New Fear for Katrina Victims: Collectors

(NEWSER) - Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is becoming an exercise in environmentally friendly reconstruction, Bryan Walsh writes in Time. Global Green USA, the American arm of a group founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, is leading the pack by building a sustainable village in the city's Lower Ninth Ward, and retrofitting schools with solar panels and wetland habitats to make them more energy efficient. More»

Report details how staff responded to agonizing situation

(NEWSER) - In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the staff at one New Orleans hospital faced a torturous dilemma: For critically ill patients who would have to be carried down as many as 8 flights of stairs and back up to the roof of a garage, evacuation seemed impossible. With rumors of rioters preparing to attack and police ordering everyone who could go into boats, the remaining staff decided euthanasia was more humane than abandonment, writes Sheri Fink for ProPublica, in a piece reconstructing the sequence of events and the decision-making. More»

'Whiz kid,' 36, pledges ethics, economic reform

(NEWSER) - Louisiana's first non-white chief executive since Reconstruction—and the first elected Indian-American governor in US history—vowed yesterday in his inauguration speech to clean up the corruption-plagued state. The charismatic Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, a Roman-Catholic convert from Hinduism, is a conservative Republican who also becomes, at age 36, the nation's youngest governor in office. More»