Federal probe: Former Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard and a former parish attorney, Tom Wilkinson, have pleaded not guilty to new charges in a federal corruption probe. A superseding indictment earlier this month added five new counts of wire fraud and one count of theft from a federal program to the charges against each man. Before they were arraigned today on the new charges, Broussard and Wilkinson already had pleaded not guilty to charges in the original 33-count indictment. The new charges accuse Broussard of giving Wilkinson a $36,000 raise in 2009 after a relative of Broussard’s was admitted into a private school where Wilkinson served on the board. The Times-Picayune reports that Wilkinson and Broussard declined to comment after their brief court appearances.
Like a pro: LSU golfer Austin Ernst has received an amateur exemption to compete in the LPGA’s first major tournament this year. The 20-year-old sophomore is the defending NCAA individual champion. LSU says Ernst is getting one of five amateur exemptions for the Kraft Nabisco Championships, which will be played at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif., from March 26 to April 1. Last August, she made it to the semifinals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship. This summer, she is expected to be one of the U.S. representatives in the 2012 Curtis Cup in Scotland.
Downtown Hong Kong: Universal Pictures is for the first time releasing a series of movies designed to be global blockbusters akin to Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean—and it all started when the Battleship filmmakers were asked to turn Baton Rouge’s Lafayette Street into Hong Kong, as The Los Angeles Times reports. “It was one of the craziest meetings I’ve ever had,” director Pete Berg recalls of the day he sat down with the new heads of Universal Pictures to discuss Battleship. “They said, ‘We want to go bigger.’ ” Following the May release of Battleship, which cost about $211 million to make, Universal has two more films for 2012 that cost about $175 million each: June’s Snow White and the Huntsman and November’s 47 Ronin. Read the full feature here.
