The head of a Somali aid group says that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have donated $340,000 to help it expand its health services to the displaced mothers and children in Somalia’s war-ravaged capital.

The Horn of Africa nation has been suffering from its worst famine in 60 years, and the United Nations says 750,000 people are at risk of starving to death in the next few months.

Mohamed Dahir of Humanitarian Initiative Just Relief Aid said the donation from the Jolie-Pitt Foundation will allow his group to expand its lifesaving health services that serve 300 women and children each day in Mogadishu’s Badbaado camp for the displaced people.

Read more/discuss.

Through their foundation, Springfield native Brad Pitt and partner Angelina Jolie on Friday contributed $500,000 to the Community Foundation of the Ozarks, to bolster the recovery effort in Joplin.

“Rebuilding after a disaster is a long process,” said Brian Fogle, President of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks. “As our neighbors in Joplin begin to deal with the devastation, this donation from the Jolie-Pitt Foundation gives them the hope and confidence they will need to rebuild their lives, homes and community.”
The money will be used to support mid- and long-term rebuilding efforts in the storm-ravaged city.

Read more/discuss.

The Jolie-Pitt Foundation today announced a donation of $150,000 to SOS Children’s Villages – USA. The donation is given in recognition of National Adoption Day, which celebrates adoptive families and highlights the needs of the over 100,000 children still waiting for adoptive families in the United States. SOS Children’s Villages play a vital role in the healing and stabilization of foster care children, and constitute a critical step along the way to family reunification or adoption for many children. SOS Children’s Villages provides loving, stable homes to children around the world whose biological families cannot properly care for them. Founded over 60 years ago, SOS operates over 500 Villages in 130 countries including Illinois and Florida in the US. The Jolie-Pitt Foundation donation will provide the supplemental long-term financial support needed for a family of four foster children in an SOS Village in the US.

Read more.

Hollywood couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie accepted an undisclosed amount of damages on Thursday after suing a British tabloid newspaper which had claimed they were separating.
In January, the News of the World reported the couple planned to part and had agreed on custody of their six children and the division of their assets estimated by the newspaper to be 205 million pounds ($310 million).
The couple said the claims were false and demanded a retraction of the story and an apology.
Solicitor-advocate Keith Schilling told the High Court in London that News Group Newspapers now accepted that each of the allegations was “false and intrusive,” the Press Association reported.
The newspaper agreed to publish an apology and pay the couple costs and damages, which they intend to donate to their charity the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

Read more.

Partners from the architectural firm Graft from Berlin, Germany — which has partners with Brad Pitt in ‘Make it Right’ in New Orleans, building affordable and environmentally intelligent houses for those affected by Hurricane Katrina — traveled to Ethiopia recently to meet with Global Health Committee workers to discuss plans for a new children’s center in Addis Ababa. The center will be run by the GHC and offer an array of support services to children who are infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. The project follows the model of the CHC’s Maddox Chivan Children’s Center in Phnom Penh, which opened in 2006. Both centers have been made possible by generous support from the Jolie-Pitt Foundation actor-activists Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (see CHC/GHC press release). The new center will be named after the Jolie-Pitt’s Ethiopian daughter, Zahara.

Source/discuss. Thanks Gabriella.

They’re between film shoots, but Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have kept busy.

First, it was the creation of the Jane Pitt Pediatric Cancer Center, named after Brad’s mother, in his hometown of Springfield, Mo. And Wednesday, in support of Jolie’s eight-year relationship with the UN Refugee Agency, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation gave $1 million to help displaced people in Pakistan, a country she has visited three times.

The head of the agency, António Guterres, thanked the foundation for its assistance, calling Pakistan’s plight “the most challenging humanitarian crisis of the past decade,” as more than 2 million people are currently displaced in the country. Read more.