Katrina horrors contine to mount

Just because other things have grabbed the headlines doesn't mean that things are now going smoothly down in the muddy post-hurricane sections of New Orleans:

• Haliburton appears to be using virtual slave labor in its part of the reconstruction, bringing in illegal immigrants and then leaving them to fend for themselves without housing or income.
  
  
• Meanwhile, families coming back to the impoverished 9th Ward area are sometimes finding the decomposing corpses of their family members still in the houses -- officials knowingly called off the search months ago without looking in every house. Now beureaucratic tangles may keep there from being any way to deal with newly found corpses. What could be grimmer.

This seems like a good time to remind folks that rebuilding New Orleans and the lives of its residents will be a project for months and years to come, and to again make this suggestion for your holiday consideration.

(new stories via Atrios)