Police respond to report of racist murders in New Orleans. New Orleans Police have launched an investigation into reports that White vigilantes hunted down and killed Black people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and were never prosecuted for their actions. An article published by The Nation magazine, “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” has sparked a national outcry about the way racism manifested itself in one of the worst national disasters in U.S. history. In a statement released Wednesday, the New Orleans Police Department said that Superintendent Warren J. Riley “is currently looking into the allegations, and asked if anyone has substantial information relative to any incidents of this type call to the New Orleans Police Department Bureau of Investigations.” Riley said the department was unaware of allegations before the article was published. He police did not receive “any complaints or information to substantiate any of the allegations of racial conflicts or vigilante type crimes in the City of New Orleans including the Algiers Point on the west bank of the City.” In the Nation article, two Black shooting survivors – Donnell Herrington and Marcel Alexander – relayed how they had been blasted with shotguns by White vigilantes in the mostly White Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans in the wake of the killer storm. The article also quotes several White vigilantes who admit targeting Blacks, even shooting them as if they were “pheasants.” One of the Whites in the story says, proudly, “Three people got shot in just one day!” Eleven Blacks were killed during the shooting spree, according to the report.

Rescuers in Haiti are no longer finding signs of life. A few days after a school building collapsed in Haiti, rescue workers are saying that they have not found any signs of life in the rubble, reports Agence France Presse. They would like to see the operation turn from search and rescue to body recovery. “We have inspected the rubble with cameras and dogs. We have unfortunately found no sign of life,” said a French medic. Rescue teams from the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the United Nations, and teams from France, the United States and Canada, along with local police, have been working together to find survivors in the Peitionville school. They will continue to “take every precaution possible” to make sure any possible survivors are protected, he said, but finding life is “very slim” at this time. Since the three-story building collapsed on Friday, only four children have been found alive; at least 93 people were killed. About 250 to 300 people where inside the La Promesse school when it collapsed. Even though 700 students attended the school, only about half would be there at a given time since it operates in two sessions, according to the country’s Youth and Sports Minister Evans Lescouflair. Officials are investigating the cause of the tragedy and already have questioned the building’s owner, Pastor Augustin Fortain, but have not decided to charge him with anything yet. Witnesses say that he built the school without using engineers. Officials will also launch an investigation into the school’s construction. “This construction did not meet normal standards. We are going to ask the minister of education to make an inspection of all the schools built in the same way,” a Haitian senator said. “It’s a real calamity. This building was not suitable for a school,” said Justice Minister Jean-Joseph Exume.

California mayor wants reporter’s death re-investigated

. Oakland Mayor Ronald Dellums said Monday he will ask for an outside investigation by either the state or federal Justice Department into city homicide Detective Sgt. Derwin Longmire’s handling of journalist Chauncey Bailey’s 2007 murder, the Chauncey Bailey Project reported early Tuesday. The lead detective assigned to investigate journalist Chauncey Bailey’s killing ignored evidence linking Yusuf Bey IV, former leader of Your Black Muslim Bakery, to a role in the killing and interfered in two other unrelated felony cases involving Bey IV, according to an investigation by the Project’s Thomas Peele, Bob Butler and Mary Fricker. The Chauncey Bailey Project is a joint venture between the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and more than 20 other news organizations that came together to complete the work of Bailey, an Oakland editor and writer who was gunned down in August 2007. The Bailey Project’s reporting has led to a police internal affairs investigation of that detective, Sgt. Derwin Longmire, and whether his close relationship with Bey IV may have compromised the case, according to InsideBayArea.com. Law enforcement officials said the investigation of the Bailey killing is in crisis. If Longmire is charged with administrative or criminal wrongdoing, the chances of convicting the one person charged, Devaughndre Broussard, might be jeopardized.

Court refuses to call a mistrial in Palin case. In Alaska, the state Supreme Court refused Thursday to halt an ethics investigation into Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee. The ruling clears the way for Alaska lawmakers to release a report today on their investigation into whether Palin abused her power to settle a family dispute in firing her public safety commissioner, The Associated Press reports. The report could prove to be an embarrassment for Palin and a distraction for John McCain’s presidential campaign. Palin’s former public safety commissioner says he was dismissed after resisting pressure to fire a state trooper who had gone through a nasty divorce from the governor’s sister. Republican lawmakers had sued to block the report, saying it had become politicized. Palin did not join the lawsuit. Her husband, Todd, and some of her top aides are cooperating in the inquiry. In affidavits submitted Wednesday, Todd Palin and two top aides for his wife’s administration portrayed the firing as the result of continued wrangling between the governor and her public safety commissioner over control of the agency. The affidavits also portray Gov. Palin as uninvolved, while her husband repeatedly tried to spread the word that their former brother-in-law was unfit to remain a state trooper. In its ruling, the Supreme Court refused to block the legislative investigation but did not immediately explain why.

Death and 6,000 sick Chinese babies trigger investigation. China will step up testing of livestock feed as its seeks to root out use of a chemical blamed for killing three babies and sickening thousands who drank tainted milk powder, state media said Thursday. Melamine, a chemical normally used in plastics, was illegally mixed into the milk powder but the increased testing of the livestock feed indicates government concern over a problem in the wider agricultural sector. The nation’s top product-quality watchdog on Wednesday gave urgent instructions to its various departments to increase tests for melamine in feed and feed additives, Xinhua news agency said. Authorities have found melamine in the products of 22 dairy companies. Spot tests for feed exporters in “key regions” were also planned, it said. Melamine is widely used in China to give livestock feed the appearance of higher protein content, past foreign media investigations have found. Last year, the chemical hit the headlines when melamine-laced food additives produced in China and later used in pet foods were blamed by U.S. officials for the deaths of dogs and cats across the United States. A recall of several pet-food brands in the United States resulted. But the worst reported use of melamine in China became public last week when it emerged the chemical was being added to baby milk formula. China said Wednesday more than 6,000 babies had fallen ill and three had died from kidney failure after drinking milk powder contaminated with melamine. Authorities have found melamine in the products of 22 dairy companies.

Two Black sharecropper couples died in a notoriously gruesome race murder

Federal and state investigators and lawmakers are hoping that, after 62 years, they can bring to justice the dozen or so men who riddled four Black sharecroppers with bullets and cut the unborn baby from one of the victims in the last recorded mass lynching in America. It was July 26, 1945 when a mob, armed with shotguns, rifles and machine guns, took the foursome to the Moore’s Ford Bridge and shot them hundreds of times. One of the men had been accused of killing a White man two weeks earlier. A Klansman bootlegger bailed the suspect out of jail, and drove him, his wife, her brother and her brother’s wife to the bridge, where they were massacred. This week, officials from the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation retrieved boxes of evidence from a home in a rural Georgia community of Walton County. “The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn’t ignore with respect to this case,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead told CNN. For the past several years, Tyrone Brooks, a member of the Georgia state House, has been pressing for justice in this 1946 case. “We just hope and pray they can bring some of these suspects to the bar of justice before they die, because they’re all getting up in age,” said Brooks, the president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials. At the national level, Rep. John Lewis, who represents Georgia in the U.S. House, sponsored a bill that provides $10 million a year over the next decade to investigate lynch cases from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although a lone Oklahoma senator, Tom Coburn, has been blocking the legislation – he almost never supports measures that require federal dollars – but his recently indicated that he might be willing to allow the legislation to go through.