Free Republic

NEW ORLEANS — As residents work to rebuild their lives and homes a year after Hurricane Katrina, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will be frequent visitors to the city observing the progress. They were in New Orleans on Thursday, though only Pitt appeared at an afternoon news conference to announce the winner of the design competition he started in April to rebuild hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods using environmentally friendly designs and construction. "We're going to be spending a lot of time down here," Pitt said. Preproduction for his next movie is scheduled to begin in November, and Pitt said he would be...

Biggest and grandest resort in Mississippi is back in business a year after devastation. BILOXI, Miss. — Beau Rivage Resort and Casino, once the crown jewel of Mississippi's Gulf Coast gaming industry, reopened for business Tuesday on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall. Hundreds of the casino's 3,800 employees — 400 more than before Katrina — lined up along the front entrance for a reopening ceremony that included remarks by Gov. Haley Barbour, U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and others. Rogelio V. Solis ASSOCIATED PRESS (enlarge photo) The area's slow progress in rebuilding affordable housing drew protests to the...

-German town donates money to run summer camp for child Katrina victims in Austin.- Almost a year ago, Michelle Williams was standing on the roof of her uncle's house in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina filled it with water. A fireman rescued her and her family in a boat, she said. This week, the 9-year-old was sitting at a picnic table in Zilker Park, grinning about all the friends she has made at a summer camp for young Katrina evacuees. "It's very fun to play with people who understand you and what you're going through," she said. "You get to...

New Orleans, LA (AHN) - The head of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund has stepped down following the resignation of a majority of the board only days ago. The Hurricane Katrina Charity, formed by former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W, Bush, has raised about $125 million. Former Executive Director Mary Ann Wyrsch said that her staying on board may slow the momentum the charity has picked up. The Bush-Clinton Fund released a statement acknowledging that Wyrsch's resignation was done in the best interest of the fund. Wysch wrote in her resignation letter, "I am concerned about any distractions from this...

Minus stout competition from the Mississippi Gulf Coast and with thousands of recovery workers with time and money on their hands, Louisiana's casino industry is enjoying its biggest boom ever - thanks to the double punch of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But Mississippi, with a reconstruction plan featuring shoreside casinos that are attracting billions of dollars in investments, will be back in the hunt soon and positioning itself to reclaim its gambling dominance in the South, industry analysts say. Flocks of gamblers have provided a revenue boost for Louisiana, which faced dire predictions of deep cuts in spending after the...

Katrina left a lot of pine trees standing, but brown and lifeless. "Eighty to 100 percent of the trees were inundated with storm surge waters from Katrina as much as 12 miles inland and that has posed some serious threats to our public safety," Hancock County Extension Service Director Gwen Smith said. The dead trees are still standing because they don't meet the guidelines for removal. Only trees with broken tops or those leaning at a 30 degree angle can be removed by U.S. Army Corps of Engineer debris crews. County Supervisor David Yarborough says that's left many properties in...

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...

-Federal labs doing more tests for ricin after doubts about initial positive result- A mysterious whitish-brown powder found in a roll of quarters in a dormitory room on the University of Texas campus might not be the poison ricin after all. A preliminary test by the Texas Department of State Health Services laboratory in Austin returned a positive result for the potentially fatal substance, prompting an evacuation of the Moore-Hill residence hall, an investigation by the FBI and worries of a link to terrorism. But three subsequent tests at the same lab came up negative. In addition, none of the...

WASHINGTON -- An enduring mystery of the response to Hurricane Katrina is how top federal officials remained unaware for days about the thousands of flood victims stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center without food, water or security. (snip) The chairwoman of the Senate committee investigating the government's response to the storm lay part of the blame at the feet of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on Wednesday accused Nagin of failing to alert federal disaster officials that he was steering storm victims away from the chaos and filth at the Superdome to the Convention...

A congressional committee wants to know why many nursing home residents were left behind before Hurricane Katrina hit, and Louisiana's governor was called upon to answer the committee's questions this morning. Gov. Kathleen Blanco finished her testimony before the committee just before noon. According to the state's emergency plan, the Department of Transportation and Development was responsible for the evacuation of the state's most vulnerable residents, like nursing homes and hospital patients. At least 140 patients at New Orleans area hospitals and nursing homes died during the storm and its aftermath. On Capitol Hill today, two senators told Blanco they...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Almost five months after Hurricane Katrina chased Yolonda Prevost from her East New Orleans neighborhood to her sister's place in Kansas City, she spends her days trying to get back home _ searching for apartments and arranging for repairs to her drowned house. The last thing Prevost wants to worry about is doing her taxes. Taxpayers like Prevost are a big question mark this year as tax preparers ranging from the nation's leader, H&R Block Inc., to mom-and-pop accountants, gear up for this year's tax season. Some in the industry predict the hurricanes will cause a...

Gov. Kathleen Blanco will attend President Bush's state of the union speech to Congress, her office said Monday. The governor has been at odds with the White House over government response to Hurricane Katrina, but was invited to sit in the gallery for Bush's speech on Tuesday night, Blanco's office said. The president is expected to focus his address on a package of energy of proposals aimed at promoting fuel-saving technologies.

- It's a good idea, but tricky to pull off - The land next to the levee was a blank, with only house foundations hinting where a neighborhood had been. St. Bernard Parish was silent, buildings jammed with rubble. But Tulane University was a comparative garden, spruced for students coming back to Tulane, Loyola, Dillard and Xavier universities. At a campus welcome-back concert, Gov. Kathleen Blanco greeted the students joyfully. They were, Blanco said, the greatest stakeholders in Louisiana's future and valued candidates for her proposed "summer of service." Blanco's idea was distinctly vague: She pledged to flesh it out...

-AP Correspondent Matt Apuzzo (Colby '00) chronicles courageous efforts to return to "normal"- The blisters on my feet have healed and the aches from sleeping on floors or in a rented sedan have subsided. Even the smell, that nauseating combination of rotting shrimp, sewage, and death that hung over downtown Biloxi for weeks, has faded from my clothes. All the things that seemed so permanent after three weeks reporting in coastal Mississippi for the Associated Press are gone, leaving behind more lasting memories of Hurricane Katrina—the people I met only in passing but who faced such incredible obstacles. Them I...

The gloves are off. In a very sharp statement, U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu responded to President Bush’s earlier comments during a Thursday press conference regarding Louisiana’s alleged lack of a rebuilding plan. Earlier this week, President Bush said he did not support the Baker Bill which is named after Louisiana Republican Congressman Richard Baker and which the entire Louisiana delegation supports. Louisiana policy makers believe the plan would help solve one of Louisiana’s major post-Katrina and Rita problems—what to do with individual and whole neighborhoods totally or substantially destroyed by the hurricanes. It is estimated that Louisiana has over 217,000...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The Gulf of Mexico's offshore petroleum industry is far from recovering from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and at least one-sixth of the region's normal daily oil production will still be off line at the start of next storm season, a federal agency says. Katrina and Rita destroyed 115 of the Gulf's 4,000 production platforms and damaged another 52, according to a report released Thursday by the Minerals Management Service, which manages federal offshore leases. The storms' combined fury - much stronger when they swept across the Gulf than when they hit shore - also damaged 183...

VENICE, La., Jan 20 (Reuters) - At the mouth of the Mississippi River, where Hurricane Katrina flattened nearly everything in sight, residents consider themselves the "forgotten survivors." With so much public attention paid to New Orleans, locals living on the decimated, southernmost spit of Louisiana fret that little is coming their way to help rebuild their houses and businesses that sat directly in Katrina's path. The handful who have returned to the wasteland left by the Aug. 29 storm sleep in ramshackle tents or, if they're lucky, in tiny trailers. They gather to smoke, sip beer and swap stories at...

OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. - The first week of class for one East Coast college is labor - toting and lifting Katrina debris. The rest of the course is economists, city planners and the like, lecturing for "Aftermath of a Storm 101." The package is a four-week course during a mini-semester in January at Salem College in North Carolina. Eleven students took it for credit, and last week they did the hands-on part in Ocean Springs and nearby communities. Salem College is just one of at least two dozen colleges and universities that have had students on the Coast in the...

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Damage to offshore oil and gas platforms from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita has tripled the number of requests to convert rigs into artificial reefs in the Gulf of Mexico. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries usually gets 10 to 12 requests each year to use abandoned rigs to create fish habitat. But that number has soared to 40 requests this year, Rick Kasprzak, program manager of the Louisiana Artificial Reef Program, told The Advocate of Baton Rouge for a story in Monday's editions. Oil and gas platforms in the program are located in federal...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Debbie Shifter faces the daunting task of whipping up Thanksgiving dinner for 18 in the tiny kitchen of her FEMA trailer. Shifter, who lives in Bay St. Louis, Miss., had to drive 45 minutes to find a Wal-Mart that survived Hurricane Katrina. Downsizing the ingredients to fit her compact oven, she will serve a 13-pound turkey instead of the usual 20-pounder. Because of a lack of counter space, she will do the chopping and dicing on two wooden TV trays in her living room. Guests will eat outside at a plastic table on her lawn, or...