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<p>A team of Indiana firefighters, volunteering to help rescue victims of Katrina, went to Atlanta, where Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers told them that their job was to hand out fliers and that their first task was to attend a multi-hour course on sexual harassment and equal employment opportunity.</p>

The government promised banks a hands-off approach in overseeing nearly $5 billion in Sept. 11 recovery aid to small businesses. What it got in return was numerous loans to companies that didn't need terror relief - or even know they were getting it, The Associated Press found.

BATON ROUGE, La.--Over the past few days, America has been both moved and disturbed by television footage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. But for those of us in Louisiana still struggling to cope, the troubling images are of opportunistic politicians playing the blame game while there is so much real work to do. Rather than point fingers, we should be fixing the situation on the ground. And that will include taking steps to ensure that red tape doesn't stifle the continued security and rebuilding efforts. There have already been a number of instances in which an overly inhibitive bureaucracy prevented an...

The Red Cross Blocked The Fox News Channel's Major Garrett was just on my show extending the story he had just reported on Brit Hume's show: The Red Cross is confirming to Garrett that it had prepositioned water, food, blankets and hygiene products for delivery to the Superdome and the Convention Center in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but were blocked from delivering those supplies by orders of the Louisiana state government, which did not want to attract people to the Superdome and/or Convention Center. Garrett has no paper trail yet, but will follow up on his verbal confirmation...

¸ Local FEMA manager said he is sad processing for aid takes so long. By ROBBYN BROOKS Daily News Staff Writer Mississippi evacuee Luan Morgan tried to keep the tone of her voice pleasant for the sake of her 5-year-old daughter Sunday, but her anger was easy to see. “I need help now,” Morgan said. “We don’t have any way to get home. There’s no gas. There’s no nothing.” Morgan evacuated from her Lumberton, Miss., home the Saturday before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. She brought her daughter, Nichole, three days worth of clothing and not much else. “I...

Sen. Trent Lott berated both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and his own state's emergency management, MEMA, for being mired in red tape at a time of urgent need given the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina. Lott said he has been trying to get FEMA to send 20,000 trailers "sitting in Atlanta" to the Mississippi coast, and he urged President Bush during a meeting Monday to intervene. He said FEMA has refused to ship the trailers until contracts are secured. "FEMA and MEMA need to be saying, 'Yes' to Mississippi's needs, not, 'No.," the former majority leader said in a...

PENSACOLA, Fla.,Sept.6-Two Navy helicopter pilots and their crews returned from New Orleans on Aug. 30 expecting to be greeted as lifesavers after ferrying more than 100 hurricane victims to safety. Instead, their superiors chided the pilots, Lt. David Shand and Lt. Matt Udkow, at a meeting the next morning for rescuing civilians when their assignment that day had been to deliver food and water to military installations along the Gulf Coast. "I felt it was a great day because we resupplied the people we needed to and we rescued people, too," Lieutenant Udkow said. But the air operations commander at...

Hundreds of would-be rescuers are wending their way to the Gulf Coast in buses, vans and trailers. But critics say government red tape has hampered many who are trying to help Hurricane Katrina's victims. Long lines of volunteers are reportedly being stopped on freeways on their way into New Orleans. "The military was worried about having more people in the city. They want to limit it to the professionals," said Kevin Southerland, a California firefighter whose rescue team was sent to New Orleans at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Aaron Broussard, president of Louisiana's Jefferson Parish,...

Kristi Richie Press-Herald Staff The nine school buses Webster Parish sent to New Orleans Friday to assist with evacuation efforts returned only with their drivers. The buses stopped at a checkpoint in LaPlace and sat for several hours. “Somebody came and told them they didn’t have a mission for them, so we loaded up and came home,” Webster Parish Schools Superintendent Butch Williams said. Webster wasn’t the only group of buses turned away, though. Several hundred school buses, which were sent by order of Gov. Kathleen Blanco, were also turned away with no evacuees — possibly because the buses are...

Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, died in New Orleans because Mayor Ray Nagin did not issue a mandatory evacuation order until Sunday morning, well after the Saturday mid-afternoon order issued by neighboring parishes. The blogosphere has been wondering what took Nagin and the city so long; Glenn Reynolds has found the answer: President Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana, authorizing federal emergency management officials to release federal aid and coordinate disaster relief efforts. By mid-afternoon, officials in Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, Lafourche, Terrebonne and Jefferson parishes had called for voluntary or mandatory evacuations. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin...

The U.S. Public Health Service said a prison morgue near New Orleans was expecting 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. And more than 125 were known dead in Mississippi. [snip] And the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, warned that there will be gruesome sights in the days ahead. "We need to prepare the country for what's coming," Chertoff told Fox News . "We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in the floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine." Meanwhile, help for the living was an uphill...

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 4 - Dr. Jeffrey Orledge and his medical team provided care in New York City after the 2001 terrorist attacks and in Florida last year after Hurricane Ivan. None of that prepared them for the bedlam of the past week, he said on Sunday. Dispatched to Alabama from its home base in Augusta, Ga., on Aug. 28 in preparation for the hurricane, the team drove from place to place in Mississippi and Louisiana. Each time, it found it had nothing to do or could not provide assistance. Finally, early on Thursday, the team decided to go to...

(source: http://thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050904/NEWS01/509040328/1002&template=printart) Thetowntalk.com material cannot be directly posted or linked. Summation: the article is an interesting and worthwhile read about inefficiencies and many, many gripes about Red Cross ineptness and bureaucracy, and how both storm victims and facilities providers are ignoring them and turning away from them to FEMA and the Salvation Army.

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (AP) -- Volunteer physicians are pouring in to care for the sick, but red tape is keeping hundreds of others from caring for Hurricane Katrina survivors while health problems rise. Among the doctors stymied from helping out are 100 surgeons and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital, developed with millions of tax dollars for just such emergencies, marooned in rural Mississippi. "The bell was rung, the e-mails were sent off. ...We all got off work and deployed," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We...

CROW AGENCY, Mont. The Crow Indians rode with Custer at Little Bighorn, but they have since reconsidered. On the anniversary of the battle Saturday, they cheered during a re-enactment when Indians drove a stake through his fringed jacket and carved out the heart of the soldier going by the name of Yellow-Hair in Blue Coat Who Kills Babies, Old Men and Old Women. Their revised opinion is understandable considering what has happened to them since that battle to get their valley back from rival tribes. Today it's a Crow reservation with enough land and mineral resources to make each tribe...

Strangled by red tape Russia's business reality By Christian Lowe 53 minutes ago MOSCOW (Reuters) - Every time Russian property developer Denis Semykin sells a new apartment, he is required by law to register the deal at a special government office. But there is a snag: the office does not exist. "We ... go to every office that might look like this place so they can put the stamp on the piece of paper but they say: 'Sorry chaps it's not us.' Everyone sits there scratching their heads," said Semykin. Months of newspaper headlines about the Kremlin dismantling oil major...

The U.S. military is the toughest and most professional in the world, but one force it usually can't beat is the bureaucracy back in Washington. The Defense Department has 200,000 acquisition personnel, whose insistence on doing everything "by the numbers" slows to a crawl efforts to get vital equipment such as armor into the field. But the bureaucracy can be defeated, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demonstrated last week when he invoked his new "Rapid Acquisition Authority," allowing him to cut through the red tape to meet urgent battlefield needs. By invoking this power, Mr. Rumsfeld has given the Secretary...

In the predawn semidarkness of a small West Toledo apartment, Dae and Yung Jung stumbled toward the thumping at their front door. Seconds later, officers in dark jackets emblazoned with Homeland Security crammed into the couple's living room demanding passports and drivers' licenses. Mrs. Jung was escorted to jail. Upstairs, the couple's son, Andrew, hid, stunned and baffled. Now, five weeks later, immigration officials still press for Yung and Dae Jung's deportation to their native land, South Korea. But the couple - Dae Jung is a sushi chef; Yung Jung is a longtime school volunteer - are finding that their...

The American Red Cross gave World Trade Center widow Russa Steiner a $27,000 check yesterday — just before she told a House panel about months of red tape she has had to endure. Steiner expressed only gratitude toward the organization, but her problems quickly became emblematic for panel members, angered by the organization's handling of $550 million in Liberty Fund donations since Sept. 11. "Something is wrong," Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) said, pounding his fist. "A separate fund was established for these families. We are hearing from families that their needs are not being met." So far, the fund has ...

Swedes left with a monster problem THE placing of a mythical monster on Sweden’s endangered species list, in an apparent fit of bureaucratic zeal, has caused an administrative problem for the country’s authorities. "During a routine inspection of the environment court in Jaemtland recently, we came across a decision that attracted our interest," said Nils-Olof Berggren, a Swedish parliamentary ombudsman. "The court had turned down an application from a man who wanted to search for and hatch the monster’s eggs, probably believing [the application] was just a joke." However, Mr Berggren found there was an actual decision from 1986 placing...