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Almost 14 months after Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, about 92,000 Mississippians still call FEMA trailers home. Now, the federal government is looking for solutions. The government is dangling $400 million in grant money for states that come up with more efficient and cost-effective ways to house disaster victims. The federal government has spent more than $1 billion on campers for residents in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama displaced by the Aug. 29, 2005, storm. Mississippi is competing with Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas for a share of the grant money, which will be used to fund a pilot "alternative housing" project. Because of the competitive nature of the grant, no details of the state's plan were available. John Davison, who has been at the Cajun RV Park in Biloxi since Katrina, said better living conditions should have come up sooner for people living in the cramped, broken and late-arriving trailers.
LAFAYETTE — High oil prices and the recent discovery of an untapped petroleum reserve in the Gulf of Mexico will be a boon for Lafayette, a noted economist told business leaders Thursday. The annual job growth rate in the Lafayette metropolitan area for 2007 and 2008 is forecast at 2.5 percent, economist Loren Scott told a luncheon crowd at the Independent Weekly’s IndExpo business conference. "That would make you the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the state," he said. Scott, a professor emeritus of economics at LSU and former department chairman at the university in Baton Rouge, is one of the authors of a recent post-hurricane economic forecast for the state. He pegged Lafayette’s strong outlook on the discovery this year of a massive deepwater petroleum pool in the Gulf of Mexico that he expects to fuel brisk activity in the oil-and-gas service sector.
MIAMI -- Some residents of Blue Lakes Mobile Home Park in west Miami-Dade County protested Tuesday, saying their landlord is harassing them to leave their homes. Residents marched and carried hand-painted signs, asking county officials for help. Residents said the landlord posted an eviction notice in March. They claimed that once the announcement was made, they were subject to threats and harassment to get them to move out sooner. .
Rafael Cantoria applied for a job at the Maids Home Services in Honolulu on a whim, and was surprised when they actually hired him. But he's happily been working for the franchise ever since, checking the work quality of the company's six home-cleaning teams and doing some of the cleaning himself. Cantoria moved to Hawaii in 1990 from the Philippines, where he had worked 22 years for the U.S. Navy at Subic Bay. The high school graduate started as a warehouseman, then moved up the ranks to customer service supervisor, then supply systems analyst, picking up many employee awards along the way. Eventually, he applied to move to the United States. Why? "Everybody likes to come here, to make more money, of course," he said last week. "That's everybody's dream." With his wife and children, his first stop was Hawaii.
EDMONTON (CP) - A construction company received the highest penalty ever imposed in Alberta on Friday for a fatal accident involving the nephew of the company's directors. H & H Stucco and Siding Ltd. was fined $345,000 under the Health and Safety Act for failing to ensure the safety of the young man, who died after falling from a fourth-floor balcony. Alex Eisenkrein, 26, was passing materials to a co-worker at a condominium construction site in March 2003 when he fell about 10 metres onto the concrete below. Eisenkrein, who was the nephew of the company's directors, was blind in one eye. There was no guardrail on the balcony and Eisenkrein was not wearing any form of fall protection. Herman and Jeannie Eisenkrein stopped running the business, based in Beaumont, Alta., one week after their nephew's death.
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