three extraordinary stories

From Yahoo News:

An Indonesian has been rescued by a passing ship after surviving for eight days afloat on an uprooted tree in the Indian Ocean, Malaysian officials say.

Rizal Shahputra, 23, from the devastated province of Aceh, lived off rainwater and coconuts that floated by but apart from some cuts on his legs, appeared amazingly healthy when he arrived in Malaysia's western Port Klang aboard a container vessel.

"When I saw him I was very surprised. He waved at me, he was standing on what look like a tree," said Huang Wen Feng, crew member of the Malaysian cargo ship that picked him up on Monday evening 100 nautical miles out to sea.

Rizal said he was cleaning a mosque when the tsunami struck his village.

"Everybody sank, my family members sank. There were bodies around me," he told reporters on Wednesday.

Huang, whose ship was returning from South Africa, said Rizal was healthy when picked up and had normal body temperature despite the ordeal, but he was later sent to hospital for checks.

From yesterday's Guardian: "The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq".

But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets?

The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq.

The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn). The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half day's spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war.

From today's Guardian: "Corporate donations to the tsunami appeal are stunningly stingy".

Corporate Britain was quick to realise it needed to stand with the public mood and publicise its concern. The major companies doubtless feel proud of their generosity. They shouldn't. They should be ashamed.

Vodafone announced it would be giving £1m and matching all staff donations. A million pounds is a lot of money to you and me, but not to Vodafone, to which it is pocket change. The company's annual profit, registered last May, was £10bn. That means the company made substantially more than a million pounds an hour. Yet that is all they gave - less than an hour's profit. It is less than they gave their new boss, Arun Sarin, for his annual bonus.

Put another way, Vodafone has given a mere one tenthousandth of its annual profit. (Not its total revenue, mind, which would be a larger figure, just its profit.) Think of your own annual income, after you've paid off all your expenses. Now work out what one ten-thousandth of that sum would be. If you had given just that amount to the tsunami appeal, would that be enough? Would you announce it with pride?