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New Orleans, Louisiana, Mayor Ray Nagin arrived in Cuba late Friday on a mission to learn about how to deal with storms, a spokeswoman said. "We understand we may have a lot to learn from the Cubans in terms of disaster preparedness and how they have dealt with hurricanes," spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett said. Cuba is internationally applauded for exceptional disaster management, according to a news release from Nagin's office. In the Cuban capital, Havana, Nagin plans to meet with several officials, including some from the Latin American Medical Centers for Disaster. He will also learn about preparations the Cuba Defense...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama, who accused former President George W. Bush of leading a government "that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns," is hearing directly from New Orleans residents who have struggled to rebuild their city since the 2005 hurricane season. Obama arrives in New Orleans Thursday on his first presidential trip to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast. About 1,600 people were killed in Louisiana and Mississippi by Hurricane Katrina, which caused $40 billion in damages and displaced 1 million people from their homes.

Obama: 'We Will Not Forget' Troubled New Orleans ASSOCIATED PRESS October 15, 2009 NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- President Barack Obama is promising the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast that his administration ''will not forget'' them as they work to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Obama says he makes no excuses for the fact that the federal government didn't work effectively with state and local officials in the aftermath of the storm four years ago. But he says his administration is ''working around the clock to clean up red tape and eliminate bureaucracy.''

President Barack Obama warned his critics Thursday that on healthcare and other agenda items that he is "not tired" and he is "just getting started." In fiery remarks at at townhall meeting in New Orleans before a "feisty crowd," Obama repeated his belief that healthcare reform would pass this year, and he again said that change would not be easy. The president drew raucous applause after he joked that he was taking criticism from the media for not solving world hunger in his first nine months in office. Even as Obama said that change would take time, he did vow...

Making his first visit to Louisiana since becoming the nation's 44th chief executive, President Barack Obama told a spirited crowd at the University of New Orleans on Thursday that he will help build a stronger Gulf Coast than the one Hurricane Katrina and broken levees wrecked four years ago. "I promise you this -- whether it's me coming down here or my Cabinet or other members of my administration -- we will not forget about New Orleans," Obama said. "We are going to keep on working. . . . Together, we will rebuild this region, and we will build it...

The Big Easy is making a big comeback. New Orleans has steadily won back some of the population it lost in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to a government report released Wednesday. New Orleans lost more than half its residents during the deluge. Few large U.S. cities have ever had to cope with disaster on that scale. Since then, it has been one of the country's fastest growing cities. Only a couple of instances can compare. Galveston, Texas, was also devastated by a hurricane in 1900, a storm that remains the most lethal natural disaster in U.S....

Reporting from New Orleans -- Nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina, it is the worry that will not fade, complicating the rebuilding of New Orleans and defining and reflecting this fragile city's racial divisions. Call it the fear of a shrunken city. Immediately after the storm, many residents, often African Americans, worried that low-lying flood-ravaged neighborhoods would be left unbuilt and turned into wetlands. Though that possibility has diminished, one fear won't dissipate: that those same areas may wither as a result of restrictive zoning changes or a waning commitment to rebuilding in certain parts of town. It's the issue...

Mr. Pitt is going Washington. Nancy Pelosi's office says Brad Pitt is set to meet with the Speaker of the House on Thursday to discuss the 45-year-old actor's charity efforts in New Orleans. Pitt founded "Make It Right" in 2007 to help build environmentally sustainable housing for low-income residents in New Orleans who lost their homes during Hurricane Katrina. He was nominated for a best-actor Oscar for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Abandoned by their government, many residents of New Orleans have little optimism about the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House on 20 January Jonny Trask - pictured outside his family's home - is disillusioned by the way he and others have been treated Jonny Trask is black, in his forties, American, and completely indifferent to Barack Obama. "It doesn't make any difference to me," he says referring to the next president. "Or to most of the black people in New Orleans." Trask, a former gang member who has served time both in the military and in prison ("Jail...

About 100 Louisiana National Guardsmen will remain on police duty in New Orleans through March 1, a legislative panel decided Friday. But some lawmakers from outside the metropolitan area bristled at the city's request for continued aid, spending several minutes brow-beating Police Superintendent Warren Riley about his department's repeated trips to the Capitol for help since Hurricane Katrina. Riley defended the city's progress and promised lawmakers that Friday would be his last appearance before the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget. ... There has been a National Guard presence in the city since the post-Katrina flooding, with the aid being...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Some survivors of Hurricane Katrina say they aren't getting enough attention from the Bush administration, so they're turning to Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez for help. Ishmael Muhammad of the New Orleans Survivor Council has visited Venezuela three times to seek funding and forge ties. He says the group hopes to raise $45,000 for a center to house 50 people as they rebuild their homes.

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Ask the man assigned to combat corruption and bureaucracy in New Orleans how the fight is going and he will tell you about his telephone problems. "I started last September and they only switched my phone lines on two weeks ago," said Robert Cerasoli, New Orleans' first-ever Inspector General in a recent interview. "Everything has been a battle since, everything has been a fight." < > "This is Louisiana," Cerasoli said with a shrug. < >

Hurdles of language, mistrust addressed: A burgeoning Hispanic population has helped rebuild New Orleans during the past two and a half years. Now officials are coming to grips with the challenge of moving and finding safe refuge for that population should another hurricane threaten. Since Hurricane Katrina, as many as 14,000 Hispanic immigrants have arrived in New Orleans to provide muscle and skills for the recovery effort. Now civic groups as well as government officials say overcoming cultural and language barriers between emergency officials and Spanish speakers -- especially the undocumented -- has taken on new urgency.

Ever since it took over the public housing projects of New Orleans more than a decade ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been itching to tear them down. Now, after years of lawsuits and delays, it looks as if the agency will finally get its Christmas wish. The New Orleans City Council is scheduled to vote on Thursday on whether to sign off on the demolitions of three projects. HUD already has its bulldozers in place, engines warm and ready to roll the next morning. Arguing that the housing was barely livable before the flooding unleashed by...

So, President and Mrs. Bush went down to New Orleans to commemorate the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina...Here's a pop quiz: How much money has Uncle Sam spent...since Hurricane Katrina ripped the place apart? The grand total is $127 billion (including tax relief). That's right: a monstrous $127 billion. Of course, not a single media story has highlighted this gargantuan government-spending figure. But that number came straight from the White House... This is an outrage. The entire GDP of the state of Louisiana is only $141 billion, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. So the cash spent there nearly matches...

Two years ago, Robert Lynn Green of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans lost nearly everything precious to him in the world. His granddaughter, Shanai, was swept out of his hands in the flood and drowned. His home was washed away. And the skeleton of his 73-year-old mother, Loyce, was found four months later, trapped in the ruins of his house. Green has been camped out for months in a FEMA trailer, waiting for help that never seems to come. One reason for the delay is that Louisiana's political corruption, unfortunately, was one thing that didn't get washed away...

How much money has Uncle Sam spent on New Orleans and the Gulf region since Hurricane Katrina ripped the place apart?...I’ll give you the answer because you’ll never guess it. The grand total is $127 billion (including tax relief)...

Aide to New Orleans mayor describes chaos after storm in new book — NEW ORLEANS — After Hurricane Katrina inundated his city with floodwaters, leaving in its wake a wave of human suffering and lawlessness, Mayor C. Ray Nagin surveyed what already was being called the nation’s worst natural disaster from the window of a sweltering hotel suite he’d commandeered. “Are you OK?” his press secretary, Sally Forman, asked. “This was God’s plan for me, Sally,” Nagin said. “What was?” she asked. “To rebuild New Orleans.” That exchange is one of the many insights into the man and the chaos...

NEW ORLEANS - For proof that Hurricane Katrina is transforming the ethnic flavor of New Orleans — and creating altogether new tensions — look no further than the taco trucks. Lunch trucks serving Latin American fare are appearing around New Orleans, catering to the immigrant laborers who streamed into the city in search of work after Katrina turned much of the place into a construction zone. The trucks are a common sight in barrios from Los Angeles to New York, but controversial in a city still adapting to a threefold increase in Hispanics since Katrina. Officials in suburban Jefferson Parish...

CHAPEL HILL -- In the attempt to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, many controversial questions have yet to be answered: Should the poorer neighborhoods like the 9th Ward be rebuilt where they are or should integrated neighborhoods be rebuilt on safe ground? And should people whose homes were destroyed be told they can't return to their old homes and told they have to move to those new neighborhoods? They were among the questions discussed Friday during a panel discussion on "Katrina Revisited: Progress Made and Challenges Ahead," hosted by former vice presidential candidate John Edwards, director of UNC Center...

In the second day of Ray Nagin's trip to New York, the mayor is seeking investors for New Orleans. Nagin is in Manhattan trying to sell New Orleans to New Yorkers, but business owners like Effie Naghi say the weekend is a washout. Naghi, a French-Quarter jeweler, joined the mayor's two-day Manhattan event hoping to strike deals or at least meet some New Yorkers. "We didn't get any New Yorkers in this facility, that's basically what happened, that's it," said Naghi. He says he made no deals and signed no contracts. "It's kind of silly, we didn't have to make...

In New Orleans these days, even a magician can run out of tricks.

WNBC.com reports: NEW YORK -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, confronted with accusations he's taking too long to rebuild his city after Hurricane Katrina, takes a swipe at New York's redevelopment of the World Trade Center site on a television news show. Nagin, weaving through the wreckage in the devastated Ninth Ward neighborhood, claimed much of the debris was removed from public property, but when a "60 Minutes" correspondent pointed out flood-damaged cars on the streets, Nagin shot back, "You guys in New York can't get a hole in the ground fixed, and it's five years later. So let's be...

CBS) Confronted by accusations that he’s taking too long to clean up his city after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin defended himself by remarking on New York City’s failure to rebuild Ground Zero. Nagin made the remarks in an interview conducted by CBS News National Correspondent Byron Pitts which will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Aug. 27, at 7 p.m. EDT. On a tour of the decimated Ninth Ward, Nagin tells Pitts the city has removed most of the debris from public property and it’s mainly private land that’s still affected – areas that can’t be cleaned...

With 219,000 estimated back, city nears half its prestorm level Nearly a year after the flood scattered its residents across the country, New Orleans' population now approaches half its pre-Katrina level, according to statistics released by Entergy on Tuesday. To be precise, the new figures -- which show that the utility's has about 52 percent fewer electrical customers than it did a year ago -- suggest a current population of 219,390, in the same range as several recent estimates.

America : How Much is a Billion? A Billion!!!!! Here's some thought provoking information - The next time you hear a politician use the word "billion" in a casual manner, think about whether you want the "politicians" spending your tax money . A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases . . . A billion seconds ago it was 1959... A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive... A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet... A...

(August 13, 2006)--A suburban New Orleans pastor says he believes Hurricane Katrina put the "fear of God" into the city, but he isn't sure that will last. The Rev. Grant Storms of The Reformer Church in Metairie, La., says New Orleans is a more sober city, literally and spiritually, than it was before Katrina struck. He hopes New Orleans' French Quarter will now shed its immoral image and become a place that families won't be afraid to visit. But Storms notes that the annual Southern Decadence festival is scheduled to begin on Aug. 30, the day after the first anniversary...

HOUSTON -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said Monday his city is recovering and that people have been "hoodwinked and bamboozled" into believing it won't be rebuilt. Nagin spoke at the Essence Music Festival's empowerment seminars, being held outside New Orleans for the first time because of lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina. "We are moving forward," he said. "New Orleans is a city that is in recovery, and it is coming back." He said he wanted to let people know "what is really going on," that New Orleans is ahead of schedule on rebuilding and that 98 percent of the...

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in Dallas to raise money for Republican candidates, described the rebuilding effort in New Orleans as "pathetic" Thursday and said it will take political courage and leadership for the city to fully recover from Hurricane Katrina. 'I expected the [hurricane] devastation. What I did not expect was the lack of activity,' said Rudolph Giuliani, who spoke Thursday at the Greater Dallas Chamber luncheon and was in town to raise money for GOP candidates. Mr. Giuliani gave his analysis to business leaders gathered at a Greater Dallas Chamber luncheon. Responding to a question from the...

Big Questions About the Big Easy Hughes Joseph Hughes chairs the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech and serves on the EPA's environmental engineering advisory committee. He toured the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast with President Wayne Clough in November, spoke to former Alumni Association trustees in January and recently sat down with the ALUMNI MAGAZINE. Hughes now is helping coordinate a conference that will address the future of New Orleans.What is Georgia Tech's role in the rebuilding of New Orleans? We're at the stage right now in the discussion where there are real questions whether we should rebuild...

In just eight months, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has done years of work on the Katrina-battered ramparts around New Orleans. The Corps has repaired 169 miles of damaged levee. Replaced long stretches of inadequate concrete floodwall with a much sturdier design. Installed 70-ton gates at the mouths of ruptured drainage canals. But it isn't good enough. Even the man who has led the monumental effort to bring the Big Easy's hurricane protection infrastructure back to pre-Katrina standards says so. The defenses are "better, stronger and more resilient" than ever, said Col. Lewis Setliff. "But I'm only fixing about...

NEW ORLEANS — Another week scooping the rotted guts of flooded homes from city streets behind him, Efrain Pineda donned his Sunday best — denim jeans and blue button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up — and made haste for Easter Mass. The name alone drew Pineda to a Catholic church near the intersection of Canal Boulevard and Rampart Street: Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of his native Mexico. Beyond the “alleluias” and “amens,” though, it isn’t much like home. The congregation has always been predominantly African-American, counting Fats Domino among its faithful. Much of the music is gospel, distinguished by...

NEW YORK-- Brad Pitt called Thursday for people to submit proposals for an environmentally friendly design competition he is sponsoring to rebuild parts of New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "Our goal is to kick off the rebuilding effort. It's certainly long overdue and I can only go from the reports that we get ... that it's behind, absolutely. People are frustrated," Pitt said by telephone from Namibia. "We could possibly build something that was better and took into account the historical traditions of the city and the voices of the people and turn this into some kind of good,"...

WASHINGTON - A full recovery in New Orleans could take 25 years as homeowners, businesses and tourists are coaxed back to the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator said Thursday. In an interview with The Associated Press, Don Powell said that much of the city's rebirth will hinge on factors he said were "out of our control," including restoring housing, ensuring safety and encouraging robust investment by the private sector. "We kind of want it to happen overnight, or I do, but it's going to take some time," Powell said. "This could be five...

The New Black Panther Party is coming to New Orleans on Friday to represent the black "masses" who have been "displaced, murdered and abandoned" by a negligent government at war with its people, the group said in a press release. The leader of the New Black Panther Party, attorney Malik Zulu Shabazz, said his group will launch a "weekend of mobilization that will give rise to a never-before-seen stage in the Afrikan Liberation Movement." The press release describes the event as a self-help program for black people in the city where "the plot to destroy the Black civilization has continued...

Evangelist Billy Graham seems to have closed out his 60-year career as the country's most famous evangelist after calling thousands to Christian faith in wounded New Orleans with the acknowledgment that "this is probably the last evangelistic sermon I'll ever preach." Frail and tentative, the 87-year-old Graham shuffled behind a walker toward the pulpit set at one end of the New Orleans Arena as a crowd his organization estimated at 16,300 stood in a sustained roar of applause on Sunday (March 12). His son and heir, Franklin Graham, gently assisted him into place. Thousands of flash bulbs exploded. An overflow...

The president, accompanied by his wife, made his tenth trip to the hurricane-damaged Gulf Coast, met with various local officials, builders, levee workers, and lent a reconstruction hand. Laura Bush, visiting an elementary school with the president, spoke about rebuilding libraries in the region. The vice president spoke yesterday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee 2006 Policy Conference. Click here for his remarks. WELCOME TO SANITY ISLAND!

Another Senator is questioning the decision to spend billions of dollars to help especially hard hit areas of southeast Louisiana rebuild – especially areas that will continue to be vulnerable to another storm. Utah Republican Senator Bob Bennett made his comments at a hearing of the Congressional appropriations committee where the head of the Department of Homeland Security and the director of HUD were asking for an additional $19 billion to continue rebuilding. “I’m happy to appropriate money to people who are in trouble,” said Bennett. “But, if we are going to appropriate money and rebuild in a place that...

"Should I stay or Should I go?" That immortal refrain, sung loudly by The Clash circa 1982, has echoed through my head day and night since returning to New Orleans last November. Like most locals, my young family faces tough decisions on whether or not to move away. We could dig down deep and stay for the long haul, accepting, as Buddhists do, that life is difficult, and that it will be difficult here for the foreseeable and very uncertain future. Or we could hit the road, Jack, pack it in and head for greener, cleaner pastures. Make no mistake,...

Developers are planning for a boom—by the city's waterfront ___ Not far from the madness that was Mardi Gras in downtown New Orleans, developers are hoping to start a frenzy of their own—in real estate along the Mississippi River. The French, it turns out, knew what they were doing when they built the Vieux Carre at the bend in the river. That section of the city didn't flood after Hurricane Katrina, even after the levees broke, because it was on higher ground. Now, while homeowners in suburban New Orleans worry that neighborhoods will be bulldozed for parks and greenways, the...

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...

snip... BOB BEA: In differing locations along the length of the MR-GO levee, we stopped, I got out and collected the soil samples. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Bob Bea is a civil engineer from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a member of an independent team investigating why the levees failed. Bea recently took three samples of soil from MR-GO and had them tested. BOB BEA: This material is relatively sandy, comes from probably something that is like a beach that has had clay mixed into it. Now the concern for such material is underwater erosion like comes from...

Officials in New Orleans are scrambling for funds to pay for the 2006 Carnival parade season. The city began planning the Mardi Gras festivities just weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit in Aug 29 and the accompanying levee failures devastated the city. Krewe officials have yet to line up the $2.7 million needed, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. MediaBuys LLC of Los Angeles, which was hired to find sponsors, told the newspaper significant sponsorships may be announced Monday. None had been finalized by Thursday, the newspaper said. Councilwoman Renee Gill Pratt, who chairs the city council's Budget Committee, said she would...

Baton Rouge -- Gov. Kathleen Blanco on Wednesday abandoned for now her push to shrink New Orleans' government after the proposal ran into strong opposition during a special legislative session on hurricane relief. "I know there's a resistance to change. It's very hard to get a focus on reform," Blanco said, acknowledging she has given up on the legislation this session. The measure by House Speaker Joe Salter would have consolidated the city's century-old network of two elected sheriffs, two elected clerks of court and two court systems. It passed the House overwhelmingly and was scheduled for a hearing Wednesday...

New Orleans Betrayed Sunday, January 29, 2006; Page B06 IN FRONT OF the cameras last September, President Bush promised to rebuild New Orleans. In private, White House officials told Louisiana's notoriously argumentative politicians -- Democrats and Republicans, state and local -- to get their act together and come up with a reasonable plan, one that would neither cost too much nor result in people rebuilding in flood-prone districts. To many people's immense surprise, they did. In consultation with the Urban Land Institute, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) proposed a logical reconstruction of his city, with buildings on higher...

A day after President Bush rebuked local and state officials for not producing a hurricane recovery plan, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said his administration is just weeks away from delivering a voluminous document that will detail the city's strategy for rebuilding neighborhoods, restoring public services and resurrecting the region's wrecked economy. Nagin's promise came on Friday after his Bring New Orleans Back commission accepted the last of six reports from subcommittees advising the mayor on education, culture, health care and other matters.

If the quote don't fit ya agenda, put your ethics in a blenda.

The sage adage reminds us, "It is better to be thought of as a fool, than to open your mouth, and remove all doubt." New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin, who, when caught with his pants down during Hurricane Katrina because of his lack of preparation, abandoned the city for higher ground, leaving many of New Orleans poor, and most of them as black as Nagin, to fend for themselves or drown, while hundreds of buses that could have evacuated them remained idle and flooded. This was the very same foul-mouthed, inarticulate, hysterical so-called leader, Mayor Ray Nagin, who cursed so...

WASHINGTON -- Pity the poor Democrats. Five years of George W. Bush in office have driven them to distraction. Their most audible advocates have developed "Mad Mule Malady." The symptoms are identical to "Foot-in-Mouth Disease," and those running for office under the Democrat Party banner this year are likely to find their colleagues' increasingly vicious verbal gaffes to be both memorable and damaging. The onset of their illness could not be more instructive. As leading Democrats are attacking Republicans, al Qaeda is planning to attack America. That is what we are told by Osama bin Laden, who, in an audio...

As usual, the mantra of tyranny in this instance is "sustainability" and "isolation". As I figured, the poor souls that have lost everything in the Katrina tragedy will now have what little remains taken away for the sake of the elites. There are plans to finagle away property at only 60% of its actual value, but even if 100 times the market value was offered, that is not the point. If one really wants to lay the foundation of a new New Orleans, why not raize Bourbon Street notorious for its debauchery and devil worship.