Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Big bucks pledged for Notre Dame Cathedral despite ongoing humanitarian crises

It's interesting, isn't it? Within 12 hours of the Notre Dame fire in Paris, a group of mega-rich French businessmen had pledged a total of over 600 million euros (nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars US) to the renovation of the church. To put this in perspective, early estimates of the actual cost of the repairs have been in the region of 300-600 million euros.
Now, sure, it's a nice church, and it has a whole load of history behind it. But how can it be that easy to find big bucks for a building when France has a major poverty problem, with nearly nine million people living below the poverty line, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that about $22 billion is currently needed to address humanitarian crises in 2019 alone?

UPDATE

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