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Since the media has planned an orgy of finger pointed for the anniversary of Katrina, let's make sure they get a finger in the eye they so richly deserve for their performance. Here's a few I recall, and I'm sure there are more: The media told us of a little girl who had been rapoed and then her throat slit in the Superdome. Photo captions had white survivors foraging for supplies, while black people were captioned as looting. Helicopters were being fired at, which led to a stand down till it became clear that it was untrue. All those...

WASHINGTON - Parts of New Orleans are sinking far more rapidly than scientists first thought, more than an inch a year, new research suggests. That may explain some levee failures during Hurricane Katrina and raises more worries about the future. The research, being published Thursday in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking — from overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts — four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly....

With the election for New Orleans mayor just three days away, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said Wednesday she is not prepared to endorse any candidate in the race. However, the governor had harsh words to say about certain aspects of current Mayor Ray Nagin's job performance. "He's in a campaign right now and not doing anything but campaigning now, trying to get himself re-elected," Blanco said. She went on to criticize Nagin's understanding of the way the federal government spends recovery money. "The mayor never has understood any of the processes that need to be undertaken in order to get...

BATON ROUGE -- A Virginia company that did not even exist was paid $5.2 million by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to set up a base camp for disaster relief workers, but most of the work was never done, authorities alleged. On Monday, U.S. District Judge James Brady froze the assets of Lighthouse Disaster Relief and owners Gary Lee Heldreth and Kerry Lynn Farmer after the Justice Department claimed the money was being spent on vehicles and checks were being cashed $10,000 at a time. Lighthouse was one of two companies that bid on the contract to provide food and...

NEW ORLEANS - A foundation problem — although not the one targeted by earlier studies — caused the 450-foot-long break in a floodwall and levee on New Orleans' western edge when Hurricane Katrina hit, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Friday. A naturally occurring, 20-foot-thick layer of clay that helped support the floodwall was too weak for the job, according to a report by a Corps task force set up to find out why the levees broke. Had the floodwall and levee held, much of the western half of the city would have escaped flooding. Previous analyses by other...

WASHINGTON -- As Hurricane Katrina loomed over the Gulf Coast, federal and state officials agonized over the threat to levees and lives. Hours after the catastrophic storm hit, Louisiana's governor believed New Orleans' crucial floodwalls were still intact. "We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29 - the day the storm hit the Gulf coast. "We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee," she said on a video of the day's disaster briefing that was obtained Thursday night...

I was born on Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans so you can't get more New Orleanian than me. The failures of government during and after Hurricane Katrina were at every single level. Last year, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the mayors of New Orleans and surrounding parishes had a trial run with Hurricane Ivan. It was a disaster even though the storm did turn eastward. Gov. Blanco especially blew it then and she blew it this time when the city of my birth was demolished. Mayor Nagin sent thousands of people to the Superdome and the Convention Center knowing that...

The government squandered millions of dollars in Katrina disaster aid, including handing $2,000 debit cards to people who gave phony Social Security numbers and used the money for such items as a $450 tattoo, auditors said Monday. Federal money also paid for $375-a-day beachfront condos and 10,777 trailers that were stuck in mud and unusable. Overcharges, poor accounting and abuses will take "months or years" to rectify, the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department's inspector general concluded in preliminary reports on how billions of dollars in taxpayer money is being spent. The Federal Emergency Management Agency recognizes it...

Thousands of applicants for federal emergency relief money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita used duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers or bogus addresses, suggesting that the $2.3 billion program was a victim of extensive fraud, a Congressional auditor will report Monday. The examination of the so-called Expedited Assistance program determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to take even the most basic steps to confirm the identifies of about 1.4 million people who sought expedited cash assistance, leaving the program vulnerable to the "significant fraud and abuse," the Government Accountability Office intends to report. The auditors did not try...

Louisiana native and political consultant for the Democratic Party James Carville talked Friday about the image of Gov. Kathleen Blanco and her performances both during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Carville said there are always things people can do better, but he thinks Blanco did as well as she could, considering the circumstances. "Once you're under water, you're kind of doomed," Carville said. "A flood is a hard thing to look good in." Carville was in Baton Rouge to attend a reception in which a new Democratic Party chairman will be elected.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Before the next big hurricane's winds howl ashore, Homeland Security officials want an emergency communications network operating, emergency medical facilities treating patients, and teams dispatched to search for victims at the likely ground zero. In the wake of congressional hearings that exposed the breathtaking failures of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration is retooling its disaster plan to react more quickly to the next catastrophe. Michael Brown, now the ex-chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, became the public face of Katrina's failure. But the administration is reviewing how other leaders also failed last...

The embattled Orleans Levee Board has received from U.S. Attorney Jim Letten's office two subpoenas for a wide range of documents, a signal that the federal criminal inquiry into the board is proceeding. One subpoena is so broad that it offers few clues to what direction the probe is taking. It requests virtually every shred of paper the agency has in its possession. The other is narrower in scope, asking for a lease agreement and a personnel file. Officials from the Levee Board were required to turn the documents over to the grand jury Friday. They provided, upon request, copies...

GULFPORT, Miss. - U.S. Sen. Trent Lott (news, bio, voting record) says personal losses he suffered because of Hurricane Katrina will weigh on his decision whether to run for re-election in 2006. -- snip -- Another consideration, he said, is that he is "so disappointed with the (Bush) administration's response to this disaster that I'm almost embarrassed." ...

WASHINGTON -- Federal Emergency Management Agency coordinators acknowledged before a congressional committee Thursday that they were overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina but blamed New Orleans and Louisiana officials for failing to implement an emergency response plan. The situation was so haphazard that New Orleans failed to identify shelters in advance where hurricane victims could go. "It's the responsibility of the local authority to evacuate their people and set up shelters," said Philip Parr, who coordinated FEMA's response at the Superdome. "I found that there was little preparation." Parr was one of three FEMA officials who testified Thursday before the Senate Homeland...

New Orleans Levee Failure Analysis - Part V Contents Introduction and Basic Levee Construction, Section and Elevation Details Section 1. Pre-Landfall Flooding in Kenner and Western Metairie of East Jefferson Parish Section 2. Analysis of the 17th Street and London Canal Breaches and Post Katrina Flood Sequence in Downtown New Orleans Section 3. Surge Sequence for the Industrial Canal Basin, Analysis of the Five Major Breaches and east Orleans Parish Flooding Section 4. Flood Sequence for St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward, MRGO Reach Failure Analysis Section 5. Contributory Causality, Political and Funding Issues Leading to Levee Failures...

Dan Rather was on "Larry King" the other night and was asked about the Katrina coverage. Say what you like about Dan, but he knows his meteorological phenomena. I've always thought there was something quintessentially American about Dan's hurricane editions of the CBS news -- not the part of the show where he's reporting on the actual hurricane, but the bit where he says "And today's other headlines," as if it's the most normal thing in the world to be reading "The Dow closed 19 points down today" while wrapped around a lamppost in your sou'wester with a rusting doublewide...

FEMA Katrina Funeral Contractor Desecrated CorpsesThursday, 15 September 2005, 2:15 pm Article: Jason Leopold Division of Funeral Corp. Charged With Desecrating Corpses Hired to Collect Deceased Victims of Hurricane Katrina By Jason LeopoldA funeral services company which recently learned that one of its subsidiaries is negotiating a lucrative contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to remove dead bodies in areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, paid $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit several years ago alleging the company desecrated thousands of corpses, and dumped bodies into mass graves.Moreover, the company paid $200,000 to settle a whistleblower lawsuit that sought...

..A month later, a review of the available evidence now shows that some, though not all, of the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations, the product of chaotic circumstances that included no reliable communications, and perhaps the residue of the longstanding raw relations between some police officers and members of the public. .

Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti's office confirmed Wednesday that it is investigating the alleged looting of a New Orleans car dealership by city police officers. More than 200 vehicles were taken from the Sewell Cadillac Chevrolet dealership in the Central Business District, and in the most chaotic hours after Hurricane Katrina, some New Orleans Police Department officers reportedly pulled up outside the mobile command center at Harrah's casino in bright, shiny Cadillac SUVs. The cars allegedly still had "2004" stickers in their windshields and "Sewell" medallions on the back. The fancy rides appeared at a time when a desperate force,...

<p>Hours before New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass announced his resignation, Tony relayed some hot information he had heard from his Capitol Hill sources. It regarded an FBI investigation currently under way.</p> <p>You can go to the source above and listen to that segment of his radio show.</p>