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Top Story
This category showcases the lead coverage readers need to know, offering context, clarity, and insight into issues shaping New Orleans and beyond.
Jackson Parish holding pre-trial youth in unlicensed juvenile jail
Despite lacking a required DCFS license, Jackson’s detention center is housing kids awaiting adjudication — and collecting roughly $200 a day per kid from surrounding parishes
Threats facing fragile lower Mississippi river delta to be addressed – and possibly mitigated – by five-year, $22 million research consortium
Tulane University and Louisiana State University will lead the Mississippi River Delta Transition Initiative – working with researchers from the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program, six HBCUs, four Southern universities and two Louisiana marine-focused nonprofits – to ‘navigate the challenges of sea-level rise, erosion and shifting river dynamics’
Historic drought at root of ‘superfog’ and massive I-55 wreck
The combination of fog and thick smoke may return this weekend, as a peat fire in remote New Orleans East swamp burns underground. Unlike the fire in Lafitte, which is actively being battled by firefighting crews, the Orleans blaze is largely unchecked. But it's now watered by two pumps from the Sewerage & Water Board pouring the equivalent of two Olympic-size pools a day into the marsh.
‘Another step backwards’: $9.5 million private security contract for Louisiana youth prisons raises eyebrows
OJJ pays $75 per hour to staffing company for guards. Critics say that contractor seems to be “enriching themselves on the backs of Louisiana's teenagers and taxpayers’
Louisiana’s inland, non-tidal wetlands are most at risk to lose protections from weakened Clean Water Act
As the Clean Water Act turns 51 today, environmental advocates scramble to understand a new judicial interpretation that leaves more than half of the country’s 118 million acres of wetlands unprotected, including the swamps of Acadiana and key waterfowl habitat.
Federal review finds grain terminal would harm historic sites in climate-vulnerable St. John Parish
Several historic sites would suffer “adverse effects” from construction of gigantic Greenfield Grain Terminal, says review of rural St. John the Baptist Parish – which was recently placed at the top spot of a nationwide list of places vulnerable to climate risks.
Sheriff Hutson moves several pre-trial detainees from New Orleans jail to Angola
While the move was largely made to bring down the jail’s population, placing pre-trial defendants in a state prison is “really problematic on a human-being level,” said public defender Alexis Chernow. The move also worries victims, who fear cases could stall if defendants not prepped for court and transported.
Residents look to St. John Parish history to save a rural stretch of the West Bank from industrialization
West Bank residents fighting the gigantic Greenfield Grain Terminal are heartened by news from the National Park Service, which will spend the next year considering a largely rural, 14-mile stretch of Great River Road for a prestigious historical designation.
‘The car never started.’
Calvin Cains III was killed in early June by a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office deputies who said they used lethal force to prevent Cains from running them over. But two key witnesses dispute that account, saying that Cains had just gotten into the car and may had not have even turned the key.
