New Orleans to move Confederate statues

NEW ORLEANS – New Orleans’ leaders on Thursday made a sweeping move to break with the city’s Confederate past when the City Council voted to remove prominent Confederate monuments along some of its busiest streets.

The council’s 6-1 vote allows the city to remove four monuments, including a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that has stood at the center of a traffic circle for 131 years.

It was an emotional meeting often interrupted by heckling infused with references to slavery, lynchings and racism, as well as the pleas of those who opposed removing the monuments to not “rewrite history.”

City Council President Jason Williams called the vote a symbolic severing of an “umbilical cord” tying the city to the legacy of the Confederacy.

U.S., Cuba strike deal on airline flights

HAVANA – The United States and Cuba have struck a deal to allow as many as 110 regular airline flights a day, allowing a surge of American travel to Cuba that could eventually flood the island with hundreds of thousands more U.S. visitors a year, officials said Thursday on the anniversary of detente between the Cold War foes.

The deal reached Wednesday night after three days of talks in Washington opens the way for U.S. airlines to negotiate with Cuba’s government for 20 routes a day to Havana and 10 to each of Cuba’s other nine major airports, the State Department said.

While it will likely take months before the first commercial flight to Havana, the reestablishment of regular aviation to Cuba will almost certainly be the biggest business development since the two countries began normalizing relations last year.

Associated Press