Author: manshipxgr

Published: May 5, 2026

By: Kylah Babin, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE –  After the discovery of new street-drug variants being used in New Orleans during Super Bowl LIX and Mardi Gras in 2025, an LSU lab is seeking to expand the use of wastewater treatment methods to help identify drug-use patterns across Louisiana.

The LSU Environmental Chemistry Lab is one of the few labs in the country that uses a method of wastewater analysis that allows samples to be run through an instrument so that the drug can be broken down into detectable compounds.

“It provides an early detection,” said Ramesh Sapkota, a graduate student who assisted with the research that centered on New Orleans wastewater during the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras.

Sapkota added that these scientific techniques would help public health officials and immunity services respond sooner to drug issues in an area.

Last year, the lab discovered seven new deadly variants of nitazenes in New Orleans. Nitazenes are manmade drugs and are highly addictive, even more so than other opioids such as morphine and fentanyl. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, some of these nitazenes can be 50 times more potent than fentanyl and 1,000 times more potent than morphine.

Read more at American Press.

Published: May 5, 2026

By: Kylah Babin and Sheridan White, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE –  U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields told the Baton Rouge Press Club Monday that Louisiana voters should vote as normal in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives even though Gov. Jeff Landry suspended voting in those races in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling that the state’s congressional districts were unconstitutional due to racial gerrymandering.

“At the end of the day, the Supreme Court did not say, ‘Halt the election,’ nor should it, and we’re going to let the Supreme Court make a decision fairly soon about whether or not Louisiana can do what it did,” Fields said. “That’s why I’m urging voters to actually go out and cast their votes for the whole ticket.”

Fields, a Baton Rouge Democrat, represents the snake-like congressional 6th District that was created by the Legislature in 2024 to give Louisiana a second majority-Black district. It was that district that drew most of the Supreme Court’s attention in its 6-3 vote on April 29 that ordered the state to once again redraw its congressional maps.

After Landry suspended the U.S. House primary elections based on the court’s ruling, Fields joined several other candidates in filing a federal lawsuit challenging the decision to suspend the congressional primary elections after voting had already begun. Election day is May 16, but absentee and early voting has already begun using the original ballot.

Fields and the other plaintiffs said suspending the elections mid-cycle violates the First, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, particularly after some voters had already begun casting ballots.

Read more at Minden Press-Herald.

Published: May 5, 2026

By: Sheldon “Trey” Vice III, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — The House voted 87-9 to allocate $64 million from excess collections by the Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation to expand a program that offers $10,000 grants to homeowners who install fortified roofs.

House Bill 1187 by Rep. Paul Sawyer, R-Baton Rouge, would reallocate surplus funds from Citizens’ emergency assessment to spur the installation of more fortified roofs, which Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple said eventually would lower insurance premiums for property owners statewide.

Temple, who worked closely with Sawyer on the bill, explained at a recent hearing why the fortified-roof program is popular and how every dollar allocated from Citizens would go toward reducing premiums statewide.

“They have determined that they will have some surplus money, and we all agreed that the fortified-roof program is the quickest, most assured way to bring premium relief to citizens on their homeowners’ insurance,” Temple said.

Read more at Shreveport Times.

Published: April 30, 2026

By: Peter Finney Jr., LSU Manship School News Service

NEW ORLEANS — So, what’s the big deal?

As a reformed sportswriter who once asked ChatGPT to plot out the best road trip for visiting national parks in Utah – and got what appeared to be a suitably Mormon answer in five seconds – I wondered how long would it take for the free AI analytical tool to create a reasonable redistricting plan for Louisiana that would map out six contiguous, right-sized congressional districts for the state’s 4.6 million residents.

In this case, about 3.7 seconds.

But, as with all things Louisiana, where politics is waged as 4D chess, checkmate is not that easy, says Greg Rigamer, one of those rare people with the ability to decipher and accommodate both the unswerving validity of mathematical equations and the relentless warrior mentality of politicians, for whom this take-no-prisoners game of redistricting comes down to: “Find me one more vote.”

Throw in the bitter divide of race, the bane of the United States for 250 years, and finding a voting solution that satisfies the most Louisiana residents becomes an AI hallucination.

Read more at WBRZ.

Published: May 1, 2026

By: Sheridan White and Courtney Bell, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s congressional map unconstitutional for racial gerrymandering, candidates in the hotly contested but suddenly delayed 5th District race to replace U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow expressed varying degrees of confidence and exasperation.

One collateral effect of the suspended election timeline is the disruptive impact on low-profile candidates in both parties who have limited resources to get their message out to voters.

“It definitely hurts the little guys like me,” said Austin Magee, a Republican candidate and construction company owner from Franklinton.

Magee supports the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling, but he said he has exhausted his already limited resources in his months-long efforts of campaigning, posting signs and talking to people around the district. Now, he said, these areas may not even be included in the redrawn district.

“It is frustrating that there’s been so much effort and energy and money expended,” Magee said. “It’s just more time for the people that have millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank to spend on this election. But for guys like me, it is a significant additional hill to climb.”

Read more at WBRZ.

Published: April 30, 2026

By: Sheridan White, Courtney Bell and Avery White, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – Gov. Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency Thursday to temporarily suspend this year’s congressional elections in Louisiana in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that maps of the state’s six districts are unconstitutional.

Landry said that the ruling had enjoined the state from going ahead with the election without drawing new maps.

“Accordingly, the State is currently enjoined from carrying out congressional elections under the current map,” Landry and state Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill said in the statement.

But Peter Robins-Brown, the executive director of Louisiana Progress, a progressive advocacy group that has worked on redistricting issues in Louisiana in recent years, disagreed that the state is legally bound to changing the maps during this election cycle.

“There wasn’t anything in the ruling that said these maps are invalid for this election and needed to be changed before it could happen,” Robins-Brown said.

Read more at KATC.

Published: April 30, 2026

By: Veronica Camenzuli, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – A bill holding adults legally responsible if children gain access to a loaded firearm was rejected 6-3 by a House committee this week.

House Bill 586, by Rep. Vincent Cox III, R-Gretna, would have criminalized leaving a loaded firearm where children could access it, potentially harming themselves or others, but failed in the House Administration of Criminal Justice Committee.

“I believe that HB 586 is common sense and responsibility without restricting Second Amendment rights,” Cox said.

Ashlyn Carraway, whose 13-year-old son Noah died due to his friend accidentally shooting him at a sleepover in 2011, spoke in support of the bill’s goals of child safety.

“We try our absolute best to keep them safe in every other way that we can,” Carraway said. “Why would this be any different?”

Read more at KALB.

Published: April 30, 2026

By: Izzy Wollfarth, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – Jimmie Duncan, released from death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola after a judge found there had been no grounds for prosecuting him on charges of murdering 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux in 1993, went before the Louisiana Supreme Court this week to fight for his innocence once again.

Duncan, 57, who spent 27 years on death row at Angola before being released last year, was convicted of first-degree murder and sexual assault in a 1998 trial that leaned heavily on testimony by Dr. Steven Hayne, a medical pathologist. Hayne later was terminated from his position over questions about his findings and testimony in other cases.

Bite-mark evidence by Dr. Michael West, a Mississippi forensic odontologist, was introduced at trial, but West was not called to testify because he had been temporarily suspended by a professional board.

Judge Alvin R. Sharp, who oversaw judicial matters in Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, presided over a 2024 evidentiary hearing in which expert testimony concluded that Duncan’s conviction was based on bite-mark evidence, which has since been invalidated, and a faulty medical autopsy. Sharp was the judge who ruled there were not sufficient grounds to prosecute Duncan.

Read more at KATC.

Published: April 30, 2026

By: Alexandra Paul, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – Even though early voting is scheduled to start Saturday, Louisiana’s Republican leaders are likely to delay party primaries in congressional races after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the maps of the state’s six districts are unconstitutional, state lawmakers said.

State Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill said after the court ruling Wednesday that there is still time to suspend the party primaries and redraw the maps, a process that almost certainly would eliminate at least one of the two majority-Black districts.

Gov. Jeff Landry and legislative leaders know that any change in the election schedule is likely to be challenged in court.

Interviews with lawmakers in both parties show how many factors are at play.

“At least in my opinion, you can’t go forward with early voting, because you would be voting in districts that are unconstitutional,” Sen. Eddie Lambert (R-Gonzales) said in an interview.

Read more at KLFY.

Published: April 29, 2026

By: Sheridan White, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – A heavily amended Senate bill that would limit the public release of information on who is a candidate for high-profile university positions and also shield the identity of university donors advanced through a House committee Tuesday.

As amended, Senate Bill 289, authored by Sen. Mark Abraham, R-Lake Charles and unanimously approved by the Committee on House and Governmental Affairs, would require state universities to release the names of three finalists in searches for new presidents and other top jobs.

Abraham’s original bill would have allowed for the process to be kept entirely confidential. His bill was a response to concerns that qualified applicants who hold an executive position elsewhere might be discouraged from applying if their names were made public.

The bill stalled in a House and Governmental Affairs Hearing last Thursday after members expressed concerns about the protection of donor names and “dark money.”

Read more at KALB.