On the roster: McKenna Kelley, the daughter of 1984 gold medal winning gymnast Mary Lou Retton, is enrolling at LSU as a freshman on the gymnastics team, Gannett Louisiana reports. Retton and her husband Shannon Kelley, a former Texas quarterback and the assistant head coach and running backs coach at Houston Baptist, will likely be frequently making the four-hour trip from Houston to see McKenna compete next year. Mary Lou, now 47, will sit in the same Assembly Center that she filled to near capacity back on Feb. 15, 1985. That night, a record crowd of 14,200 watched her, four other medal winners from the ’84 Olympics and an up and coming 12-year-old named Kristie Phillips of Baton Rouge at the Mardi Gras Invitational. Read the full story.
Tossed: A lawsuit filed in 2013 by a Louisiana flood board that sought damages—potentially in the billions of dollars—from scores of oil, gas and pipeline companies over erosion of the state’s fragile coast has been thrown out by a federal judge. The Associated Press reports U.S. District Judge Nanette Jolivette Brown dismissed the suit in a complex 49-page ruling issued on Friday evening. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East had claimed in the lawsuit that coastal drilling and dredging activities contributed to the loss of coastal wetlands that form a natural hurricane protection buffer for New Orleans. Read the full story.
Getting an extension: Americans who couldn’t enroll in federal Obamacare insurance plans over the weekend because of computer glitches or long waits will now have until next Sunday to sign up, federal officials announced this morning. “For those consumers who were unable to complete their enrollment because of longer than normal wait times at the call center in the last three days or because of a technical issue such as being unable to submit an application because their income could not be verified, we will provide them with a time-limited special enrollment period for March 1 coverage,” says Aaron Albright, spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. USA Today has the full story.
