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Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is asking for leniency ahead of his July 2 sentencing. New court filings say Nagin is looking at a minimum of 20 years in prison, based on federal sentencing guidelines. That's a "virtual life sentence" for the 58-year-old former two-term mayor, defense attorney Robert Jenkins wrote in a Friday filing to U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan asking her to hand down a lighter term.

Politics: If the Democrats' stitched-together Frankenstein monster of health care reform gets the 60 votes to get through the Senate, it will have been done through an assortment of bribes and brass knuckles. (snip) Sen. Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, has also been critical of the buy-in and public option, but he has an additional issue about whatever comes out of the Senate not involving public funding of abortion in any way. Michael Goldfarb on the Weekly Standard blog quotes a Senate aide as saying the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the...

Staffers on Capitol Hill were calling it the Louisiana Purchase. On the eve of Saturday's showdown in the Senate over health-care reform, Democratic leaders still hadn't secured the support of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the 60 votes needed to keep the legislation alive. The wavering lawmaker was offered a sweetener: at least $100 million in extra federal money for her home state. And so it came to pass that Landrieu walked onto the Senate floor midafternoon Saturday to announce her aye vote -- and to trumpet the financial "fix" she had arranged for Louisiana. "I am not going...

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 23, 2008 – As Joint Task Force Gator continues to help with security in New Orleans, many of the city’s residents are becoming comfortable with the attention the soldiers and airmen of the Louisiana National Guard have been giving them. A Louisiana Army National Guard soldier and New Orleans police respond to a vehicle fire in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. The soldier is a member of Joint Task Force Gator, which helps the New Orleans Police Department provide security. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Michael L. Owens  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available....

NEW ORLEANS - The city and the state of Louisiana will pay the bulk of a $3.4 million racial discrimination judgment against the New Orleans District Attorney's Office, officials announced Tuesday. The judgment was awarded to 36 employees, 35 white and one Hispanic, who were fired and replaced by black employees shortly after Eddie Jordan took over as the city's first black district attorney in 2003. Under the agreement outlined at a conference, the city will pay about one third of the judgment, or more than $1.1 million. The state will pay about $1.6 million, subject to approval by a...

SLIDELL, La. — It was just before dawn when the pickup truck arrived at the two-story house in this middle-class suburb, which was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. But unlike most of the trucks here now, it was not carrying construction supplies. Federal agents, who were hiding in the bushes, say the truck was bringing 50 kilograms of cocaine, worth $5 million, from Houston to the murderous streets of nearby New Orleans. They also say that the shipment, seized on May 18, was at least five times as large as the typical drug delivery before the storm. The drug trade...

Shootings tarnishing New Orleans' image By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 18 minutes ago NEW ORLEANS - Breakfasting on beignets in the French Quarter on a Sunday morning, Dorothy Washington was a tourism official's dream — she saw none of the scars that still mark most of New Orleans 11 months after Hurricane Katrina and she had heard nothing about six weekend shooting deaths. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060730/ap_on_re_us/new_orleans_shootings

Big Questions About the Big Easy Hughes Joseph Hughes chairs the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech and serves on the EPA's environmental engineering advisory committee. He toured the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast with President Wayne Clough in November, spoke to former Alumni Association trustees in January and recently sat down with the ALUMNI MAGAZINE. Hughes now is helping coordinate a conference that will address the future of New Orleans.What is Georgia Tech's role in the rebuilding of New Orleans? We're at the stage right now in the discussion where there are real questions whether we should rebuild...

New Orleans -- A federal judge Monday refused to delay New Orleans' April 22 mayoral election, but told lawyers on both sides of the case to identify any problems that might hinder displaced residents' ability to vote and then solve them.

(CNN) -- The Rev. Torris Young lost his home, his church and many of his parishioners to Hurricane Katrina. Young and his family left their home in Orleans Parish on Sunday, the day before Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005. They evacuated to Houston, Texas, believing their stay would be short. "We were thinking then that the storm would pass over like it normally does, and we thought we could return home, clean up the leaves and go through the normal thing you go through," he said. Young returned shortly after Katrina passed, but his family stayed in Houston...

5 Evacuees Charged In 3 Murders, Home Invasion Crime Stoppers Rewards Offered In 2 Cities POSTED: 2:56 pm CST February 16, 2006 UPDATED: 2:58 pm CST February 16, 2006 HOUSTON -- Crime Stoppers rewards are being offered in two cities in hopes of catching five suspects wanted in three murders and one home invasion in the Houston area, KPRC Local 2 reported. All five are Louisiana residents who relocated to Houston following Hurricane Katrina, and are believed to be either in the Bayou City or in New Orleans. Investigators said Richard Foster, 17, and Ricardo J. Irvin, 18, are charged...

Open it, and they will come. Maybe not just the politicians, either, but the children and their mamas, papas, sisters, brothers, cousins and aunts. New Orleans threw open the doors of Benjamin Franklin Elementary School yesterday in the neighborhood called Uptown, the first public school to open in the city since Hurricane Katrina and the flood shut down everything Aug. 29. In Washington, Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, announced that he would take 400 Democratic pols to New Orleans in April, for the first convention since the storm. He got permission from the AFL-CIO to meet...

A Bush Cabinet officer predicted this week that New Orleans likely will never again be a majority black city, and several black officials are outraged. Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development, during a visit with hurricane victims in Houston, said New Orleans would not reach its pre-Katrina population of "500,000 people for a long time," and "it's not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again."

<p>Hours before New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass announced his resignation, Tony relayed some hot information he had heard from his Capitol Hill sources. It regarded an FBI investigation currently under way.</p> <p>You can go to the source above and listen to that segment of his radio show.</p>

NEW ORLEANS -- After the storm came the carjackers and burglars. Then came the shootouts and the chemical explosions that shook the restored Victorian houses in New Orleans' Algiers Point neighborhood. "The hurricane was a breeze compared with the crime and terror that followed," said Gregg Harris, a psychotherapist who lives in the battered area. As life returned to this close-knit neighborhood three weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, residents said they hoped their experience could persuade political leaders to get serious about the violence and poor services that have long been an unfortunate hallmark of their city. "I think now...

White Devils Strike New Orleans By Ben Johnson FrontPageMagazine.com | September 15, 2005 Weeks after leftists began claiming President Bush’s environmental policies and budget cuts caused Hurricane Katrina’s devastation – and that Bush did not dispatch federal aid workers to Louisiana more quickly because of the victims’ skin color – the Left’s politics of perpetual demonization have reached their logical conclusion: one seasoned race-baiter has accused the president of ordering one of New Orleans’ levees dynamited to kill black people. “I heard from a very reliable source, who saw a 25-foot deep crater under the levee breach,” said Louis Farrakhan,...

There was no town like New Orleans. It was reviled as a center of sin, but praised as a center of Catholic piety. It was defined by both the innovations in its music and the old-world touches in its architecture. In songs and in literature, it has always been used to evoke the best in America culture — it was a key ingredient for William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Catholic novelist Walker Percy. Arlo Guthrie found America on “the train they call the City of New Orleans.” And now it’s gone. “Oh my God, oh my God,” said Mayor Ray...

BELLEVUE, WA – Following low-key inquiries that were met with stony silence and official indifference, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) today is calling for a federal investigation into reports of gun seizures from law-abiding New Orleans residents, and is demanding that officials there immediately account for all confiscated firearms. CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb is also demanding that New Orleans police officials immediately stop the seizures, disclose where those firearms are being kept, how they are secured, the type and number of firearms involved, and how those guns will be promptly returned to their...

Politics: Louisiana's senior senator, whose brother is lieutenant governor and whose father was New Orleans' mayor, is blaming President Bush for "the staggering incompetence of the federal government." Come again? It's understandable that on the Sept. 4 edition of ABC's "This Week," Mary Landrieu said of President Bush, "I might likely have to punch him — literally" if he or members of his administration made any more disparaging remarks about local authorities and their pre- and post-Katrina efforts. Some are and were family. Brother Mitch Landrieu is lieutenant governor of Louisiana. Father "Moon" Landrieu was not only mayor of New...

Modern broadcast media stars take prodigious pride in the speed with which they can communicate to the masses. Of course, these artistes remain utterly oblivious of the poisonous concomitant of that speed, namely, the media's almost inane superficiality. Discovering the cause of the New Orleans tragedy will take months, perhaps years. In reading "In Command of History," a brilliant history soon to be published here of Winston Churchill's efforts to write his monumental history of World War II, I have been struck by the differing explanations of great events historians accumulate after an event. Doubtless, many explanations will accumulate in...