Free Republic

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...

New Orleans police chief during Hurricane Katrina, Eddie Compass, says he unnecessarily "heightened people's fears" by repeating unconfirmed reports of out-of-control crime in the city during the aftermath of the storm, adding to the confusion caused by the disaster and potentially hampering rescue efforts. "There were reports of rapes and children being raped. I even got one report … that my daughter was raped," Mr. Compass says in a Spike Lee documentary scheduled to air on HBO tonight. "In hindsight, I guess I heightened people's fears by me being the superintendent of police, reporting these things that were reported to...

NEW ORLEANS -- Mayor Ray Nagin unveiled a new evacuation strategy for New Orleans on Tuesday that relies more on buses and trains and eliminates the Superdome and Convention Center as shelters. "There will be no shelter of last resort in the event of a major hurricane coming our way," Nagin declared. The mayor, facing a runoff election May 20, has been widely criticized for failing to get the city's most vulnerable residents out of town as Hurricane Katrina approached. The Superdome and Morial Convention Center became a scene of misery for days after the Aug. 29 hurricane as thousands...

NEW ORLEANS - At first glance, the mayoral debate seemed like any other -- a forum in which the challengers focused most of their attacks on the incumbent, who spent much of his allotted time defending his record and trying to turn the problems that have plagued his administration into a positive in the name of experience. But Monday night's New Orleans mayoral debate also reflected the unprecedented circumstances of this election, first and foremost by being broadcast on national television, on MSNBC. Viewers outside New Orleans may not have recognized any of the seven candidates who took part except...

New Orleans has long been pivotal in the struggle for black voting rights. During the Civil War, free blacks there demanded suffrage; their efforts resulted in Lincoln's first public call for voting rights for some blacks in the final speech of his life. Once these rights were won, New Orleans blacks took an active part in politics, leading to the establishment of the South's only integrated public school system. But rights once gained aren't necessarily secure; after Reconstruction, blacks in New Orleans lost the right to vote. As Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote at the time of the Civil War, "revolutions...

WASHINGTON -- Four African-American New Orleans residents told a House committee Tuesday that they felt a sense of abandonment from all levels of government when Hurricane Katrina hit three months ago and believe more lives and homes would have been saved had the victims been predominantly white and wealthier. "People were allowed to die," said Leah Hodges, who told the panel she still doesn't know if her brother survived the hurricane. She likened what happened to New Orleans, and many of its black residents, to "genocide and ethnic cleansing."

NEW ORLEANS — Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders. Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department's resolve to take back the streets. But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account...

There is a shot where Blanco is being set up several days ago for a TV interview, and her press secretary is helping her adjust her mic. They’re having a personal conversation, but the cameraman catches it!! In it, she kinda jokes to her press secretary something like “yeah, well I guess I really need to ask for troops,” and a couple more things she says. A bit later in hte segment she gets into a semi-argument with Miles O’Brien, and he’s pointedly asking her exactly WHEN she asked the President for troops.She gets frustrated and says she didn’t even...

‘We cannot allow it to be said by history that the difference between those who lived and those who died in the great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin color.” - Representative Elijah Cummings It’s painfully difficult for me to wrap my mind around images of Americans lying dead by the score, their corpses being eaten by rats and dogs. As a brave new America trudges forward into the 21 st Century armed with a new set of national priorities, there’s something acutely unnatural about this disaster. First of all, it didn’t have...

Brinkley, a professor at New Orleans' own Tulane University who accompanied Penn on his voyage through the under-water city, was among the first to denounce the report. "There was never a leak," he said in the Daily News. On Larry King Live, Penn concurred: "The boat never sank." According to Brinkley, the boat did take on water--because it was "overloaded" with storm survivors. According to Penn, his "entourage" consisted of "a couple of friends." (The actor's camp denied the existence of the "personal photographer.

The Red Cross has confirmed to Fox News Channel's Major Garrett that they had requested permission to take food and medical supplies to the Louisiana Superdome in the hours immediately after Hurricane Katrina's landfall. That request was denied by none other than Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco.Garrett appeared on Hugh Hewitt's syndicated radio program this evening to discuss the shocking revelation.MG: Well, the Red Cross, Hugh, had pre-positioned a literal vanguard of trucks with water, food, blankets and hygiene items. They're not really big into medical response items, but those are the three biggies that we saw people at the New...

The number of Katrina evacuees counted at Houston's largest shelters is dropping dramatically as people leave for new accommodations, new jobs and new lives. Today 8,066 hurricane victims are still stranded at the three Reliant Park shelters and the downtown George R. Brown Convention Center, down from 25,400 reported just Tuesday. It's evident at a glance that evacuees have more breathing room than they did last weekend, but it's hard to track how many people are simply switching shelters, moving in with relatives or actually finding more permanent housing. After Reliant Park imposed a curfew for the first time last...

http://www.infowars.com/articles/new_orleans/police_loot_walmart.htm

When night falls, Charlie Hackett climbs the steps to his boarded-up window, takes down the plywood, grabs his 12-gauge shotgun and waits. He is waiting for looters and troublemakers... Two doors down, John Carolan is doing the same on his screened-in porch, pistol by his side. "We kind of together decided we would defend what we have here and we would stay up and defend the neighborhood..." Many of the homes appear only slightly damaged, or even untouched. But the neighborhoods are stunningly empty, and so quiet that they sound like a forest. ...it reminds me of Dac To." They...

HURRICANE Katrina was a horrific natural disaster. To America's Angry Left it was yet another occasion to score political points against President George W. Bush. In the same spirit of opportunism that animated looters who stole television sets, Bush's political foes frantically sought to blame the devastation on him. A measure of the anti-Bush Left's derangement is that it blames him for bad weather. "Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes," The New York Times editorialised on Thursday. "But since this administration won't acknowledge that...

Tensions color Bush, Blanco meeting Gov. Kathleen Blanco canceled a scheduled trip Monday to visit Louisiana evacuees in Houston shelters to stay in Baton Rouge to meet with President Bush. Blanco Communications Director Bob Mann said the governor did not learn about the Bush visit until early Monday morning. “We had no idea the president was coming,” Mann said. Tension between the Blanco and Bush administrations has surfaced in recent days as state and federal officials try to coordinate recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Blanco administration clearly wanted to express their irritation with the communication about...

NEW ORLEANS - New Orleans turned much of its attention Sunday to gathering up and counting the dead across a ghastly landscape awash in perhaps thousands of corpses. "It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine," the nation's homeland security chief warned. SNIP With large-scale evacuations completed at the Superdome and Convention Center, the death toll was not known. But bodies were everywhere: floating in canals, slumped in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways and medians and hidden in attics. SNIP The U.S. Public Health Service said one morgue alone, at a St....

<p>Mod point of clarification: The first 100 or so replies below were posted in reaction to reports that the contractors had been fatally shot.</p>