New Orleans mayor defends return
NEW ORLEANS – Mayor Ray Nagin defended his plan to return up to 180,000 people to the city within a week and a half despite concerns about the short supply of drinking water and heavily polluted floodwaters.
Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, head of the federal disaster relief effort, said Saturday that Nagin’s idea is both “extremely ambitious and extremely problematic.”
But Nagin said his plan was developed in cooperation with the federal government and balances safety concerns and the needs of citizens to begin rebuilding.
“We must offer the people of New Orleans every chance for a sense of closure and the opportunity for a new beginning,” he said.
Iran to go through with uranium enrichment program
UNITED NATIONS – Iran’s president proclaimed his country’s “inalienable right” to nuclear energy Saturday and offered other nations a role in its program to prove that Tehran is not producing nuclear arms.
In a highly anticipated speech to the U.N. General Assembly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rejected a renewed offer from the European Union, backed by the United States, to halt uranium enrichment in exchange for economic and other incentives.
He said Iran has a right to a nuclear fuel program under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and implicitly accused the Europeans and Americans of “misrepresenting” Iran’s desire for civilian nuclear energy “as the pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
The Europeans and Americans have argued that Iran doesn’t need to enrich uranium because it can obtain it from other countries, but Ahmadinejad said, “The peaceful use of nuclear energy without a fuel cycle is an empty proposition.”
Rescuers find 76-year-old man in Big Easy
NEW ORLEANS – Day after day, for more than two weeks, the 76-year-old man sat trapped and alone in his attic, sipping from a dwindling supply of water until it ran out. No food. No way out of a house ringed by foul floodwaters.
Without ever leaving home, Gerald Martin lived out one of the most remarkable survival stories of Hurricane Katrina. Rescuers, who found him Friday as they searched his neighborhood by boat, were astounded at his good spirits and resiliency after 18 days without food or human contact.
“It’s an incredible story of survival,” said Louie Fernandez, spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency search unit that carried out the rescue.