Serving Up Some News
Laughing stock of Katrina makes disaster his business
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
The Guardian
Michael Brown, the bureaucrat who headed America's response to Hurricane Katrina and himself became a symbol of man-made calamity, is going into the disaster management business. He is setting up as a consultant, marketing his expertise on coping with catastrophe - natural and self-made.
"Look, Hurricane Katrina showed how bad disasters can be, and there's an incredible need for individuals and businesses to understand how important preparedness is," Mr Brown told the Rocky Mountain News. "So if I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses - because that goes straight to the bottom line - then I hope I can help the country in some way."
Rural Water Worries Persist After Chinese Chemical Spill
By JIM YARDLEY
New York Times
Liu Shiying lifted the metal cover off the clay cistern in a corner of the bare kitchen and lowered a tin ladle into what remained of her water supply. Then she raised a scoop to her mouth. "Do you think it smells?" she asked on Saturday, not taking a sip. "We're still drinking this. It is our only choice."
Ms. Liu lives in one of the dingy villages on the outskirts of Harbin, the provincial capital whose municipal water supply had been shut off for four days to prevent contamination from a chemical spill that dumped a huge tide of pollution into the city's main water source, the Songhua River.
But on Saturday, as Harbin's four million residents learned that water would be restored by Sunday night, rural residents like Ms. Liu in the villages beside the Songhua got no such good news. Isolated and reachable only by rugged, dirt roads, these villages depend on underground wells or the river itself for drinking water. And as the pollution passed by, many villages never got the boxes of bottled water delivered to major cities like Harbin.
Cindy Sheehan Back in Crawford, Tx.
By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press
CRAWFORD, Texas - Three months after the mother of a fallen soldier led a 26-day anti-war vigil near President Bush's ranch, peace activists and Bush supporters converged again Saturday for dueling rallies.
Cindy Sheehan, whose 24-year-old Casey died in Iraq, called for anti-war activists to return to Crawford this week as Bush celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday. The war opponents' camp is at the same 1-acre private lot that a landowner let them use in August when Sheehan's original campsite became too crowded.
The first demonstration attracted thousands from around the country and made the woman from Berkeley, Calif., a national figure."
Nobody knew what was going to happen, and we made up Camp Casey as we went along, and it grew and grew and grew," said Sheehan. "But we're here to say that the killing has to stop, that we're not going to justify any more killing on our losses. And we're not going away."
