New Zealand is donating NZ$50,000 towards the disaster relief effort in Venezuela following last week’s devastating floods, Associate Foreign Affairs Minister Matt Robson announced today.

The donation will go towards the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) appeal and comes from the Disaster Relief allocation in New Zealand?s Overseas Development Assistance (NZODA) programme.

Mr Robson said the flooding was Venezuela?s worst-ever disaster, killing more than 10,000 people and leaving another 250,000 homeless.

?The disaster has devastated the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. Entire towns have been wiped out and hundreds of thousands of people will have to be relocated,? Mr Robson said.

He said the United Nations had mobilised a team to assist the UN coordinator in Venezuela with damage assessment and relief activities.

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For more comment, contact: Josie Harbutt, Press Sec. 025 5888 60 04 470 6676, or Matt Robson 025 909 936

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Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>