New Orleans trades reality for revelry

NEW ORLEANS — Official data so far from the second Mardi Gras celebration since Hurricane Katrina shows a city on the rebound.

Last year’s festivities were scaled down — fewer parades and only about 13,000 hotel rooms available. This year there are 30,000 hotel rooms ready and for the big weekend leading into Mardi Gras, most of them were filled.

Merchants, hotel operators and others felt the crowd would exceed the 700,000 who visited the city during the same time period last year, the first since the storm hit on Aug. 29, 2005.

“It was an excellent weekend,” said Michael Valentino, managing partner of three French Quarter hotels. “There is clearly more demand this year. It’s feeling more like our normal Mardi Gras pressure.”

Fat Tuesday is the last day of the Mardi Gras Carnival season. Highlights of the celebration were to be Rex and King Zulu parades in the French Quarter.

Three parades rolled Monday night, including Orpheus, the glitzy parade founded by singer Harry Connick Jr. Actress Patricia Clarkson and New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton were celebrity monarchs for the parade.

“The weekend was surprisingly busy,” said Earl Bernhardt, co-owner of two bars and a blues club in the French Quarter. “The crowd is bigger and they’re spending a lot of money.”

Effects of Proposal 2 on University of Michigan admissions not yet clear

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The effect of the state’s new law banning some types of affirmative action programs on admissions at the University of Michigan is unclear based on recently released data, the school said.

The number of black, Latino and American Indian applicants was up compared with a year ago by 10.5 percent to 2,460, according to school figures released Feb. 16 and reported by The Detroit News and The Ann Arbor News.

In the weeks leading up to Proposal 2’s implementation, the university said it admitted 55 percent more minority students than the same period a year before. Minority admissions declined 25 percent in a period that includes the time after.

University leaders cautioned that the numbers were too preliminary to draw conclusions. School spokeswoman Julie Peterson said the university made no special effort to push through minority students before the ban was in place.

“We didn’t evaluate their applications first. We evaluated their applications in the order they came in,” she said.

The application deadline was Feb. 1. The school has rolling admissions and is still making decisions. In all, the school received 26,554 applications, a 6.5 percent increase from a year ago.

Proposal 2, approved in November, bans the use of race and gender preferences in public university admissions and government hiring and contracting.

The new law took effect Dec. 23. Cases challenging all or parts of Proposal 2 continue in federal courts.

ACLU says California school district has few minorities in ‘gifted’ classes

TUSTIN, Calif. — The American Civil Liberties Union accused school district administrators of enrolling too few Hispanic and black students in gifted programs.

The ACLU said in a Feb. 16 letter to Tustin Unified School District officials that it plans to sue if the disparity isn’t corrected.

About 43 percent of the district’s students are Latino, but they made up only 8.6 percent of its Gifted and Talented Education program’s enrollment in 2005-06. Blacks make up 2.4 percent of the student body and 1.4 percent of those in the gifted program.

Whites make up nearly 36 percent of the district’s students and nearly 60 percent of those in the gifted program. Asians, who are 13.3 percent of the district enrollment, make up 26.6 percent of the gifted enrollment.

District spokesman Mark Eliot said administrators were reviewing the letter.

Reports: Settlement reached in dispute over Rosa Parks estate

DETROIT — A settlement has reportedly been reached in the dispute over the estate of Rosa Parks, including the rights to the name and image of the civil rights icon.

The settlement avoids a trial that could have started this week, The Detroit News and WDIV-TV in Detroit reported. The newspaper said it was announced early last Saturday.

The outlines of a proposed settlement were placed on the Wayne County Probate Court record late last Thursday, but officials would not release that filing the following day, saying it would be part of a sealed agreement, The News reported.

The civil rights icon’s 13 nieces and nephews have feuded for years with the people she appointed to handle her affairs. The relatives in May filed a legal challenge to Parks’ will. She died Oct. 24, 2005 in Detroit at the age of 92.

Parks left virtually all her estate to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. Longtime friend Elaine Steele maintains that Parks intended to leave her belongings and her legacy in the hands of the nonprofit organization she founded.

Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus to a white man. The arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and led to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a national civil rights leader.

(Associated Press)

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