Storm season starts minus floodgates
Massive floodgates designed to better protect the heart of New Orleans from the type of storm surges that breached levees during Hurricane Katrina may not be installed until July, more than a month after hurricane season starts, a top Army official said Friday.
But large storms are rare before August, and the Army Corps of Engineers said it has a plan to reinforce the levees if another major storm threatens any earlier than that.
“We’re trying to communicate this to the public because we understand they need to know where we are, but we also need to reassure everyone that we can provide the level of protection we promised,” said Col. Lewis Setliff III, who is overseeing repairs to the city’s entire levee system.
The Corps is installing the floodgates to protect weakened levees along three major drainage canals that channel rainfall from city streets into Lake Pontchartrain. The gates will sit at the mouths of the Orleans, London and 17th Street canals.
New York
Murdoch to help Hillary Clinton
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News Channel and other conservative news outlets have been skewering Hillary Rodham Clinton for years, will host a summer fundraiser for the senator, mystifying some observers and enraging others.
Especially incensed are liberal activists, who for months have decried what’s seen as a shift to the right on Clinton’s part as the Democrat contemplates a run for president in 2008. They are stunned that she is associating with a man viewed as a cornerstone of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” the term Clinton herself coined.
Liberal blogger David Sirota complained: “The brazenness of this move is almost too much to stomach.”
Neither Clinton nor Murdoch has had much to say about the fundraiser since it was first reported this week by the Financial Times.
“I think this is about New York. It’s about the kind of job that I’m doing as a senator from New York,” Clinton said Friday.
Murdoch, for his part, dismissed the event as “no big deal.”
“We think that she has been effective on state issues and local issues here in New York,” Murdoch said.