Underground Journal of Initiation

BATON ROUGE, La. - Louisiana wants thousands of state and local government workers to send back $10 million in unemployment pay they received while still collecting regular pay after Hurricane Katrina. A state audit found lax control by the state Department of Labor was the main reason the 5,439 ineligible workers were able to collect up to $258 a week, Legislative Auditor Steve Theriot said. Administrative workers with the City of New Orleans received the most money with 2,233 wrongfully collecting $4.3 million. There were 1,638 state workers, many with the state Department of Health and Hospitals, who got $2.7 million. The money was a small portion of the overall $560 million the department pay out in unemployment benefits to public and private workers in the four months after Katrina. continued...

The latest crime statistics released by the New Orleans Police Department show an increase in homicides and violent crime over the same period last year that, according to one criminologist, clearly outpaces the city's population growth. The statistics, released late Friday by e-mail, also show a slight shift downward in murders, rapes and robberies compared with the last three months of 2006. The numbers detail the first three months of 2007, when 48 people were killed in New Orleans, according to the NOPD, a rate of one victim every 1.8 days. The department also reported 14 rapes, 190 armed robberies, 54 simple robberies and 447 assaults in the first quarter of this year. Violent crime was up a total of 107 percent compared with the same period last year, according to the department.