Charitable giving -- the online version -- usually peaks on December 31st each year.

While most nonprofits wish giving was more spread out and less event-driven (e.g., not in response to a disaster at home or abroad), in fact, most individual and family donors total up their year-end surplus, recover...

This holiday season there are a number of ways you can donate to powerful causes in honor of family and friends that they would wholeheartedly endorse in lieu of a gift:

1. Water purification tablets to disaster-prone areas like Cuba, Haiti, The Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka. Each $125 buys...

My employer, a charity, just received a 10% increase in our Blue Shield group health plan -- a standard Preferred Provider Plan with a $500 deductible for outpatient care and for prescription drugs. Care is expensive in Los Angeles and many physicians have dropped health insurance billing altogether -- which...

I expect the Obama-Congress health care legislation to either fail to pass or be so attenuated that it will not remotely cover the nation's 47 million medically uninsured; to be offensive to many in its prosciptions on reproductive health services; to not dramatically curb health insurance or actual health care...

Madonna recently announced that she was helping to build a $15 million girls school in Malawi; She apparently does not know that former Malawi President, Hastings Banda, an anglophile, built an exact replica of Eton in rural Malawi, complete with black tie & tails for each boy and to worldwide...

What if you lived in a country which is one of America's staunchest allies, whom some visitors often think of as our 51st state because so many things there resemble what we have here in the U.S. -- The Philippines? What if you were now in American Samoa? Or Indonesia,...

Operation USA, a small, highly respected Los Angeles-based international relief agency (www.opusa.org) thought two weeks ago that its relief efforts in the triple disasters striking The Philippines, Samoa and Indonesia had finally tapped into the public's consciousness when it simultaneously was listed at the top of USA Today's list of...

Operation USA to send emergency medical aid to American and Western Samoa following earthquake and resulting tsunami

Waves and quake bring devastation across the islands; Total loss of life still being assessed.

LOS ANGELES, CA (September 30, 2009)-- Los Angeles-based International relief agency Operation USA announced today...

The never ending series of Pacific Rim natural disasters continues but the American public's response has been tepid at best. Hopefully, the fact that President Obama has such intimate ties to Indonesia will stimulate a response moderately similar to that following the Asian Tsunami which struck Aceh...

LOS ANGELES, CA (September 28, 2009)-- Los Angeles-based International relief agency Operation USA announced that it was preparing relief supplies to assist local health care agencies and NGOs in and around Manila as they try to assist nearly 450,000 people in immediate need of assistance as a direct result of...

My family invested nearly $15,000 last year in Barack Obama, Inc. stock. We bought in heavily out of accumulated capital and it was a significant amount for us... fourth months worth of what my wife would call "the rent money" and then some.

Some "stock" was acquired directly through the...

Wanna have a good cry all you Blue Cross/BlueShield/Aetna/Metlife/Unihealth or medically uninsured people? Take a look at Britain's National Health Service website.

Not only can you download 55 coherent pages on just Swine Flu symptoms and treatment, but the site itself is called "NHS Choices." It's full of simple,...

Thanks in part to the heroics of former President Bill Clinton and a number of behind the scenes private diplomats using LA producer Steve Bing's private jet, the two Asian-American journalists working for Current TV (co-owned by ex-VP Al Gore) and being held for crossing North Korea's borders without visas...

Starting this Tuesday, August 11 and running for a full week, a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical Services and several of its L.A.-area partners, like Operation USA and Tzu Chi Buddhist Foundation are hosting a free health fair at The Forum, 3900 West Manchester Blvd in Inglewood, California.

What's remarkable...

Last May 12th and for a month afterwards, most of China's populous Sichuan Province shook as a huge fault deep under a mountain range began to move. Tens of millions were displaced, 80,000 died and 230,000 were injured. Among the dead and injured were 5000-7000 students at a number of...

With so many people in Los Angeles suffering from lay-offs, catastrophic drops in home prices and retirement funds, paralyzing fear of Swine Flu (the PC term is now H1N1), canceled film and TV projects, and mergers of convenience in the entertainment industry....what exactly does the Democratic Party think it is...

Today's World Health Organization announcement that it was raising the Swine Flu alert to Stage 5, or Pandemic status, is meant as a serious warning that we need to mobilize resources to confront this threat.

There appears at first blush to be less of a risk to mankind than that...

Operation USA, a Los Angeles-based disaster relief agency, announced that it was sending tens of thousands of N-95 biohazard protective masks to a network of community clinics in San Diego County along with latex gloves and other protective gear in the event that the airborne version of the H1N1 virus,...

I must admit, after 15 years of providing humanitarian aid to Cuba and going hat in hand to Washington, D.C. to apply for annual Department of the Treasury and bi-annual Department of Commerce licenses to "Trade With The Enemy" by sending free medical supplies to pediatric hospitals, I am feeling...

Despite the best of intentions and an unprecedented financial commitment by the Chinese Government, China's 10 million-plus victims of last May's Sichuan Earthquake remain largely in massive temporary prefabricated housing complexes, in tents or under blue tarps in partially damaged homes.

Thousands of schools also collapsed when the quake struck...