Free Republic

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...

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...

- 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...

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...

Texas Tech architecture students have designed and are constructing a modular unit that can be transported to disaster-torn cities to provide temporary housing. They intend the units to help alleviate housing shortages that occur when cities are struck by disasters. It is a class project for the 12 graduate-level students, who are at the work site three days a week driving nails, building floors, putting up the sides of the unit and pitching in with various other construction tasks. The units have been designed to be mass-produced and configured with other units. When the prototype unit under construction is completed,...

BATON ROUGE, La. — Military officials told President Bush today that the U.S. needs a national plan to coordinate search and rescue efforts following natural disasters or terrorist attacks. (snip) Bush got an update about the federal hurricane response from military leaders at Randolph Air Force Base. He heard from Lt. Gen. Robert Clark, joint military task force commander for Hurricane Rita, and Maj. Gen. John White, a task force member, who described search and rescue operations after Hurricane Katrina as a "train wreck." With Katrina, "we knew the coordination piece was a problem," White said. He said better coordination...