Craven:
Thank you for your "apology," however you are still incorrect when you claim I misread what I posted. But I suspect you are correct that I bristle when people incorrectly accuse me of making errors I did not make.
I asked you whether only the French directly contributed logistics, supplies and trained rescue teams to the rescue effort because you seemed to be indicating it was these contributions that were not included in the figure I quoted -- yet I was citing to the initial pledges of the other rich countries. So unless those other countries were NOT contributing logistics, supplies, and trained rescue teams, then it was an accurate comparison.
Your attempts to help my reading comprehension by bolding the words in the following sentence I posted, "
It planned to send 16 rescue workers to Thailand on Tuesday and 10 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Sri Lanka in the next few days, the ministry said," did not work. I do not understand how you are able to conclude
from those words alone that France had sent additional rescue workers to other countries in addition to those 16 they sent to Thailand. I submit this is not an example of "factual inaccuracy" nor a "lapse in reading comprehension" on my part.
Craven wrote:I respectfully submit this as yet another example of the factual inaccuracy and lapses in reading that I reference.
So much for the apology!
Craven wrote:You misread the article that refers to a single contribution for rescue efforts to one country.
Again ... HOW did
I misread the article I posted?
Craven wrote:... France had already contributed many times that amount at the time of that pledge.
* On December 26th the EU earmarked 4 million dollars through ECHO, the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Department, for "initial vital needs" saying that subtantial future aid was forthcoming.
* On December 26th France put together a team of "about 100 doctors, rescue specialists and communications experts" (if you want exact numbers I believe it ended up being a 95-man team and 17 tons of cargo) to be sent to Sri Lanka in a Airbus A310 on the 27th.
* On December 28th EU aid commissioner Louis Michel announced 27 million more in contributions and made a suggestion for a donor's conference.
* On December 28th the figure you cited (only a fration of France's contributions) is allocated to a single rescue effort in one of the affected countries.
* On December 29th France pledged 15 million Euros.
* By December 30th France's had added more to total 41.3 million euros (56.17 million dollars).
According to what you posted there, the only thing "France" had contributed in addition to the $135K prior to that pledge, was a team of "'about 100 doctors, rescue specialists and communications experts' to be sent to Sri Lanka ... ". While that may be true, I did not know about it, nor was that fact reported on any news stories I had perused at the time of my post. You did not post a link to where you got that information, but since the fact of the $15 million Euro pledge on the 29th had to initially be gleaned from French publications, you cannot honestly be accusing me of having "reading comprehension" problems? And I do not see that you have shown that France had pledged "many times that amount" at the time of the $135K pledge, unless you attribute the EU contributions to France. As I stated in my last post to you, I included in my initial post the figures from other EU countries, and those did not apparently take into consideration their EU contributions. Regardless, this is not a "reading comprehension" problem as you claim.
You seem to think it is important to distinguish between Search & Rescue money, and Relief and Rebuilding money. I asked you whether the US separated the money it donated to this cause into S&R money, and relief or restoration money. You pointed out that the US contribution had been separated to the different countries the money was going to go to ... but that wasn't the question I asked. I then asked you whether any known news organizations had reported the "separate" amounts of these contributions. Again, I was asking whether the separation had been made on the basis of money going to rescue operations, and money going to relief/rebuilding/restoration. Your response was to point out that usaid.gov broke down the US aid to six specific countries. The amounts provided to each of those 6 countries was also further itemized to the "implementing agencies," but they all appear to be earmarked for "relief" activities, be they "relief activities," "relief supplies," or "relief items." I did not see any diferentiation between "relief," "rebuilding," "restoration," and/or "rescue" operations.
Where are you getting this distinction between "relief" and "rescue"? And why do you think it an important distinction?
You then state that "
France wasn't missing a couple of zeroes, you were. And as I suggested earlier it is due to your misreading of what that sum represented." You do understand that the article I posted wasn't the only one reporting France's monetary contribution as being limited to $135K. For example,
this article that FreeDuck quoted also reported $100K Euros from France, as did many others. Are you sure that it was
I that was missing the zeros, or every news organization that indicated the French contribution was $135,000? But you don't say it was the news organizations that were erroneous, you say it was I that was erroneous when I interpreted what that sum represented. I say again, that sum represented what it was:
the reported amount of the initial French contribution to the rescue effort in asia. You have gone through a lot of maneuvers to imply that amount was apparently dwarfed by some earlier contribution by the French, but you have not provided any evidence of this. And you have most certainly not "clearly illustrated" this point. My posting is not "demonstrably wrong," or at least it has certainly not been shown to be by your postings.
Just as you stand by yours, I stand by my remarks.
A million more since I checked last night 
By the time we get to the 8th response, which begins: "To bush and his supporters and partners...these children aren't really human beings", it's a full out U.S. policy bashing free-for-all. 
