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Danziger Bridge could have slipped back to being just a name on a map if the cover-up had succeeded. But as prosecutors accuse four New Orleans police officers of gunning down unarmed residents on its span, killing two, we know it will always stand for much more. Here the last bonds of trust between a city and its guardians died.

The alleged crimes occurred one week after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The lasting shame may be that it has taken almost five years for federal charges to be filed. But their unveiling by the US Attorney General Eric Holder had the power and ominous shock of a thunderclap. The defendants, if found guilty, could spend the rest of their lives in prison – or they could face the death penalty.

Chaos came in several forms in the woebegone city in the days after the storm. Four-fifths was under water, hospitals lost power and public shelters were fouled by human waste. And there was a police department that became unhinged, nowhere more horrifically than on Danziger Bridge.

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The indictments unsealed late on Tuesday allege what the families of the victims have asserted from the start. On 4 September 2005, the four officers fired on six civilians – going to shop for groceries and check on family property – without justification. Four were wounded – a woman had part of her arm blown off, her husband was shot in the head. Two were killed.

Even if the city has been reliving the tragedy for some time – state charges were filed against the defendants in 2006, but that case later fell apart – the details in the federal indictments still had the power to appal. They describe the shooting in the back of the mentally disabled man, Ronald Madison, as he tried to run away, and offer a new detail: after Madison fell, already mortally wounded, one of the officers stamped on his body.

Those facing possible death sentences are the police officers Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius and Anthony Villavaso as well as former officer Robert Faulcon. They are charged not with murder but rather "deprivation of rights under colour of law". Along with two other officers, they are also charged with attempting to construct an elaborate cover-up that hinged on their assertions at the time that they had been fired upon on the bridge, which, it is alleged, they hadn't.

In court in New Orleans yesterday, three of the men – Mr Bowen, Mr Gisevius and Mr Villavaso, pleaded not guilty to all charges. Mr Faulcon was not in the courtroom, but is awaiting extradition from Texas to Louisiana to stand trial.

Eric Hessler, a lawyer representing Mr Gisevius, said that no consideration had been given to the chaos police were operating in during the first few days after Hurricane Katrina. "The federal government has clearly forgotten or chosen to ignore the circumstances police officers were working under," he told The New York Times.

According to the criminal indictments, the four officers arrived at the scene in a Budget rental van after receiving a radio message from a colleague nearby suggesting that officers may have come under fire from unidentified assailants. What they found when they got to the bridge was merely a straggle of pedestrians crossing from New Orleans to the other side.

Then, the complaint says, the firing began. James Brissette, 17, was with a friend's family heading eastwards in search of groceries. The group tried to hide behind a concrete divider on the bridge. The head wound and the partially lost arm were among the injuries they suffered. The bullets that hit James killed him.

Before he turned to flee, Ronald Madison was on his way with his brother, Lance, to check on the surgery of another brother, Rommel, a prominent New Orleans dentist. After the killing – and kicking – of Ronald, Lance was arrested by the officers. On him they hung their story of having come under fire. He was held for three weeks on charges of trying to kill a police officer before being released for lack of evidence, such as a gun.

That the four officers on the bridge could now be sent to Death Row, if found guilty, seemed yesterday to have left Rommel Madison – the brother of Ronald and Lance – in a quandary. "I don't want to see anyone executed, but I guess I have to keep in mind that they executed my brother," he said.

Tom Perez, the head of the US Justice Department's civil rights division, said that the indictments were "a reminder that the Constitution and the rule of law do not take a holiday – even after a hurricane".

But one New Orleans resident whose home virtually backs on to Danziger Bridge, gave voice to what many in the city still feel: they have a police force they cannot trust. "They put doubt in my mind about the police officers because, if they did that to those people, what they are going to do to us?" said Berthe Delonde.

The investigation into the Danziger shootings took two years and more indictments may still come. The breakthrough for prosecutors that makes the success of the federal case more likely came earlier this year when five former officers reached guilty pleas in connection with the alleged cover-up under which they undertook to offer testimony against the remaining defendants.

In the meantime, Mitch Landrieu barely had his feet under his desk this spring as the new Mayor of New Orleans when he announced that he had asked the federal government to investigate the city's police force "that has been described by many as one of the worst in the country". That review may result in a wholesale restructuring of the department.

Restoring its integrity – and the bonds of trust with the city's residents – is inextricably linked to ensuring justice is done in the Danziger case. "Put simply, we will not tolerate wrongdoing by those who are sworn to protect the public," the Attorney General, Eric Holder, said, unveiling the indictments.

Tobacco giant Philip Morris has been forced to admit that child workers as young as 10 have been subjected to long hours working on tobacco farms with which it has contracts in the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, migrant workers at the farms, mostly from neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, were subjected to conditions that often amounted to forced labour, as employers contracted by tobacco farms that sold their produce to Philip Morris International had their passports confiscated and were often made to do additional work for no pay. The company, which sources tobacco from Kazakhstan for cigarette brands sold in Russia and other former Soviet states, said it was taking "immediate action" to stop the abuses.

In many cases families were expected to pay back unrealistic debts to intermediaries who had arranged for their journeys to Kazakhstan, in schemes that bear all the hallmarks of people trafficking. The report also documented 72 cases of children working on the farms.

Philip Morris produces brands such as Marlboro and Chesterfield in over 150 countries around the world, and purchased 1,500 tonnes of tobacco from Kazakh farms in 2009. The company issued a statement yesterday saying it is "grateful" to Human Rights Watch for raising the issues, and "is firmly opposed to child labour and all other labour abuses". The company says it is implementing a range of measures to ensure the abuses end, such as working with local government and NGOs to ensure school access for children of migrant workers, and implementing a system of third party monitoring to ensure tobacco farms comply with strict guidelines.

Jane Buchanan, the report's author, blamed the Kazakh government as well as Philip Morris for the abuses. She said yesterday that progress had been slow with the authorities in discussions over bureaucratic hurdles and the need to provide schooling for migrant workers' children.

"The commitments from [the government] have been very vague," she said. "It has been a lot of work to get them to accept the idea that migrant workers, even if they are working illegally, still have fundamental rights."

According to Ms Buchanan, Human Rights Watch had first approached the tobacco conglomerate with the allegations in October last year, and there has been a "regular and constructive dialogue" since. "However, we have done some more research recently, and it's clear that not all the things they promised have been fully implemented yet," she said.

One woman told the report's authors that young children had developed red rashes on their necks and stomachs after working with the tobacco, and there were also cases of dangerous pesticides being stored in living areas. During a single work day, tobacco harvesters can be exposed to a similar amount of nicotine as would be found in 36 average-strength cigarettes, and workers are at risk of contracting Green Tobacco Sickness, where nicotine is absorbed through the skin from contact with tobacco leaves. The illness causes nausea, vomiting, headache, muscle weakness and dizziness, and children are particularly susceptible due to their small body size.

Migrant workers come to Kazakhstan from impoverished neighbouring countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan where there are few job possibilities. They are allowed to enter for up to 90 days without a visa, and the complications in securing official work permits mean that many end up working illegally, and are thus at their employers' mercy.

In one of many such stories, Almira, 45, travelled to Kazakhstan from Kyrgyzstan with her husband and two children last year. They were promised by the intermediary who drove them to a tobacco farm in rural Malybai that they would be paid a minimum of $2,300 (£1,500) for their work over the season. However, when they arrived they were told they would have to work off debts from the journey, and had their passports confiscated by the landowner.

"He treated us really badly," recalls Almira. "We couldn't defend ourselves, since we were on his land after all. We worked for 11 to 13 hours a day. The work was really hard." The family contemplated running away, but this was impossible. "Our passports were with the landowner, and we had no money. If we left, then all of our work would be for nothing. And without money, how would we even get back home from there?"

These charges have been a long time coming. I was in New Orleans throughout the floods and in the days after, and I still remember the sense that something had gone amiss when we first heard of the incident on Danziger Bridge, the way our anger grew.

Since that terrible day back in September 2005, the community – and most particularly the African American community – has been petitioning, marching, following lawsuits, begging, and pleading for justice to be done over these premeditated, murderous acts.

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The community has known, through its own investigation and its own work, what happened that day. But the Bush administration did nothing. The local justice department did nothing. It wasn't until finally the administration changed and we got a new attorney general in Eric Holder that we saw any movement towards the investigation and prosecution that were so desperately needed.

But the charges alone will not make a difference. This was not a unique incident. No one had a crystal ball, but there was a clear sense that the police were not trusted. The summer before, there was a huge effort to bring the police and African American communities together – but that effort was derailed. The truth is that there is a cancer in the New Orleans Police Department that has been allowed to fester, and until the diseased tissue is removed, the cells will continue to grow.

There have been some extraordinary efforts to force the NOPD to change, trying to make them agree that any reforms should have the force of law – but there's always been a distrust of the NOPD here, and it's only grown over the years. After Hurricane Katrina the black community has just taken insult after insult, and it's been death by a thousand cuts: little by little, we've come to the sense that there will be no justice through the police – that whoever you complain to, nothing will get done.

That feeling runs through the whole community. Since our new mayor has been elected, we've had 35 murders in three months. This has gone almost unremarked in our local media, and in our community I hear people asking why this isn't being covered, why there's nothing being done about it. There's a sense of disconnection. I have a 17-year-old son, and he makes his own curfew, because he's scared of the police. Imagine that: a 17-year-old black male with his own car, and he's telling his mother that he's scared to go out.

I would love to be optimistic. But what may be hard to understand from so far away is the historic injustice against the African American community here. This is an incredibly poor community, with a history of oppression. There's that saying of Ronald Reagan's, trust but verify: we would love to trust, but we can't until we can verify that there is a real effort towards change.

But the ice has been melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the autumn, so that the bears are now spending on average three more weeks on land per year, without food, than they did three decades ago, the researchers say. As a consequence, their body weight in that time has dropped by 60lb, females have lost 10 per cent of their body length, and the west Hudson Bay population has declined from 1,200 animals to 900.

If the decline in the sea ice continues – as predictions of global warming suggest it will – it is feared that the bears could die out in 25 to 30 years, or perhaps in as few as 10, if there are a succession of years with very low sea ice cover. The Hudson Bay group of bears is the second-most southerly population and might be expected to feel the effects of climate change early. The Arctic sea ice as a whole reached its lowest-ever recorded extent in September, 2007. In the last two years it has recovered, but it is once again declining rapidly this year.

The dependency of the bears on the ice has long been known, and the animals have become an iconic species in terms of being used to promote awareness of global warming. But predictions of how long they may survive have until now been little more than educated guesses.

The significance of the new study is that it is based on a mathematical model which matches the weight and energy-storing capacity of the bears, which are known – the west Hudson Bay animals are the most closely observed of all polar bear populations – against the annual ice shrinkage and the time they have to spend on land without food.

Carried out by Professors Andrew Derocher and Mark Lewis, with graduate student Peter Molnar, it has been published in the journal Biological Conservation, and Professor Derocher talks about it at length in the current issue of Environment 360, the online environmental journal of Yale University in the US.

"We understand very well things like how fat a bear has to be to produce a certain number of cubs, and we know a lot about how much energy these bears are burning during the period of time over the summer that they're forced ashore when the sea ice melts," Professor Derocher says. "And from there it's fairly easy to run various scenarios of sea ice change to look at when, basically, the bears' fat stores run out – and when that happens the bears, of course, subsequently die."

He adds: "There's been a gradual decline in [the bears'] body condition that dates to the 1980s and we can now correlate that very nicely with the loss of sea ice in this ecosystem. And one of the things we found was that the changes that could come in this population could happen very dramatically, and a lot of the change could come within a single year, if you just ended up with an earlier melt of sea ice."

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Polar bears in the Hudson Bay area of Canada are likely to die out in the next three decades, possibly sooner, as global warming melts more Arctic ice and thus reduces their hunting opportunities, according to Canadian biologists.

The animals in western Hudson Bay, one of 19 discrete sub-populations of the species around the Arctic, are losing fat and body mass as their time on the floating sea ice gets shorter and shorter, according to the researchers from the University of Alberta.

The sea ice is where the bears hunt ringed and bearded seals, their main prey, and they have to build up enough fat in the winter, when the ice is at its greatest, to get through the summer, when the ice retreats from the shoreline and the bears can find no food.

woman's body shape may influence how good her memory is, according to US researchers.

Although carrying excess weight anywhere appears to impair older women's brains, carrying it on the hips may make matters worse, they say.

The Northwestern Medicine team found "apple-shaped" women fared better than "pears" on cognitive tests.

But depositing fat around the waist increases the risk of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, experts warn.

They said the findings, in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, highlighted the importance of maintaining a healthy weight for both body and mind.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

With so much evidence of the dangers of obesity, we could all do well to consider sensible lifestyle changes to keep our weight in check”

End Quote Rebecca Wood Chief executive of The Alzheimer's Research Trust

Some of the health risks associated with obesity, such as vascular disease and inflammation, may explain why people who are overweight appear to be at higher risk of dementia.

However, the latest study suggests a bit of extra fat around the waist may actually protect brain functioning.

Spare tyre

The researchers believe belly fat makes more of the female hormone oestrogen that naturally dips after the menopause.

Oestrogen is thought to help protect the brain from cognitive decline.

The study involved 8,745 post-menopausal women aged 65 to 79.

These women were asked to complete a memory test that doctors use to judge brain function. They were also weighed and measured, then scored on an obesity scale known as Body Mass Index or BMI. Over two-thirds of the women were overweight or obese.

The researchers found that for every one point increase in a woman's BMI, her memory score dropped by one point.

And pear-shaped women - those with smaller waists but bigger hips - scored particularly poorly.

The researchers say this is likely to be related to the type of fat deposited around the hips versus the waist.

Scientists already know different kinds of fat release different hormones and have varying effects on insulin resistance, lipids and blood pressure.

Lead researcher Dr Diana Kerwin said: "We need to find out if one kind of fat is more detrimental than the other, and how it affects brain function.

"The fat may contribute to the formation of plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease or a restricted blood flow to the brain."

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said: "The pear-shape is incredibly common, and while this study doesn't explain fully the link between body shape and brain function, it surely makes the case for watching the scales.

"There is little we can do about our natural body shape, but a lot we can do about our weight.

"With so much evidence of the dangers of obesity, we could all do well to consider sensible lifestyle changes to keep our weight in check.