Free Republic

FULL TITLE: Transgender visitor at a prison files lawsuit after she was ordered by guards to remove her underwear because a screening machine detected 'unknown object' in her pants A transgender woman who tried to visit her incarcerated brother has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Louisiana prison officers ordered her to remove her underwear and show her genitals before she could leave the facility. Donald Nelson, a 48-year-old New Orleans resident who goes by the name 'China,' said in the complaint filed Tuesday that officers at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola insisted on searching her vehicle after she refused...

Soft-on-crime Judge Trudy White is right in the middle of the tragic death of 41-year old Zachary police officer Christopher Lawton Monday night. Lawton’s alleged killer, 33-year-old Albert Franklin, has been the beneficiary of White’s well-established history of being lax with criminals. Franklin now sits in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, charged with first-degree murder of Lawton. Late Monday, East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said Lawton was killed while working undercover with another Zachary police officer searching for Franklin, who was wanted on active warrants for aggravated second-degree battery, felon in possession of a firearm and aggravated assault with...

A 14-year-old New Orleans student on Saturday (March 10) became one of the latest to face charges after police say the student posted several threats against ReNEW Dolores T. Aaron Academy on Curran Boulevard. The school shooting threat, discovered Friday, forms one of more than 106 such threats made toward Louisiana schools since the Feb. 14 shooting that killed 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., according to the FBI's New Orleans Field Office and the Louisiana State Police. New Orleans area schools have been the targets of a number of threats in the...

BAKER – A reserve Zachary Police officer was killed after being run over in a shopping center parking lot Monday evening. The officer has been identified as Christopher M. Lawton. According to Chief David McDavid, 33-year-old Albert Franklin had struck his girlfriend with an AR-15 last week; a warrant was later obtained. Monday night, Zachary Police received information on Franklin's whereabouts. Officers attempted to arrest Franklin and 30-year-old Ashley Chaney, who were in the Walmart parking lot sitting in a U-Haul truck. As the suspects tried to drive away, the reserve officer was pinned between the truck and grocery cart...

SAARTJ is a pop-up restaurant in the Louisiana city run by local Nigerian chef Tunde Wey who will be charging white customers $18 (£13) extra for their meal. Much like the cafe in Melbourne, Australia which charged a 'man-tax' due to the gender pay gap, SAARTJ is charging an increase to highlight the racial pay gap in New Orleans. In 2013, a study found that the average household income of an African-American in the city was 54 per cent lower than that of a white person.

President Donald Trump embraced Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) gun control bill but rejected Rep. Steve Scalise’s (R-LA) push for national reciprocity during a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers Wednesday afternoon. After listening to Sen Chris Murphy (D-CT), Trump looked at toward the end of the table and asked Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) to detail their gun control bill. The Manchin/Toomey gun control bill is the same universal background check legislation supported by Barack Obama in the wake of the heinous attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School. It the very bill that was defeated in the Democrat-controlled...

A Republican senator is arguing that the country needs more "idiot control" rather than more gun control in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that has reignited a national debate about gun violence. "I don't think we need more gun control laws," Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told CNN's John Berman Tuesday. "Not a single one?" Berman asked. "No. I think we need more idiot control," he said, referring to people who perpetrate mass shootings.

A Louisiana student has been investigated by police after saying a math symbol looks like a gun.-snip-"The students were working together, and a student made a math symbol of a square root sign, which kind of looks like a pistol. And he was helping a weaker student, and the student says, 'Well, that looks like a pistol!' And he just made a comment [like] 'let's just get to work before I shoot you with a pistol," Doucet said. According to Doucet, the comment then spread throughout the school like gossip, and grew into a rumor that the student was planning...

A discussion among students at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, La., about a mathematical symbol led to a police investigation and a search of one of the student’s homes, according to the Allen Parish Sheriff’s Office. On the afternoon of Feb. 20, detectives investigated a report of terroristic threats at the school, where they learned that a student had been completing a math problem that required drawing the square-root sign. Students in the group began commenting that the symbol, which represents a number that when multiplied by itself equals another number, looked like a gun. After several students made comments...

The U.S. Department of the Interior will offer offshore Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida for oil and gas exploration and development //snipp// This will be the largest such lease sale in the country's history, it will include almost 77 million acres of federal waters in the Gulf. The lease sale will be live streamed online from New Orleans.

House GOP leaders are forging ahead with their own hardline immigration bill, as the Senate threw in the towel Thursday on legislation to protect hundreds of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants from deportation. The main author of the House bill, Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), said Thursday that he’s building support for his measure, even as other GOP colleagues said an initial vote tally this week was well below the 218 votes needed to pass the bill. Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) “instructions to me are ‘get this bill done,’ and we’re working hard to accomplish that,” Goodlatte said in an...

Mardi Gras is a time to celebrate New Orleans culture, and what better way to do that than by making delicious South Louisiana dishes to share with family and friends. We've combed our recipe archive and come up with a batch of tried-and-tested recipes for you to consider. We've included classics as well as an eclectic batch of dishes that would be excellent for pre- or post-parade parties during Carnival. They are highlighted below. If you want to search for others, check out our database of thousands of recipes. Also, if you have a recipe or another variation on one...

A leader of the Black Lives Matter movement died early Wednesday morning in New Orleans after being shot in the thigh, according to multiple reports. Muhiyidin Elamin Moye, 32, was shot in the thigh while riding a bicycle, police told The New Orleans Advocate.

RUSH: Here’s another great piece, another Limbaugh echo. There’s so many Limbaugh echoes out there today that I’m reveling in it here, folks. By the way, from TheHill.com, headline: “Left Says Democrats Caved on Shutdown — Progressives are hammering [Chuck You] Schumer for his agreement … to end the government shutdown on Monday. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has spoken out against the deal, saying there was no reason to support it. ‘I don’t see that there’s any reason — I’m speaking personally and hearing from my members — to support what was put forth,’ Pelosi said…” Pelosi is...

The Supreme Court faces a test of the authority of politicians to use police to silence their critics.If a citizen speaks at a public meeting and says something a politician doesn’t like, can the citizen be arrested, cuffed, and carted off to the hoosegow? Suppose that, during this fraught encounter, the citizen violates some law—even by accident, even one no one has ever heard of, even one dug up after the fact—does that make her arrest constitutional? Deyshia Hargrave, meet Fane Lozman. You need to follow his case. Hargrave is a language arts teacher in Kaplan, Louisana. She was arrested...

<p>Laving signs heralding free speech and chanting "Stand by Deyshia," about 100 people gathered in a light rain Thursday to rally to support Deyshia Hargrave -- the Louisiana teacher ejected from a school board meeting and roughly handcuffed in a video-recorded arrest after she questioned her superintendent's pay raise.</p>

A special meeting of the Vermilion Parish School Board got a bit heated last night and a concerned educator ended up in handcuffs. Deyshia Hargrave, an English language arts teacher at Rene Rost Middle School in Kaplan, got up to address the board during the public comments portion of the meeting to discuss teacher salaries and pay raises. Her big concern was that while teachers were asked to do more for little to no extra pay, the board was voting to increase the salary of current superintendent Jerome Puyau. However, Hargrave was ruled out of order by board president Anthony...

HOUSTON - U.S. Coast Guard officials are trying to make contact with a Texas-bound, single-engine plane they say is missing. Officials say the plane took off from Oklahoma City Wednesday and was headed to Georgetown Municipal Airport but diverted at some point and headed south. Coast Guard officials say they lost contact with the pilot after the plane flew past Freeport. The New Orleans Coast Guard is sending a plane to make communication with the aircraft. Officials have not said at this time whether the plane crash. They are labeling the incident an "aircraft emergency." It is unknown at this...

SLIDELL – A 67-year-old Slidell man who served as a go-between for an international team of scammers running a “Nigerian prince” email scheme has been arrested after an 18-month investigation. Michael Neu, who is neither Nigerian nor a prince, has been charged with 269 counts of wire fraud and money laundering. Neu helped shuttle fraudulently obtained money to his co-conspirators, some of whom actually do live in Nigeria, according to the Slidell Police Department. The ubiquitous scheme, which begins when an email is sent to an unsuspecting recipient the scammers claim has been named as the beneficiary in a will,...

Attorney General Jeff Landry is urging a federal appeals court to reverse an order that is preventing the implementation of President Donald Trump's executive order regulating so-called "sanctuary cities," arguing that such immigrant-friendly jurisdictions "undermine the rule of law and deprive law enforcement of the tools necessary to enforce the law effectively." "We have seen too many crimes occur against our own State’s citizens due to sanctuary city policies; which is why I have been actively fighting back against these policies since taking office," Landry, a Republican, said in a news release announcing that he had joined 10 other attorneys...