The 'Big Uneasy' -- Harry Shearer's Film About New Orleans and Katrina
NEW ORLEANS -- In the occupational kaleidoscope that constitutes Harry Shearer – screenwriter, actor, comedian, novelist, voice on "The Simpsons," host of "Le Show" on public radio -- one obsession stands out. A resident of Santa Monica, Calif., Shearer has for many years had a second home in New Orleans. This city has become his cause in the long ache since Hurricane Katrina. "What happened in New Orleans was not unique because parts of the town are under sea level," Shearer said by phone from Dallas after a recent screening of his documentary, "The Big Uneasy." Related ...
Richard Scruggs: A Big-Time Lawyer's Fall From Grace
A review of Curtis Wilkie's "The Fall of the House of Zeus," (Crown, 2010), 400 pages, $25.99 Money is the milk and whiskey of politics, at once nurture and stimulant in the gravy-spattered table of democracy. This is true in the poor states as well as the big ones -- maybe more so. When the fabled plaintiff's lawyer Richard Scruggs pleaded guilty in 2008 to a bribery scheme involving a backcountry Mississippi judge, it was more than the standard true crime story. Scruggs had operated at the pinnacle of Mississippi law and politics and earned a fortune pioneering asbestos and tobacco ...
New Orleans Rising: Katrina's Wrath, a City's Resilience
NEW ORLEANS -- Sunday marks the fifth year since Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast. The next day saw the failure of a federally managed levee system (by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), which caused 80 percent of New Orleans to go underwater. This weekend the city is filled with events that recall the epic destruction and aching diaspora, while promoting the persona of a city reborn. The national media has descended in force. Of the many network specials,"Witness: Katrina," which airs Monday night on National Geographic Channel, is a superb visual narrative drawn from video shot by ...
The Gulf Oil Spill: Blame, Fear and the Sound of Hope
NEW ORLEANS -- When BP's platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men, New Orleans had slowly, achingly, begun to get past Hurricane Katrina. Nearly five years on, many neighborhoods in the vast urban expanse that went underwater -- an area eight times larger than Manhattan -- had rejoined the B-flat hum of the city. Federal money had finally hit the streets with miles of thoroughfares gouged by water getting repaved. A quarter of the population has not returned, most of them poor people lacking the means to do so. But the disastrous inefficiency of Mayor Ray Nagin was about to end. ...
BP Storm: Tulane Prof Oliver Houck Warned for Decades of Peril of Lax Energy Regulation
NEW ORLEANS -- Page One of the June 11 Times-Picayune on the BP disaster carried the headline "Spill Could be Double the Size" with the subhead, "40,000 barrels may be flowing daily." The wide photograph beneath the banner showed four women wearing thick rubber gloves, their hair wrapped over industrial-sized tubs, on the last day of oyster-shucking for the 134-year-old P&J Oyster Co. If this surreal horror story has taught us one thing it is that we need real sources to explain how human error could wreck a regional economy, poison a coastal marsh, endanger vast fishing areas, and up the ...
Sorrow and Joy at a Funeral Fit for a Brass Band King
NEW ORLEANS -- Richard "King" Matthews, a grand marshal of the brass band parades here, got his sendoff Saturday in a pageant worthy of his persona. His widow, five grown children, relatives and fellow church members gathered with hundreds of friends at Charbonnet-Labat-Glapion Funeral Home in Tremé, an ancient neighborhood where poverty and music live cheek to jowl, now celebrated in the HBO series of the same name set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. On Saturday, no TV cameras turned out for the funeral. King Richard was the last of the original members of Dejan's Olympia Brass Band, ...
On the Gulf Coast, Fighting a Tide of Oil, Painful Memories and Dread
NEW ORLEANS -- The great media machinery has descended on Louisiana's serrated Gulf of Mexico coastline, the wetlands scarred by 10,000 navigational canals cut by the oil companies over many years. All that gouging of saw grass and florabunda yields the disappearance of a marsh plot the size of a football field every hour. Flash back to Aug. 31, 2005: Hurricane Katrina's winds pushed rolling sheets of water into a huge funnel that surged across those soggy flatlands like a sluiceway into the holy city where jazz began, 80 percent of which went under water. Average flood level, four feet. You ...
Vatican's Point Man on Abuse Was Successfully Sued by Whistleblowing Priest
With Pope Benedict XVI in a stance of passive silence on the clergy sex abuse crisis, the Vatican strategy of attacking the news media has made the pope more vulnerable to criticism. Loyal Catholics, and even political leaders inclined to give the pontiff the benefit of the doubt, are wondering why he can't say what went wrong and how he will make structural changes. Instead, just before Easter, the Vatican launched a counteroffensive against the media in general and The New York Times in particular. The opening salvo was Cardinal William Levada's critique on the Vatican Web site of the ...
What Pope Benedict Must Do
Pope Benedict faces an epic scandal as victims of clerical sex abuse in Ireland, Western Europe and America raise the issue of justice denied by secret tribunals that allowed predators to remain priests. Yet an editorial in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, scored the media for "an ignoble attempt to strike at Pope Benedict and his closest aides at any cost." Benedict is grappling with an unfinished crisis that drew media coverage in America in 1992; victims' lawsuits revealed bishops who had sheltered predators from prosecution. By 1994 the coverage had ebbed. Then, in 2002, The ...
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