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WASHINGTON - President Bush on Saturday renewed the nation's commitment to help victims of last year's Gulf Coast hurricanes and thanked U.S. troops fighting abroad. In his Saturday radio address, Bush said Americans are grateful to those who rallied after hurricanes Katrina and Rita to bring food, water and hope to people who lost everything. "We renew our commitment to help those who are still suffering and to rebuild our nation's Gulf Coast," Bush said. This week, the president will attend a NATO summit in Europe and will meet in Jordan with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. On Saturday, he...

This historic waterfront city was on the verge of becoming the great gambling destination of the South. Then came Hurricane Katrina. Now the Gulf Coast is fighting to get back in the game. BILOXI, Miss. -- Olivia Boglin stood in her yard, staring down at a pile of Sheetrock. Just staring in the Mississippi heat, dabbing the sweat off her forehead with a wadded-up tissue. A block away, a guy was riding a bicycle slow, so the front wheel swerved with each crank of the pedals. The heat, the humidity and the noon hour had everything almost at a standstill....

Comic Relief held its 20th event Saturday night from the Harrah's property in Las Vegas to help raise money and awareness for victims of Hurricane Katrina. That's a noteworthy cause, to be sure, and we in South Mississippi were gratified to hear that more than a year after the storm, people still recognized we need help here. Of course, that was before the pre-event press releases came out, advertising appeared and the show itself was aired simultaneously on HBO and WTBS. The media advances talked about how bad New Orleans was affected. The billboards and at least one full-page ad...

"I got a cut on my bone," Timothy Sims said as he showed a deep cut on his leg. Sims learned a painful lesson about being in the wrong place, at the wrong time Monday morning. "I go to the bus to catch my bus and all of a sudden I saw this dude across the street trying to fight," said Sims. Sims says the fight at a bus stop on Bonita Drive was between a teenager and a Gulfport student. Sims says he saw the student grab a stick. "He got a stick or something, and just started swinging,"...

PASCAGOULA - Unlike many other Coast cities, Pascagoula is moving ahead with plans developed through the renewal and recovery sessions sponsored by the governor's office and community leaders. The city is partnering with developers to build new homes that draw on the vision New Urbanists have for rebuilding the Coast. In addition, the city is putting an emphasis on its long-term plans for recreation, and is entering into a lease-purchase agreement to buy government-subsidized property for a new community center and retail shops. Pascagoula was among the first South Mississippi cities to adopt FEMA's new elevation requirements, and its residents...

President and Mrs. Bush are spending Labor Day weekend at their ranch in Crawford, Texas.* *This is based only on the information I could find. I could be wrong. On Tuesday, September 5, the president will resume his series of speeches which remind us all of the true nature of our enemy (the Islamic fascists), while criticizing the critics of the WOT (the leftist appeasers). With no other news available, today’s Dose will recap the best photos of the week. Enjoy your Saturday visit to Sanity Island

Seemingly before the wind stopped, certainly before power was restored, they began arriving. The initial wave brought the food, the drink, the clothing, the gasoline to get through those first desperate, chaotic days. The second wave brought hammers, saws, shovels, drills, all the tools necessary to begin removing Hurricane Katrina’s afterbirth. As summer turned to fall and fall to winter, they came, wave after wave after wave. From near and far, points domestic and international, some 350,000 volunteers set aside their lives to help us rebuild ours. And still they come. To paraphrase volunteer Elizabeth Ryan, they climb, pound, beat,...

Scotty Hancock spent a week in southern Mississippi, seeing Hurricane Katrina’s destruction firsthand. Monday night at the old Kroger building on Hicks Drive, Hancock, the Floyd County Emergency Management Agency director, shared his photos, videos and personal accounts of the devastation with RomeKares volunteers. His message to them: You’re doing more good than you could possibly know. “I wanted to let these folks see what their time and donations are going toward,” he said. “There is a lot of good going on down there.” While no pictures may truly capture the scene, volunteers got what some called their best portrayal...

BILOXI - While New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin continues to get criticized for his actions and inactions before, during and after Hurricane Katrina, Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway has been a media darling. It seems that Holloway, 63, has made all of the right moves before, during and after the big storm. Despite that fact that many Biloxi neighborhoods were hit just as hard as Waveland and Bay St. Louis, Holloway's keen preparation and a little luck helped him and his city get back into the fight more quickly than most. “I put our success to the people of Biloxi,” Holloway...

"And it was in a CNN story where we first saw it. Miles O'Brien was standing in front of the Beau Rivage doing a stand up," said City of Biloxi spokesman, Vincent Creel. The CNN reporter told his audience that 30 people died in the St. Charles apartment complex on the beach in Biloxi. Concrete columns and an elevated slab are all that's left of the St. Charles condominiums on Highway 90 in Biloxi. But there were certainly not 30 deaths there. "We never recovered a single body from that location," said Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove. Hargrove also heard...

6/16/2006 - WASHINGTON (AFPN) -- It's been more than eight months since Hurricane Katrina displaced thousands of people. Veterans who stayed at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Gulfport, Miss., were among those who had to leave. More than 400 of the 600 residents were evacuated to the AFRH here and have been without most of their personal belongings since September. "The only thing I brought with me was three shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of shoes and a towel -- that's it," said Leonard Drozal, a World War II Marine Corps veteran. "I miss my computer." Since...

GULFPORT - Lynn Meadows Discovery Center, Beauvoir and the Seafood Industry Museum are among the landmark sites designated for an intensive cleanup effort by people from across the United States who work in the tourism industry. Their visit, set for March 16-19, has been organized by Tourism Cares for Tomorrow in conjunction with the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention & Visitors Bureau. The volunteers range from company chief executive officers to hotel clerks, who have all paid $50 to work hard and stay in tent accommodations. They will get a cap, a couple of T-shirts, some free meals and the satisfaction...

BILOXI, MISS. — Jim Ullery drove along Highway 90 in this coastal community earlier this month, somberly taking in the devastation from Hurricane Katrina with other volunteers from Aiken. Then he stopped the car. “I know that church,” he said. Five years earlier Ullery and his wife, Sandra, had visited friends in nearby Gulfport, spending five days at the Methodist church’s adjacent retreat center. Virtually nothing was left of the church, battered by winds and water last fall. Little more than the shell remained ... along with a cross on the glass front and another on a back wall. “Some...

As Aug. 29 recedes into the conscious time of many Americans, the great storm that devastated 70 miles of Mississippi's Coast, destroying the homes and lives of hundreds of thousands, fades into a black hole of media obscurity.

Many Gulf Coast Towns Feel Neglected Monday January 16, 2006 6:32 PM By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN Associated Press Writer GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) - Nicki Henderson has had plenty of reasons to be angry since Hurricane Katrina destroyed her Biloxi home, but it was a simple news item about dislocated dolphins that really made her blood boil. Henderson lost her temper when she logged on to her computer and spotted this headline: ``New Orleans Dolphins Find New Home.'' She knew the dolphins actually came from a hurricane-ravaged marine park in Gulfport, not New Orleans. The headline writer's error reinforced her belief -...

If Congress funds repairs to the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Gulfport it could take two years for the work to be completed, officials said.The home might be rebuilt to theoretically withstand a Category 5 hurricane, said Sheila Abarr, a spokeswoman in the retirement home's Washington office.Abarr said representatives are asking Congress for $374 million spread over two years to fund the repairs."It could be May of 2006 (before funding is secured). It looks like hopefully Congress would look at it. They haven't done anything at this point."

GULFPORT, Miss. --Gulfport and its neighboring towns -- from Waveland in the west to Pascagoula in the east -- were epicenters of destruction when Katrina came ashore Aug. 29. But more than two months later, with the reconstruction in full swing, Gulfport has the feel of a latter-day frontier boomtown. At night, restaurants ... are packed, with hourlong waits for tables and a lively, manly bar scene.... Gulfport has a semi-intact infrastructure of motels, restaurants and retail stores ... shakily supporting the migrants who have flocked here to help rebuild and make a buck. About a quarter of the city's...

Dear All, Sorry if this is not appropriate for everyone, but I just sent this to my entire email list, and I am too tired to pick and choose to whom it should go. I thought you would like to know, I am back home, safe and sound from the wilds of Gulfport, Mississippi, where I did, I am sure, I some of the most important work of my life. Mom even saved a life by sending an epinephrine pen with me (a very expensive item, and the only ones we had...she actually sent 8), which we used on a...

GULFPORT, Miss. - The Grand Casino went out with a bang on Wednesday. A demolition crew blew up a section of the barge that has been blocking U.S. Highway 90 near Gulfport ever since Hurricane Katrina heaved it ashore. Three explosions in rapid succession brought down the five-story structure in a demolition overseen by the state Transportation Department.

President Bush traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana today to observe progress made in the recovery process following Hurricane Katrina. He met with Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Jim Barksdale, chairman of the Governor's Commission for Recovery, and area business leaders in Gulfport, and then traveled to New Orleans where he was briefed by Vice Admiral Thad Allen on Hurricane Rita on board the USS Iwo Jima outside New Orleans, and then met with contract workers, and workers at the Folger's Coffee Plant and made comments to the press. First Lady Laura met with Librarian of Congress James Billington in preparation...