Luxury relief for Katrina officials, Lebanon aid, tsunami power...

How about this for a disaster response package: dog booties, a plasma TV, an iPod music player and a home beer-brewing kit?

These are just some of the 'essentials' bought by U.S. Homeland Security Department employees while helping those affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The original idea sounds good - giving staff 'purchase cards' so they can bypass red tape for smaller transactions. When the hurricanes struck, Congress increased the cap on the cards from $2,500 to $250,000.

But investigators from the Government Accountability Office found that $300,000 was spent on laptops, printers and boats (which are now missing), another $8,000 on a plasma TV (still unused six months later), and $68,000 on unworn dog booties designed to protect search dogs.

They also found that employees held team-building exercises at expensive golf and tennis resorts.

The 54 iPod music players were bought by Secret Service staff who said they were for training and data storage - a claim they couldn't back up.

And the home beer-brewing kits? Well, the Coast Guard said it was cheaper to provide home brew at official functions than spend lots on commercial brands.

The head of the committee that commissioned the investigation, Senator Susan Collins, sums it up quite succinctly: "There was a failure of leadership here."

A similar investigation last month found that aid payments to hurricane survivors worth around $1 billion were based on bogus claims or spent on items like diamond rings and sex videos.

Lebanon's humanitarian crisis

While the international community is trying - or not - to get Israel and Hizbollah to agree to a ceasefire, Lebanon's humanitarian crisis is growing.

Not only is Lebanon more or less cut off from the outside world, the south of Lebanon is increasingly cut off from the rest of the country according to several media reports.

An estimated 500,000 people have been displaced by the fighting, says the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF). Most have fled to Beirut, the southern cities of Tyre and Sidon and the Chouf mountains. Some are by the border with Syria, trying to buy a road passage out of Lebanon.

Many are sheltering in schools, and other makeshift accommodation where there is a lack of water, sanitation and kitchens.

"The Israeli Army is making the situation even worse for Lebanese civilians by targeting warehouses and factories," says a Caritas report. "Food storage houses in particular have become the target of Israeli reprisals."

And for those left behind, particularly in villages in the south, it is increasingly hard to leave. Roads and bridges have been bombed and fuel is running short.

"The problems in the south are big, big, big," says Soha Boustani, UNICEF's spokeswoman in Lebanon, in a Reuters report.

"If access to the roads leading there remains dangerous, then we will be facing a major humanitarian crisis."

Crucial medical and food supplies are running out fast in the south, according to Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper. It quotes the health ministry as saying hospital supplies in there will last for just two more days.

Reuters spoke to Ghassan Bourji who says he has run out of insulin for his two diabetic children and heart medication for his mother because the Israeli bombardments have cut supplies to his village of Rmadiyeh in south Lebanon.

"I'm scared I might lose them," the 55-year-old father of four said by telephone. "The situation here is miserable. We need help."

Many villagers say water supplies too are dwindling. Israeli strikes have restricted the movement of humanitarian aid to areas hardest hit in the conflict.

Agence France Presse reports that in some villages in the south, shops have been stripped bare, and officials say babies are already showing signs of malnutrition.

Border villages, near where the two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped by Hizbollah on July 12, appealed yesterday for desperately needed food and medicine.

"The situation is catastrophic, I cannot tell you how long they can last. They have been practically without water, electricity and food supplies," a Lebanese Red Cross official told AFP reporters.

"We desperately need a humanitarian corridor," said the official, who did not wish to be named.

Reuters reports that UNIFIL, the small U.N. peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, is also appealing to the Israeli military for safe passage for its convoys.

UNIFIL says it has only been able to carry out a few logistic and humanitarian convoys to needy villages, and the Israeli military has ignored its requests for safe passage for convoys carrying supplies to UNIFIL posts and distressed Lebanese civilians.

There have also been reports of Israel bombing trucks carrying humanitarian supplies from the United Arab Emirates via Syria earlier this week.

Israel said the trucks contained weapons and munitions destined for Hezbollah fighters. Syria denies the charge. Its denial is backed by AFP and Washington Post reporters who visited the scene.

The dangers of collecting firewood in Darfur

It's a well-known fact that women and girls collecting firewood near refugee camps are often raped by locals in the process. So why don't the men go instead?

The reason is stark and reflects a brutal reality: reports from Darfur and Ethiopia show that refugee families have to make tough decisions - it's better to risk a woman or girl being raped than a man or boy being killed by the same locals.

According to The Health Exchange Magazine, several studies recommended that refugee agencies provide families with firewood to solve the problem. But when this was done in 1996 in Dadaab camp in Kenya, the number of rapes related to firewood fell but the overall number of rapes reported in the camps grew.

Eileen Pittaway and Linda Bartolomei from the Centre for Refugee Research at the University of New South Wales, Australia, suggest the only way to solve the problem is to address the root causes for the rapes.

Their proposals include:

extra funding to help host governments and the U.N. Refugee Agency to integrate refugees into the local community

give refugees are the means to produce food and earn money so women and girls no longer need to forage for wood to sell

and finally and provide local communities as well as refugees with alternative fuels to replace the scarce wood supply

"If the local people were benefiting from the arrival of the refugees instead of losing their scarce resources, they also might look more favourably on the newcomers," write Pittaway and Bartolomei.

Tsunami warning is all about power

A lot of disaster experts pretty much agree that any effective method for warning people about impending disasters needs to concentrate on the "last mile" of the communication chain that stretches from the scientists who detect it and the governments of emergency-prone nations to the residents in the path of danger.

Hazards expert Ben Wisner and his colleagues in cyberspace have been discussing why people in Java didn't get told a tsunami was heading for them this week. He says ordinary people need to be involved in setting up warning systems from the very beginning.

"I would like to see rural and urban representatives of working class people, trades people, fishing people, farmers, women and men, and young people present even in the technical meetings."

Wisner, a hazards specialist with the Environmental Studies programme at Oberlin College, Ohio, argues: "The very formulation of 'the last mile' problem assumes that once the bugs get worked out of a warning system - as one official quoted today on (U.N. website) ReliefWeb said, the present time it takes to analyse data and give a warning is an hour, but that can get down to five minutes eventually - maybe by 2009 - then and only then do we worry about how to 'communicate the warning'.

"I think that very notion and formulation is flawed," Wisner says. "Bear with me. Assume for a moment that I am correct. Ok, then what has the government of Indonesia got to lose involving ordinary people from the very beginning?

"The answer is that (a) it's likely they don't know how to involve them; (b) there is so much mistrust that it is unlikely that the full cross section of people (including the poorest) would be willing."

As far as Wisner's concerned, the problem is a political one. For him, "(It's about) power - economic, legal, and police power - and why the military doesn't want to give up power under a newly structured disaster management system in Indonesia."

Alex Whiting and Ruth Gidley
AlertNet journalists