Secrifice this Angelina donates $100,000 to Pakistan for flood relief

Angelina donates $100,000 to Pakistan for flood relief

Angelina has expressed her desire to visit Pakistan and communicate with the people directly on the ground zero. Justifying her stature, the actress has once again won the hearts of millions with her noble gesture.

HOLLYWOOD'S LEADING actress, Angelina Jolie has set great example for others once again when it comes to express sympathy and compassion for calamities across the world. The leading celebrity of silver screen poured her heart out for the victims of devastated flood across many parts of Pakistan. The devastating natural calamity according to official resources has claimed over 2000 lives and left over two million people homeless.

The actress has donated $100,000 for the rehabilitation of flood victims. Besides, she has also asked her fans across the globe to come forward and donate wholeheartedly for the flood victims, who need immediate assistance in terms of food, shelter and medicine.

Angelina is also a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations; she is one of those actors in the world, who are often seen playing key role in the rehabilitation of victims affected by war, flood or any other calamity. The actress recently donated $1 million to help the survivors of devastated earthquake that rocked Haiti. To build a girl school in war ravaged Afghanistan the actress contributed $75,000.

The flood has displaced over 20 million people; however donations are far below than expected. World is slowly realizing the gravity of the catastrophe and donations are pouring in from the countries across the world.

Angelina has expressed her desire to visit Pakistan and communicate with the people directly on ground zero. Justifying her stature, the actress has once again won the hearts of millions with her noble gesture. Hats off to you Angelina for your great move.

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Pakistan flood recovery could take years

enjoy Pakistan flood recovery could take years




Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari warned his beleaguered nation could take years to recover from devastating floods as global pledges topped 700 million dollars and waters refused to relent.
The near month-long floods have killed 1,500 people and affected up to 20 million nationwide in the country’s worst ever natural disaster, with the threat of disease ever present in the camps sheltering desperate survivors.
“Your guess is as good as mine, but three years is a minimum,” Zardari told reporters on Monday when asked how long it would take Pakistan to go through relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation after the floods.
“I don’t think Pakistan will ever fully recover but we will move on,” the president said, adding the government — under fire for its slow relief response — was working to protect people from similar disasters in future.
Senior US official Dan Feldman, the deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington that a UN General Assembly meeting last week was “a real galvanising moment” in the aid effort.
“By our count, we’ve seen over 700 million dollars pledged, including our own 150 million dollar commitment, from over 30 countries,” Feldman said, without giving a country-by-country breakdown.
He said there are an “additional 300 million dollars in as yet undefined commitments” from a variety of countries.
The United States has made nuclear-armed Pakistan a key ally in the fight against Islamic extremism with fears militancy could benefit from the instability after the flooding and fury at the government.
Zardari was strongly criticised for failing to cut short a visit to Europe at the start of the disaster and while he defended that decision, he acknowledged that some criticism of the government’s response was justified.
“There will always be a ‘could have been better, would have been better, should have been better’... (but) you have to understand how enormous the issue (the scale of the disaster) is,” he said.
Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from flood-threatened areas in the south since Saturday, including most of the 100,000 residents in the city of Shahdadkot, which authorities were battling to protect.
Dozens of villages around Shahdadkot were inundated, district administration official Yasin Shar told AFP Monday, as floodwaters threatened the city.
Nearly 90 percent of people living in the area had left and the remaining were being rushed out, he said.
Similar efforts were being made to save Hyderabad, a city of 2.5 million people on the lower reaches of the Indus river, where at least 36 surrounding villages have been swept away.
Pakistani officials on Monday began talks with the International Monetary Fund in Washington amid reports Islamabad was asking the fund to ease the terms of a loan worth nearly 11 billion dollars.
Last week Pakistani officials said Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh would ask the IMF to restructure the current loan or consider new financing.
There are fears that losses as a result of the floods could reach 43 billion dollars.
Millions of survivors are in desperate need of food, shelter and clean drinking water and require humanitarian assistance to survive, as concerns grow over potential cholera, typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks.
Disaster management officials say that the scale of the flooding is much larger than Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake, which killed 73,000 people and made 3.3 million homeless.
Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Islamabad, said that 1.5 million people were being treated for everything from respiratory and skin infections to diarrhoea
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Pakistan accepts $5m flood aid from India

We are enjoy Pakistan accepts $5m flood aid from India

Tens of thousands have been made homeless by the floods in Sindh province
Pakistan has accepted $5m (£3.2m) in aid from its rival and neighbour India, as donors pledged more money for the flood-hit country.
Abdullah Haroon, Pakistan's UN Ambassador, welcomed the offer saying the disaster transcended any differences the two countries had.

Meanwhile, officials say the province of Sindh is now the worst hit, with more than two million people affected.

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Pakistan's Monsoon Floods

Battle for survival
Feuds and sickness in camps
Who cares about Pakistan?
In pictures: Pakistanis await aid
New warnings are being issued and villages evacuated, they said.

Mr Haroon welcomed the latest offers of help, which followed a two-day special meeting of the UN Security Council in New York to discuss the crisis.

UN figures showed on Friday that $490.7m had been raised for the relief effort, with another $325m pledged. The total tops the $460m sought in the UN emergency appeal.

Mr Haroon described the new donations as "indeed heartening" and "a good beginning", but added that Pakistan will need support for years to come.

India's UN Ambassador, Hardeep Singh Puri, said the donation of $5m in relief supplies was an initial offer and his country was ready to do more if needed.

"We are willing to do all that is in our power to assist Pakistan in facing the consequences of floods," he said.

"We extend our wholehearted support to the government of Pakistan in its efforts for relief and rehabilitation of the... population."

The offer came after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke to his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani on Thursday.

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We had no way to save our goats and buffaloes, stranded in the water and crying”

Qasim Bhayyo
Refugee from Sindh province
Pakistan and India have slowly been improving ties since the Mumbai militant attacks of 2008 put relations between the two nuclear-armed rivals at a new low.

Homes lost
The floods began last month in Pakistan's north-west after heavy monsoon rains and have since swept south, swamping thousands of towns and villages in Punjab and Sindh provinces.

About one-fifth of Pakistan's territory is underwater and an estimated 20 million people are affected.

Officials estimate that about 1,600 people have been killed.

In the southern province of Sindh, hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless as the Indus river overflowed, swamping homes and valuable farmland.

"Everything has been wasted. Nothing is left," said Qasim Bhayyo, 45, a refugee from Qayyas Bhayyo village in Sindh.

"I saw my house of wood and mud washed away. I saw grain and flour - we stockpiled food for months. It was all destroyed. We had no way to save our goats and buffaloes stranded in the water and crying."

As aid agencies stepped up the relief effort, the UN said on Friday that more helicopters were urgently needed to reach communities cut off by the water.

Experts warn of a second wave of deaths from water-borne diseases such as cholera unless flood victims have access to supplies of fresh drinking water.

If you would like to make a donation to help people affected by the floods in Pakistan, you can do so through the UK's Disasters Emergency Committee at www.dec.org.uk or by telephone on 0370 60 60 900

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Watches UN hits Pakistan flood cash target

UN hits Pakistan flood cash target
The United Nations appeared to have met its target of £295 million in immediate aid for flood-stricken Pakistan, after Britain, the US and other nations dramatically upped their pledges.

The rush of promised help came after UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, addressing a hastily-called meeting of the General Assembly, urged governments and people to be even more generous than they were in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and this year's Haiti earthquake.

Mr Ban said the floods were a bigger "global disaster" with Pakistan's government now saying more than 20 million people needed shelter, food and clean water.

"This disaster is like few the world has ever seen," Mr Ban told the meeting. "It requires a response to match. Pakistan needs a flood of support."

Before the meeting, donors had given only half the sum the UN had appealed for to provide food, shelter and clean water to up to eight million flood victims over the next three months.

But Mr Ban said all the money was needed now - and much more would be needed later.

After listening to speeches by top-level representatives of around 20 countries, Pakistan's foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said he was assured that the £295 million goal "is going to be easily met", including "100 million dollars plus (£64m)" from Saudi Arabia.

Aid groups and UN officials had worried about a slow response to the flooding, believing donors who spent heavily on a string of huge disasters in recent years were reluctant to open their wallets yet again.

Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, told reporters before the meeting that he believed that where the tsunami and Haiti catastrophes happened suddenly, "for about 10 days people didn't realise that this wasn't just another flood".

On Thursday, after visiting flood areas with Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari, US senator John Kerry warned of extremists who might "exploit the misery of others for political or ideological purpose, and so it is important for all of us to work overtime".
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Pakistan finally accepts Indian flood aid offer

Watches this Pakistan finally accepts Indian flood aid offer

WASHINGTON: Pakistan has finally accepted the USD five million aid offered by India for flood relief victims and said such a gesture was appreciated.

"I can share with you that the Government of Pakistan has agreed to accept the Indian offer (of USD 5 million aid)," Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said on the sidelines of the special session of the General Assembly on Pakistan at the United Nations headquarters.

The US had yesterday asked Pakistan to accept USD five million in flood aid from India as politics should have no role in disaster response.

The foreign minister asserted that Pakistan was not playing any politics on aid offer from India.

"We are not playing politics. Let me acknowledge the fact that the minister for external affairs, Mr (S M) Krishna, called me in Islamabad and he expressed sympathy, he condoled with me on the loss of life, and offered assistance to Pakistan," he said in an interview.

Qureshi was at the United Nations headquarters in New York to attend the special session of the General Assembly on Pakistan.

Qureshi thanked Krishna, Indian Government and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, for this very "positive" gesture.

"It's highly appreciated by Pakistan and we have recognised it. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Prime Minister Gillani and they have also exchanged views on the evolving flood situation in Pakistan.

"He has reiterated the offer made by the foreign minister, and I can share with you that the government of Pakistan has agreed to accept the Indian offer," Qureshi said.

"I think this initiative of India is a very welcome initiative and I'm looking forward to further engagements with my counterpart to improve the environment, to build confidence and to bridge the trust deficit between the two countries," the Pakistan foreign minister said.

When asked about reports that Islamic extremist groups might take advantage of this opportunity to win over hearts and minds, Qureshi asserted this will not happen.

"I think what we saw today and the UN will not permit them to take advantage of the situation. I think the international community is now forthcoming and the international community is responding and they are responding quickly, and we will not allow them to exploit that situation,"

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Flood diseaster in hangu and its surronding

Watches this enjoy Flood diseaster in hangu and its surronding
Pakistan's recent flood disaster remains an open page before the world. But the damage suffered by the northwestern town of Hangu in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province hasn't found sufficient coverage in any major English daily or international media.

Host to the terror-affected internally displaced people (IDPs) from its neighboring tribal area of Orakzai Agency, Hangu was hit hard by nearly ten days of continual rain, starting at the end of July 2010. A total of 250 to 300 ml of rain was recorded in Hangu and the Orakzai Agency, leaving 18 people dead and about two dozen wounded, besides heavy damage to property.

The most serious toll on life by the flood waters was recorded in the more southern and western villages of Chamba Gulo, Zargairi, Kotki, Hayatabad, and Naryab. A total of 12 minors (under 13 years) died in these villages, six of them being crushed to death under collapsed roofs in houses in Zargari. At least 40 houses either collapsed or were seriously damaged in Zargari village.

Hangu city remained safe from damage to life; however, damage to property was widespread. Houses and shops were flooded and food items spoiled in a number of places. The northwestern locality of Gulshan Colony was almost entirely washed away by the floods as its location directly at the foothills made it the prime target of ravaging flood currents rushing down the hill slopes. Hardly any house escaped damage in this colony, some of them being entirely washed away.

Refugees in Hangu often pay the most in any crisis, and the flood disaster was no exception. The Afghan refugee camp in Kata Kanrhi hills saw ravaging flood currents in the stream that flows all along the camp's length in the hills marking the northern border of the town. Some 60 houses of clay and thatch were washed away by the flood in this stream-sided community of Afghan refugees. Besides this, the IDPs camp at Togh Sarai (southwest of Hangu) was also seriously affected by the flood waters, which damaged at least 100 tents in the camp, sheltering as many families of Orakzai IDPs.

Other damage to infrastructure and animal life was also reported from all around the district. About 10 small bridges collapsed in Hangu town. Toward the south in Tal, the main bridge at Mamo Banda was closed for transport after it developed cracks in its pillars due to the heavy rain and subsequent flood. But the worst damage was seen in the collapse of the famous Jawzara Bridge that was built in 1996 with an expenditure of 9.6 million rupees. Traffic was also suspended across the main Hangu-Kurrum bridge at Chapri Patak as the bridge developed cracks during the rain. In addition, livestock was killed in some places due to the collapse of roofs/barns.

Amidst all this destruction, no emergency rescue operation was launched, or even attempted, by the government authorities. Those who survived the flood owe their lives to self-help and the efforts of their community. The government hospitals and private medical centers in Hangu city did well in treating the wounded and the sick (usually having diarrhea and fever). Currently, official damage assessments are underway in Hangu and no one knows when the relief aid will arrive for the unfortunate victims of flood in this otherwise beautiful town.
Coppied by http://article.wn.com/view/2010/08/15/Flood_Disaster_in_Hangu_and_its_Surroundings/