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New Orleans hopes free wireless Web aids recovery

By wire services
Published November 30, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - To help boost its stalled economy, hurricane-ravaged New Orleans is offering the nation's first free wireless Internet network owned and run by a major city.

Mayor Ray Nagin said Tuesday the system would benefit residents and small businesses who still can't get their Internet service restored over the city's washed out telephone network, while showing the nation "that we are building New Orleans back."

The system started operation Tuesday in the central business district and French Quarter. It's to be available throughout the city in about a year.

Hundreds of similar projects in other cities have met with stiff opposition from phone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at blocking competition from government agencies - including a state law in Louisiana that needed to be sidestepped for the New Orleans project.

Tribe chairman's son guilty in school shooting case

MINNEAPOLIS - The teenage son of a tribal chairman pleaded guilty Tuesday to a criminal charge for his role in shootings that left 10 people dead on an Indian reservation last March.

Louis Jourdain, 17, pleaded guilty to threatening interstate communications, according to a docket released by a federal court in St. Paul, Minn. Two other charges - conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States - were dropped.

The docket gave few details of the charge, saying only that Jourdain used a computer to conduct interstate communications that "could be taken by an objective observer as threatening" sometime between Jan. 1, 2003 and March 2005.

Jourdain is the son of Floyd Jourdain Jr., the tribal chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. He was also a friend of 16-year-old Jeff Weise, who shot and killed nine people, most at Red Lake High School on the northern Minnesota reservation, before killing himself. It was the nation's worst school shooting since Columbine.

Two arrested in attacks on Calif. liquor stores

OAKLAND, Calif. - A man linked to a black Muslim group was among two men who turned themselves in to police Tuesday for their roles in vandalizing a pair of stores for selling alcohol to blacks, police said.

Investigators said it was too soon to say whether the vandals were connected to Monday's fire and kidnapping of clerk at the same store ransacked by a gang of black men in suits and bow ties three days earlier.

Yusef Bey IV, 19, and Donald Cunningham, 73, turned themselves in to face charges including robbery, felony vandalism and terrorist threats, Oakland Deputy Police Chief Howard Jordan said. Police obtained warrants charging four others with similar crimes and expected to make arrests.

No arrests have been made in the kidnapping or the fire.

Store employee Abdel Hamdan was found safe in the trunk of a car Monday, about 12 hours after the fire, as police sought to get to the bottom of the attacks.

Media finally gets to meet panda cub

WASHINGTON - Tai Shan, the giant panda cub, showed Tuesday that he is a quick study, prancing about in his den and otherwise mugging for hordes of camera crews in this city that's a veritable fishbowl for celebrities.

More than 100 reporters from around the world got their first look at the fuzzy creature as they filed past his indoor enclosure in five different shifts. And the 41/2-month-old cub did not disappoint.

He chased his zoo keeper around, trying to nibble at the hems of her jeans. He tumbled onto his back, and he gummed at the bamboo stalks that will someday form his diet.

"He's just a fantastic little bear," said Lisa Stevens, the zoo's assistant curator for pandas. "He's climbing all over his cage."

[Last modified November 30, 2005, 02:15:38]