Gary Monro’s blog

Beef from Britain - and some other European countries - is banned in the US.

Britain donated food - including beef - to the Hurricane Katrina victims and, for a while, the fact that our banned beef was being fed to people wasn’t noticed. Now it has been and so products containing the offending item are being kept in storage.

US officials are looking to forward the stuff to countries who are less fussy about eating our meat. In the meantime, they may eventually discover that, the UK having sorted out our infected beef problem, they might be better of with ours than theirs.

It’s a question that’s being asked. Is it worth recreating what was there before?

The city’s romance is not the reality for most who live there. It’s a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it’s a black place, where 67 percent are African-American.

The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as “Academically Unacceptable” and another 26 percent are under “Academic Warning.”

The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city’s homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

New Orleans puts the “D” into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools.

A number of factors mitigate against New Orleans becoming viable. The city’s geographical condition - low-lying, over-settled, ex-swamp, hurricane-prone - means that hurricane Katrina isn’t necessarily the worst it can get. Many of those with home insurance may realise this and decide to rebuild elsewhere - that will include many of New Orleans’ main professionals - and tax-payers: doctors, lawyers, professors and so on. The Wall Street Journal thinks many businesses will relocate completely.

The destruction wrought by Katrina may turn out to be “creative destruction,” to crib from Joseph Schumpeter, for many of New Orleans’ displaced and dispossessed. Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration, a positive side-effect of the uprooting of thousands of lives will to be to deconcentrate one of the worst pockets of ghetto poverty in the United States.

On paper the arguments make sense. However, the human factor is the intangible that can make all the difference. People - even those who know how bad things are in New Orleans - may still not want to live somewhere else. Even if it were easy to move them elsewhere New Orleans is where they have a lifetime of friends, family, experiences and memories. The irresistible pulls the city has on its inhabitants may well be the undoing of a large-scale removal plan.

From The Washington Post (free subscription required):

Battle-hardened troops back from Baghdad find little difference - apart from the flood water - between their experiences there and their latest jobs in New Orleans.

Those war-zone images and instincts came flooding back Friday when Atkinson and 300 other Arkansas guardsmen, wearing helmets and full body armor, rolled into the chaos of central New Orleans.

“It’s like Baghdad on a bad day,” said Spec. Brian McKay, 19, of Mount Ida, Ark

The soldiers are trying to contain a crime spree:

“We’re having some pretty intense gun battles breaking out around the city,” said Capt. Jeff Winn of the New Orleans police SWAT team. “Armed gangs of from eight to 15 young men are riding around in pickup trucks, looting and raping,” he said. Residents fearful of looters often shout to passing Humvees to alert the soldiers to crimes in progress.

The soldiers are quite prepared to use lethal force:

“If we’re out on the streets, we’ll fight back and shoot until we kill them. That’s too bad but that’s what has got to happen,” said Spec. Jake Perry, 20, of Camden, Ark. “I didn’t spend a year in Iraq to come to Louisiana and get killed.”

I really don’t fancy the looters’ chances at all…

Elsewhere in the Post it’s reported that a million Gulf Coast residents are homeless and will remain so for months to come. The state of Texas has already declared itself full and unable to take any more people.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials said that about 50,000 people are in Louisiana shelters, but Brecke Latham, spokeswoman for Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D), said that virtually none of the 1 million evacuees have been able to return to their homes. Many are now living in hotels, with family or with friends, but officials said they are preparing for many of them to need help as their money, or their welcome, wears out.

Survivors are being taken to states as far away as Michigan, Utah and California.

New Orleans is starting to resemble a battle zone:

A series of huge explosions were reported along the riverfront in New Orleans today as hundreds of US troops with orders to shoot-to-kill looters and gunmen were sent into the flooded city.

Kathleen Blanco, governor of Louisiana, said: “They have M-16s and they’re locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will.”

As President Bush is roundly blamed for the disaster, the alleged shortage of troops to deal with the disaster and, no doubt, the weather that caused it Ray Nagin, the Mayor New Orleans, made a televised plea for more resources:

“This is a desperate SOS,” he said in a statement. “Right now, we are out of resources at the convention center and don’t anticipate enough buses. We need buses. Currently, the convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for 15 to 20,000 people.”

Storm survivors are succumbing to searing heat, lack of food and water and insanitary conditions. There is no electricity inside the emergency rescue centres - centres include the Superdome sports stadium (see picture, right). Looters have done their part to hinder the relief effort including attacking hospitals, robbing of survivors and firing at a rescue helicopter.

One is left bewildered by the turn of events in the US. America’s ability to help the tsunami victims so quickly was under-reported but impressed many of us who cared to notice. Similar speed is needed at home. The heat of New Orleans will exacerbate at an escalating rate the problems of insanitary conditions and water polluted by filth, chemicals and dead bodies. As tens of thousands of people remain stranded one can only imagine the diseases that will prosper in such conditions.

Evacuation must be the priority, surely. Feeding people in situ might be the best short-term remedy - it saves lives - but clearly there is no city for people to live in anymore. Houses are damaged or destroyed, the economy has been ruined in some areas and basic amenities - clean water, electricity and communications - just don’t exist in large areas. The government will quickly need a re-housing scheme for tens of thousands of its homeless citizens. America may well need to build its own refugee camps.

Terrible news from the US as the death toll from Hurricane Katrina runs into the hundreds.

Hundreds of people are feared dead in Mississippi, and the Louisiana city of New Orleans is badly flooded.

The city mayor said rescuers were unable to retrieve the dead. “They’re just pushing them aside,” he said.

Amid worsening conditions, officials plan to evacuate a New Orleans stadium where up to 20,000 people took shelter.

I recall seeing the Mayor on television a few days ago ordering people to leave the area. It seems his advice, which I initially thought was a little dramatic, turned out to be prescient - to put it mildly.

Then in Baghdad we have more than 600 dead in a Shia march to a holy shrine.

The incident happened on a bridge over the Tigris River as about one million Shias marched to a shrine for an annual religious festival.

Witnesses said panic spread because of rumours that suicide bombers were in the crowd. Many victims were crushed to death or fell in the river and drowned.

The pilgrims had already withstood one attack:

Earlier, mortar rounds had been fired into the crowd, killing 16 people.

About 36 others were injured when four mortar rounds landed close to the Kadhimiya mosque.

Tension between the two main factions in Iraq - Sunni and Shia - may come to a head over the proposed constitution. Sunnis fear it will lead to a break-up of the country depriving them of the oil in the Shia south of the country.