before and after the quake, photos of landslides, leveled landscapes, successful and failed rescues, satellite imagery, and a climactic string of photos that present a whole variety of difficulties for those who deal with the earthquake destruction, from 4 million Chengdu citizens sleeping on the streets to babies crying for parents.

At the end, I chose to have a moment of silence and, during this moment, open some thoughts about some of the questions journalists and many Chinese raised about shoddy buildings for schools, concerns about safety of many dams in this earthquake prone region, so on and so forth. As these will be some of the very important questions for China to address to rebuild stronger and better houses, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure projects.

This production is the most heart breaking piece I have done. But as a powerful video presentation, I hope it can help my nation and millions of those affected in their reconstructions by getting continued attention from outside China even though people here tend to forget about a most devastating earthquake in this century on the other side of the planet.Less than two weeks after the monster earthquakes hit Sichuan, China, the Western media have significantly cut back on, if not... more