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Despite the wall-to-wall coverage of the damage from Hurricane Katrina, nearly one-third of young Americans recently polled couldn't locate Louisiana on a map and nearly half were unable to identify Mississippi. Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 fared even worse with foreign locations: six in 10 couldn't find Iraq... _ Nearly three-quarters incorrectly named English as the most widely spoken native language. _ Six in 10 did not know the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified in the world. Thirty percent thought the most heavily fortified border was between the United States and...

NEW ORLEANS (UPI) -- New Orleans levees completed in the 1980s and 1990s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were not designed for a sinking city, a report says. The design decision was made in 1985 by Frederick Chatry, then the head of engineering for the New Orleans district, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. The corps was in the midst of a massive project building levees and flood walls that had been authorized by Congress in 1965. In 1985, the U.S. Geodetic Survey released a new map that put the baseline elevation of New Orleans as much as a...

Against the odds, New Orleans and Katrina survivors went to the polls last week to elect the mayor and other officials who will guide the reconstruction of the city. The current mayor, Ray Nagin, placed first, and will face a runoff against leading challenger Mitch Landrieu on May 20. Newspapers hailed the election as demonstrating the grit of the people of New Orleans. But this election was marked by voting wrongs, not voting rights. This election was held under protest in flagrant violation of the Voting Rights Act. The votes that were tallied were less significant than the voters who...

The President of the United States of America has announced in a theatrically heroic manner that New Orleans will be rebuilt. At first blush, what he has proposed seems like a nice idea. That is the best that can be said of it. A wise evaluation of the facts tells us that the horrendously expensive project he has proposed is a fool’s errand. The city is doomed. There is absolutely no hope for it in the long term. Emotionally pleasing as it may be, rebuilding New Orleans prophesies an even worse disaster than what we have just seen. Hurricanes are...

The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city's poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana. The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city's poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city's poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some...

The White House yesterday agreed to spend $1.5 billion to strengthen levees in New Orleans, although it stopped short of saying the levees will be able to withstand a Cat egory 5 hurricane. "The levee system will be better and safer than it's ever been before," said Donald Powell, the administration's reconstruction czar. "The federal government is committed to building the best levee system known in the world." Mr. Powell made the announcement at the White House after meeting with President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, head of...

John Cooper is a freelance cameraman who has been working as one of the “roving cameramen” for Newspath, CBS’s news service that provides material for the network’s affiliates across the country. He has been in New Orleans for two weeks, traveling around the city with a producer and a correspondent, seeking stories and filing daily for CBS affiliates. Cooper has been with CBS News for about 10 years and has been in the news business for 20, covering many hurricanes throughout that time. He has traveled the world working on various documentaries, and most recently, he traveled with CBS News...

NEW ORLEANS -- Hurricane Rita rattled even more debris out of New Orleans yesterday, as federal officials began bracing for another possible wave of oil, chemical, and hazardous waste spills. Federal emergency officials launched helicopters yesterday afternoon, as soon it was safe to inspect fragile containments and clean-up machinery at dozens of sites where hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spilled during Katrina. Concerns were high that other tanks, pipelines, or drums that had been weakened during Katrina may have sprung leaks Meanwhile, the putrid soup of chemicals and bacteria that had settled into a thick sludge was sloshing...

What is it about New Orleans? Why does it loom so large on the American psyche, take up such a huge chunk of our collective imagination? It's not that big. Its population of 484,000 puts it at 31st among American cities. Its metropolitan area of 1.3 million is dwarfed by many others whose destruction at the hands of a natural disaster would certainly be mourned but not with the intensity of feeling that the nation is feeling now. The breaches in the levees of New Orleans seemed to have landed a blow to our national solar plexus. There is the...

"There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eights of our territory must pass to market." So wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1803 to his negotiators in France, in words intended to persuade Napoleon to sell the already thriving port city to the young United States. The French ruler was impressed enough to throw in the vast hinterland of the Louisiana Purchase, all for the bargain price of $15 million. As I write, four days after the levees broke, the possessors of...

Extremely dangerous Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on the North Central Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans metro area. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin conceded that as many as 100,000 inner-city residents didn't have the means to leave and an untold number of tourists were stranded by the closing of the airport. At this hour, people are still filing into the Superdome after security screening for weapons and contraband. National Guard have brought in 360,000 MRE (meals ready to eat) to feed the estimated 30,000 storm refugees in the Superdome. The following links are self-updating: Public Advisory Currently published every...

New Orleans - Sam Uglesich grew up among mariners and fishermen off the coast of Croatia on rocky Dugi Otok, whose name means "long island," surrounded by the azure waters of the Adriatic. Twice he set out for the United States. The first time, he jumped ship in New York, but was caught and sent home. The second time, he made his break in New Orleans, then as now a more permissive city, and got away with it. Naturally enough, he opened a seafood restaurant in his adopted city, specializing in the local shrimp, soft-shell crabs, lake trout and oysters....

It was a beautiful, mild, sunny day in Metairie (a suburb of New Orleans), and the crowd of patriots who came to our informal “Rally for America” were full of optimism and in a flag-waving mood. We are all so thankful that seven of our POWs were found alive today and that our heroic troops have brought freedom to the people of Iraq! We are so proud of our troops and so proud to be Americans! This is the fourth patriotic rally in the New Orleans area in four weeks organized by Patriot1 and me. We have been organizing “informal”...