Word: louisiana
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...only real crime at former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards' trial - well, besides the 17 counts of racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy that a Baton Rouge jury convicted him of Tuesday - was that Edwards was prevented by a judge's silencing order from talking about the verdict. Luckily, after two previous trials, 22 grand jury investigations (by Edwards' own count), and four gubernatorial terms on the very edge of the law, the 72-year-old Edwards, who could now spend the rest of his life in prison, was able to skirt that one too, a little. "The Chinese have a saying...
Like everyone else in Louisiana, folks in Natchitoches benefit from the state's appealing tax structure, which exempts the first $75,000 of home value. Another attraction is the region's semitropical climate--January temperatures rarely dip below 50[degrees]F, and summer days hover...
Another dismally awe-inspiring legacy of our 20th century obsession with water development has been the gradual disappearance of southern Louisiana. When the first irrigated civilizations were appearing in contemporary Iraq and Pakistan about 5,000 years ago, the Gulf of Mexico was roughly where New Orleans now sits. The Gulf, like all the other seas, had been rising since the last Ice Age, but the Mississippi River dumped 18 billion truckloads of sediment at the Gulf's door in the time it took the seas to rise a foot. It was (and still is) one of the planet...
Until just a few decades ago, land was winning. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the Gulf had retreated some 60 miles (100 km) south of New Orleans. The Mississippi's immense burden of flaked-off topsoil (originating mainly from its big western tributary, the Missouri) overmatched the rising Gulf. The unrestrained river episodically changed course, laying new land from Biloxi to Houston. Over 7,000 years, the Mississippi River created a new piece of continent the size of New Jersey...
...just three or four decades, we had managed to reverse one of nature's most remarkable geomorphological phenomena. By the 1980s coastal Louisiana, instead of expanding in size, was disappearing under the Gulf at a rate of nearly 40 sq. mi. (100 sq km) a year. (The rate of land loss has declined somewhat since then; no one seems sure...