• Men's Final Four returning in 2012
The Final Four is coming back to New Orleans.

• Lack of police report dooms cases
More than 500 moldering criminal cases dating back to 2006 were refused by the Orleans Parish district attorney's office this fall, with prosecutors citing the same reason for dropping all of them: Police never gave them a report.

• Rapper gets new trial, new judge, too
Signaling that she will not preside over the rapper's murder trial a second time, Judge Martha Sassone has set a January hearing in the Corey "C-Murder" Miller case, two weeks after her final day on the District Court bench in Gretna.

• SAVED BY THE CELL
When Ronald "R.J." Richard jumps on his tractor to do yard work, he normally clips his cell phone to the hip pocket of his overalls.

• Flood rates going through the roof
St. Charles Parish residents who don't have federal flood insurance should get it as soon as possible, to avoid dramatically higher rates expected to go into effect next year.

• HANO to shed scattered sites
The Housing Authority of New Orleans on Wednesday approved the sale or demolition nearly three-quarters of its scattered-site properties, targeting more than 500 of 700 total apartments.

• Land plan for Kenner touted
After eight years and numerous public meetings, a master plan to govern land use in Kenner for the next 20 years comes up for a City Council vote today.

• Some schools ban talk about election
Crowded into the multipurpose room at Mandeville Elementary School on the morning of Nov. 5, the student body of more than 500 boys and girls joined American citizens and people throughout the world in celebrating the election of Barack Obama, who will become the country's first black president.

• Taxing bodies holding back
Except for fire protection districts, most taxing bodies in St. Tammany Parish have heeded a call from local legislators, officials and the general public to maintain lower property tax rates.

• BLIND JUSTICE
ore than a dozen of Kendrick Thomas' friends stood outside his house Tuesday afternoon, steps from the spot where he got shot dead a night earlier.

• Shreveport officials join pitch for auto industry aid
WASHINGTON -- Representatives of the Big Three U.S. automakers made their pleas for government aid Tuesday on Capitol Hill, cheered on by rallies at the Shreveport GM plant and outside the Senate office buildings where its fate likely will be decided.

• Fatal bullet traced to bar owner
One of four men killed during a shootout at a Marrero bar last month was hit by a bullet fired by the bar owner as he exchanged gunfire with robbers, according to testimony Tuesday during a court hearing for two of the five suspects.

• Armed man in Nazi garb arrested
A Westwego man found walking down the street in a German Nazi uniform and carrying a high-powered rifle was arrested after he told police he was on his way to kill his sister's next-door neighbor.

• Beaten mayor testifies about robbery
For the second time this year and with the same defendant seated at a table nearby, Madisonville Mayor Peter Gitz took the witness stand on Tuesday, hoping that the man he and prosecutors believe beat and robbed him at his restaurant in 2006 gets placed behind bars.

• Bridge over canal finally reopens
Some two decades after a new Kawanee Avenue bridge over Elmwood Canal was added to Jefferson Parish officials' wish list of infrastructure improvements, the bridge has become reality.

• Parish opens new animal shelter
St. Tammany Parish's new $1.9 million animal shelter, on the drawing board since 2002, finally opened this week with little fanfare north of Lacombe.

• Schools chief gets state honor
Recognized for innovation in education, St. Tammany Parish schools Superintendent Gayle Sloan has been named the 2009 state Superintendent of the Year.

• SUNO's top cop quits amid inquiry
The top police officer at Southern University at New Orleans resigned Tuesday, hours after the release of a report from the state inspector general accusing her of running personal errands when she should have been working, giving herself excessive overtime and skipping the required annual firearms test for five years.

• Water filtering system almost ready
Representatives of a water-filtration system aimed at removing bacteria from St. John the Baptist Parish's drinking water have told officials startup is days away.

• Audit attacks Citizens rate cuts
BATON ROUGE -- The state Department of Insurance made "improper adjustments" to rate increases submitted by Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp. in 2006, resulting in lower premiums that may have violated state law and put state taxpayers at risk in the event of a catastrophe, according to an audit released Monday.

• Audit's demands unlawful, suit claims
BATON ROUGE -- Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon has filed a lawsuit complaining that Legislative Auditor Steve Theriot's demands for records would force Donelon to violate state and federal laws.

• Demoted workers get new SUNO jobs
Two Southern University at New Orleans employees who were demoted after calling attention to what they felt was a fraudulent enrollment scheme started new jobs Monday at the Lakefront campus.

• Carville the class clown to get serious at Tulane
James Carville, the colorful political mastermind whose strategy helped propel Bill Clinton into the White House, will join Tulane University's political science faculty in the spring to teach an undergraduate course on this year's presidential election.

• Budget features cash for paving, offices
The Covington City Council has approved an $18.1 million spending plan for 2009 that includes $1.1 million for street resurfacing and $175,000 to begin turning all of City Hall into a police station.

• Council rejects Montz zoning change
Facing a roomful of Montz residents who said the area cannot support more development, the St. Charles Parish Council on Monday voted down a request to rezone 24 acres for single-family homes.

• New DA warns staff of hard work
Newly sworn-in District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro got an early start on his first day at the job Monday, meeting with prosecutors to outline his expectations.

• Priest's chalice stolen from church
Burglars took a priest's chalice from a Kenner Catholic church this past weekend, along with money in an offering box, police said Monday.

• OK IN K.C.
KANSAS CITY, MO. -- Instead of chanting "Who Dat?" Saints fans likely found themselves muttering it to themselves as they watched their beloved Bless You Boys batter the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday.

• Police chief held on to small-town methods
The opening strains of Tom Buell's farewell to Mandeville on Thursday night were met with accolades befitting a police chief who had served for three decades, shepherding his department from a handful of officers into a modern force equipped with laptops and sophisticated radios.

• An old scourge violently reappears
Through the sparse cover of barren trees, a cluster of colorful tents adorns a rise alongside the Pearl River Canal.

• Storm debris doesn't mix in FEMA's eyes
In the more than three years since Hurricane Katrina, a scattered mess of storm-tossed washers, dryers and refrigerators is still lurking in the waters of Grand Isle's Caminada Pass.

• As five suspects fled, owners fired shots
Just moments after a barrage of bullets had been exchanged inside Gomez's bar, Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputy Rhonda Goff was passing the Fourth Street establishment when two men carrying a third caught her eye.

• Teachers clothing tests Jeff schools
Should teachers be allowed to wear capri pants and blue jeans in the classroom? At some Jefferson Parish public schools, they are. At others, they aren't.

• New Orleans to host Women's Final Four
To UNO Athletic Director Jim Miller, securing the 2013 Women's Final Four for New Orleans wasn't so much a matter of convincing the NCAA of the city's worthiness.

• Land-use anxieties simmer in east N.O.
For residents and activists in eastern New Orleans, the "green dot" debate isn't finished. The notion that redevelopment of a flood-torn section might be prohibited, with idle property converted to green space, has taken on new life -- at least in the realm of political rhetoric and homeowner fears.

• Medicaid program on skids, Jindal says
BATON ROUGE -- Arguing that "doing nothing is not an option," Gov. Bobby Jindal on Friday proposed restructuring Louisiana's health-care program for the poor into a private insurance model that relies on managed-care principles to control costs and improve health outcomes.

• Campus named for first schools chief
The St. Tammany Parish School Board has decided to honor its past by naming the new elementary school in Madisonville after the district's first recorded superintendent.

• Evidence room warnings ignored, cop says
The former overseer of the New Orleans Police Department's evidence room churned out a steady stream of memos to supervisors warning them that the facility's lax security and manpower shortages were a "recipe for disaster."

• Man dies after being shot in St. Rose
Tameka Lee was supposed to be planning a surprise birthday party on Friday; instead, she was attempting to contain her grief after authorities say someone shot and killed her 26-year-old boyfriend in St. Rose.

• Parish budget settles back down
Hurricane Katrina's stamp on Jefferson Parish's annual budgets has been all but wiped away from the spending proposal for 2009.

• FUEL ECONOMY
Mark Mobajni is a serious, straight-up businessman, but some of the regulars at his Harvey gas station can't resist asking him whether he's pulling their legs.

• Mandeville police chief retiring
Mandeville Police Chief Tom Buell announced his retirement on Thursday after 30 years in the post, making him the first official to take the fall for a series of scandals that is now the focus of state and federal criminal investigations.

• Jindal details Medicaid revamp
BATON ROUGE -- Gov. Bobby Jindal plans to unveil today a proposed restructuring of the state's Medicaid program that would steer hundreds of thousands of low-income Louisiana residents into private managed-care plans in an effort to control costs and improve the state's historically poor health-care outcomes.

• Murder, suicide bind families in grief
Just hours after Jason Alexander shot and killed his ex-girlfriend and then committed suicide next to her in the front yard of her Kenner home, many of Alicia Fruge's relatives gathered midday Thursday to share their grief.

• Vouchers add life to private schools in city
After Hurricane Katrina flooded its building and scattered its families, the Upperroom Bible Church Academy kept its elementary school open -- barely.

• Church worker booked in sex abuse
A youth leader at Reserve Christian Church was arrested and booked with several counts of molestation after a 13-year-old church member told authorities that the man assaulted him several times during the past seven months, a spokesman for the Sheriff's Office said Thursday.

• Nagin: Trash talk at hearing over line
Incensed by apparently erroneous accounts of Tuesday's heated confrontation between New Orleans City Councilwoman Stacy Head and the director of the city's Sanitation Department, Mayor Ray Nagin has accused Head of "very crude race-baiting" and has directed all his department heads to walk out of council meetings "if they are verbally assaulted or personally insulted."

• Change of heart doomed woman
Cynthia Lynch boarded a bus in Tulsa on Friday and braced herself to venture out of Oklahoma for the first time in her life.

• NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
Ashley Alden may never have known that a man rummaged around her Broadmoor basement for a half-hour Monday while she and her two children were upstairs in their living room if her rock-guitar-playing neighbor hadn't taken his dog for a walk.

• Charges against Jefferson to stand
WASHINGTON -- Acting with unusual speed, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected a request from Rep. William Jefferson's attorneys to throw out 14 of the 16 corruption charges in a federal indictment, setting the stage for a trial, probably in 2009.

• Corps plans canal upgrade
When Tropical Storm Frances flooded the Louisiana Newpack Shrimp Co. in 1998 thanks, in part, to an incomplete floodwall along the adjacent Company Canal, owners of the Westwego business took matters into their own hands, renting a Bobcat and ordering truckloads of dirt.

• Critics say lock plans are unfair
The Army Corps of Engineers' latest plan to build a new Industrial Canal lock drew sharp criticism Wednesday night from activists who say the controversial project unfairly puts shipping interests above the environmental health of neighborhoods along the waterway.

• Ferry status riles officials
For many St. John the Baptist Parish Council members this week, a meeting on the west bank of the parish gave way to talks of the missing Reserve-to-Edgard ferry.

• Fire, police pay disputed
Covington Mayor Candace Watkins and City Council President Matt Faust got into heated exchanges Wednesday night as the council approved an $18.1 million budget for 2009.

• Union surveys teachers ahead of talks
With less than eight months remaining in its contract with the School Board, the Jefferson Parish teachers union has begun talks with teachers to solicit their comments on salaries, class size and other issues.

• Klan initiation turns deadly, sheriff says
A Tulsa, Okla., woman who traveled to Louisiana to join the Ku Klux Klan was shot to death by the leader of the group's Bogalusa chapter Sunday after she tried to back out of initiation rites at a remote, sandbar camp in northeastern St. Tammany Parish, authorities said Tuesday.

• Jindal says he refused possible VP run
BATON ROUGE -- Gov. Bobby Jindal said Tuesday that he "politely declined" last summer an opportunity to be on John McCain's short list for the vice presidency.

• Vatican might expel activist priest
The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, the missionary priest from Lutcher who has devoted his career to opposing U.S. policy in Latin America, appears to be on the brink of excommunication from the Catholic church for participating in a ceremony that purportedly ordained a woman to the priesthood.

• Arson suspected in home's blaze
A weekend blaze that gutted the home of a man who is leading an effort to recall Mandeville Mayor Eddie Price is being investigated by the state fire marshal as a possible arson.

• Clearer picture sought on cameras
Under fire for crime cameras that critics say often don't work and haven't proved an effective tool for fighting crime, officials of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's administration tried Tuesday to redefine the equipment's purpose to justify spending another $1.6 million on maintenance next year.

• Schools look for advice on security
The St. Charles Parish School Board will seek a security consultant to advise it on beefing up school security systems.

• Audit rips spending by ex-chief of Citizens
BATON ROUGE -- The former head of Louisiana's state-run homeowners insurance program charged taxpayers for $106,579 in questionable expenses from 2003 to 2006, including cigars, high-end wining and dining at fancy restaurants, trips, a possible prom party for his daughter and tickets to LSU football games, according to an audit released Monday.

• Road Home could still visit those who sold home early
Roughly 700 Road Home applicants who sold their hurricane-damaged homes at a loss before they could get a compensation grant were given new hope Monday.

• Council holds off on budget vote
St. Charles Parish Council members discussed employee pay and opted not to set up their own e-mail system, but put off a decision on whether to adopt the parish's $123 million budget that would finance both.

• Council unhappy with signs of recovery
Hoping to boost public confidence in New Orleans' recovery, Mayor Ray Nagin's administration in recent months has erected a host of large neutral-ground signs touting millions of dollars in construction projects that are on the way.

• Habitat to work with city on designs
Representatives from the local Habitat for Humanity chapter said Monday night that they want to work with Slidell officials to come to a consensus on new housing designs to bring variety into the neighborhoods where the organization builds.

• Teachers union seeking foothold
Two years after it lost collective bargaining rights in New Orleans schools, the city's teachers union is seeking a small foothold in the handful of schools still under School Board control.

• TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE
A last-second score couldn't overcome injuries, interceptions and a determined Falcons team, and the Saints slid below .500 again

• THE ROLE OF RACE
WASHINGTON

• What will Obama do about New Orleans recovery?
WASHINGTON -- During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama issued a policy paper pledging to "keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast" and "ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur."

• Officials: Design of twin spans not at fault
More than a week after tons of concrete and 10 men came crashing down into Lake Pontchartrain's chilly waters, leaving one construction worker dead, officials have no clear idea how a common procedure in a common construction design quickly turned into tragedy at the site of the new twin spans bridge.

• System sought to monitor charter schools
New Orleans' recent rapid-fire embrace of charter schools propelled the city to the vanguard of national education reform circles. But state and local educators are only now working on a charter-oversight system that demands performance and allows schools autonomy at the same time.

• Hope lives at property auction
Contractor and architect Gary Meadows went to his first "sheriff's sale" property auction purely out of curiosity.

• Orleans schools show mixed results
In the first full measure of their performance since the 2005 flood, New Orleans public schools showed improved academics, with a handful of open-admission charter and state-run schools posting fairly strong gains over the previous year, according to results released Friday.

• State rebukes SDT over trash facility
SDT Waste & Debris has been cited with numerous environmental violations alleging it didn't properly contain waste and allowed contaminated water to fester at a St. Bernard Parish garbage transfer site that Chalmette native Sidney Torres IV has operated since last year.

• Landrieu voices support for Letten
If tradition holds sway, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten will start packing up his office sometime early next year, as Democratic politicians and supporters advocate their candidates for the position to the new administration.

• Jeff awaits extradition of 2 in killings at Marrero bar
With the final suspects in the quadruple killing at a Marrero bar last week in custody in Texas, Jefferson Parish authorities are now waiting for their return to Louisiana.

• Man beaten with lamp, dies
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office was searching Friday night for a New Orleans man who they say crept into a Metairie home through an unlocked door Thursday evening with an accomplice and savagely beat two men with a table lamp, killing one of them.

• Parish schools rank 3rd in state
Receiving a districtwide score for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, the St. Tammany Parish public school district ranked third in the state for school performance, accountability results released Friday for the 2007-08 school year show.

• Pay scale could be rising for St. Charles personnel
St. Charles Parish's employees might get cost-of-living raises totaling 3.9 percent and merit raises of as much as 4 percent under the administration's proposed 2009 budget.

• School scores rise in River Parishes
Both St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes improved their school district performance scores last year, according to figures released Friday.

• Scores for Jeff schools delayed as state recalculates
BATON ROUGE -- As it released new performance scores for almost every public school system in the state Friday, the Department of Education withheld most of those for Jefferson Parish.

• River diversion slated for closure
The Breaux Act Task Force voted to close the West Bay diversion on the Mississippi River -- the most effective existing sediment diversion in fighting coastal erosion -- unless an alternative source of money is found to pay for dredging sediment from anchorages located just downriver.

• FAREWELL VOYAGE?
The 82-year-old Delta Queen steamboat, the country's only floating National Historic Landmark and a vestige of New Orleans' glory days as a port city, docked for what was likely the last time Thursday night at the Julia Street Wharf.

• Marrero bar slaying suspect found in Houston
A fourth man wanted in a quadruple homicide at Gomez's bar in Marrero last week was arrested Thursday afternoon in Houston after authorities responded to a Crimestoppers tip.

• Parish tells FBI of rising SDT bills
Three months into his administration, with parish garbage bills more than 14 times higher than the year before, St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro alerted the FBI to mounting landfill costs billed to the parish account by local garbage hauling executive Sidney Torres IV.

• $2 billion schools plan OK'd
The Orleans Parish School Board voted to approve a public school facilities master plan Thursday, pushing ahead on the largest school building effort in the city's history.

• Council agrees to lower property tax rates
The St. Tammany Parish Council agreed Thursday night to maintain reduced property tax rates collected by parish government this year -- a move that will soften the blow of increased property values faced by most taxpayers.