On the morning of Aug. 28 last year, as Hurricane Katrina closed in on the Gulf Coast of the US, building contractor Vincent Whittaker nailed shut his home in Waveland, Mississippi, climbed into his old red Ford truck and fled for his life with his nephew Vincent.
Sitting in the north-bound bumper-to-bumper Interstate 59, they became part of the largest one-time displacements of people the US has ever known. More than 1 million people were uprooted by one of the worst natural disasters in American history -- a catastrophe which cost 1,815 lives, caused an estimated US$125 billion in damage and devastated a region the size of Britain.
"I thought I would be back in a few days," Whittaker said this month, nearly a year after the storm.
"Now I don't think I'll ever go back again. There's nothing left there for me now," he said.
Whittaker, 52, seems older than his years. You can see he was once handsome. There's still no fat on him, but his face is heavily lined, his hair a dirty grey and his mouth has no teeth. He is a black man who moves slowly, as though every step is painful.
In February he went back to Waveland, a small town of 7,000 on the Gulf Coast that was pummelled by 280kph winds.
It was a wasteland.
"I watch the TV like everyone so I knew not to expect much," he recalls.
"But the place I lived in was dead. That place was my soul and everything was gone. Just a heap of stinking trash and cars," he said.
Still, some of his former neighbors have gone back. Many live in government trailers on their property as they negotiate the cumbersome bureaucracy of insurance and permits and finance. Retail stores like Wal-Mart have reopened.
Nevertheless, Whittaker says he's "staying right where I am, thank you sir."
He landed on his feet, 650km from home in Huntsville, Alabama, a booming southern town with its own Toyota plant. There he drummed up business as a building contractor, and has since bought his own home.
"This place is good. It don't make no sense to go back to all that danger out there," he explains.
While many other evacuees were fortunate, like Whittaker, as they scattered across the US, hundreds of thousands of others remain in limbo amidst Katrina's destruction or displaced in strange communities, with few family members nearby. Many are single mothers.
As of April, the last time such figures were compiled, there were still 750,000 displaced by Katrina and the two hurricanes that followed, Rita and Wilma, according to Bob Howard, communications director for the Washington-based Red Cross Hurricane Recovery Program.
There are 100,000 evacuees in Atlanta, Georgia, and up to 150,000 in Houston, Texas. Many are blacks from the disadvantaged neighborhoods of New Orleans who remain jobless and will run out of federal disaster assistance in March, when they could quickly become homeless
"These families consist mostly of women, generally poor and uneducated, with children," said an editorial in the Houston Chronicle.
"Almost all are still reeling from their losses. They are uniquely ill-prepared to start anew in a city so much larger and more complex than New Orleans," it said.
There has been a backlash in some host communities. A Houston police report this month blamed the influx of hurricane refugees for the 17.5 percent rise in the city's homicide rate this year.
One in five murders involved an evacuee as suspect or victim, it said.
New Orleans, which bore the brunt of the storm and public interest, is slowly getting back on its feet. The mayor's office says the city's population is already "north of 250,000" out of the pre-storm population of 455,000.
But given the scale of destruction, it will probably take decades rather than years to recover. Decisions still haven't been made about which areas can be rebuilt, and which are still at risk of flooding. A total of 1.7 million families registered for help at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has paid out some US$6 billion in personal aid.
The Red Cross provided emergency assistance to 1.4 million families and an estimated 4 million people, Howard said. "We are still trying to deal with infrastructure issues and the ability to provide basic services," he said.
Prior to Katrina, the largest Red Cross operation ever was providing assistance for 70,000 families after four hurricanes hit Florida in 2004.
"We went from supporting 70,000 families to 1.4 million. It was 20 times larger than anything we had faced in our 120-year history," he said.
Ultimately, it's up to each individual family to determine their own recovery, he said.
Some will be like Nathan Whittaker -- who now plans to take additional relatives into his flourishing construction business.
But others will never get over Hurricane Katrina, Howard says, "not in one year or 10."
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under