Latest News

WASHINGTON (AP) — A ranking U.S. senator is calling off a proposed hearing on bounties in professional sports. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin says he's satisfied with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's response to the issue, including the creation of an anonymous hotline for players to report bounty activity.

Summer Lyric Theater at Tulane University celebrates with Hollywood glamor, as it opens its 45th season with the premier of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Tony Award-winning musical Sunset Boulevard.

We go Inside the Arts for a sneak peek.

A judge in New Orleans has ruled in favor of school employees fired after Hurricane Katrina. The decision could pave the way for thousands more workers in a class-action lawsuit.

The oil and gas industry remains confident of the supplies available in the central Gulf of Mexico. The first oil and gas lease sale in that sector since the BP oil spill generated billions of dollars in bids.

The federal government is set to sell off oil and natural gas leases in the central Gulf of Mexico off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The sale, taking place in the Superdome, starts at 9 a.m. CDT and ends at noon, when the U.S. Department of the Interior is expected to announce the results.

The government is offering 7,434 tracts covering about 38 million acres. As of Tuesday, 593 bids were submitted by 48 companies for 454 tracts.

The blocks are located from three to about 230 miles offshore.

A federal appeals court has scheduled a hearing for the case against three former New Orleans police officers convicted of charges stemming from a man's fatal shooting and burning of his body in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.

A three-judge panel from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments on both sides of the case on July 11.

BATON ROUGE — Notification letters are being sent to Louisiana's lawmakers, advising them about the planned July 14 veto session and how to scrap the meeting if they don't want to hold it.

The veto session was automatically set when Gov. Bobby Jindal rejected bills from the regular legislative session that ended this month. A veto session would allow lawmakers to decide if they want to override some of the governor's decisions.

There's plenty of mud flowing down the Mississippi River and getting washed out into the Gulf of Mexico every day. Now, in a bid to save the threatened delta, the Army Corps of Engineers says it wants to take mud dredged from the shipping channels to build up fragile wetlands.

NEW YORK — Former Saints defensive end Anthony Hargrove says it's not his voice saying "Give me the money" in a video used by the NFL as evidence in its investigation of the New Orleans bounty program.

Hargrove spoke Tuesday outside NFL headquarters.

Hargrove, Will Smith, Scott Fujita and Jonathan Vilma each attended appeals hearings for their suspensions with Commissioner Roger Goodell at the league offices in Manhattan on Monday.

The Southern Baptist Convention will be under the leadership of its first African-American president. The country’s largest Protestant denomination is hoping to diminish its troubling racist past.