AEHR Media Coverage

Monday, January 21, 2008
Katrina response still not meeting U.N. human rights standards, LA Weekly

Hurricane Katrina was not only a domestic tragedy. The U.S. government’s insufficient efforts to prevent families from being uprooted, its inadequate emergency response, and the still-lagging recovery are at odds with internationally recognized human rights principles that the Bush administration has promoted in other countries.

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Thursday, January 17, 2008
UN Official: Do More for Katrina Victims, USA Today

“Whether you’re displaced in a rich country or a poor country, what remains the same is you need to get the help, the assistance of the authorities, of the communities, to be able to restart a normal life, and the people I have met are not there yet,” said Walter Kalin, the UN secretary general’s representative on the human rights of internally displaced persons.

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Thursday, January 17, 2008
U.N. sees issues on Coast, Mississippi Sun Herald

GULFPORT — After touring hurricane-stricken areas in Mississippi on Wednesday, a top United Nations official met with Coast residents to talk about how his international organization can aid local recovery.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
U.N. rep, human rights groups concerned with problems getting displaced people to return, WWL TV

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, hundred of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes. But even two and half years after the storm, there is no official number and no agency in charge of figuring out how many people remain displaced from their homes.

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Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Flood projects biased, critics say, White neighborhoods favored, corps told, The Times-Picayune

Representatives of environmental groups joined eastern New Orleans residents Tuesday in charging that the early focus of the Army Corps of Engineers on improving flood protection in the mostly white neighborhoods of Lakeview and Old Metairie has discriminated against minority communities.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Health threats action urged *** Community says industry to blame, Richard Burgess; Acadiana Bureau

CALCASIEU PARISH – Residents in a Calcasieu Parish community who say they suffer from pollution-related health problems are asking the federal government to relocate their families, provide medical treatment and place a moratorium on industrial facilities in the area...

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Report: SW La. dioxin levels linked to nearby manufacturers

The New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights released a report by chemist Wilma Subra about federal data on dioxins in the blood of residents in Mossville, an unincorporated community near Westlake. More than a dozen refineries and factories are in the area. The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in May released results of its study comparing dioxin levels in Lafayette and Calcasieu parish residents. The agency found that only Mossville residents at least 45 years old had above-average dioxin levels.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Tiny Town Demands Justice in Dioxin Poisoning, InterPress News Service Agency

A U.S. health agency has made research subjects of people in tiny Mossville, Louisiana by repeatedly monitoring dangerously high levels of dioxin in their blood while doing nothing to get the community out of harm’s way, residents say. Further, the agency failed to release important test results for five years, and made it difficult for the community to obtain the actual data, say residents and their lawyers.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Health Advocates Taking Environmental Concerns to D.C., Associated Press

High levels of toxic chemicals in the blood of Calcasieu Parish residents are tied directly to nearby factories that make vinyl, plastics and petroleum products. That’s according to an environmental advocacy group. The New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights released a report yesterday (Tuesday) by chemist Wilma Subra about federal data on dioxins in the blood of residents in Mossville, an unincorporated community near Westlake.

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Report: SW La. dioxin levels linked to nearby manufacturers, Associated Press

WESTLAKE, La. — High levels of toxic chemicals in the blood of Calcasieu Parish residents are tied directly to nearby factories that make vinyl, plastics and petroleum products, an environmental advocacy group said again Tuesday...

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Friday, June 29, 2007
NEW ORLEANS FLOOD RISK AND RACIAL DISPARITY, PRI’s Living On Earth, Host: Steve Curwood

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood. It’s hurricane season again, and some folks in New Orleans are feeling a little safer than they have for a while. But others feel just as vulnerable as ever. That’s because the Army Corps of Engineers has rebuilt some levees that failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina almost two years ago. But not all neighborhoods have gotten equal treatment so far, and protection for African Americans is lagging far behind efforts for whites…

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Friday, June 29th, 2007
Nearly Two Years After Katrina, Gulf Coast Residents Fighting Environmental Neglect, Privatization, Democracy Now!

Twenty-two months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf region of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, residents are still fighting to save their communities. We speak with Monique Harden, co-director of the New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, and organizer of a caravan of Katrina activists to the U.S. Social Forum this week…

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Friday, June 22, 2007 
New Orleans Remains At Risk for Flooding, NPR Tell Me More

MICHEL MARTIN, host: And we’re going to continue our conversation about flood risk in New Orleans with Monique Harden. She’s an environmental and community activist in New Orleans and she joins us from member station WWNO. Monique, thanks so much for speaking with us...

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Sunday, April 15, 2007
Letter to the Editor: Home to New Orleans, New York Times

To the Editor:
An April 10 news article praises Edward J. Blakely, the executive director of New Orleans’s Office of Recovery Management, for having a ”clinical, outsider’s eye” when in fact his eye is blind to the human rights of New Orleanians displaced by Hurricane Katrina…

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Thursday, October 5, 2006
Poor, Black and Dumped On, Bob Herbert, NY Times

Most of the carnage — the terrible illnesses and the premature deaths — is hidden.

“The people in those agencies who issue the permits, and then do very little monitoring and very little enforcement in our communities, they don’t go with us to the emergency rooms where the children are suffering from serious asthma attacks. And they certainly don’t go with us to the funeral homes where we bury people who are 40 years old and have died of cancer. They don’t see the terrible damage that this stuff is doing…”

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Saturday, July 29, 2006
Gert Town residents return from activist trip in Switzerland, New Orleans City Business

They had to travel across the world to get the help they needed, but in the end, it paid off. In front of a Gert Town home that had collapsed like an accordion six months ago, Gert Town residents and community activists spoke about their recent trip to Geneva, Switzerland, where they convinced the United Nations Human Rights Committee that the U.S. federal government violated the human rights of poor, African American people post-Katrina.

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Friday, July 28, 2006
U.N. panel: U.S. must protect blacks, poor in disasters, CNN

The U.N. Human Rights Committee said poor and black Americans were “disadvantaged” after Katrina, and the United States should work harder to ensure that their rights “are fully taken into consideration in the reconstruction plans with regard to access to housing, education and health care.

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Tuesday, July 27, 2006
It’s un-American – Why the displaced of the Gulf Coast don’t get the help that foreign refugees do, Point of View, The Times-Picayune

If you’re wondering why our government still has no comprehensive rebuilding plan for New Orleans and Gulf Coast communities, and why residents and volunteers are shouldering the tremendous burden of restoring homes on their own, look no further than policymakers who shun fundamental human rights protection as “foreign law” that somehow undermines the American way of life.

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Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Bush administration denies racism in Katrina response, The Times-Picayune

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Monday conceded mistakes in the government’s initial response to Hurricane Katrina but disputed allegations by some organizations that the response reflected governmental racism.

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Saturday, March 4, 2006
Human rights group calls for Katrina investigation, The Times-Picayune

An international human rights agency is being asked to investigate whether the U.S. government is doing enough to help Hurricane Katrina victims and whether workers doing post-hurricane cleanup and rebuilding jobs are being protected from exploitation by contractors. “Six months have passed, and these communities still look like the hurricane hit yesterday,” said Monique Harden, co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights in New Orleans.

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Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Group protests Landrieu’s recovery bill, Baton Rouge Advocate

A group of residents representing Louisiana environmental groups took over a conference room in the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., on Tuesday, refusing to leave until they met with her over hurricane recovery legislation that they said would be detrimental to the environment. Attorneys for Advocates for Environmental Human Rights contend that Landrieu’s “Louisiana Katrina Reconstruction Act” contains several provisions that allow President Bush to waive numerous public health and environmental laws.

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Tuesday, March 22, 2005
No Joy in Mossville, Gambit Weekly

Sixty-nine years ago, Edgar Mouton Jr. was born into a small town in southwest Louisiana where the houses alternated with rice and potato fields and where patches of forest lined the dirt roads. The townspeople were poor, he says, but the bounty from the Bayou d’Inde turned many meals into feasts. “When I was coming up as a kid, you could eat any amount of fish, crawfish, shrimp, oysters that you wanted,” he says.

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Friday, March 11, 2005
Living on Earth, National Public Radio, Environmental Human Rights

A group of citizens from the small Louisiana bayou town of Mossville recently visited the nation’s capital—most of them for the first time. They did the kinds of things tourists do. They climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and marveled at the Capitol Rotunda. But they were also on business in Washington, as lifelong Mossville resident Christine Bennett was quick to point out. While she and her group were admiring the White House from Pennsylvania Avenue, she told us that they came to try and save their town from a decades-old deluge of industrial pollution.

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