Hurricane Katrina, and its terrible aftermath, are being covered in great detail by the international media and in the blogosphere.
It is a complex, moving and quickly developing story, and it can be a challenge to reach out and grab the best coverage and comment.
Below is an attempt to round up some of today's best links on the hurricane and the recovery efforts that are following, complementing an earlier Newsblog round-up of notable links. Please feel free to insert other good links in the comment field.
Wired carries some good hurricane stories, one hailing the great emergency resource of sciponius.com. This uses a Google Map of the disaster area as a template, and allows users to post information about specific areas and streets.
The entries give evolving information such as how submerged a certain area is, or whether it has mobile phone coverage. Wired describes the site as a "wiki disaster map".
Another interesting Wired story outlines attempts being made to develop modern ways of replacing the sandbag as the answer to blocking broken levees. It looks at three floodwall systems being examined by the US military, which use a variety of plastic and other methods: Geocell Systems, Hesco and Portadam.
A reader sent us a link to Whitewashingblack, a blog by two law professors which has been examining the widespread allegations of a racist element in the sluggish early rescue efforts to help the mostly black residents remaining in New Orleans.
Another sent this link to I was from Biloxi, a weblog. Clearly, the writer knows they are among the lucky ones, and a recent post has a passionate call for help from "the Feds":
We need some New Deal-like initiatives down there in a big way. Federal loans at 0% interest for like 10 years. Federal employment. Federal housing. There had better not be any goddamned libertarian foolishness going on down there.
CNN, which has carried consistently excellent online coverage throughout the disaster, has created a "safe list" for survivors, many of whom have had no way of communicating with loved ones. The list also brings home how far away the authorities are from having anything approaching a list of victims, with many bodies still lying in the floodwaters.
CNN also features a video report from a small town – Greenville, in Alabama - which has been reaching out and "opening hearts and homes" to evacuees. Residents have already held a big barbecue for refugees.
The report is a counterpoint to a broadcast I watched last night on BBC Newsnight, on which evacuees spoke of how some middle class local residents in Baton Rouge were quickly becoming sniffy about the influx of refugees.
With the prisons of New Orleans swamped along with so much of the rest of the city, around 8,000 inmates were moved to jails in nearby towns last week. But a temporary prison, which can hold up to 700 people, has been established in a major New Orleans bus station.
You can read more about this on the state's official public safety and corrections website.
Finally, it is of course not just people who have been the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The Daily Telegraph has a story about the starving pet animals left to fend for themselves after the deaths or evacuation of their owners.
