Having lunch today, with most of us having thrown money in a bucket towards Red Cross Tsunami drives on the High Street, we were discussing how you know which charity to donate to. How do you know that your tenner or whatever will make a difference on the ground and not vanish into administrative costs? I mentioned the DEC (Diasters Emergency Commitee), an umbrella organisation I came across whilst worrying how to donate money towards the Sudanese crisis without it vanishing into some kind of political quagmire. They are now running a Tsunami special appeal.

Meanwhile, two bloggers I read raise good points:

• Blue Witch highlights the problems surrounding the media coverage (I'd point out that we react in horror at the idea of 125,000+ killed by a natural diaster, but the predicted death in Sudan back in August was 350,000+ and it has received much less coverage - I suspect because of the political element).
• Miss Cranky points to a question a scale, initially raised by Rayne (when you follow the links back). At the time they were writing, the US pledged aid was USD15m, and the cost of Bush's inaugeration was USD30m. Real Life Preacher asked whether the inauguration celebrations should be scaled back and even got someone quoting the Book of Revelations in the comments (well, it is inevitable that some will see the movement of the earth's plates as god's retribution. Nutters.)