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Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn were in New Orleans Wednesday doing their part to help rebuild the Gulf Coast. Video: Watch the Story Carter was among dozens of volunteers helping Habitat for Humanity rebuild a home in the Upper Ninth Ward. Carter and his wife were in the area last May when the 100th home was built – now they are back to celebrate another milestone: the 25th anniversary of the Carter Work Project.

GENEVA (AP) — Two human rights experts for the United Nations on Thursday criticized a plan by New Orleans authorities to raze public housing projects, saying it will force the predominantly black residents into homelessness. They charged that demolition would harm thousands of people by denying them a place to live in a city where housing already is scarce since Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005. The joint statement was not a U.N. finding, but only the individual views of Miloon Kothari, a special investigator on housing matters for the U.N. Human Rights Council, and Gay McDougall, a lawyer who...

When Woodrow Wilson went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war in 1917, the U.S. Army was ranked 17th in the world, behind Portugal. On Armistice Day, 19 months later, there were 2 million doughboys in France, where they had helped to break the back of Gen. Ludendorff's theretofore invincible army in its final offensive, and 2 million more in the United States ready to march on Berlin. No other nation could have done that. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR demanded that a disarmed America "build 50,000 planes" -- a seemingly impossible number, but one...

HOUSTON -- In a cramped guard booth on the edge of a community of luxury townhouses, the sense of helplessness that has become so familiar to Gregory Sam since Hurricane Katrina uprooted him from his home town of New Orleans can become all-consuming. "I'm struggling," said Sam, 29, a college graduate who took an $8-an-hour post as a security guard after more than 20 job interviews led to nothing. "I feel like I'm isolated in the country somewhere . . . in a time warp." For the nearly quarter-million people such as Sam who were evacuated to Texas after the...

BAINS — West Feliciana Middle School sixth-graders left school last Tuesday with laptop computers and words of encouragement and caution. The students are participating in “Turn on to Learning,” a $5 million initiative to put Apple MacBook computers into the hands of more that 3,500 sixth-graders and their teachers across the state. West Feliciana’s students received their computers last fall, and Tuesday was their first opportunity to use them at home. “I think the kids are so excited about it, that they’ll take care of them,” Principal Darryl Powell said. “The parents are excited, too. They’re so proud their kids...

Tom Kauffman thought that once a storm blew over people could go home, clean up a few things and return back to normal, everyday life. But two mission trips to Biloxi, Miss., changed his thinking. People are still recovering from the impact of Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. "A storm doesn't just blow over and people don't go back to their homes the next day," said Kauffman, 69, of Manchester Township. "There's a lot of pain and suffering and a lot of waiting. I opened my eyes up." Kauffman plans to return to Biloxi a third...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The National Rifle Association has hired private investigators to find hundreds of people whose firearms were seized by city police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to court papers filed this week. The NRA is trying to locate gun owners for a federal lawsuit that the lobbying group filed against Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Superintendent Warren Riley over the city's seizure of firearms after the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane. In the lawsuit, the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation claim the city violated gun owners' constitutional right to bear arms and left them "at...

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) is recognized for 5 minutes. Mr. HUNTER. Madam Speaker, I want to talk a little bit about the wonderful people of Rescue Task Force who are headquartered in San Diego, who have been operating in the disaster area in New Orleans, and use that discussion about them to reflect on all the great private efforts and public efforts to help the victims who have been created by this incredible disaster in New Orleans. Rescue Task Force is a small group. It is headed...

President Bush has shown that he can be empathetic, sensitive and decisive. But those qualities eluded him for days after Hurricane Katrina . . . He didn't cancel his vacation until two days after Katrina struck and didn't visit the region until four days after the storm. -- "A compassionate Bush was absent right after Katrina", USA Today, 9-9-05 USA Today's broadside is typical of the MSM criticism leveled at Pres. Bush for his failure to visit New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. So, now that President Bush has announced that he will be visiting California on Thursday while the wildfire...

Talk about your bigotry of low expectations . . . Brian Williams has defended armed looting during Katrina as the work of heads of family providing for their own. The NBC Nightly News anchor is in New Orleans on the second Katrina anniversary. He appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" at 7:30 A.M. EDT. Williams first passed along a predictable race-and-classed based explanation of the botched relief efforts. BRIAN WILLIAMS: That's when human life started to degrade. That's when people ran out of of bathroom facilities and started having to use the entire [Superdome]: no power, no circulating air, and worse,...

BILOXI, Mississippi (Reuters) - Officials from the Federal Reserve on Saturday warned of dangers from a rising tide of trade disputes and the harmful impact on what one otherwise termed a "resilient" United States economy. Three regional Fed presidents steered clear of current economic or monetary policy topics at a panel discussion on the southern U.S. economy at the Southern Governors' Association conference. The presidents of the St. Louis, Dallas and Atlanta Feds, respectively, mostly focused on the dangers of protectionism and the need for an educated and flexible work force to cope with rising foreign competition. The governors convened...

(CNN) -- A New Orleans grand jury that declined to indict a doctor on charges that she murdered patients in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina never heard testimony from five medical experts brought in by the state to analyze the deaths. All five concluded that as many as nine patients were victims of homicide. In detailed, written statements, the five specialists -- whose expertise includes forensic medicine, medical ethics and palliative care -- determined that patients at Memorial Medical Center had been deliberately killed with overdoses of drugs after Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005. The grand jury had...

Francois de La Rochefoucauld had a point when he said, in his frequently quoted formulation, that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In the case of John Edwards, however, hypocrisy is simply a way of life. The infamous $400 haircut — actually, some of his hairstyling sessions ran as much as $1,200 all told — wasn’t a freak embarrassment for a candidate so self-righteously devoted to the poor. It was part of a pattern so pervasive that it has become the defining aspect of Edwards’s candidacy. When he lambasted hedge funds for incorporating offshore to avoid or...

Embarrassed presidential hopeful John Edwards promised yesterday to take millions of dollars of his own fortune out of a hedge fund tied to subprime lenders who foreclosed on victims of Hurricane Katrina. The populist candidate - who has denounced such lenders - invested $16 million of his $30 million in assets in Fortress Investment Group. The Wall Street Journal reported that 34 New Orleans homeowners struggling to overcome Katrina's aftermath faced foreclosure suits from subprime-lending units of Fortress. Yesterday, the red-faced Democratic candidate vowed to remove from his portfolio any Fortress funds that have a stake in those lender units....

Baton Rouge, LA (LifeNews.com) -- Just one day after a grand jury decided not to indict Dr. Anna Pou on charges that she allegedly euthanized patients in the dreadful aftermath following Hurricane Katrina, the state's attorney general will not drop the case. Attorney General Charles Foti has asked a state judge to release previously sealed documents. Foti wants the judge to release documents that has been used in the investigation of the deaths at Memorial Medical Center. The documents were sealed when Foti gave Judge Calvin Johnson the search warrants, subpoena requests and other records in January 2006. Judge Johnson...

NEW ORLEANS, July 25, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A New Orleans grand jury decided Tuesday not to indict Dr. Anna Pou, a doctor who was accused of murdering four patients during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Pou had been charged by Louisiana's attorney general on 10 counts, including second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder. Earlier this year two nurses who had admitted to administering lethal doses of medication to patients at the same medical center were offered immunity in return for their testimony before the grand jury. Pou and the others have consistently claimed that while they did administer...

BILOXI, Miss. — This seaside gambling resort along a stretch of the Gulf Coast, sometimes called the “redneck Riviera,” has 40 percent fewer hotel rooms and only two-thirds as many slot machines as it did before Hurricane Katrina. A major bridge that connects the casinos in this popular tourist destination to Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and other points east remains closed, and Mayor A. J. Holloway estimates that as many as 15 percent of the city’s pre-Katrina residents still have not returned. Yet business in the gambling halls of Biloxi has reached all-time highs in recent months, so much so...

It's been two years since Hurricane Katrina and Rita ripped through the belly of the South, and survivors, along with various scholars and activists, are seeking to hold the US government responsible in a tribunal court hearing scheduled for this August. On Tuesday (July 17), New York City Councilman Charles Barron and former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney met at Manhattan's Center for Constitutional Rights for a press conference to discuss the upcoming trial. The tribunal will target President Bush, the US government, State of Louisiana, State of Mississippi, and various other agencies who were involved in the Katrina and Rita...

It is just after Christmas in 2003 and John Edwards is running hard for president of the United States. He is in Iowa, with the caucuses about three weeks away. Pundits, guided by a massive disinformation campaign, have decided that Howard Dean is going to win Iowa. Edwards remains undiscouraged. A highly effective stump speaker, Edwards always gets a laugh by saying, "Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear." Edwards is a product of the American middle class. His father worked in a textile mill, and his mother ran an antique refinishing business and then became a...

NEW ORLEANS, June 21, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, who have admitted to administering lethal doses of medication to patients during the hurricane Katrina disaster, are being offered immunity from prosecution by the Louisiana Attorney General. CNN reports that in two weeks the two will testify before a Grand Jury that four patients died after being administered what Louisiana's Attorney General, Charles Foti Jr., called a "lethal cocktail" of drugs.In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in late August 2005, rumours began to fly around the internet world that patients were...

Stand atop any levee in the New Orleans area, and one question will offer itself, unbidden, to the mind: Is this pile of dirt tall enough to stand up to the next storm? The answer is complex, and a wary city has been waiting to hear it. After the New Orleans hurricane protection system failed under the onslaught of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Army Corps of Engineers rethought the way it assesses hurricane risk. It devised new, flexible computer models and ran countless simulations on Defense Department supercomputers to help it understand what kind of storms the region can...

Houston-based KBR, formerly the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton Co., has a contingency contract in place with the Department of Homeland Security to construct detention facilities in the event of a national emergency. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback confirmed yesterday in a telephone interview that the KBR contract for $385 million was awarded initially in January 2006 for a one-year base period with four one-year options. It has been extended into 2007. KBR held a previous emergency detention contract with ICE from 2000 to 2005. Zuieback told this writer the primary intent of the KBR...

I've been hearing rumors for a couple of weeks now that New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin is considering running for Governor. I finally found a news outlet that confirms this rumor, thanks to freelance journalist Jason Berry, who appeared on Informed Sources last night to predict that Nagin will run for Governor. Hat tip to Library Chronicles. As an aside, is this Jason Berry the author of Amazing Grace, an account of Charles Evers' run for Governor in Mississippi back in 1972? But back to the issue at hand - Ray Nagin running for Governor of Louisiana. This makes...

Hillary Rodham Clinton says "If talk, bureaucracy and promises were enough" New Orleans would have been rebuilt three times over by now. The Democratic presidential candidate spoke to graduates at Dillard University in New Orleans today. She says rebuilding New Orleans is an "American obligation." One she says the Bush administration has failed to meet. The historically black college was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Clinton says she has a plan that would speed the pace of recovery and assess progress in shoring up levees. Nearly two years after the hurricane, about 40% of the city's population remains displaced.

The Left is in a tizzy over the use of private security companies in New Orleans following the destruction of Hurrican Katrina. And it has less to do with the fact they have been used on US soil than the fact that they exist at all. I have absolutely no problems using such companies overseas (I wish we could just hand over the entire country of Iraq to such a company), but as a free ‘non-serf’ citizen I am always on guard against strong arm tactics by government on any level that may endanger the rights of the citizenry. But...

NASA announced plans on Monday to build a new engine test stand at Stennis Space Center in Hancock County. The announcement represents an estimated $175 million investment in Stennis and serves to support the Constellation Project. That's NASA's plan to return the United States to the Moon and eventually to Mars. The new stand at Stennis will test NASA's J-2X engines, which will be used in the second stage of the Ares I launch vehicle. NASA officials say the new 300-foot-tall open-frame design will allow engineers to simulate conditions at different altitudes. The new stand will be completed in time...

Some California high school students are discovering they don't have to travel to foreign lands to make a positive difference in the lives of others. The juniors and seniors from The King's Academy in Sunnyville, California are used to the hard work that goes along with building and repairing houses, but they're used to doing it in Mexico. High school junior Spencer Nolet said, "When you go down there and you see what these people are living in, tarps and cardboard walls, it's pretty amazing." This is Community Service Week at The King's Academy. While some students still went south...

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin believes that that the slow recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is part of a plan to disperse black voters geographically to make it more difficult for blacks to be elected to political office."Ladies and gentlemen, what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere. They are studying this model of natural disasters, dispersing the community and changing the electoral process in that community," Nagin said in a speech to the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group for newspapers serving the black community.The Washington Post reports that Nagin, who won reelection...

Washington Post reporter Lyndsey Layton reported Thursday that House Republicans will move for an unusual vote protesting the new committee assignment of Democratic Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana, the congressman still under investigation for the $90,000 in bribe money found in his home freezer. After removing Jefferson from the powerful Ways and Means Committee last year as the Democrats ran against a "culture of corruption," Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi now wants to place him on the Homeland Security Committee. Layton's story highlights Jefferson's role as a "vocal critic of FEMA's performance" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans...

Five days ago, Diane Sawyer promised viewers they could wake up to ABC’s morning program to find her and her colleagues “taking your case” to insurance companies “and getting answers” about unresolved Hurricane Katrina claims. Yet on the February 20 show, when the answers weren’t to her liking, Sawyer’s colleague Robin Roberts presented a Democratic congressman attacking the industry as a champion of homeowners, and only mentioned her own compromising emotional connection to the story at the end of her report. “And full disclosure here, to be fair, you are understanding [sic] that my family was very much affected by...

Former Senator and 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards first came to national prominence when his 2004 presidential campaign focused on the “two Americas” theme of fighting poverty. Edwards’ second presidential campaign again makes poverty a central focus, and he announced the campaign in December in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward (video below). I am very glad that Edwards is out there highlighting the neglect of the Gulf Coast when the mainstream media ignores it, but a deeper analysis shows that sadly, Edwards is no Gulf Coast champion and neglects the issue almost as much as the media. As of...

My son had been on me for a while to watch this video... I love U2, and loved the song when I first heard it, but I'm not really appreciative of Green Day's message and politics (obviously), so I avoided it for a while. That said, I was pretty blown away by this video, and can't believe Green Day had anything to do with it, unless I'm just retarded and missing something? Watch it here.

Some days nothing goes right. John Edwards had one of those days the last week of 2006 when he announced his candidacy for president -- and hardly anyone noticed. On the other hand, who didn't already know? Edwards -- who, if I'm not mistaken, is the son of a millworker -- hasn't stopped running for president since he started four years ago. He paused briefly to run for vice president in 2004, when John Kerry dragged him off the dance floor and made him his main squeeze. But no sooner did they lose than Edwards began running again. Like Forrest...

The following is the latest information on casinos reopening on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Open Beau Rivage Resort & Casino opened Aug. 29, 2006, the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The resort also plans to open a new golf course in autumn 2006. Beau Rivage has new restaurants, a redesigned and more luxurious casino, and the stores along the promenade will look more like a street with each having their own look inside and out. In addition, all of the guest rooms have been redesigned and have a new look. NEW - Silver Slipper, the Coast's newest casino opened November...

Yes, the rumor’s true. Greg Palast is facing a criminal complaint from the Department of Homeland Security stemming from his filming the Hurricane Katrina investigation for Link TV and Democracy Now. The film’s producer, Matt Pascarella, is also facing the legal wrath of Big Brother. It appears the complaint is about filming a sensitive national security site owned by Exxon petroleum. It seems that photographing major Bush donors is now a federal offense. Reached at an undisclosed location, Palast says, “Let’s not get over-excited. They haven’t measured us for our orange suits yet.” During questioning by Homeland Security, Palast asked,...

According to some political operatives and willing members of the dominant media, the nation has a President who is extraordinarily inept. Yet other critics say George W. Bush is evil beyond description. But conventional wisdom among the President's detractors implies Bush is both of these things, inept and evil, to a point never before seen in world history. According to the far left, Bush, a bumbling fool, is one of the great evil masterminds of our times. However, no one has ever accused liberals of basing their views on logic or truth. If this sounds extreme, it is. To those...

Americans still remember vividly the scenes from a year ago when Hurricane Katrina swept away entire communities, sent thousands of families for shelter in the Super Dome, and left hundreds of thousands more homeless and jobless. Americans throughout the land were moved to help in any way they could - sending donations and aid and volunteering to meet the needs of our fellow citizens. We responded because that's what Americans do. We care for our country, help our neighbors, and lend a hand to those in need. However, as we all painfully know, the Administration did not live up to...

With a tropical storm threatening Florida and the one-year anniversary of Katrina approaching, CNN’s August 28 “American Morning” kicked off a weeklong look at “Red Tape and Rubble” in the Gulf Coast. But Ali Velshi’s first report in the series was unbalanced, treating insurance companies as guilty until proven innocent of greed or fraud. “We’re going to be there when you need us,” anchor Soledad O’Brien said is the promise insurance companies extend out to policy holders, “But many Katrina victims think uh, uh, that’s not true,” she complained. O’Brien set the stage for Velshi’s unbalanced report by painting insurance...

I am not writing the following to minimize or downplay the destruction that occurred a year ago from Hurricane Katrina. Let's face it, Katrina was one of the most devastating storms to hit the United States. It was very reminiscent of Hurricane Camille in 1969 in terms of destruction. As with 9/11 and the Christmas 2004 Tsunami, we saw the best in the American people once again. Without being prompted, Americans united to send food, clothes, money, supplies and volunteers to New Orleans and the Mississippi/Alabama coast. There is no denying the generosity and compassion of Americans seen time and...

DO you remember the dramatic TV footage of National Guard helicopter landings at the Superdome, as soon as Katrina passed, to drop off tens of thousands saved from certain death? Of the corpsmen running with stretchers to carry the survivors to ambulances and the medical center? Or the reports on how the operation - with Coast Guard helicopters, regular military units and local first responders, too - went on for more than a week, saving more than 50,000 lives? No? That's because the national media imposed a near-total blackout on the nerve center of what may have been the largest,...

Matthews Has Cheney Heckler on Hardball08/25 06:54 PM - The Markup, Videos The heckler, in a scenario that no one could have foreseen, proceeded to heckle both Matthews and the other guest on the program: The heckler is Dr. Ben Marble, who famously approached Dick Cheney as he was speaking to a group of reporters in a Katrina-ravaged Mississippi neighborhood and told him to engage in an act of congress with himself. Tonight on Hardball, Marble interrupted host Chris Matthews and his other guest, Katrina survivor Rockey Vaccarella, several times. Most egregiously, he shouted down Vacarella, who recently met with President Bush, by interjecting, "You...

The president spoke with UN SG Kofi Annan about the international force being assembled for Lebanon; the Iranian regime's statement on its nuclear program; and the need to improve the situation in Darfur. He attended a fundraiser for Senator George Allen, R-VA. President Bush met with Rockey Vaccarella, Louisiana victim of Hurricane Katrina, to discuss rebuilding efforts there.

What a difference one year makes. With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall (August 29, 2005) rapidly approaching, who would have predicted that we would now be in the middle of a near-normal Atlantic hurricane season? Weren't the global warming pundits' predictions for this hurricane season that it would be just as bad -- maybe even worse! -- than last year? Yet, now at mid-August, we have had only three named tropical storms, compared to nine by this date last year. Normally, we would have had one hurricane by now, and we have not had any so far, so by...

NEW YORK — Several weeks after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, HBO documentary executives were stumped. How to respond on film to something so monumental? "We were in a meeting one day and I said, `I guess we'll have to let Katrina go,'" said Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary and Family. "Then, literally within the hour, Spike called. It was like, `Eureka!'" Spike Lee was quickly signed to chronicle the storm and its aftermath in New Orleans. The first half of Lee's heartbreaking film, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," debuts Monday. The four-hour documentary marks...

Today: August 17, 2006 at 8:45:37 PDT Son Sues Over Katrina Wheelchair Death By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The son of a 91-year-old woman who died in her wheelchair while waiting to be rescued from the city's Convention Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina sued the city and state Thursday. Herbert Humphrey Jr.'s lawsuit accuses numerous state agencies and the city of New Orleans of willful misconduct in the death of his mother, Ethel Freeman. It was filed in state Civil District Court in New Orleans. The Convention Center had been overwhelmed with desperate evacuees,...

"Greed is not the product of one particular economic system, but something that all economic, political and social systems have to cope with one way or the other." So asserts economist Thomas Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman senior fellow on public policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. According to Marxist ideology, "greed" in a capitalist system would inescapably deliver a lower level of overall well-being -- economically, morally, and politically -- than a collectivized "people's" system with more elevated and nobler goals than crass acquisitiveness, unbridled individualism and gross profit-making. Instead, as was demonstrated in the Soviet...

The CBS “Evening News” may want to change its theme music to R.E.M.’s “End of the World As We Know It.” Nearly two months into a quiet hurricane season, CBS’s Michelle Miller alarmed viewers of the July 30 broadcast with ominous warnings of a “long overdue Northeast hurricane” that “could devastate the region and cripple the U.S. economy.” Invoking the “Long Island Express” hurricane of 1938, Miller warned that as devastating at that storm was in lives lost and property damage, the economic hit today would be much worse, as “real estate values from Maryland to Maine are among the...

PASADENA, Calif. - Mr. T has given himself a makeover. The former television action star shed the piles of gold chains that were his signature look after witnessing the destruction from Hurricane Katrina. "As a spiritual man, I felt it would be a sin against my God for me to wear all that gold again because I spent a lot of time with the less fortunate," the actor said Thursday at the Television Critics Association's summer meeting. "I saw some, I call it `sorry celebrities.' They'll go down there and hook up with the people to take a photo-op. I...

KENNER, Louisiana — Three people convicted of hauling away liquor, wine and beer from a grocery store after Hurricane Katrina were sentenced to 15 years in prison. The judge said Wednesday he wanted to send a message that looting would not be tolerated when he gave the maximum sentence to Coralnelle Little, 36, Rhonda McGowen, 42, and Paul C. Pearson, 36. A jury convicted the trio May 2 on a portion of the state's looting law that took effect two weeks before the Aug. 29 storm. The amended law set a three-year minimum sentence, and a maximum of 15 years...

June 15, 2006 -- WASHINGTON - A Houston hairdresser with a long rap sheet conned the feds into paying for his sex-change operation with Hurricane Katrina aid, it was revealed yesterday. In a shocking example of mismanagement and fraud in the widening FEMA fiasco, Michael James Green, 25, was charged with bilking the feds out of $36,000 meant for destitute hurricane victims. He claimed to have lived in 18 damaged addresses and used 18 different Social Security numbers, federal prosecutors said. But Green wasn't using the money for food and shelter: He used it to pay for a sex-change operation,...