Legislature approves $26M in spending during crime session. Here’s where the money’s going.

By Greg Larose

It was difficult for lawmakers and fiscal experts to pinpoint an exact cost of the stricter crime prevention measures Republican Gov. Jeff Landry called on the Louisiana Legislature to approve during a special session on criminal justice policy that concluded Thursday. 

Just how many more people will be incarcerated and how much longer they will stay in prison as a result of the new laws is a moving target, meaning so is the price tag.   

But what we do know is that legislators approved nearly $26 million in spending in an  appropriations bill authored by Rep. Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, the top budget architect in the Louisiana House. He and other GOP members of the Legislature countered arguments from Democrats that the unforeseen cost of higher incarceration rates won’t be justified. 

Majority of Americans Want Halt of US Weapons Bound for Israel: Poll

By Julia Conley

"Everyone knows that the U.S. could end this today if we wanted to," said one analyst.

A new poll released Tuesday revealed that a majority of Americans want to the U.S. government to stop supplying the Israeli military with weaponry to carry out its brutal assault on Gaza that has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, most of them civilian men, women, and children.

As organizers called on Democratic voters in at least seven states to vote "uncommitted" on their Super Tuesday primary ballots on Tuesday to help push the Biden administration to demand a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, the YouGov poll provided another measure of Americans' growing outrage over their government's material and political support for the "genocidal" campaign by Israel's far-right government.

Death penalty on trial as Racial Justice Act hearing begins

By Kelan Lyons

In 1968, days after the Ku Klux Klan marched through Black neighborhoods in Benson following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., five young Black adolescents tried to burn down the Klan’s meeting hall in the Johnston County town. The fire did not travel past the doorway. The boys, all of whom were between the ages of 16 and 20 and did not have criminal records, were each given 12 years of imprisonment and hard labor, harsher than the sentences meted out to white defendants who were found guilty of similar crimes in the county.