Louisiana

More than three months of your hard-earned wages are going straight to your tax bill this year. Americans will spend an average of 29% of their income on federal, state and local taxes in 2012, the Tax Foundation announced Monday.

International Women's Day honors women's successes, and also their struggles for equality. Nearly a century after American women won the universal right to vote, equal pay continues to remain a distant goal. Here are the metropolitan areas where the wage gap is the widest.

When Robert Thibodaux Sr. went to buy his weekly lottery tickets at the end of October, he planned to spend $5, but the clerk accidentally added the powerplay option, costing him $2 more. The result: a $1 million payday.

Illegal immigrant populations are shrinking in New York, Florida and the Mountain West state as undocumented workers relocate to states that offer more promise of finding work, such as Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. And overall, the drop in immigration has stabilized.

The recent fire at an oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico has brought unexpected focus on the platform's owner, Mariner Energy. Here's more on a company that isn't well known outside oil circles.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is older, wealthier and less diverse, but it's also home to more well-off young people -- demographic changes that could attract more businesses and developers, and give a real lift to efforts to rebuild the Big Easy.

Kenneth Feinberg, who was jointly selected to be the new oil spill claims czar by the White House and BP, spent his first official day on the job Monday taking heat over the guidelines he has established for claims against the fund BP set up for victims of the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

The decline in property values could total $3 billion over five years, Bloomberg reported, citing real estate data company CoreLogic. The BP oil spill could wipe out the premium that buyers normally pay to be near the ocean.

Northrop Grumman depends on government contracts for more than 90% of revenue, making talk of cutting the budget deficit a prickly subject. Here's how the defense contractor plans to stay in the game and how it will affect earnings.

A consortium of 11 Gulf Coast tourist destinations in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida has requested a grant from BP to fund a marketing campaign aimed at luring vacationers back. While the group hopes to entice tourists to the region, it will also need to be honest about the current state of the area's beaches.