PHILADELPHIA, Miss. – Out on the cabin porches where fairgoers have gathered for decades, it’s old home week.

There’s gossip, how’s-your-mama banter, ice-cold sweet tea and, if you know where to look in this mostly dry county, a little hooch.

As the nation roils in recession, overseas wars and the federal health care debate, in Mississippi it’s just too darned hot to care — at least at the Neshoba County Fair.

“There’s a hard-core cult of true believers who grew up coming to the fair and wouldn’t miss it,” said Dick Molpus, who hasn’t skipped one in his 59 years.

Tens of thousands of people make a sweltering pilgrimage every July or August to the eight-day fair on 60 acres of rolling hills, red clay, oaks and pines in east central Mississippi.

The fair is known as “Mississippi’s Giant House Party” because extended families set up residence in 600 shotgun-style cabins that are among the state’s most prized pieces of real estate. More than one divorce has stalled because of fights about who would get the cabin.

About 50 cabins surround Founders Square, where politicians swoop in for two days of speeches under a tin-roofed, open-air pavilion filled with wooden pews. Other cabins line small, unpaved passageways with names like “Happy Hollow.” Still others surround a dirt track, where jockeys race horses and teenagers prod unpredictable mules.

Jim Perry, a 33-year-old New York investment banker, grew up in Mississippi. As a child, he’d fall asleep during the fair’s all-night singing sessions, where people harmonized with gospel tunes like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

“You have to have an attitude about life where you can be comfortable sitting and talking,” Perry said. “If you can’t take a week out of the year to do that, then your priorities aren’t in the right place.”

His father, Pete Perry, bought a cabin in 1973. It’s now a hub for Republicans to have a cold drink and engage in off-the-record political scheming. Among the guests this week was Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, who swapped Hurricane Katrina stories with friends as a staffer plucked a banjo.

The fair dates back to 1889, with some years off for World War II. It offers the traditional midway rides, fried-food-on-a-stick and exhibitions of livestock, quilts and prize-winning vegetables.

Molpus has spent part of each summer on the sawdust-strewn fairgrounds and his family still occupies a prime spot on Founders Square, where the family makes lunch for hundreds of visitors each year — ham, sliced tomatoes, cold black-eyed peas, thick slices of caramel cake.

The barefoot country living comes at a price. While residential lots in nearby Philadelphia go for about $20,000, the narrow cabin sites on Founders Square sell for $150,000 to $200,000. People sink another $100,000 or more into tearing down and fixing up the structures, with massive camp-style bedrooms typically filled with enough bunk beds to sleep 10, 20 or more.

In a place where summer air can feel like wet cotton, “it was originally considered kind of low-class to air-condition your cabin,” Molpus said. People started surreptitiously installing window units during the 1970s.

In the past several years, rickety structures have been replaced with two- and three-story buildings that look more like beach condos than state park cabins.

Many are painted in a rainbow of colors — bright turquoise with lime-green window trim, tangerine walls painted with parrots, carnation pink with purple porch railings.

Outside Mississippi, the county is known for something far less pleasant: the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” slayings of three civil rights workers. The fairgrounds are just a few miles from where Ku Klux Klansmen buried the young men in an earthen dam.

In 2005, state prosecutors brought charges against reputed Klansman Edgar Ray Killen and a Neshoba County jury convicted him of manslaughter.

At the fair a few weeks later, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who had helped prosecute the case, boasted: “Aren’t you proud of Neshoba Countians for what they’ve done to right a past wrong? Aren’t you proud to tell the world that you’re from the state of Mississippi, that we will do the right thing in Mississippi?”

In 1980, Ronald Reagan made the Neshoba County Fair one of his first campaign appearances after accepting the Republican presidential nomination at the national convention. During a speech that was moved from the Founders Square pavilion to the racetrack to accommodate the crowd, Reagan roiled critics by invoking “states’ rights.”

In 1988, Democrat Michael Dukakis also spoke, and his signature still decorates a poster in a cabin owned by Democrats Gloria and Ed Williamson.

The Williamsons have had a place at the fair since the 1980s; they tore down the original two-story structure in 2002 and replaced it with a three-story cabin that’s painted canary yellow with red trim.

About 20 years ago, one teenager slept in the family’s cabin for five days. As he left, he shook hands with all the women, told them how much he had enjoyed their food and thanked them for their hospitality.

Gloria Williamson told one of her young relatives he should ask the boy back next year. Turns out, nobody knew the teenager before that week, and nobody had invited him. He just showed up, stayed and blended in with the crowd.

She still laughs at the memory: “He had the nicest manners.”

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On the Net:

Neshoba County Fair: http://www.neshobacountyfair.org

WASHINGTON – Government subsidies for flights in and out of rural communities can reach up to thousands of dollars per passenger, and Congress is moving to increase the budget by almost 30 percent to keep those flights going next year.

Some of the subsidies, to places like Ely, Nev., Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Havre, Mont., are eye-popping.

Ely, in Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s state, leads the pack with a $4,500 per passenger subsidy, according to new data from the Senate Appropriations Committee. Just 414 people flew out of Ely last year. That’s 0.7 passengers per flight, which means that some planes fly empty of passengers.

For Havre, each of its 359 passengers — 0.6 passengers per flight — received an almost $2,900 subsidy.

No matter. On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $175 million for the program, a $39 million increase from current funding. Congress initially provided $123 million in rural air subsidies this year, then added $13 million more as costs spiraled.

The committee warns it really has no idea what the true cost of the program will be this year, so it gave Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood power to shift money out of other programs to make sure the subsidies keep flowing.

Reforms promised by the Obama administration have yet to arrive, but there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency to fix the situation, either within the administration or on Capitol Hill.

The troubled Essential Air Service program is a product of deregulating the airlines during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It was established to guarantee that small communities would continue to get commercial air services even though the routes were no longer profitable after deregulation.

Presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush sought unsuccessfully to cut the subsidies that keep flights going to 107 communities in 31 states in the continental U.S. and 45 tiny towns in Alaska, according to the most recent reports. Subsidies are greatest for airports that are more than 210 miles from regional hubs. Communities within 70 driving miles of a hub airport are ineligible.

The budget for the program has bounced around. In the 2001 budget year, it was $50 million, but after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, airlines pulled out of smaller unsubsidized markets, leading more cities to require taxpayer subsidies to keep their flights.

The major airlines have pulled out of the program, leaving smaller, often financially troubled airlines to serve the subsidized communities. There are also fewer and fewer 19-seat airplanes in operation as many airlines turn to more cost-efficient 30-seat planes. But many small communities can’t support the larger planes and are being left without air service

The Bush administration tried to cut the subsidies and focus them on the most isolated communities, but the plan went nowhere in Congress.

The program enjoys strong support among lawmakers. In April, 22 senators wrote White House budget director Peter Orszag to demand more money for it.

“Simply put, the Essential Air Service program was a promise made to rural America, and a promise that must be kept,” the senators wrote.

Support is particularly strong in the Senate, where rural states have disproportionate strength. “It’s a program that is very popular for communities that have very few ways to get in and out of,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who chairs the Appropriations Committee’s transportation subcommittee.

Flights out of Lebanon, N.H., receive a $137 per passenger subsidy. Nonetheless, the state’s Republican senator, Judd Gregg, calls the program “a massive waste of money.”

LaHood told lawmakers earlier this year that the program should be updated and made more cost effective to “provide better value for passengers and the American taxpayer.”

Pressure on the program keeps building as more and more airlines pull out of cities that don’t currently have subsidies. Government subsidies often are needed to get service back.

For example, earlier this month, Mesaba Airlines, a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, served notice it is ceasing flights to eight cities, including Tupelo, Miss.; Paducah, Ky.; and Eau Claire, Wis. The airline hopes to continue with subsidized service.

Supporters of the program claim it’s essential to attracting investment and demonstrating that cities aren’t second-class communities.

“If you don’t have air transportation into your communities … those communities are not going to have an opportunity for economic development,” said Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. Flights out of Nelson’s hometown of McCook get a $468 per passenger subsidy.

BRUSSELS – European air safety regulators told world airlines on Friday they will have to replace hundreds of air speed sensors of the type that may have contributed to the Air France Airbus A330 crash in the Atlantic Ocean in June.

The announcement came after Airbus recommended that airlines flying its planes exchange some of the speed sensors manufactured by Thales Corp. for another model.

Investigators have focused on the possibility that the external monitors on the A330, known as pitot tubes, iced over and gave false speed readings to the Air France plane’s computers as it ran into a turbulent thunderstorm. Each modern jet airliner carries at least three of the L-shaped metal pitot tubes that jut from the forward fuselage.

Several other manufacturers make the components, including North Carolina-based Goodrich Corp.

“The European Aviation Safety Agency plans to propose an airworthiness directive mandating that all A330 and A340 currently fitted with Thales pitot probes must be fitted with at least two Goodrich probes, allowing a maximum of one Thales to remain fitted to the aircraft,” said a statement released by the agency based in Cologne, Germany.

The statement said the airworthiness directive — effectively an order to the planes’ operators — would be issued within the next 14 days. It described the move as precautionary, based on pitot tube data the agency had analyzed in recent weeks.

Airbus spokesman Stefan Schaffrath told The Associated Press that his company also had recommended on Thursday that airlines using its planes exchange two of the three pitot tubes on each of its A330 and A340 aircraft from the Thales type to the Goodrich product.

The recommendation would create a mix of different sensors that would increase safety by providing redundancy if one of the systems failed.

Schaffrath said the move would affect some 200 aircraft in the inventory of various airlines.

He noted that it remains unclear whether incorrect air speed data had contributed in any way to the Air France crash, but said Airbus has since received more feedback from airlines about glitches with the Thales probes.

In June, one of the Air France pilots’ unions urged its members to refuse to fly Airbus A330s and A340s unless their Thales tubes have been replaced.

“Obviously pilots are watching this very carefully,” said Philip von Schoppenthau, secretary-general of the European Cockpit Association. “We obviously want safe operations, and there is a clearly identified problem with the Thales probes that needs to be addressed.”

But air safety experts have cautioned that there was no hard evidence that a pitot tube malfunction caused Air France Flight 447 to crash during a thunderstorm on June 1. The black boxes containing flight data recordings have never been recovered.

Air France said in a statement Friday that it would begin replacing Thales pitot tubes with Goodrich models on its A330 and A340 aircraft after it receives the technical instructions from Airbus next week.

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Associated Press writers Deborah Seward, Tobias Schmidt and Greg Keler in Paris contributed to this report.