A drive-by shooting in New Orleans has left a man and an 18-year-old woman dead and five others wounded, three of them children.

US police have identified a 19-year-old as a suspect in the shooting of about 20 people during a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans.

Lindsay Lohan told British band McFly such graphic details of her sex life they couldn’t finish their dinner.

Floodwaters from Hurricane Isaac receded today, power came on and businesses opened ahead of the US Labour Day holiday weekend, the beginning of what is certain to be a slow recovery for Louisiana.

Hurricane Isaac sidestepped New Orleans, sending the worst of its howling wind and heavy rain into a cluster of rural fishing villages with few defences against the slow-moving storm that could bring days of unending rain.

Hurricane Isaac has lashed the Louisiana coast and is heading for a shuttered New Orleans, sending floodwaters surging and unleashing fierce winds.

Tropical storm Isaac strengthened into a hurricane just off the US Gulf Coast as it churned toward landfall in the New Orleans area seven years to the day after the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

A barmaid who claimed Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr pushed her does not plan to pursue criminal charges against him, her bosses at a New Orleans restaurant said.

STANDING at the southern most point of the USA, in Key West Florida, the realisation set in that we had finally run out of road.

VIOLENCE marred Halloween night in New Orleans, with two men killed and more than a dozen wounded in five shootings, including in popular tourist areas in or near the city’s famous French Quarter.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are selling their Californian mansion for $13.75m (€9.5m).

Nicolas Cage was “screaming” in the street before being arrested in the early hours of Saturday morning.

ACTOR Nicolas Cage is facing a domestic violence charge after he was arrested while drunk in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

BRAD PITT and Angelina Jolie are suing over a report that their relationship has hit the rocks.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are suing over a report that their relationship has hit the rocks.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt want to settle down in New Orleans, Louisiana - because the city's racial diversity echoes their own family's mixed heritages.

Families are moving into the first six houses built through Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation in Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

Actor Nicolas Cage is set to spook home-buyers after putting his "haunted" New Orleans home back on the market.

Hundreds of determined Louisiana locals insisted they would stay put as their neighbours fled Hurricane Gustav’s approach by the thousands today.

American film star musicians Bruce Willis, Dennis Quaid and Kevin Bacon will perform with their bands in US cities where movies in which they starred were filmed.

Brad Pitt, filming a movie in New Orleans, and girlfriend Angelina Jolie have moved into a French Quarter residence in the city.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have moved their family to New Orleans, Louisiana to escape the constant media attention they are subjected to in Hollywood.

A NOTE found on the body of a suicide jumper led police to a French Quarter apartment in New Orleans where they found a woman’s charred head in a pot, her arms and legs in the oven and her torso in the refrigerator, police have said.

US President George Bush bowed his head in prayer today to remember the hundreds who perished in Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that forever changed the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico - and his presidency.

Sunshine and mild temperatures helped bring the crowds out yesterday as New Orleans’ first post-Katrina Mardi Gras neared, but a stroll through the French Quarter is a lot easier now than it was this time last year.

The first Mardi Gras parade since Hurricane Katrina marched through the French Quarter of New Orleans pulling carts with blue tarpaulins, effigies of Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco and floats with themes such as “Give Me That Mould Time Religion".

There are still sultry, secluded French Quarter courtyards and majestic old Garden District mansions to be seen in New Orleans these days but the tour that John and Toni Stone of Harrisonburg, Virginia, opted for today took them past boarded up shops and collapsing houses.

THE last time Don Glossop saw his customers they were ritually burning green candles, hoping voodoo would pierce the federal bureaucracy and hasten the arrival of desperately-needed relief cheques.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said today he was abandoning his proposal to create a casino district as a way of revitalising the city’s shattered economy, bitterly complaining of resistance from Mississippi politicians.

Engineers pumped much of the remaining floodwater out of New Orleans as tens of thousands of residents continued returning to dry neighbourhoods to check on houses and reopen businesses.

SOME of New Orleans’ most popular neighbourhoods officially reopened to residents yesterday, a move that could bring back about a third of the city’s half a million inhabitants.

The mayor of New Orleans today invited residents of some of the city’s neighbourhoods to return at their own risk, a move that could bring back about one-third of the city’s half-million inhabitants.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, eager to welcome back his city’s residents, says he’s fighting a national impression “that we’re tainted, we’re not ready".

The Mayor of New Orleans has suspended the reopening of large portions of the city and ordered nearly everyone out because of the risk of a new round of flooding from another tropical storm.

Residents began trickling back today as part of a plan by the mayor to reopen New Orleans one postal code at a time, despite repeated warnings from the top federal official on the scene – and US President George Bush himself – that the city is not ready.

NEW ORLEANS' mayor has the authority to let residents return to his hurricane-damaged city, but the Coast Guard official in charge of the federal disaster response said yesterday that all the information from health and environmental experts recommends against it.

US President George Bush ruled out raising taxes to pay the massive costs of Gulf Coast reconstruction, saying other government spending must be cut to pay for a recovery effort expected to swell the national debt by $200bn (€164bn) dollars or more.

US President George Bush said today the Gulf Coast must be rebuilt with an eye toward wiping out the persistent poverty and racial injustice plain to all in the suffering of the black and the poor in Hurricane Katrina’s wake.

US President George Bush promised the US government will pay most of the costs of rebuilding the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast in one of the largest reconstruction projects the world has ever seen.

NEW ORLEANS Mayor Ray Nagin announced yesterday that large parts of the city will reopen early next week, and the French Quarter the week after that. “The city of New Orleans will start to breathe again,” he said.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced today that large parts of the city will reopen early next week, and the French Quarter the week after that.

The putrid air rising from New Orleans’ slowly receding floodwaters was found not to be overly polluted, encouraging news for a mayor weighing the reopening of the French Quarter and other dry parts of the city.

The suffering of New Orleans, long a culturally rich city, is being felt across the entertainment world.

Massive explosions rocked the New Orleans riverfront a few miles south of the French Quarter this morning.