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A shooting on Bourbon, at St. Louis Street, in the French Quarter about 12:30 a.m. injured seven people and killed a 25-year-old man. All of the victims were caught in the crossfire when two people began to shoot at each other in a crowd of costumed revelers celebrating Halloween, police said.

Melvin Clay, 37, and Helaina Amrine, 21, were arrested Thursday night in connection to the stabbing death of 23-year-old Marine Ryan Lekosky in October.New Orleans Police Department spokeswoman officer Shereese Harper reported that the two were arrested by police shortly after 9 p.m. at the intersection of Dauphine Street and Bienville street, just one block from where the fatal stabbing occurred.According to Harper, Clay was charged with second degree murder, while Amrine, his girlfriend, was charged with accessory after the fact.After leaving the Marine Ball with his wife around 3:30 a.m. on October 31, Lekosky was stabbed several times when...

UPDATE, 10:35 p.m.: It’s possible we may have found out who “D-Bloc” is. If you’ll recall, “D-Bloc” is the lead blogger on the Iron Rail Book Collective’s web site. He’s the guy who has bragged about vandalizing banks in the French Quarter and he was the guy who boasted on Gambit Weekly’s Blog Of New Orleans that on April 9 the protest went well because: Tons of direct confrontation. New Orleans bared its teeth and snarled, and the rich plutocrats shat themselves in fear. Also in the same comment section, D-Bloc posted a few days later, when the blogosphere began...

Over at Pajama's Media, Scott McKay, whose Hayride blog has been tirelessly cataloging the story of a brutal assault on a young Republican operative and her boyfriend outside a New Orleans fund-raising dinner earlier this month, summarizes his findings. Though initially reported as a straight fight, there is increasing evidence that the attack was political, perpetrated by a group of (get this) anarcho-communist agitators who had broken away from a larger protest at the nearby SRLC. The victim, Allee Bautsch, tentatively identified a member of a group called thee Iron Rail Book Collective, as the chief perpetrator of an attack...

UPDATE, 10:55 p.m.: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Allee Bautsch’s boss, gave WWL-TV in New Orleans a no-comment comment this evening… Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday he isn’t going to comment further on the investigation into the recent French Quarter attack that left his chief fundraiser and her boyfriend injured. Allee Bautsch, 25, suffered a broken leg, and her boyfriend suffered a broken jaw, nose and concussion. When asked about the incident on Monday, Jindal said the couple is now recovering at home after receiving “serious” injuries. “We’re going to refrain from commenting on it. We certainly keep her in our...

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday he isn't going to comment further on the investigation into the recent French Quarter attack that left his chief fundraiser and her boyfriend injured. Allee Bautsch, 25, suffered a broken leg, and her boyfriend suffered a broken jaw, nose and concussion. When asked about the incident on Monday, Jindal said the couple is now recovering at home after receiving "serious" injuries. “We're going to refrain from commenting on it. We certainly keep her in our thoughts and prayers,” Jindal said. “I know she appreciates many people asked about her. She is...

Friday, Allee Bautsch’s mother Della Berning appeared by phone on Fox News to speak about the events of last weekend on behalf of Allee and her boyfriend. Video of that interview follows: Earlier today, Yahoo! News posted a story with another interview with Ms. Berning in which her confirmation of a political cause for the attack on her daughter and her boyfriend is more explicit: Contrary to our initial report, the NOPD is now saying that it does not know whether or not the attacks were politically motivated and the police report lists the motive as unknown. However, Allee Bautsch’s...

…you have to more or less suspend disbelief not to recognize that. But based on various agendas, it seems like that’s what’s going on. Beyond the reactions of left-wing journals, when those sources have reacted to this story at all, we notice that Allahpundit at HotAir.com and Michelle Malkin have both gone out of their way to disparage the idea that the attack had to do with politics. The attack was political. But, and I think I’ve been clear on this and hopefully in this post I’ll be even clearer, while it was political it doesn’t appear that it was...

UPDATE, 11:05 p.m.: A frequent reader and usually reliable source to the Hayride passes along a possible explanation of how the attack happened (and this substantially fits with what we’ve been told by a couple of other people we’ve talked to on background): You might be interested in a comment that showed up under the Times-Picayune’s last article which contained that photo of the crime scene. A commenter who calls himself lernedlesson and who is usually in the know posted that he heard from a co-worker who knows Joe Brown and has talked to him since the incident. Brown confirmed...

I just had a very interesting and somewhat confusing conversation with New Orleans Police Department Public Information Officer Bob Young. Mr. Young confirmed to me that the New Orleans police had indeed taken statements from both of the victims, Jindal aide Allee Bautsch and her boyfriend, Joe Young. He confirmed that in those statements, the victims reported that their assailants had indeed hurled “insults” at them, and the “insults” were, and I quote, “of a political nature”. Describing the entire attack, he went on to say “it was of a political nature”. I then repeated what he told me, and...

UPDATE, 1:32 a.m.: And now comes something not altogether unexpected. Daniel Mauch, “francisnblake,” has gone dark. He’s deleted all 21 of his YouTube videos. And he’s made his Facebook page private. Poof – he’s gone. He posted in the comments below, and I asked him in reply if he knew the identity of “D-Bloc,” the blogger for the Iron Rail Book Collective’s blog who bragged about vandalizing French Quarter banks, and also bragged to Gambit’s Best Of New Orleans Blog about how “rich plutocrats shat themselves” following confrontations with the Iron Rail Gang’s protestors last Friday. D-Mauch had nothing much...

Fourteen year-old Ernest Cloud should be tried as an adult for the murder of Wendy Byrne, prosecutors said Wednesday during a hearing at Orleans Parish Juvenile Court. Cloud, who lived with his mother in Kenner before his arrest in connection to the Jan. 17 French Quarter killing, remains detained on $250,000 bond at the city's juvenile detention center. The parents of the three teens turned them into police, who were able to hone in on the suspects from composite sketches. The teens pick-pocketed someone and then robbed another victim at gunpoint before approaching Byrne at the corner of Gov. Nicholls...

The political tug-of-war over New Orleans' 2009 budget continued Monday as Mayor Ray Nagin announced he will make cuts in the level of sanitation services in the French Quarter next week despite steps taken by the City Council to preserve the "Disneylike" cleaning that has won raves from locals and visitors since it debuted two years ago. To head off what he said would be a $7.5 million budget shortfall, Nagin said he has ordered SDT Waste & Debris Services to stop providing mechanical street and sidewalk sweeping and flushing in the city's premier tourist district beginning Feb. 1. At...

HOUSTON -- In a cramped guard booth on the edge of a community of luxury townhouses, the sense of helplessness that has become so familiar to Gregory Sam since Hurricane Katrina uprooted him from his home town of New Orleans can become all-consuming. "I'm struggling," said Sam, 29, a college graduate who took an $8-an-hour post as a security guard after more than 20 job interviews led to nothing. "I feel like I'm isolated in the country somewhere . . . in a time warp." For the nearly quarter-million people such as Sam who were evacuated to Texas after the...

A Florida teen-ager and two 24-year-old women -- one from New Orleans and the other from Galveston, Texas -- were hit by gunfire about 1 a.m. this morning in the French Quarter, police said.

Jefferson Parish's murder rate continued to spiral upward Friday night, after authorities logged a third killing within 24 hours, pushing the bloodshed to its highest level since 1980. The tally stood at 62 homicides in unincorporated Jefferson Parish, with the West Bank accounting for 43. The previous high for unincorporated Jefferson Parish was 50 murders logged in all of 1990, said Col. John Fortunato of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office. Friday night's violence, which brought Sheriff Harry Lee to the scene in Terrytown, came more than 24 hours after two men were cut down in a Harvey neighborhood Thursday night.

Is Crime Causing Locals To leave? NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Even among the best-off post-Katrina returnees to New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parishe — those living in houses or apartments, rather than trailers — about one-third say they may leave the area within the next two years, a small poll indicates. The poll only reached people whose houses or apartments were in good enough shape to have a land-based phone, pollster Susan E. Howell of the University of New Orleans noted as she released the results Tuesday. "They are presumably not in trailers," she wrote. And, since the university's Survey...

HOUMA -- A well-liked local Catholic priest landed in jail Thanksgiving night after he fired a shot in the air with a hunting rifle and resisted arrest, kicking a deputy in the groin, authorities said. The Rev. Joseph Tu Tran, 51, from St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Pointe-aux-Chenes, was "highly intoxicated" when he went into Roland’s Mini-Mart in Bourg around 8 p.m. carrying a 12-gauge shotgun and later threatened a store clerk with a .270-caliber rifle, Sheriff Jerry J. Larpenter said. No one was hurt in the incident. According to Larpenter, a deputy was near the store on Bourg-Larose...

>>NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A note found on the body of a suicide jumper led police to a French Quarter apartment where they found his girlfriend's charred head in a pot on the stove, her arms and legs in the oven and her torso in the refrigerator, a law enforcement officer said Wednesday. New Orleans Police spokesmen confirmed that a 26-year-old woman was found dismembered Tuesday night in her apartment above a voodoo shop. Details from the kitchen were released by a law enforcement officer close to the investigation who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity and...

A 21-year-old Tennessee woman was found near death in a downtown hotel room Monday with a single gunshot wound to her head, New Orleans police said. The woman, whose name police are withholding pending family notification, was rushed to a local hospital where emergency personnel pronounced her dead, said NOPD spokesman David Adams. Police in the Eighth District received a call Monday morning of a female shot at 334 O’Keefe Street, in a room inside the Sleep Inn Hotel. Investigators said the woman was from Memphis, and was “possibly involved in illicit activity in the French Quarter.” Police yesterday afternoon...

A New Orleans police officer lost his job and was jailed Friday after being nabbed in a French Quarter sting operation, authorities said. An internal affairs investigation was started after complaints had been lodged against Donald Baptiste, 37, alleging he had been taking money from citizens, police said. Late Thursday, police used a confidential Hispanic informant who pretended to speak very little English and pretended to be intoxicated. Baptiste was dispatched to the scene to handle a disturbance call and allegedly confronted the informant and took several hundred dollars that had been given to the informant by police, according to...

A suicide note in the pocket of a man who jumped off the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel late Tuesday led police to the grisly scene of his girlfriend’s murder, where they found her charred head in a pot on the stove, her legs and feet baked in the oven and the rest of her dismembered body in trash bag in the refrigerator, according to police and the couple’s landlord. The man, Zackery Bowen, a tall man in his mid 20s with long blond hair, claimed in the note to have killed his girlfriend, Adrian “Addie” Hall, on Oct. 5, according...

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Women seem to have become a rare sight in many sections of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At a bar in the French Quarter on a recent night, there was not a single unattached woman, observers said. City officials guess New Orleans now has a population of 150,000 during the day and 75,000 at night after commuters have left, The Los Angeles Times reports. Sally Forman, the mayor's press secretary, says: "There's this strange feeling that it's all men in town." Part of the reason is that the wives and children...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — French Quarter bar owners frustrated with the slow pace of recovery in New Orleans won a partial victory Friday when the city pushed back its curfew from midnight to 2 a.m., allowing a little more partying into the wee hours. Bars on or near Bourbon Street had been threatening to defy the midnight curfew, complaining it was putting a damper on the famously raucous neighborhood and the city's economy, too. City Hall announced that the streets in recovering neighborhoods will be off limits to pedestrians and vehicles between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. The city put...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — French Quarter bar owners say the Big Easy's soul can never be restored if a midnight-to-6 a.m. curfew continues to be enforced, so they plan to challenge it the only way New Orleans knows how: with a party. Jim Monaghan said his Molly's at the Market bar will return Friday to its normal operating hours of 10 a.m. to 6 a.m. regardless of a curfew police have enforced more aggressively over the past week or so. His goal, he said, is to demonstrate that New Orleans is on the mend and it's open for business. "We'll...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Although the cleanup will likely take months, Mayor Ray C. Nagin said the tourist-friendly French Quarter and central business district may reopen as early as Monday after the Environmental Protection Agency said the foul-smelling air in the city was not overly polluted. Nagin said he expects about 180,000 people to return to the city within a week or two, when power and sewer systems are restored. Some retailers should be operating by then, as well as two hospitals. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard and other rescue teams continued searching for bodies by boat and helicopter in areas...

An upbeat New Orleans mayor announced Tuesday eve that he hoped to reopen 4 neighborhoods, including the city's central business district and the French Quarter, to residents and business owners by the end of the week... Developing...

I hope this ok to post, and I hope I put it under the right category. This slideshow is fascinating, but long. However, it's worth going through and reading all of the commentary by this resident of the French Quarter who stayed for Katrina. His view of reporters is especially interesting.

Somebody forgot to tell the French Quarter that this town is dead. Because the regulars at Johnny White's Sports Bar & Grill on Bourbon Street were having none of the talk about their city being the new Chernobyl, a ghost metropolis never to rise again. Even if the bureaucrats in Washington and Baton Rouge want to shut the place down and move everybody out. "It's my property. I have a right to die in my property," bartender Larry Hirst said as he served up a pair of Heinekens to two female patrons Thursday night. The politicians and disaster planners, Hirst...

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 9 - The New Orleans business establishment-in-exile has set up a beachhead in a government annex here, across the street from the state Capitol. From here, organizations like the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau have begun to plot the rebirth of the city. In the cramped offices and hallways of this building, called the Capitol Annex, and continuing into the evening at bars and restaurants around Baton Rouge, New Orleans's business leaders and power brokers are concocting big plans, the most important being reopening the French Quarter within 90 days. Also under discussion are plans...

Last Updated: Wednesday, 7 September 2005, 12:16 GMT 13:16 UK French Quarter keen to open for business The BBC News website's Richard Greene discovers how the heart of tourist New Orleans, largely untouched by Hurricane Katrina, is looking to the future, despite the mayor's order to evacuate the city. Finis Shelnutt is enjoying a beautiful September day. The sun is blazing hot, the sky perfectly clear, and he has a table with a tidy white tablecloth all to himself in front of Alex Patout's Louisiana Restaurant. His moustache is perfectly trimmed. Not a hair is out of place. His collarless...

NEW ORLEANS - New Orleans turned much of its attention Sunday to gathering up and counting the dead across a ghastly landscape awash in perhaps thousands of corpses. "It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine," the nation's homeland security chief warned. SNIP With large-scale evacuations completed at the Superdome and Convention Center, the death toll was not known. But bodies were everywhere: floating in canals, slumped in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways and medians and hidden in attics. SNIP The U.S. Public Health Service said one morgue alone, at a St....

NEW ORLEANS — You know a city has legs when three or four dozen of them are parading down Bourbon Street — some clad in tutus and grass skirts — six days after the most damaging hurricane in American history. But the annual Southern Decadence parade through the heart of the French Quarter stops for nothing — not even Katrina. "Hey, we've got to keep our morale up, too," said Jill Sandars, aka "Jelly Sandwich," her "Quarter" name. Resplendent in a fluffy red skirt, dark hat and small black umbrella, she strutted and sang with 15 to 20 other storm...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor. As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim. ... "Some people became animals," Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. "We became more civilized."

The French Quarter was damaged by Katrina, but it was not destroyed, and tourists and residents let the good times roll and wondered why they were so lucky. By ERIKA BOLSTAD ebolstad@herald.com NEW ORLEANS - At the start of hurricane season, the historic St. Louis Cathedral in the heart of the French Quarter offers a short prayer in the Sunday church bulletin to Our Lady of Prompt Succor. Each year, the city's Catholics clip out the prayer, place it on their refrigerators and repeat the entreaty whenever a tropical depression appears in the Gulf of Mexico: Spare New Orleans from...

NEW ORLEANS - In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming “tribes” and dividing up the labor. As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim. While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods — humanity.

Today's NPR's Talk of the Nation hosted a call-in program for people affected by Hurricane Katrina. A woman who evacuated safely called to ask if anyone could assist her with getting hay and water to the carriage mules left behind in the evacuation. The caller said she was a carriage driver in the French Quarter and she was very concerned for the mules. She said three people stayed with the mules during the hurricane. They are stabled near the French Quarter. The woman thinks their supply of food and water must be gone by now. The NPR commentator responded that...

Bourbon Street in New Orlans is relatively unscathed...but let us consider what this means in light of the twisted logic of notorious Christian terrorists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The only lights Saturday night on Bourbon Street were the flashing blues of police vehicles on patrol, the headlights of rumbling military trucks and an occasional flashlight or cigarette glow among bedraggled holdout residents. "Why does any local stay? Because this is our neighborhood, this is home," said Ride Hamilton, 29. He has turned his French Quarter home into a mini-warehouse of supplies for his neighbors. He said he accumulated the goods during daily "shopping" trips to local stores, "trying to get it before somebody else does. We're relying on ourselves out here." Johnny White's Sports...

In New Orleans, winding streets where revelers meandered, listening to jazz in the sticky heat, are now flooded with murky water. Some businesses and landmarks are submerged or damaged; others escaped the water but were ravaged by looters. Rescue workers are combing the waters in search of survivors, but a different kind of reckoning is also becoming clear. New Orleans is one of the most iconic cities in America, and some of the places and pieces that make it unique could be lost or looted. A list of famous spots in the city, and how they are faring, though the...

Sitrep: WDSU just showed video of Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. First store to reopen in the French Quarter. Four customers. Choice of beverage was Budweiser. Dog outside, street performer playing guitar with small amp.Laissez Le Bon Temps Roulez Encore

NEW ORLEANS - Singer-songwriter Ray Davies (news) of the celebrated British rock band the Kinks was shot in the leg while chasing thieves who snatched a purse from a woman he was with, police said Monday. He was not seriously injured. Police said Davies, 59, and the woman were walking near the edge of the French Quarter when the shooting happened around 8:30 p.m. Sunday. Davies was treated and released at a hospital, said Capt. Marlon Defillo, a police spokesman. One suspect was captured within hours and another person was being sought. The woman was not hurt. Police would not...