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The Obama administration on Wednesday will announce plans to sell about 1,800 trailers to families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who are living in government housing, The Washington Post reports.

Nearly four years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita left a million Americans homeless, the government is threatening to throw thousands of storm survivors out of temporary federal housing. A FEMA official told a House panel Friday that the government will send Katrina survivors still living in temporary housing eviction notices starting June 1 and try to connect them to agencies that can help them. But he also said it would be "some period of time," meaning months, before the evictions actually would begin. The $5.6 billion housing assistance program that provided temporary trailers and hotel rooms to victims was supposed...

JACKSON, Miss. — Thanh Nguyen will soon give up the cramped travel trailer that's been her home for more than four years, pack her belongings into an old Toyota Corolla and rely on the kindness of others for a place to live. She has no choice: The government is taking back the trailer. "I'm going to pack everything I have in a car and go to my friends' houses and move on and on until I find something I can afford," the Vietnamese immigrant said through a translator. "It's for however long they allow me to stay." Nguyen is one...

Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina said Tuesday that racism contributed to the slow disaster response, at times likening themselves in emotional congressional testimony to victims of genocide and the Holocaust. The comparison is inappropriate, according to Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla. “Not a single person was marched into a gas chamber and killed,” Miller told the survivors. “They died from abject neglect,” retorted community activist Leah Hodges. “We left body bags behind... The people of New Orleans were stranded in a flood and were allowed to die.” Angry evacuees described being trapped in temporary shelters where one New Orleans resident said...

Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, known for her provocative statements when she was a congresswoman from Georgia, accused the Department of Defense this week of using Hurricane Katrina to cover up the slaughter of 5,000 prisoners. At a news conference in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, McKinney claimed the Pentagon authorized the execution of the prisoners with one bullet to the head three years ago and then dumped their bodies in a Louisiana swamp.

Former Democrat member of the House of Representatives and current presidential candidate of the Looney Tunes Party Cynthia McKinney is alleging that 5000 prisoners were executed with one bullet to the head, and the thousands of bodies disposed of in a Louisiana swamp, using Hurricane Katrina as cover.Looney Tune Cynthia on YouTubeThe far left cancer has softened enough minds in the United States that people feel free to propagate lunatic theories in public.

BATON ROUGE, La. - A construction company owner who lost two homes in Hurricane Katrina claimed a $97 million Powerball prize, a jackpot won off a ticket he bought at a convenience store where he stopped to buy his wife a gallon of milk. When he turned in the winning ticket, Carl Hunter became the largest Powerball winner in Louisiana's history. He won the jackpot in January, but the 73-year-old small businessman waited nearly four months to claim the prize. An avid lottery player, Hunter said he already had bought a Powerball ticket on Jan. 16 at the gas station...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant. Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars. Thousands of Katrina victims may be in the same boat. A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid...

(NEW ORLEANS) - A group of Gulf Coast hurricane victims sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday for sheltering them in trailers that allegedly exposed them to dangerous fumes. The complaint filed in federal court adds FEMA as a defendant in a batch of consolidated cases against several manufacturers that provided the agency with tens of thousands of trailers and mobile homes after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The cases against trailer makers were consolidated in November 2007 and transferred to U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt in New Orleans. However, FEMA couldn't be named as a defendant in...

Another Katrina Lawsuit!

BOSTON, Mass. (October 31, 2007) -- According to the most comprehensive survey of people affected by Hurricane Katrina, results of which are being presented today to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery, the percentage of pre-hurricane residents of the affected areas in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi who have mental disorders has increased significantly compared to the situation five to eight months after the hurricane. These findings counter a more typical pattern from previous disasters where prevalence of mental disorders decreases as time passes. The detailed results of this report are...

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....

NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Katrina victims whose homes and businesses were destroyed when floodwaters breached levees in the 2005 storm cannot recover money from their insurance companies for the damages, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The case could affect tens of thousands of rebuilding residents and business owners in Louisiana, Daniel E. Becnel, who represented 21 plaintiffs in the case, said. Insurers could have taken a “multibillion dollar hit” if the ruling had gone against the industry, said David Rossmiller, an insurance attorney and analyst. “This event was excluded from coverage under the plaintiffs’ insurance policies, and under Louisiana...

New Orleans (AP) -- A federal appeals court ruled Thursday against Hurricane Katrina victims who argued their insurance policies should have covered flood damage caused by levee breaches that flooded 80 percent of New Orleans during the 2005 storm. The case could affect thousands of rebuilding residents and business owners in Louisiana. An insurance expert had said a ruling against the industry could have cost insurers $1 billion. "This event was excluded from coverage under the plaintiffs' insurance policies, and under Louisiana law, we are bound to enforce the unambiguous terms of their insurance contracts as written,"

The People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Committee held a press conference this morning in front of their New Orleans office to protest the alleged withholding of funds from Hurricane Katrina victims by the American Red Cross. PHRF charges that the humanitarian aid organization is concealing money available through the Means to Recovery program, which is part of its third-phase recovery efforts for people who suffered losses in Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The first phase was emergency response, sheltering and feeding, while the second phase was financial assistance. According to PHRF, the Means to Recovery program is supposed to allocate...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A grand jury refused on Tuesday to indict a doctor accused of murdering four seriously ill hospital patients with drug injections during the desperate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, closing the books on the only mercy-killing case to emerge from the storm. Dr. Anna Pou acknowledged administering medication to the patients but insisted she did so only to relieve pain. Pou (pronounced "Poh") and two nurses were arrested last summer after Attorney General Charles Foti concluded they gave "lethal cocktails" to four patients at the flooded-out, sweltering Memorial Medical Center after the August 2005 storm. The decision...

New Orleans, LA (LifeNews.com) -- Two nurses accused of euthanizing patients in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have seen the charges against them dropped by the district attorney in the case. Nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry were arrested along with physician Anna Pou on charges that they killed four patients. All three worked at New Orleans' Memorial Medical Center at the time of the hurricane. The three were accused of killing as many as nine patients so they could relinquish their responsibility for patients and flee the hospital as conditions there deteriorated. John DiGiulio, Landry's attorney, said he was...

WASHINGTON - American Indian tribes throughout the country will receive 2,000 unused trailers that were intended for but never given to Hurricane Katrina victims. Thousands of trailers have been idling in Arkansas and Texas, prompting criticism about government waste. They originally were purchased to house people displaced by the hurricane, but FEMA officials said regulations against placing the homes in flood plains prevented their use on the Gulf Coast. Last year, Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., urged the agency to donate the trailers to American Indian country, but the agency said federal law dictated the trailers must be used for disaster...

Nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of New Orleans, 100 bodies of victims remain housed in a warehouse near the Superdome. CNN reports that 70 of those bodies have been identified, but relatives are simply "too poor" or otherwise unable to claim them. The names of the other 30 victims are still unknown. Dr. Frank Minyard, New Orleans' coroner, has so far raised $250,000 of the $400,000 he says is needed to break ground on a mausoleum for the unclaimed bodies. For now, those 100 people rest in numbered plastic-wrapped coffins inside the unmarked warehouse.

WASHINGTON -- Regions plagued by rising violent crime could share in a $200 million grant next year with a new Justice Department grant targeting gangs, illicit drugs and gun offenses. The Justice Department will ask for the funding for state, local and tribal authorities as part of its 2008 budget request to Congress next week. It comes in the wake of a 2.2 percent rise nationwide in rapes, murder, robbery, aggravated assault and other violent crimes in 2006 -- the first increase since 2001. Communities that team up with other cities and regions, partnering with at least one federal law...