Newsitem List

A month after Hurricane Katrina, serious questions remain about the fate of hundreds of prisoners in New Orleans. Human Rights Watch says there are 517 unaccounted for, while prisoners and their lawyers say many were abandoned in the flooding jails. We'll speak with Human Rights Watch's researcher, as well as a man who was in the Orleans Parish Prison during the storm, and two lawyers fighting to discover what exactly happened inside the jails....

As Katrina's flood waters recede, government contractors are flowing into the Gulf Coast and reaping billions of dollars in pre-bid, limited bid, and sometimes no-bid contracts. We speak with Pratap Chatterjee, managing editor of CorpWatch.org, about his latest article titled "Big, Easy Iraqi-Style Contracts Flood New Orleans."...

We speak with writer and author Naomi Klein about what some are calling the real looting of New Orleans. In this week's cover story in The Nation magazine, Klein reports on how the city's poorest evacuees are being kept out of thousands of perfectly livable empty homes....

The People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Community Labor United of New Orleans have issued an Action Plan detailing the formation of a national coalition for rebuilding the city and a committee structure to implement the coalition's goals....

On September 20, Vinny and I returned to the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston to find out what was happening with the Katrina survivors since the Convention Center was closing it's doors as a shelter. An "Exit Only" sign on the doors made it clear that Katrina survivors were no longer welcome at the Convention Center. According to Anna Holly, Onsite Public Information Officer, it was time to "get back to business, back to conventions."...

As of yet, HUD has not even offered any temporary Section 8 vouchers to Katrina's victims....

On Saturday September 17, Vinny and I were on our way to the Reliant Arena, but we got a little lost in the sprawling city of Houston, Texas so we made our way to the George R. Brown Convention Center first. This convention center is next to the new baseball stadium where tens of thousands of people were watching an Astros game. Nobody seemed to care that in the building next to the baseball stadium, more than a thousand people are still struggling to survive the aftermath of Hurricane Katrin...

The day after his speech from New Orleans pledging that the government “will do what it takes, will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives,” President Bush hastened to reassure the American ruling elite on Friday that whatever spending is required, it will not hurt the pocket books of the wealthy. Bush vowed that spending on the hurricane-devastated region would come from cuts in other parts of the federal budget....

The medical relief effort at the Common Ground clinic in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans is shifting from "emergency response" to "primary care" mode. Many patients now are repeat visitors. The clinic is well stocked with first aid supplies and has a phone line and several donated computers....

On September 15, Vinny and I were driving around Algiers to determine the reception quality of 94.5 FM, the Battle for Algiers. Next thing we knew, we were on the Mississippi River Bridge headed to downtown New Orleans....