Free Republic

BATON ROUGE -- Nearly five months after Hurricane Gustav, the public relations battle between Gov. Bobby Jindal and FEMA continues over who was to blame for the exasperating depletion of emergency food and water supplies soon after the storm. At stake is a clear understanding of how to prepare for disasters. FEMA's argument, contained in a retort to comments made by Jindal last week, is that basically the responsibility for the problem lies with the storm victims of Louisiana, who gobbled up food and water at an "extraordinary" rate after Gustav swept through. The federal agency said it worked closely...

A spinster who obsessively hoarded clothes died in her home after a mountain of suitcases fell on her, burying her alive. Joan Cunnane, 77, owned 300 scarves as well as thousands of trinkets and valuables. They took up so much space in her bungalow that she had only a 2ft-wide path to get around them, and her car and garage were packed with other goods. After she was reported missing earlier this week, it took police searching her home two days to sift through her possessions. Miss Cunnane was eventually found buried under a 3ft pile of cases in a...

Farmers and food executives appealed fruitlessly to federal officials yesterday for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher. Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas. Their pleas did not find a sympathetic audience at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where regulators said high prices are mostly the result of soaring world demand for grains combined with high fuel prices and drought-induced shortages in many countries. The regulatory clash came amid evidence that a rash of...

, New Jersey (Aug. 16) - A rotten odor seeping from a home in an upscale neighborhood led to the discovery of dozens of dogs and cats, many of them dead, inside the feces-ridden mansion, authorities said. "Behind a mansion door there's a horror house," said James Lagrosa, head of the Bergen County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. At least 80 live cats and six dogs were removed Wednesday from the Saddle River house, although one kitten died later, he said. In the garage, authorities found 23 separate plastic bags that contained the remains of dead animals,...

US President George W. Bush said today that he hoped China would transform from a country where people "hoard the money they have" into one where people buy large amounts of US products. In an interview with conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Mr Bush said China should become "a society in which there's consumers. Because now they're a society of too many savers". "If we can encourage China to become a country of consumers, you can imagine what it would mean for US producers and manufacturers to have access to that market," he said.

A woman in Shelton, Wash., who was reported missing by her husband, was found dead under piles of clutter in their home, where she suffocated to death, according to police. Shelton Police Chief Terry Davenport said the home was so cluttered that police officers' heads touched the ceiling as they climbed over the clutter. Authorities found the body of 62-year-old Marie Rose buried under clothes after 10 hours of searching. She reportedly suffered from a condition known as hoarding. Rose's husband believes she fell while looking for the phone in the house this week and suffocated. There were so many...

Like people all over the country, Gary Patronek, a veterinarian who teaches at Tufts University, heard the bizarre story of Ruth Knueven and her 488 cats -- 222 of them dead, and most of the others so wild and sick that they had to be euthanized. Knueven, 82, charged with five misdemeanors, including animal cruelty, became a public curiosity last week after Fairfax County officials hauled the cats and carcasses out of her home in Mount Vernon and her daughter's townhouse in Burke. Both residences, filthy and damaged, were declared unfit for habitation until repairs are made. In the Mount...

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Shoppers in Finland raided shelves for toilet paper Wednesday in fear of it running out as a lockout of workers kept the Nordic country's paper mills shut. "As soon as we get a delivery, the packages vanish off the shelves. The big bags go first," said Hille Laine, manager of a central Helsinki shop which had no tissue paper products left. Paper makers enforced a four-week lockout on May 18 following a two-day strike by workers. The dispute in the key export sector is mainly over industry's plans to scrap mill shutdowns during some holidays and on...

<p>For 25 years, a difficult-neighbor problem plagued Curtis and Elaine Colvin of Seattle. The neighbor's home and lawn resembled a junkyard. Finally, last spring, the elderly man was taken out of state by relatives.</p> <p>Konstantinos Apostolou bought the house — and sent in five men to clear the floor-to-ceiling junk. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life," says his son, George Apostolou. There was nowhere to walk, except for a narrow "goat path" connecting the rooms. The men hauled out seven Dumpsters' worth of clothes, books, magazines, spoiled food, firewood, car parts, tires, bank statements and 50-year-old tax records. "I feel bad for the guy," says Apostolou. "I'm sure he was ill."</p>

The cases never cease to fascinate: reclusive people trapped by their own accumulations, in rooms made unlivable by floor-to-ceiling heaps of newspapers, books and saved objects — from twist ties to grand pianos.Some pass into legend, like the Collyer brothers, "the hermit hoarders of Harlem," who in 1947 were buried by the piles of urban junk that filled their four-story Harlem brownstone. But even less extreme examples, like that of the Bronx man rescued on Monday after being trapped for two days under an avalanche of magazines and catalogs, haunt the public imagination.Such compulsive hoarding is being recognized as a...

Afghan warlords hoarding income Jonathan Steele Tuesday May 20, 2003 The Guardian President Hamid Karzai has threatened to resign if Afghanistan regional governors go on hoarding customs revenues rather than handing them to the central government in Kabul. His angry remark shows how much power still remains in the hands of rebellious warlords and religious fundamentalists 18 months after US forces toppled the Taliban regime and promised to create a properly functioning society. In a speech broadcast on state television Mr Karzai said the provincial authorities had sent no money to Kabul since mid-March, the beginning of the Afghan fiscal...