• Baptist leader urges GOP to hew to conservative line
The Republican Party's return to power depends on staying anchored in traditional anti-abortion and pro-family policies, while making inroads among Hispanics with enlightened immigration rules, a leading conservative figure said Tuesday in New Orleans.

• Carville the class clown to get serious at Tulane
James Carville, the colorful political mastermind whose strategy helped propel Bill Clinton into the White House, will join Tulane University's political science faculty in the spring to teach an undergraduate course on this year's presidential election.

• Change of heart doomed woman
Cynthia Lynch boarded a bus in Tulsa on Friday and braced herself to venture out of Oklahoma for the first time in her life.

• Jindal says he refused possible VP run
BATON ROUGE -- Gov. Bobby Jindal said Tuesday that he "politely declined" last summer an opportunity to be on John McCain's short list for the vice presidency.

• Klan initiation turns deadly, sheriff says
A Tulsa, Okla., woman who traveled to Louisiana to join the Ku Klux Klan was shot to death by the leader of the group's Bogalusa chapter Sunday after she tried to back out of initiation rites at a remote, sandbar camp in northeastern St. Tammany Parish, authorities said Tuesday.

• Vatican might expel activist priest
The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, the missionary priest from Lutcher who has devoted his career to opposing U.S. policy in Latin America, appears to be on the brink of excommunication from the Catholic church for participating in a ceremony that purportedly ordained a woman to the priesthood.

• Engineer guilty in gift scandal
A former supervisor of the federal agency that oversees offshore oil drilling pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to a charge that he lied about receiving gifts from a contractor who worked in his jurisdiction.