Latest in New Orleans

The eye of dangerous storm Hurricane Ida has now reached land on the southeastern coast of Louisiana, near Port Fourchon. “Within the past hour, sustained winds of 43 mph and a gust to 67 mph were reported at Lakefront Airport in New Orleans. A NOAA National Ocean Service tide gauge in Shell Beach, Louisiana, recently…

Pre-production on the upcoming NBC/Blumhouse limited series The Thing About Pam, starring Renée Zellweger and Josh Duhamel, has been suspended, a rep for Blumhouse told Deadline. Based on a the real-life, stranger-than-fiction story behind the 2011 murder of Betsy Faria, the series has been in final stages of…

EXCLUSIVE: The National Hurricane Center said Friday afternoon that a Category 4 hurricane is forecast to make landfall in Louisiana on Sunday, which marks the exact day Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans 16 years ago as a Category 3 storm. New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell has called for all those…

It's fascinating to watch local governments — New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans — rush to enact Covid vaccine requirements for entry to the publicly accessible spaces of private business, including, yes, movie theaters. I'm not equipped to judge the ultimate propriety or efficacy of such mandates…

A quarter-century ago, Will Smith’s Capt. Steven Hiller was “a little anxious to get up there and whoop ET’s ass” and save Earth from alien invaders in Independence Day. In 2021, the actor paid it forward in a less-dramatic but equally cool way: He paid a reported $100,000 to save New Orleans’ Fourth of July fireworks…

Though COVID-19 may be complicating celebrations and gatherings for this upcoming holiday season, the City of New Orleans is taking safety precautions into 2021. Beau Tidwell, Communications director for New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, stated during a press conference on Tuesday that while Mardi Gras celebrations…

George J. Steiner, Jr., former Louisiana Film Commissioner and president of Filmworks New Orleans, a 36-acre motion picture and television production facility, died Sept. 26 in New Orleans at age 68. The cause was a cardiac event, according to Phil Caruso, a photographer and friend. Steiner’s work spanned 50 years…

As Hurricane Laura nears landfall as a massive Category 4 storm, some 1.5 million people in the Gulf Coast region are under evacuation orders ahead of what federal officials are describing as an “unsurvivable storm surge.” Today co-anchor and weatherman Al Roker said on MSNBC this morning, “I’ve never seen that phrase…

Olga Wilhelmine, SAG-AFTRA's national board member from New Orleans, is on a mission. With so many of her fellow actors struggling financially during the coronavirus pandemic, she's trying to connect them with their unclaimed residuals. The union is holding tens of millions of dollars in unclaimed SAG residuals for…

The opposition party at SAG-AFTRA's local in New Orleans has won a resounding victory in a re-run of the August election that was mandated by the local's election committee. Olga Wilhelmine, who won the original contest for a seat on the national board, won again in the re-run, as did all of her running mates on the…

Mayor LaToya Cantrell has declared a state of emergency in New Orleans, which has ordered the shutdown of most of the city’s computer network following a ransomware attack. The attack started at 5 a.m. CST on Friday, according to the City of New Orleans' emergency preparedness campaign, NOLA Ready, managed by the…

Saying that "your vote counts, even if they make you do it twice," a group of SAG-AFTRA members in New Orleans say they will "embrace" the mandated re-run of their local's election even though they think the do-over is the result of a "biased decision." "The decision to re-run the NOLA election is a biased decision…