Tag Archives: Louisiana

What does a state’s secretary of state do? Most run elections, a once-routine job facing increasing scrutiny

By John J. Martin, University of Virginia. Published 2-29-2024 by The Conversation

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger with Governor Brian Kemp. Photo: Brad Raffensperger/Facebook

They may be the most important government officials you can’t name. Their decisions have the potential to alter election results. Scholars have referred to them as the “guardians of the democratic process.”

Who are these unknown, but essential, officials?

State secretaries of state.

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Under Pressure From Angry Students, GOP Gov Reverses on Federal Summer Meals Funding

“It only took literally everyone in the entire state telling him that he was being a monster,” said one political scientist, “for him to do the absolute easiest thing and feed hungry kids.”

By Julia Conley. Published 2-13-2024 by Common Dreams

Photo: USDA/Public domain

As the deadline rapidly approached for state governments to accept federal funds for summer food assistance for children, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen announced Monday that conversations with students from around the state had convinced him to take the funding—leaving just 14 Republican-led states still refusing the aid.

At a news conference, the GOP governor—who previously said he didn’t “believe in welfare” and would be forgoing $18 million for the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer (Summer EBT) program—said he had changed his mind after “an evolution of information” about how young people across Nebraska would be affected by his decision.

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‘Death Sentence’: Reports Call for End to Big Oil’s US Sacrifice Zones

“People’s lives and the environment are being devastated at the hands of big business,” one human rights researcher said.

By Olivia Rosane. Published 1-25-2024 by Common Dreams

Cancer Alley. Photo: Gines A. Sanchez/flickr/CC

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both published reports on Thursday detailing how the fossil fuel industry has harmed the health and environment of communities in Texas and Louisiana, and how state and federal regulators have failed to protect them.

The Amnesty report, The Cost of Doing Business? The Petrochemical Industry’s Toxic Pollution in the USA, focused on the Houston Ship Channel, which has some of the worst air pollution measurements in the U.S. The HRW report, “We’re Dying Here”: The Fight for Life in a Louisiana Fossil Fuel Sacrifice Zone, looked at the state’s Cancer Alley, an 85-mile zone along the Mississippi that reportedly has the highest concentration of fossil fuel and petrochemical plants in the Western Hemisphere.

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Post-Dobbs Bans Leave 14 States With No Abortion Clinics

A new analnysis shows how “abortion bans, extremist harassment, and the financial realities of operating community-based clinics make it increasingly difficult for independent clinics to stay open.”

By Brett Wilkins Published 12-5-2023 by Common Dreams

Stop Abortion Bans Rally in St Paul, Minnesota May 2019. Photo: Lorie Shaull/flickr/CC

Scores of independent reproductive health centers have been forced to close or stop offering abortion care, with 14 states now having no abortion clinics, a report published Tuesday revealed.

Abortion Care Network (ACN) released its annual Communities Need Clinics report, which details how “abortion bans, extremist harassment, and the financial realities of operating community-based clinics make it increasingly difficult for independent clinics to stay open” after the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court canceled half a century of federal abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization a year-and-a-half ago.

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200,000+ Urge DOE to ‘Do the Right Thing’ and Block LNG Buildout

One project in particular, the CP2 export terminal, “would be the most harmful facility built in the United States,” one frontline activist said as campaigners delivered petition signatures.

By Olivia Rosane. Published 11-30-2023 by Common Dreams

Roishetta Ozane, founder and director of the Louisiana-based mutual aid organization Vessel Project, speaks as activists deliver 200,000 signatures opposing the LNG buildout to the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., on November 30, 2023. (Photo: Jamie Henn/X)

Climate and environmental justice campaigners on Thursday delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures calling on the Biden administration to reject the Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, liquefied natural gas export facility as well as all other planned LNG infrastructure.

Environmental advocates and progressive lawmakers have been increasingly raising the alarm about CP2 and the broader expansion in LNG exports, pointing out that they put both the U.S. climate goals and frontline Gulf Coast communities at risk. CP2, for example, would emit 20 times as many greenhouse gases as the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska.

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Day After Texas Fire, Report Reveals US Hazardous Chemical Incidents Occur Almost Daily

“Hazardous facilities must be required to do more to protect workers and communities,” said Coming Clean’s federal policy director.

By Jessica Corbett. Published 11-9-2023 by Common Dreams

The Sound Resource Solutions facility made solvents for glue and paint remover.. Photo: @JamaalBowmanNY/X

A shelter-in-place order has been lifted in two Texas counties after a chemical plant fire on Wednesday, which came on the eve of a report showing just how frequent such incidents are across the United States, particularly at sites tied to the fossil fuel industry.

There have been at least 287 hazardous chemical incidents—including explosions, fires, and toxic releases—this year alone, and over 825 since the beginning of 2021, according to the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters’ online database.

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In ‘Victory for Voting Rights,’ Federal Judges Adopt New Alabama Congressional Map

“Today’s order means for the first time, Black voters in two congressional districts will have an opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice,” said the head of the state’s ACLU branch.

By Brett Wilkins. Published 10-5-2023 by Common Dreams

Photo: Black Voters Matter

Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and Alabama Republicans’ open defiance of a federal tribunal’s order to reconfigure the state’s racially gerrymandered congressional districts, a three-judge panel on Thursday adopted a new map that will be used in the 2024 elections.

Proponents hailed the ruling by U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, District Judge Anna Manasco, and District Judge Terry Moore as a win for democracy. The move creates a second “opportunity district” where voters will have a fighting chance to elect a second Black member of Congress for the first time since Reconstruction.

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Thousands Evacuated After Chemical Leak and Massive Fire at ‘Cancer Alley’ Oil Refinery

“Such events are an all-too-common and exceptionally dangerous reality for those living within fossil fuel and petrochemical ‘sacrifice zones,'” observed one researcher.

By Brett Wilkins. Published 8-25-2023 by Common Dreams

A massive plume of smoke—visible from outer space—billows from a burning storage tank at Marathon Petroleum’s Garyville, Louisiana refinery on August 25, 2023. (Photo: Mike Friloux/Facebook)

A mandatory evacuation was ordered for thousands of people living within a two-mile radius of a Marathon Petroleum refinery in Louisiana’s so-called “Cancer Alley” after a chemical leak and massive fire broke out at a storage tank there on Friday.

The temporary evacuation order, which Marathon Petroleum called “precautionary,” followed a leak of naphtha—a hazardous and highly flammable liquid hydrocarbon mixture—and blaze at the refinery in Garyville in St. John the Baptist Parish, located about 45 miles upriver from New Orleans.

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‘Bad News for the South’: State Supreme Court Upholds 6-Week Abortion Ban in South Carolina

“The result will essentially force an untold number of affected women to give birth without their consent,” wrote Justice Donald Beatty in his dissent. “I am hard-pressed to think of a greater governmental intrusion by a political body.”

By Julia Conley. Published 8-23-2023 by Common Dreams

Abortion rights activists wait for state lawmakers to arrive before a Senate vote on a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy at the South Carolina Statehouse on May 23, 2023 in Columbia, South Carolina. Screenshot: ABC News

Despite a recent poll showing that just 37% of South Carolinians backed a six-week abortion ban, the state Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated the previously blocked law, gutting what remained of abortion access for millions of people across the South.

The ruling was handed down by the all-male high court following the mandatory retirement of former Justice Kaye Hearn, who wrote the majority opinion in another ruling in January which struck down a nearly identical six-week ban that had been passed in 2021.

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Developers Found Graves in the Virginia Woods. Authorities Then Helped Erase the Historic Black Cemetery

The cemetery’s disappearance cleared the way for the expansion of a Microsoft data center, despite layers of federal and state regulations nominally intended to protect culturally significant sites.

by Seth Freed Wessler.  Published 12-16-2022 by ProPublica

Microsoft’s Boydton Data Center in Mecklenburg County. Photo: Data Center Knowledge

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906.

“This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.” Continue reading

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