The Advocate 04-01-2025 by The Advocate

WILDLIFE SUPPORT

La. rehabilitators, veterinarians experience an influx of animals this time of year

BY CLAIRE GRUNEWALD Staff writer

About a dozen animals around the room watch as Deborah Harris ﬁlls a thin syringe with kitten milk replacement to feed her newest additions: four newborn raccoons.

She has to do this ﬁve times a day and throughout the night for several days until the 3-week-old raccoons can start suckling a bottle on their own.

“It’s just like baby care,” the Baton Rouge wildlife rehabilitator said.

In a room at her house with a “Raccoon Crossing” sign above it, Harris is caring for young raccoons and opossums, a beaver, a skunk and five turtles — as well as the four newborns.

These baby raccoons were found in an attic separated from their mother so Harris stepped in to ﬁll that role. The intense feeding schedule is a testament to her dedication to animals — and also that not just anyone can take care of stranded

ä See WILDLIFE, page 7A

La. farmers react to end of USDA programs

Cuts end aid to food banks, schools

BY STEPHEN MARCANTEL Staff writer

Betty Chenier started up her sideby-side on an early spring day at her small farm in Opelousas. She drove past large greenhouses and rows of crops She inspected her recent plantings and then pointed to a pecan tree in the distance.

“My husband said once, when the pecan trees start to sprout, that’s how you

really know when winter is over,” she said laughing. “No other superstitious stuff, just that one.” She returned to her inspection of tomatoes, garlic and onions, strawberries and sweet potatoes. But this year, her crops look more bare than usual, she said.

“We usually have all this planted, but we’re not planting a lot of stuff because we don’t know what’s what,” Chenier said The “what’s what” is in reference to recent Trump administration cuts to U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that helped food banks and

schools purchase food from small local farmers.

The two federal programs, called Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement, provided about $1 billion to schools and food banks across the nation.

Louisiana food banks received around $13 million this year for the program, with Lafayette’s Second Harvest spending around $6 million across two years to Acadiana-area farmers. In 2023, the food purchase assistance

ä See FARMERS, page 7A

Teachers pay hike uncertain

No plans in place after Louisiana voters rejected constitutional amendment

BY ELYSE CARMOSINO Staff writer

After voters on Saturday rejected a constitutional amendment that would have funded higher salaries for teachers, it’s unclear whether educators will still receive a raise next school year or instead see their paychecks shrink.

One of four constitutional changes championed by Gov Jeff Landry that failed to pass over the weekend, Amendment 2 would have made one-time pay stipends the Legislature approved last year

$2,000 for teachers and $1,000 for support staff — a recurring part of their salaries.

ä Lawmakers are working on an alternative plan after the defeat of an amendment to change state tax policy PAGE 5A

But now, without funding for permanent raises and with the stipends set to expire after this school year, there are no plans to keep teacher pay at its current level. As a result, Louisiana educators could see their paychecks decrease unless the Legislature ﬁnds funding for another round of stipends or a permanent increase.

While campaigning for the amendment, Landry said there was no alternative plan to raise teacher salaries: “If Amendment 2 does not pass,” he posted on X last week, “there is no backup stipend.”

When asked Monday, a spokesperson for Landry did not say whether the governor would support additional stipends for teachers if lawmakers proposed them during the coming legislative session.

“We tried to give them a permanent pay raise so our teachers never had to go back to the (Legislature) again to advocate for their money,” the spokesperson, Kate Kelly, said in a statement. She added Landry will “continue to advocate for structural reform to provide a permanent pay increase for our teachers.”

However it’s not clear how permanent raises would be possible without the funding that was expected to come from the passage of Amendment 2. If voters had approved the amendment, it would

ä See TEACHERS, page 5A

cuts

talk about the

and

U.S. Department of Agriculture programs. The programs contributed to at least half of their business.

Deborah Harris, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries permitted wildlife rehabilitator for East Baton Rouge, feeds a baby raccoon with a syringe at her home rehabilitation building recently

STAFF PHOTO By STEPHEN MARCANTEL

John

Betty Chenier

recent

to two

Deborah Harris pets her only male turtle at her home rehabilitation building

Plans to end protections for Venezuelans halted SAN FRANCISCO A federal judge on Monday paused plans by the Trump administration to end temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, a week before they were scheduled to expire.

The order by U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco is a relief for 350,000 Venezuelans whose Temporary Protected Status was scheduled to expire April 7. The lawsuit was filed by lawyers for the National TPS Alliance and TPS holders across the country Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has also announced the end of TPS for an estimated 250,000 additional Venezuelans in September Chen said in his ruling that the action by Noem “threatens to: inﬂict irreparable harm on hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives, families, and livelihoods will be severely disrupted, cost the United States billions in economic activity, and injure public health and safety in communities throughout the United States.” He said the government had failed to identify any “real countervailing harm in continuing TPS for Venezuelan beneﬁciaries” and said plaintiffs will likely succeed in showing that Noem’s actions “are unauthorized by law arbitrary and capricious, and motivated by unconstitutional animus.”

U.S. airstrikes pound Yemen overnight

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates Suspected U.S. airstrikes struck around Yemen’s rebel-held capital overnight into Monday morning, attacks that the Iranian-backed Houthis said killed at least three people.

The full extent of the damage wasn’t immediately clear The attacks followed a night of airstrikes early Friday that appeared particularly intense compared to other days in the campaign that began March 15.

The strikes around Sanaa Yemen’s capital held by the Houthis since 2014, and Hajjah governorate also wounded 12 others, the rebels said. Their Al-Masirah satellite news channel aired footage of broken glass littering homes in Sanaa after the concussive blast of the bombs, but continued not to show the targets of the attacks — suggesting the sites had a military or intelligence function. Strikes there killed one person, the rebels said.

Another strike targeting a pickup truck in Hajjah killed two people and wounded a child, the Houthis said. It marked the ﬁrst publicly known time the American strikes targeted a vehicle in this campaign.

Severe weather blamed for 4 deaths in U.S

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — A tree fell on a van in Michigan, killing three children, during a ﬁerce weekend storm that swept the region and contributed to the death of an 84-year-old man in an Amish buggy in Indiana, authorities said Monday Meanwhile, more potentially dangerous weather rolled across parts of the Southeastern U.S. Trees and power lines were no match for freezing rain and extreme winds over the weekend, and utilities were gradually restoring power in Michigan, although 290,000 outages remained by Monday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us. Indiana and Wisconsin had trimmed their outages to roughly 85,000.

The victims of the fallen tree in Kalamazoo County were a 2-yearold girl, her 4-year-old brother and an 11-year-old girl who was their cousin Three other people in the van were injured Sunday about 130 miles west of Detroit.

“The family could not have avoided this,” Sheriff Richard Fuller told reporters, adding that the tree struck the passenger area where the children were sitting.

The area had been under a severe thunderstorm warning at the time, one of several Sunday in southern Michigan.

At roughly the same time, an Amish buggy in Middlebury, Indiana, ﬂipped because of intense winds, killing Lonnie Yoder police said.

Myanmar quake deaths pass 2,000

Disaster compounds country’s humanitarian crisis

BY DAVID RISING Associated Press

BANGKOK The death toll in last week’s massive earthquake in Myanmar has passed 2,000, state media said Monday, as accounts of some people’s last moments emerged: Two hundred Buddhist monks crushed by a collapsing monastery Fifty children killed when a preschool classroom crumbled Seven hundred Muslims struck while praying at mosques for Ramadan.

The quake could exacerbate hunger and disease outbreaks in a country that was already one of the world’s most challenging places for humanitarian organizations to operate because of civil war, aid groups and the United Nations warned.

The 7.7 magnitude quake hit Friday, with the epicenter near Myanmar’s second-largest city of Mandalay It damaged the city’s airport, buckled roads and collapsed hundreds of buildings along a wide swath down the country’s center Relief efforts are further hampered by power outages, fuel shortages and spotty communications. A lack of heavy machinery has slowed search-and-rescue operations, forcing many to search for survivors by hand in daily temperatures above 104 degrees Rescue workers at Mandalay’s collapsed U Hla Thein monastery said they were still searching for about 150 of the dead monks.

Some 700 Muslim worshippers

attending Friday prayers were killed when mosques collapsed, said Tun Kyi, a member of the steering committee of the Spring Revolution Myanmar Muslim Network. He said some 60 mosques were damaged or destroyed. Videos posted on The Irrawaddy online news site showed several mosques toppling.

It was not clear whether those numbers were already included in the ofﬁcial toll.

Myanmar state MRTV reported that the leader of the military government, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, told Pakistan’s prime minister during a call that 2,065 people were killed, with more than 3,900 injured and about 270 missing. Relief agencies expect those

Displaced Palestinians arrive Monday in Khan younis, Gaza, after the Israeli military issued sweeping evacuation orders covering most of Rafah.

Israeli military orders evacuation of Gaza’s Rafah

BY WAFAA SHURAFA and FATMA KHALED Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip Israel’s military on Monday issued sweeping evacuation orders covering Rafah and nearby areas, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation in the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city Israel ended its ceaseﬁre with the Hamas militant group and renewed its air and ground war earlier this month. At the beginning of March it cut off all supplies of food, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid to the territory’s roughly 2 million Palestinians to pressure Hamas to accept proposed changes to the truce agreement.

Israel’s military ordered Palestinians to head to Muwasi, a sprawl of squalid tent camps along the coast. The orders came during Eid al-Fitr, a normally festive Muslim holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Last May, Israel launched a major operation in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, leaving large parts in ruins. The military seized a strategic corridor along the border as well as the Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s only gateway to the outside world that was not

controlled by Israel.

Israel was supposed to withdraw from the corridor under the ceaseﬁre it signed with Hamas in January under U.S. pressure, but it later refused to do it, citing the need to prevent weapons smuggling.

On Monday, people fled with their belongings loaded onto donkeys and stacked on car roofs. Families traveled by foot carrying luggage as children held the adults’ hands.

“We are dying. There is no food, no drink, no electricity, no medicine,” said Hanadi Dahoud, who was displaced from the southern city of Khan Younis. “We want to live. We just want to live We are tired.”

Dozens gathered at a funeral for some of the 15 emergency responders killed by Israeli ﬁre during a ground operation in Rafah last week. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies called it the deadliest attack on its medics in several years.

Raed al-Nems, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent, said the paramedics were “killed in cold blood” despite wearing uniforms and operating in clearly labeled ambulances. At funeral prayers, their shrouds were draped with Red Crescent banners.

numbers to rise sharply since access is slow to remote areas where communications are down.

The United Nations’ Myanmar country team called for unimpeded access for aid teams.

“Even before this earthquake, nearly 20 million people in Myanmar were in need of humanitarian assistance,” said Marcoluigi Corsi, the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator

“We’re really not clear on the scale of the destruction at this stage,” Lauren Ellery, deputy director of programs in Myanmar for the International Rescue Committee, told The Associated Press.

“They were talking about a town near Mandalay where 80% of the buildings were reportedly col-

lapsed, but it wasn’t in the news because telecommunications have been slow.”

Groups the IRC works with have reported that some places are cut off by landslides, she said.

The World Health Organization said it has reports of three hospitals destroyed and 22 partially damaged in the region.

“There is an urgent need for trauma and surgical care, blood transfusion supplies, anesthetics, essential medicines and mental health support,” it said.

More than 10,000 buildings are collapsed or severely damaged in central and northwest Myanmar, the U.N. humanitarian agency said. One preschool classroom building collapsed in Mandalay district, killing 50 children and two teachers, it said.

An artiﬁcial intelligence analysis of satellite images of Mandalay by Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab showed 515 buildings with 80% to 100% damage and another 1,524 with 20% to 80% damage. It was not clear what percentage of the city’s buildings that represented. Rescue efforts are also complicated by the civil war In 2021, the military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, sparking what has turned into signiﬁcant armed resistance.

While one group has declared a partial unilateral ceaseﬁre, the government and other armed groups have not stopped ﬁghting.

Government forces have lost control of much of Myanmar, and many places were dangerous or impossible for aid groups to reach even before the quake. More than 3 million people have been displaced by the ﬁghting, according to the U.N.

3 U.S. soldiers found dead in armored vehicle in Lithuania

One soldier still missing

BY LIUDAS DAPKUS and LOLITA C. BALDOR Associated Press

VILNIUS, Lithuania Three of the U.S. Army soldiers who went missing in Lithuania have been found dead in their armored vehicle that was pulled from a swampy area early Monday, according to U.S. Army Europe and Africa Command. Another soldier is still missing.

The bodies of the three soldiers were recovered after a massive six-day effort by U.S., Polish and Lithuanian armed forces and authorities to dig the M88 Hercules vehicle out of a peat bog at the expansive General Silvestras Žukauskas training ground in the town of Pabrade.

The soldiers were on a tactical training exercise when they and their vehicle were reported missing early Tuesday, the Army said.

The command in a statement said the identities of the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division soldiers are being withheld pending family notiﬁcations.

“We stand in grief with the families and loved ones of these extraordinary ‘Dogface Soldiers’ during this unimaginable time,” said Maj. Gen Christopher Norrie, 3rd Infantry Division commander “But the search isn’t ﬁnished until everyone is home. Words cannot express our gratitude to those still working around the clock during these extensive search and recovery efforts and your unwavering commitment not to rest until all are found.”

Hundreds of Lithuanian and U.S. soldiers and rescuers took part in the search through the thick forests and swampy terrain around Pabrade, just 6 miles west of the border with Belarus. The armored vehicle was dis-

covered on Wednesday submerged in 15 feet of water

Lithuanian armed forces provided military helicopters, fixed wing aircraft, unmanned aerial systems and search and rescue personnel. They brought in additional excavators, sluice and slurry pumps, other heavy construction equipment, technical experts and several hundred tons of gravel and earth to help the recovery U.S Navy divers were able to maneuver through thick layers of mud, clay and sediment “with zero visibility” to reach the 63ton vehicle Sunday evening and ﬁnd two points to attach steel cables, according to the command. The command said that during the effort to pull out the vehicle, it began to lose traction, so additional heavy dozers were brought in and attached to provide additional grip. The vehicle was pulled free after about two hours, the command said.

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Members of a Chinese search and rescue team transfer a pregnant survivor from a collapsed building on Monday in Mandalay Myanmar in the aftermath of an earthquake.

ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO By ABDEL

U.N.: Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinian medics

Officials say bodies buried in mass grave

BY WAFAA SHURAFA, LEE KEATH and FATMA KHALED Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip Palestinians held funerals Monday for 15 medics and emergency responders killed by Israeli troops in southern Gaza, after their bodies and mangled ambulances were found buried in an impromptu mass grave, apparently plowed over by Israeli military bulldozers.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said the slain workers and their vehicles were clearly marked as medical and humanitarian personnel and accused Israeli troops of killing them “in cold blood.”

The Israeli military said its troops opened ﬁre on vehicles that approached them “suspiciously” without identiﬁcation.

The dead included eight Red Crescent workers, six members of Gaza’s Civil Defense emergency unit and a staffer from UNRWA, the U.N.’s agency for Palestinians. The International Red Cross/Red Crescent said it was the deadliest attack on its personnel in eight years. Since the war in Gaza began 18 months ago, Israel has killed more than 100 Civil Defense workers and more than 1,000 health workers,

according to the U.N Here is what we know about what happened.

Missing for days

The emergency teams had been missing since March 23, when they went about noon to retrieve casualties after Israeli forces launched an offensive into the Tel al-Sultan district of the southern city of Rafah.

The military had called for an evacuation of the area earlier that day, saying Hamas militants were operating there. Alerts by the Civil Defense at the time said displaced Palestinians sheltering in the area had been hit and a team that went to rescue them was “surrounded by Israeli troops.”

The available information indicates that the ﬁrst team was killed by Israeli forces on 23 March,” the U.N. said in a statement Sunday night

Further emergency teams that went to rescue the ﬁrst team were “struck one after another over several hours,” it said. All the teams went out during daylight hours, according to the Civil Defense.

The Israeli military said Sunday that on March 23, troops opened fire on vehicles that were “advancing suspiciously” toward them without emergency signals.

It said “an initial assessment” determined that the troops killed a Hamas operative named Mohammed Amin Shobaki and eight other militants. Israel has struck ambulances and

other emergency vehicles in the past, accusing Hamas militants of using them for transportation.

However, none of the dead staffers from the Red Crescent and Civil Defense had that name, and no other bodies were reported found at the site, raising questions over the military’s suggestion that alleged militants were among the rescue workers.

The military did not immediately respond to requests for the names of the other alleged militants killed or for comment on how the emergency workers came to be buried.

After a ceaseﬁre that lasted roughly two months, Is-

French far-right leader barred from seeking office for 5 years

BY SYLVIE CORBET, JOHN LEICESTER and SAMUEL PETREQUIN Associated Press

ing across the road. Gunﬁre rings out and they ﬂee. One stumbles, apparently wounded, before he is shot and falls onto his face to the ground. The U.N. said the team retrieved the body of the woman and left. On Sunday, the U.N. said teams were able to reach the site after the Israeli military informed it where it had buried the bodies, in a barren area on the edges of Tel al-Sultan. Footage released by the U.N. shows workers from PRCS and Civil Defense, wearing masks and bright orange vests, digging through hills of dirt that appeared to have been piled up by Israeli bulldozers. The footage shows

rael relaunched its military campaign in Gaza on March 18. Since then, bombardment and new ground assaults that have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry The ministry’s count does not distinguish between militants and civilians, but it says over half those killed are women and children.

Aid workers say ambulance teams and humanitarian staff have come under ﬁre in the renewed assault. A worker with the charity World Central Kitchen was killed Friday by an Israeli strike that hit next to a kitchen distributing free meals. A March 19

Israeli tank strike on a U.N

compound killed a staffer, the U.N. said, though Israel denies being behind the blast.

Mass grave

For days, Israeli forces would not allow access to the site where the emergency teams disappeared, the U.N. said. On Wednesday, a U.N. convoy tried to reach the site but encountered Israeli troops opening ﬁre on people.

The convoy saw a woman who had been shot lying in the road. The dashboard video shows staff talking about retrieving the woman. Then two people are seen walk-

ily damaged or torn apart, are also buried in the dirt.

“Their

VoterRegistration Deadline

TheEastBaton RougeParishRegistrar of Voters Office announces thelastday to register to vote or make changes to your voter registration forthe May3,2025Electionis:

Le Pen

PARIS A French court on Monday convicted Marine Le Pen of embezzlement and barred her from seeking public ofﬁce for ﬁve years — a hammer blow to the far-right leader’s presidential hopes and an earthquake for French politics Le Pen denounced the verdict in an interview with French TV channel TF1 as a “political” move aimed at preventing her from running in the 2027 presidential election and said that millions of French people “are outraged.” She described the ruling as a violation of the rule of law, said she would appeal and asked that the court proceedings take place before the 2027 campaign. She would remain ineligible to be a candidate until the appeal is decided.

Le Pen also was given four years’ imprisonment, with two to be served under house arrest and two suspended — which would not apply pending appeal. The court ruling was a political as well as a judicial temblor for France, hobbling one of the leading contenders to succeed President Emmanuel Macron at the end of his second and final term. So broad were the political implications that even some of Le Pen’s opponents said the Paris court had gone too far But it’s too early to say how the case will affect voters. The potential elimination of Le Pen could fire up die-hard supporters, just as U.S President’s Donald Trump’s legal problems motivated some of his. But it could also leave her on the sidelines, deflating what had been her upward trajectory

Le Pen said the court should not have made her in-

Feds deport 17 more accused gang members to El Salvador

BY REBECCA SANTANA and MARCOS ALEMAN Associated Press

WASHINGTON The Trump administration said Monday that it has deported 17 more “violent criminals” from the Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gangs to El Salvador, as it doubles down on a policy of removing people from the U.S. to countries other than their own despite criticism over lack of transparency and human rights issues

The State Department said the immigrants were removed Sunday night. The statement said murderers and rapists were among them but didn’t give details of the nationalities or alleged crimes of those removed. The office of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, however, said Salvadorans and Venezuelans were among the prisoners.

“These criminals will no longer terrorize our communities and citizens,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in the statement. “Once again, we extend our gratitude to President Bukele and the government of El Salva-

dor for their unparalleled partnership.”

The men were ﬂown to El Salvador by the U.S. military the State Department said. As seen in video from the Salvadoran government, they were transported by bus to El Salvador’s maximum security prison, changed into the prison’s standard white T-shirts and shorts and had their heads shaven.

They were walked by guards into a cell block, the video shows, and some were made to kneel upon the ﬂoor with their wrists cuffed behind their backs and ankles shackled Guards put one or both hands on the men’s necks and forced them to walk quickly while bent at the waist and shackled with their heads down. Some men in the video grunted from the exertion, and one appeared to vomit on the ﬂoor while listening to instructions.

More than 200 Venezuelan immigrants facing deportation were sent to El Salvador earlier this month and are also being held in the maximum security prison

eligible to run for ofﬁce until all her chances at appeal had been exhausted, and that by doing so it was clear the court was aiming “specifically to prevent” her from being elected president.

“If that’s not a political decision, I don’t know what is,” Le Pen said in the TF1 interview

She said the ruling marked a “fateful day for our democracy” but vowed to keep pursuing what she called the now “admittedly narrow” path to the presidency

Wednesday,April 2, 2025 by-mailorinpersonatthe officesofthe RegistrarofVoters, weekdays 8:00 am until4:30pm.

Main Office:CityHall– 222Saint LouisSt. –Rm. 201 Southeast: Fire StationBuilding–11010 CourseyBlvd. Baker: MotorVehicle Building–2250MainSt. or Saturday,April 12,2025for online transactions at www.GeauxVote.com

Call (225)389-3940 formoreinformation

ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO By ABDEL KAREEM HANA

Mourners react Monday during the funeral of eight Red Crescent emergency responders recovered in Rafah a week after an Israeli attack in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip.

Trump task force to review Harvard’s funding

BY COLLIN BINKLEY Associated Press

WASHINGTON Harvard University has become the latest target in the Trump administration’s approach to fight campus antisemitism, with the announcement of a new “comprehensive review” that could jeopardize billions of dollars for the Ivy League college.

A federal antisemitism task force is reviewing more than $255 million in contracts between Harvard and the federal government to make sure the school is following civil rights laws, the administration announced Monday The government also will examine $8.7 billion in grant commitments to Harvard and its afﬁliates.

The same task force cut $400 million from Columbia University and threatened to slash billions more if it refused a list of demands from President Donald Trump’s administration. Columbia agreed to many of the changes this month, drawing praise from some Jewish groups and condemnation from free speech groups, who see it as a stunning intrusion by the federal government.

Dozens of other universities have been put on notice by the Trump administration that they could face similar treatment over allegations of antisemitism. The federal government is a major provider of revenue for American universities through grants for scientiﬁc research.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Harvard symbolizes the American dream, but has jeopardized its reputation by “promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry” and failing to protect students from antisemitism.

“Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truthseeking, where all students feel safe on its campus,” McMahon said in a statement. Harvard did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Groups sue over

BY ALI SWENSON Associated Press

NEW YORK Two election watchdog organizations sued President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday over his executive order seeking to overhaul the nation’s elections through a proof-of-citizenship requirement, new mail ballot deadline restrictions and other sweeping changes.

The lawsuit, filed by the Campaign Legal Center and the State Democracy Defenders Fund in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asks the court to declare the order unconstitutional and stop it from being implemented.

It names three nonprofit voter advocacy organizations as plaintiffs that it alleges are harmed by the order: the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Secure Families Initiative and the Arizona Students’ Association.

“The president’s executive order is an unlawful action that threatens to uproot our tried-and-tested election systems and silence potentially millions of Americans,” said Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center

Judge OKs document release in Hackman case

BY MORGAN LEE Associated Press

SANTA FE, N.M. — A court on Monday cleared the way for the release of investigative records from the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, as long as depictions of the deceased couple are blocked from view

The ruling from a New Mexico judge allows the possible release of redacted police body camera video and other investigative materials, including im-

ages of the couple’s dead dog. All photos, video and documents from the investigation had been restricted from release by an earlier temporary court order

“There shall be no depiction of either body in any video production” or photographic image of the bodies, Santa Fe-based Judge Matthew Wilson said in response to questions from attorneys on his ruling.

A representative for the Hackman family estate had urged a New Mexico judge to keep the records sealed to

protect the family’s constitutional right to privacy

The partially mummiﬁed remains of Hackman and Arakawa were found in their Santa Fe home on Feb. 26, when maintenance and security workers showed up at the home and alerted police.

Authorities have said Hackman, 95, died of heart disease with complications from Alzheimer’s disease about a week after his wife died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which is a rare, rodent-borne disease. Hackman may have been

unaware Arakawa, 65, was dead.

One of the couple’s three dogs, a kelpie mix named Zinna, also was found dead in a crate in a bathroom closet near Arakawa, while two other dogs were found alive. A state veterinary lab tied the dog’s death to dehydration and starvation.

Authorities unraveled the mysterious circumstances of the couple’s deaths and described their conclusions at a March 7 news conference without releasing most related written and photo-

graphic records. New Mexico’s open records law blocks public access to sensitive images, including depictions of dead bodies. Experts also say some medical information is not considered public record under the state Inspection of Public Records Act. In seeking to block the release of records, estate representative Julia Peters had emphasized the possibly shocking nature of photos and video in the investigation and potential for their dissemination by media.

Trans Day of Visibility has different tenor under Trump

BY GEOFF MULVIHILL and JESSE BEDAYN Associated Press

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump used contentiousness around transgender people’s access to sports and bathrooms to fire up conservative voters and sway undecideds. And in his first months back in office, Trump has pushed the issue further, erasing mention of transgender people on government websites and passports and trying to remove them from the military

It’s a contradiction of numbers that reveals a deep cultural divide: Transgender people make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, but they have become a major piece on the political chess board particularly Trump’s

For transgender people and their allies — along with several judges who have ruled against Trump in response to legal challenges — it’s a matter of civil rights for a small group. But many Americans believe those rights had grown too expansive

The president’s spotlight is giving Monday’s Transgender Day of Visibility a different tenor this year

“What he wants is to scare us into being invisible again,” said Rachel Crandall Crocker, the executive director of Transgender Michigan who organized the ﬁrst Day of Visibility 16 years ago. “We have to show him we won’t go back.”

So why has this small population found itself with such an outsized role in American politics?

Trump’s actions reﬂect a constellation of beliefs that transgender people are dangerous, are men trying to get access to women’s spaces or are pushed into gender changes that they will later regret.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and other major medical groups have said that gender-afﬁrming treatments can be medically necessary and are supported by evidence.

Zein Murib, an associate professor of political science and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Fordham University, said there has been a decadesold effort “to reinstate Christian nationalist principles as the law of the land” that increased its focus on transgender people after a 2015 U.S Supreme Court ruling recognizing samesex marriage nationwide It took a few years, but some of the positions gained traction.

One factor: Proponents of the restrictions lean into broader questions of fairness and safety which draw more public attention.

Sports bans and bathroom laws are linked to protecting spaces for women and girls, even as studies have found transgender women are far more likely to be victims of violence Efforts to bar schools from encouraging gender transition are connected to protecting parental rights And bans on gender-affirming care rely partly on the idea that people might later regret it, though studies have found that to be rare.

Since 2020 about half the states passed laws barring transgender people from sports competitions aligning with their gender and have banned or restricted gender-affirming medical

care for minors. At least 14 have adopted laws restricting which bathrooms transgender people can use in certain buildings.

In February Iowa became the first state to remove protections for transgender people from civil rights law It’s not just political gamesmanship. “I think that whether or not that’s a politically viable strategy is second to the immediate impact that that is going to have on trans people,” Fordham’s Murib said.

More than half of voters in the 2024 election 55% — said support for transgender rights in the United States has gone too far, according to AP VoteCast. About 2 in 10 said the level of support has been about right, and a similar share said support hasn’t gone far enough.

Nevertheless, AP VoteCast also found voters were split on laws banning gender-affirming medical treatment, such as puberty blockers or hormone therapy, for minors Just over half were opposed to these laws, while just under half were in favor

Trump voters were overwhelmingly likely to say support for transgender rights has gone too far while Kamala Harris’ voters were more divided.

About 4 in 10 Harris voters said support for transgender rights has not gone far enough, while 36% said it’s been about right and about one-quarter said it’s gone too far

A survey this year from the Pew Research Center found Americans, including Democrats, have become more slightly more supportive of requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams that match their sex at birth and more supportive on bans on genderafﬁrming medical care for transgender minors since 2022. Most Democrats still oppose those kinds of measures, though.

Leor Sapir, a fellow at Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, says Trump’s and Republicans’ positions have given them a political edge.

“They are putting their opponents, their Democratic opponents, in a very unfavorable position by having to decide between catering to their progressive, activist base or their median voter,” he said.

Not everyone agrees.

“People across the political spectrum agree that in fact, the major crises and major problems facing the United States right now is not the existence and civic

participation of trans people,” said Olivia Hunt, director of federal policy for Advocates for Trans Equality.

And in the same election that saw Trump return to the presidency, Delaware voters elected Sarah McBride, the ﬁrst transgender member of Congress.

Paisley Currah, a political science professor at the City University of New York, said conservatives go after trans-

gender people in part because they make up such a small portion of the population.

“Because it’s so small, it’s relatively unknown,” said Currah, who is transgender “And then Trump has kind of used trans to signify what’s wrong with the left. You know: ‘It’s just too crazy It’s too woke.’”

But Democratic politicians also know the population is relatively small, said

Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver who is writing a book about the GOP

“A lot of Democrats are not particularly fired up to defend this group,” Masket said, citing polling.

For Republicans, the overall support of transgender rights is evidence they are out of step with the times.

“The Democrat Party continues to find themselves on the wrong side of overwhelmingly popular issues, and it proves just how out of touch they are with Americans,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Mike Marinella said.

Some of that message may be getting through. In early March, California Gov Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, launched his new podcast by speaking out against allowing transgender women and girls competing in women’s and girls sports. And several other Democratic ofﬁcials have said the party spends too much effort supporting transgender rights. Others, including U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, have said they oppose transgender athletes in girls and women’s sports.

ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO By MARK SCOLFORO

Participants grab signs at the Transgender Day of Visibility rally on Monday in the Pennsylvania Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg Pa

Lawmakers consider amendment future

Measure’s failure looms ahead of legislative session

BY ALYSE PFEIL Staff writer

After Gov Jeff Landry and his allies in the Legislature failed to convince voters to green-light a constitutional amendment to change state tax policy, lawmakers are already beginning to formulate an alternative plan.

The question is: Will they again propose a sprawling rewrite of an entire section of the constitution, or will they take a less ambitious approach?

The decision looms large as the next legislative session is set to begin in two weeks on April 14.

On Saturday, 65% of voters — or roughly 410,000 out of the 634,000 total who cast ballots rejected Amendment 2, which failed by wide margins in urban, mostly Democratic parishes, but also failed in some Republican areas of the state.

The proposed amendment would have been a near-complete revision of Article VII of the Louisiana Constitution, an expansive and complicated section

TEACHERS

Continued from page 1A

have dissolved three longstanding education trust funds and used that money to pay down debts related to the state’s teachers’ retirement fund, for which individual districts pay interest. School systems would then have been expected to put some of their savings, estimated to be about $200 million annually toward giving teachers and support staff raises.

Rep. Barbara Freiberg, R-Baton Rouge, who serves on the House Education and Legislative Budget committees, said she supports raising teacher pay but understands why voters declined to approve the 115-page amendment, pointing to its length and complexity

“People were concerned about an amendment with so much in it,” she said. “We have to go back to the drawing board.”

Freiberg said she would support either permanent teacher raises or one-time stipends this session if Landry and lawmakers can ﬁnd funding. She noted that the governor’s proposed budget, released in February does not include funding for stipends.

Last year’s proposed budget also did not initially include money for stipends. The governor agreed later to include the funding in exchange for $24 million in cuts to day care subsidies. Richard Nelson, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Revenue, said this year’s steep budget shortfall will likely make it more difﬁcult to

that governs state taxes and budgeting.

Now lawmakers are back at the drawing board At least one piece of legislation aimed at constitutional changes to state tax law likely will be introduced during the regular session this year, said state Rep. Julie Emerson, R-Carencro, who sponsored Amendment 2 and was a key ﬁgure in advancing the Landry administration’s tax policy initiatives over the past several months.

Emerson, who chairs the House tax-writing committee, said she’s unsure if legislation will take a more “broad strokes” approach or if it will be narrowly focused on certain changes.

“I do think you’ll see at least one bill that deals with Article VII. I just don’t know how many pieces of Article VII we’ll be trying to deal with,” she said Department of Revenue Secretary Richard Nelson, the architect of the tax overhaul pushed by the Landry administration during a November special session, said he would “continue to work with the Legislature to earn voter support for essential revisions to Article VII.” Asked what legislation this

year could entail, Nelson said, “We are still looking at our options.”

Some think a piecemeal approach might be more palatable to voters.

Amendment 2 was “a very ambitious approach,” said Sen. Franklin Foil, R-Baton Rouge, who chairs the Senate tax-writing committee.

“If I were to try to do it again, I might try to do it in smaller pieces so people can have some options as opposed to just one big amendment with everything in it,” he said.

Policy plans

Amendment 2 included dozens of proposed changes.

Among them:

n Loosen restrictions on constitutionally protected state trust funds dedicated to speciﬁc priorities such as coastal restoration and education

n Put a constitutional cap of 3.75% on the state income tax rate

n Put a higher standard tax deduction for seniors in the constitution

n Allow state lawmakers to adjust certain property tax exemptions

n Make it harder for lawmakers to approve tax break programs

n Free up money to in-

crease teacher salaries by $2,000 by paying off $2 billion of state debt using money in state trust funds.

“I thought it was a really good amendment and would have done a lot of really good things for the public,” Foil said.

Looking ahead to this year’s legislative session, he said, “everything is on the table.”

Foil said he’s unsure if the plan will ultimately result in another proposed constitutional amendment or just changes to state statute, but either way he’s “anxious to move forward.”

Some of his priorities that were also part of Amendment 2 include doubling the standard deduction for seniors and merging two state savings accounts that are designed to help the state weather financial downturns.

Emerson said it’s particularly worth revisiting the debt payment that would pave the way for teacher salary increases. And like Foil, she said important priorities include doubling the standard deduction for seniors and merging the two state savings accounts.

Those two accounts are trust funds set up through the constitution.

“People were concerned about an amendment with so much

REP BARBARA FREIBERG, R-Baton Rouge

ﬁnd funding for teacher pay

“There’s just not as much wiggle room in the budget,” he said in an interview Monday

The state’s largest teachers union, the Louisiana

Federation of Teachers, had supported the amendment.

Since voters rejected it, union President Larry Carter said he has been in touch with lawmakers and Landry to ﬁgure out next steps.

He said the big question now is how the state would pay for a salary increase.

“With the amendment failing,” he said, “funding for teacher pay raises is uncertain.”

Email Elyse Carmosino at ecarmosino@theadvocate. com.

Mugs,

After voters rejected a constitutional amendment, it’s unclear whether educators will receive a raise next school year or instead see their paychecks shrink.

The Budget Stabilization Fund was set up in 1990, and money in that account can be used when the state is facing budget shortfalls. As of November, the fund balance was $1.06 billion.

The Revenue Stabilization Trust Fund was set up in 2016 to shield the state from year-to-year ﬂuctuations in oil and gas revenue and corporate tax revenues.

Money there can be used for transportation and construction projects and in emergency cases decided by the Legislature. Its balance was $2.77 billion as of October

Amendment 2 would have essentially combined these two accounts, leaving the Budget Stabilization Fund while eliminating the Revenue Stabilization Fund and freeing up more money for lawmakers to spend on yearly expenses.

Lessons learned

As lawmakers consider the path forward, some said they received valuable feedback from constituents on the lack of support for

Amendment 2.

One of those was House budget Chair Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, who said voters called him to share their reasoning for voting “no.”

The task of educating voters on a complex amendment was a tall one, he said.

“It’s difficult to educate every voter on each part of that. I mean it was a lot in one amendment,” McFarland said.

Emerson acknowledged, “there were a lot of components to Amendment 2.”

“We had a lot of people reach out and say, you know, it was just too much,” she said. “I wish y’all could maybe break it up a little bit.” She heard from several people that they were confused about it after hearing a lot of information, both for and against the measure.

“Several people told me I didn’t go vote because I heard so much on both sides, and I was confused about it,” she said.

Email Alyse Pfeil at alyse. pfeil@theadvocate.com.

NoticedisherebygivenpursuanttoArticle7, Section23(C) of theLouisiana Constitution andR.S.47:1705 (B)thata public hearing of theTownofClinton District of East FelicianaParishwillbeheldatits regular meetingplace at theClinton Town Hall Officelocatedat11209BankStreet,Clinton, LA on Tuesday, May13, 2025 at 5:45 p.m. to consider levyingadditionalorincreased millagerateswithoutfurthervoterapproval or adopting theadjustedmillage ratesafter reassessment androllingforward to rates nottoexceedthe prioryear’smaximum. Theestimated amount of taxrevenuestobe collectedinthenextyearfromtheincreased millage is $1,523,094.23, andthe amount of increase in taxesattributabletothe millage increase is $8,942.39.

BUSINESS

BRIEFS

FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

Dow wants to use new nuclear reactors

Dow, a major producer of chemicals and plastics, wants to use next-generation nuclear reactors for clean power and steam at a Texas manufacturing complex instead of natural gas. Dow’s subsidiary, Long Mott Energy, applied Monday to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a construction permit. It said the project with X-energy an advanced nuclear reactor and fuel company, would nearly eliminate the emissions associated with power and steam generation at its plant in Seadrift, Texas, avoiding roughly 500,000 metric tons of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions annually

If built and operated as planned, it would be the first U.S. commercial advanced nuclear power plant for an industrial site, according to the commission.

The Seadrift manufacturing complex, at about 4,700 acres, has eight production plants owned by Dow and one owned by Braskem. There, Dow makes plastics for a variety of uses, including food and beverage packaging and wire and cable insulation, as well as glycols for antifreeze, polyester fabrics and bottles, and oxide derivatives for health and beauty products.

The commission expects the review to take three years or less. If a permit is issued, construction could begin at the end of this decade so the reactors would be ready early in the 2030s, as the natural gas-ﬁred equipment is retired.

Rocket spending $9.4B on rival Mr. Cooper

The mortgage company Rocket is buying competitor Mr Cooper in an all-stock deal valued at $9.4 billion, just weeks after acquiring real estate listing company Redﬁn. Rocket Cos. said Monday that bringing Mr Cooper Group Inc. into the fold will create a business representing one in every six mortgages in the United States and give it almost 7 million additional clients. The deal will boost loan volumes, the company said, while lowering client acquisition costs.

The U.S. housing market has been slumping for years with homebuyers and sellers buffeted by soaring mortgages rates and sky high prices that have put homes out of reach for many Americans.

Companies like Rocket, which is on an acquisition streak, are attempting to create more of a one-stop shopping experience for frazzled would-be homebuyers.

Trump executive order targets ticket scalpers

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that he said will help curb ticket scalping and bring “commonsense” changes to the way live entertainment events are priced. Designed to stop “price-gouging by middlemen,” the order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to ensure that scalpers offering tickets at higher prices than their face value comply with all Internal Revenue Service rules, according to a fact sheet released by the White House.

It also orders the Federal Trade Commission to ensure “price transparency at all stages of the ticket-purchase process” and to “take enforcement action to prevent unfair, deceptive, and anti-competitive conduct in the secondary ticketing market,” which the Trump administration argues can “restore sensibility and order to the ticket market.”

The push marks a rare instance of policy crossover with the administration of former President Joe Biden, which used the FTC to target “junk fees,” or levies tacked on at the end of the purchase process that can mask the full price of things like concert tickets, hotel rooms and utility bills.

Wall Street swings on tariff threats

Trump says ‘Liberation Day’ is Wednesday

BY STAN CHOE AP business writer

NEW YORK President Donald Trump’s fast-approaching “Liberation Day” sent stock markets swinging sharply worldwide on Monday

On Wall Street, the S&P 500 rose in another roller-coaster day, after being down as much as 1.7% during the morning. The reversal helped the index shave its loss for the ﬁrst three months of the year to 4.6%,

making it the worst quarter in twoand-a-half years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also swerved higher after erasing an initial loss. Slides for Tesla, Nvidia and other influential Big Tech stocks, though, sent the Nasdaq composite down. Such neck-twisting turns have become routine for the U.S. stock market recently because of uncertainty about what Trump will do with tariffs — and by how much they will worsen inflation and grind down growth for economies.

Wall Street’s swings followed a selloff that spanned the world earlier Monday as worries built about the effects of the tariffs that Trump says will bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Instead of stocks, prices strength-

ened for things considered safer bets when the economy is looking shaky Gold rose again to briefly crest $3,160 per ounce. Prices for Treasury bonds also climbed, which in turn sent their yields down. The yield on the 10year Treasury fell to 4.21% from 4.27% late Friday and from roughly 4.80% in January

On Wednesday, the U.S. is set to begin what Trump calls “reciprocal” tariffs, which will be tailored to match what he sees is the burden each country places on his, including things like value-added taxes. Much is still unknown, including exactly what the U.S. government will do on “Liberation Day.”

If the tariffs end up being less onerous than investors fear maybe Trump includes no additional tariff increases on China, for example — stocks could rally But if they end up being a worst-case scenario, which gets businesses so fearful that they start cutting their workforces, stocks could sink much further

At Goldman Sachs, economists expect Trump to announce an average 15% reciprocal tariff. They also raised their forecast for inﬂation and lowered it for U.S. economic growth for the end of the year They now see a 35% chance of recession in the next year, up from an earlier forecast of 20%, “reﬂecting our lower growth forecast, falling confidence, and statements from White House officials indicating willingness to tolerate economic pain,” according to Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle.

European countries resist U.S. push to scrap DEI initiatives

Contracts could be dropped, leaders say

By The Associated Press

PARIS U.S. government efforts to eliminate diversity initiatives are not going down well on the European continent

Laurent Saint-Martin, France’s minister for foreign trade, said on Monday the country won’t compromise after the U.S State Department said that French companies who have contracts with the U.S. government need to drop diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. In neighboring Belgium, where some companies received similar requests, the government lashed out at the new U.S. rules.

French media reported last week that French companies received a letter saying U.S. President Donald Trump’s rollback of DEI initiatives also could apply outside of the U.S. Saint-Martin spoke to RTL Radio following the reports and said French authorities will

seek explanations from their U.S. counterparts about the letter

The reported demands included abandoning inclusion policies that are part of French and European Union laws such as equality between men and women, the ﬁght against discrimination and racism or the promotion of diversity to help people with disabilities, he said.

“All of this is progress that corresponds ﬁrst and foremost to our French values, we are proud of this and we don’t want to compromise on it,” Saint-Martin said. “We can’t just cancel the application of our own laws overnight.”

French media said the letter was signed by an ofﬁcer of the U.S. State Department who is on the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. The embassy didn’t respond to questions from The Associated Press. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, speaking to reporters at a brieﬁng in

Washington, conﬁrmed that letters were sent.

“This is an effort to comply with the executive order from the president and it is essentially a self-certifying statement to local consulates and embassies,” she said.

Le Figaro daily newspaper published what it said was a copy of the letter The document said an executive order that Trump signed in January terminating DEI programs within the federal government also “applies to all suppliers and service providers of the U.S. Government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate.”

The document asked U.S. government contractors to complete, sign and return within ﬁve days a separate certiﬁcation form to demonstrate that they are in compliance.

Saint-Martin said he was “deeply shocked” but insisted on the need to have a “positive agenda” and maintain a dialogue with the U.S. In Belgium, Finance Minister Jan Jambon said Europeans have a “culture of nondiscrimination” that must be continued. “We have no lessons to learn from the boss of America,” he told channel RTL-TVi.

BY LIZ SWAINE Staff writer

The $1.2 billion acquisition is complete. Delta Utilities now owns CenterPoint Energy’s natural gas distribution in Louisiana and Mississippi.

By the summer, they are set to add Entergy’s gas distribution, giving Delta reach into large chunks of Louisiana that include Shreveport, Bossier City, Lafayette, Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Delta Utilities CEO Tim Poche said the company name and logo

may be different, but the transition should be seamless to CenterPoint’s 380,000 customers in Louisiana and Mississippi.

“They will interface, interact with us just like they do CenterPoint today, we have a transition services agreement in place with CenterPoint,” Poche said. That means for the next six to 12 months, CenterPoint customers will log into the same website and use the same auto-pay system.

Job offers have also been made to the 500 current CenterPoint employees, and Poche said they’re all joining the team. “They’re the most important asset of the organization, that asset walking in and out of the door every day and we want to protect it and invest in it,”

he said. The same offer will be made to Entergy employees.

With the anticipated summer addition of Entergy’s gas assets, Delta, headquartered in New Orleans, would become one of the 40 largest natural gas providers in the U.S. with 600,000 customers and a $1.7 billion business.

The company is wholly owned by Bernhard Capital Partners and its afﬁliated funds. BCP is a private equity management company headquartered in Baton Rouge.

When the Louisiana Public Service Commission approved the sale of CenterPoint in November, Delta Utilities said they were “committed to continuing under the existing rate stabilization plan, tariffs,

schedules and riders. These commitments will ensure continued rate stability for customers for a signiﬁcant amount of time.” Poche has been following the natural gas market and is aware of talk of price increases due to data center power needs and LNG exports.

“We anticipate a very stable rate environment. We are stepping into the shoes, as we’re saying, of CenterPoint,” he said. “We received unanimous regulatory approval from Louisiana and from the Mississippi regulators, and the rates will continue to be intact for a fairly long-term period.”

Email Liz Swaine at liz.swaine@ theadvocate.com.

ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO French companies received a letter last week that said President Donald Trump’s rollback of DEI initiatives also could apply outside of the U.S

OMV has new head as computer outages continue

BY MEGHAN FRIEDMANN Staff writer

During a time of turmoil for the Office of Motor Vehicles, State Fire Marshal Bryan Adams will take over the agency after Commissioner Dan Casey stepped down last week, Gov Jeff Landry announced Monday In a statement, Landry pointed to Adams’ career in public service as making him exceptionally qualiﬁed for the role.

“He is committed to modernizing the outdated OMV system

baby animals. As spring arrives in Louisiana, litters of wild baby animals will, as well. Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries wildlife rehabilitators and local veterinarians experience an inﬂux of animals during this time. These animal experts recommend leaving the babies’ care to their mothers or the professionals Harris, who has been rehabilitating animals in Louisiana for nearly 24 years, said if you ﬁnd an uninjured baby animal, you should leave it for a few hours before taking action because chances are the mom could be nearby “First and foremost, try to reach a wildlife rehabber. Unfortunately, there are not many of us, and it can be hard to make contact,” Harris said. If an animal is injured, that’s when you should reach out to a veterinarian.

FARMERS

Continued from page 1A

program made $837 million in payments to over 10,900 farmers nationally

In Louisiana, the program worked with about 40 farms to get products into food banks in every Louisiana parish.

This ﬁscal year, Louisiana has spent about $3.4 million getting food from local farmers into schools as of Dec. 9, according to a table that has since been removed from the USDA’s website.

The Ascension Parish School Board is the largest purchaser in the state in the Local Food For Schools program, spending $269,347 between 2023 and 2024. Lafayette Parish ranks third with $157,344 in purchases, according to the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry

Existing agreements are expected to be fulﬁlled, but the USDA said it did not plan to award additional money that had been set aside for the year but not yet used.

For people like Chenier, that looks like thousands of pounds of food dedicated to helping ﬁght food insecurity while providing her and her husband, John, with a steady source of income for their small operation. She said this season, she is expecting to plant half of what she did

to better serve the people and ensure it operates efﬁciently moving forward,” Landry said. For weeks, delays at OMV ofﬁces and public tag agencies statewide have frustrated Louisianans. That’s because the system’s outdated software system keeps freezing, sometimes multiple times a day

The Louisiana Public Tag Agent Association reported that, between

The LSU School of Veterinary Medicine expects an increase in animals during every spring, said Kimberly Boykin, assistant professor of wildlife medicine and surgery

The animals they receive at the vet school aren’t always injured Sometimes people bringing in orphaned animals are just trying to ﬁgure out what to do with them, Boykin said.

The school’s biggest offenders are typically baby birds who get injured after their ﬁrst attempts at ﬂying, followed by baby squirrels and bunnies.

However, people can call for advice, consult the internet for information or reach out to a wildlife rehabilitator if the animals are actually orphaned, Boykin said.

“The biggest thing that we really want to hone in on and tell people is that mom is going to be so much better at taking care of the baby than we are,” Boykin said. “Their chances of surviving are so much higher if they’re with mom instead of us.”

last year

Chenier has worked with Second Harvest Food Bank for more than four years. She started providing food for the mobile markets but was approached to participate in the food purchase assistance program two years ago She said she was contracted until 2027.

“I was told that this could not go away It made us invest and put money into (our farm),” she said.

The couple recently built a home for a farmworker that they can no longer afford and two greenhouses to make room for fall and winter crops set aside for the program John Chenier, who just turned 70, said with the program gone, he is not sure how much longer they can operate adding that it might be time for him to retire.

“We can’t afford to make a living with it,” he said. “Everything was going up,” but he said, the couple had a guarantee they would sell their produce. “Now, we don’t have that guarantee anymore.”

In Eunice, a beef processor and fifth-generation rancher Chip Perrin said the two USDA programs allowed his business to thrive. He joined the programs a year ago when Second Harvest reached out to him

Through the programs, his company processed around 7,000 pounds of beef for food banks and 10,000 pounds for schools and food banks a

Feb. 21 and Monday, one member tracked 38 hours of downtime. On March 21, Landry declared a state of emergency due to the outages, waiving late fees for Louisianans that need to renew their Class E driver’s licenses. Most regular drivers hold a Class E license. The OMV has also been holding some weekend hours, as ofﬁcials believe a high volume of trafﬁc in the OMV database may contribute to the system outages.

Adams said in a statement that he is dedicated to improving the

Harris, the wildlife rehabilitator, said rehabilitating spring babies takes all her time. The number of animals she takes in depends on the amount of help she has. All the state-permitted wildlife rehabilitators do it on a volunteer basis and pay out of pocket for supplies.

Harris said she gets four to six calls a day about rehabilitating baby animals during the springtime, and more if the weather has been bad.

Harris has over 15 animals she’s rehabilitating at her house, with names ranging from a squirrel called “Sassy” to a raccoon named “Sugar Bear.”

Harris releases the animals into an area full of nature after about six to 12 months of caring for them.

When asked if she gets attached to the animals she rehabilitates, Harris replied, “yes, unfortunately.”

Email Claire Grunewald at claire.grunewald@theadvocate. com.

week. They also processed around 30 cattle a week from other ranchers in the program.

The increased business allowed him to expand his operations and hire more workers. Perrin also said he was able to visit a school that his product went to, adding that he was proud to play a role in combating child food insecurity

“Everybody was excited about it, and we really ramped up to take on that business this year, and then overnight, funds get cut, and that business is gone. For farmers, the ranchers, us, the schools, everybody,” Perrin said. “That’s 40,000 pounds of beef that’s no longer running through our plant.”

Perrin’s business is pivoting in an attempt to make up for the loss, but he said he had to lay off employees.

Perrin said he believes the USDA programs will be reinstated in some form, and that there is likely wasteful spending in the federal government and agencies like the USDA. However, he said, these programs did their job of investing in local farmers and small communities while decreasing food insecurity

Second Harvest is also trying to pivot, Paul Scelfo, regional director, said. His office has received many calls from rural community pantries across the Acadiana region that have shown

OMV system, which “has faced challenges for too long.”

Adams will return to the State Fire Marshal’s Office after his time at the OMV a release from Landry’s office said Dale “Ed” Branch, the chief of staff for the State Fire Marshal’s Office, will replace Adams as the head of that agency Casey said he left the OMV so he would have more time with his grandchildren, noting how much time the job of OMV commissioner requires.

The OMV’s software system is 50

years old. The state is on the brink of selecting a new one, officials have said, but it could take several years to fully install it.

Landry’s executive order allows the state to skip a six- to ninemonth procurement process that would have made the modernization take even longer

The outages come as a May 7 deadline looms for travelers to get driver’s licenses that meet federal REAL ID requirements in order to travel. Those licenses require more stringent proof of identiﬁcation.

concern.

“Obviously, the decision to cut that funding is not favorable for Second Harvest,” he said. “I don’t know how else to put it, but that doesn’t mean we’re stopping. We’re still looking for other funding opportunities and other ways to work with our farmers to make sure they stay engaged.”

In Louisiana, 1 out of 7 people are considered food insecure, and 46 out of 64 parishes have food insecurity rates higher than 15%.

Scelfo said cutting these programs will increase food insecurity in the state, especially in rural communities.

“It was an unprecedented amount of food and an unprecedented amount of a ripple effect throughout our communities,” Scelfo said. Staff writer Ashley White contributed to this article.

The USDA’s food purchase assistance funds allowed for one of the largest sources of fresh produce to Second Harvest.

Deborah Harris, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries permitted wildlife rehabilitator for East Baton Rouge Parish, wrestles Robby the raccoon after she went in his cage to clean it

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LOUISIANA AT LARGE

Hard to beat an April in La.

April is peak Louisiana. Flowers. Showers. Sun Music. Festivals. There are the biggies Baton Rouge Blues Festival (Friday through Sunday), the French Quarter Festival (April 10-13), Festival International in Lafayette (April 23-27) and Jazz Fest in New Orleans (April 24-May 4). There are also other delights that don’t get as much attention that the more intrepid would appreciate.

Hallmark-style charm

Last year I went to New Iberia’s Books Along the Teche Literary Festival and had one of the most enjoyable weekends of my life. I realize that may sound like a stretch, but the weekend had all the things: perfect weather, great food, a cute town, lots of books and incredibly kind, smart and generous people. I’m going back this year because I liked it so much. (In full disclosure, I’m making a presentation, too.)

The festival begins Friday and lasts through Sunday New Iberia has enough charm to merit a trip almost any time (or a Hallmark made-for-TV movie for that matter), but this is the weekend it really shines. Organizers have three days of events from morning until night including local and Southern authors, covering a wide range of topics, including:

n Storytelling traditions in Acadiana with Barry Jean Ancelet and Darrell Bourque

n How to turn travels into books and articles with Chere Coen

n A James Lee Burke Book Club discussion of “Clete” hosted virtually by CJ Lotz and Burke

n The Great Southern Writer Symposium with Mary Kay Andrews n “Critiquing Your Book: The Truth of an Audience” with Ben Gibson

n “I’ve Got an Idea for a Picture Book! Now What?” with Denise Gallagher But that’s not all New Iberia’s book festival offers. It has adventures that build on the obsession of one of the town’s favorite sons, Burke, including a bookstore with the same name as the festival, a Dave Robicheaux-themed mystery bus tour and more, including:

n Panel discussion “Traiteurs: The Traditional Cajun French Folk Healers in the 21st Century” led by Mary Perrin

n Readers’ Theater from Burke’s book “New Iberia Blues”

n T-Boy’s Adventure Boat Tour of Bayou Teche

n Symphony Sunday in New Iberia City Park. Many events are free, but some require tickets. Visit booksalongthetecheliteraryfestival.com for details. The city is a walkable, charming downtown set on Bayou Teche, with a variety of good eats, including the chic Pie Bar Plus, Avery Island, home of Tabasco and Jungle Gardens, is nearby and offers a wonderful tour of the factory and a selfdriving tour of the gardens. New Iberia, population 27,000, is about 135 miles from New Orleans if you avoid the interstate and take U.S. 90. Having done that drive many times, I appreciate its scenery and noninterstateness. From Baton Rouge, New Iberia is about 70 miles. I love much of that drive, too, by opting for the more rural route that takes me over drawbridges and through sugar cane ﬁelds.

Devil’s Swamp Lake nears restoration

the agency also reached a courtordered deal with Clean Harbors to spend around $3.2 million on remediation aimed at protecting public health.

BY DAVID J MITCHELL Staff writer

Nearly 40 years after regulators declared Devil’s Swamp Lake and surrounding wetlands in East Baton Rouge Parish dangerously contaminated work to protect the public and restore the environment is ﬁnally taking shape.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies have ﬁnalized a plan to determine how to restore the ecology of Devil’s Swamp Lake and nearby bottomland forest from damage left, in part, by Rollins Environmental Services, a defunct hazardous waste incinerator and landﬁll operator

The plan comes months after

Near the historic Freedmen community of Alsen founded in 1872, the 3,500-acre bottomland swamp along the Mississippi River and its upland fringes have become home to three Superfund sites, including the Rollins property They are in various stages of study remediation or long-term monitoring.

The sites are the legacy of industrial operations in the 1960s and 1970s, when environmental laws were much weaker and after 1950s-era city-parish leaders zoned for industry the largely rural, majority-Black area, which then had little representation in city leadership, according to the EPA.

The U.S Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies have finalized a plan to determine how to restore the ecology of Devil’s Swamp Lake from damage left, in part, by Rollins Environmental Services, a defunct hazardous waste incinerator and landfill operator

WEATHER WARNING

BY CHRISTOPHER CARTWRIGHT Staff writer

Last spring, a 10-bed

Work-based learning lags in Louisiana, study finds

BY ELYSE CARMOSINO Staff writer

STAFF PHOTO By MICHAEL JOHNSON

A firefighter sprays fire retardant foam over two oil tanks that were fully engulfed by fire after being struck by lightning during severe weather early Monday in Livonia.

Tornado confirmed in Livingston

BY CLAIRE GRUNEWALD Staff writer

The National Weather Service

conﬁrmed that a 75 mph tornado touched down in Livingston Parish early Monday morning.

An EF0 tornado touched down near the intersection of Lard Road and Florida Boulevard in Holden

The tornado then headed southeast and left broken branches in its track At the end of the twister’s path was a small area of more tree damage and a small amount of damage to manufactured homes, according to the weather service.

The path was less than 4 miles, and the tornado is estimated to have peaked at 75 mph, the National Weather Service ofﬁce in New Orleans discovered after sending a team to survey the area.

The tornado lasted 7 minutes at about 7 a.m. Monday Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Ofﬁce spokesperson Lori Steele said there has been no reported damage aside from the trees and branches.

Email Claire Grunewald at claire.grunewald@theadvocate. com.

AG’s Office to defend death sentence

BY JILLIAN KRAMER Staff writer

Louisiana Attorney General

Liz Murrill’s ofﬁce announced on Monday that it will take over defending the conviction and death sentence of Antoinette Frank, the former New Orleans police ofﬁcer who killed two restaurant workers in a notorious triple homicide that shocked the city Murrill said in a statement that adopting Frank’s post-conviction case was part of a sweeping offer she’s made to every Louisiana district attorney to “take over defending in all of the death penalty cases through post-conviction relief, federal habeas, and execution.

Murrill said many on death row have raised “the same or very similar” claims, and having her ofﬁce respond will mean “courts will receive consistent brieﬁngs.

Her ofﬁce has taken over eight other post-conviction death penalty cases in addition to Frank’s case, a spokesperson said, declining to provide speciﬁcs.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams’ ofﬁce did not respond to a request for comment about ceding Frank’s case to the attorney general. Neither ofﬁce responded Monday to a request for a

RISHER

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25 miles of garage sales?

Not only will the town of Jackson host a car show Saturday, it will also be along the route of 25 miles of garage sales along La. 10, from Clinton, through Jackson to St. Francisville. (This is rural Louisiana, which means that sales won’t be one on top of the other They’ll require some driving.)

Midway along the garage sale path, in Jackson, local residents will offer a variety of other activities, including an art gallery opening at Jackson Presbyterian Church, located at 3017 Bank St I loved visiting Jackson a

HOSPITAL

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The hospital, which was located south of the intersection of Airline Highway and La. 42, opened in 2019 and was one of the few emergency rooms in the area. It treated patients who had strokes, heart or respiratory problems, abdominal issues and

LAKE

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Though the bottomland swamp has been studied multiple times, the restoration plan anticipates more studies to determine the level of contamination in wildlife, what it will take to bring back the environment, who should be responsible for the cost and which contaminants pose the greatest risks.

While groundwater contamination has been a major concern for the two other nearby Superfund sites, the EPA said that hasn’t been found in the Devil’s Swamp Lake area on the southern end of the large wetland EPA researchers have pinned Rollins’ share of the contamination on discharges from its treatment system and stormwater runoff into the Devil’s Swamp Lake area via a drainage ditch.

The earlier, court-ordered remediation deal will require Clean Harbors, which took possession of the Rollins operation in 1995, to cover contaminated stretches of the bottom of the 39-acre Devil’s Swamp Lake with dirt and cap the ditch, which had drained from Rollins into the lake from the 1970s until 1993. The remediation plan for Dev-

copy of a letter making it ofﬁcial

Louisiana ended a 15-year hiatus in executions when it killed Jessie Hoffman Jr on March 18 using nitrogen gas. A federal judge had blocked Hoffman’s execution, but Murrill fought in court to reinstate it Just who may face execution next among the state’s 55 death row prisoners is uncertain Capital defense lawyers claim none have exhausted their full legal remedies, which also include a review by a federal judge.

But Murrill’s ofﬁce argues that Frank has waited too long to challenge her fate.

Prosecutors claim that Frank assisted her lover Rogers LaCaze, on March 4, 1995, in a late-night robbery gone awry at Kim Ahn Noodle House.

A jury convicted LaCaze of killing 25-year-old Ronald Williams II, an off-duty police ofﬁcer guarding the restaurant. In a separate trial, a different jury convicted Frank of fatally shooting Cuong Vu, 17, and Ha Vu, 24.

LaCaze and Frank each received a death sentence. LaCaze has since succeeded in having his death sentence tossed, following an appeal in 2015. He is now serving life in prison.

Frank has argued that a lifetime

few weeks ago and looking at the innovative ways people are working together to make things work, particularly at the aforementioned Presbyterian church, which was built in 1852, and is down to four members.

Remarkably, the church is still going relatively strong, thanks in large part to clever members who decided to open part of their lovely and historic building to create an artists’ studio, with another part of the church acting as a small art gallery

Jackson has around 4,000 people and is centrally located, about 35 miles north of Baton Rouge. Topographically it just feels different from many other south Louisiana towns and cities, which could have something to do with its elevation. Jackson is a whopping 151 feet above sea

other health concerns. Its closure last April resulted in the loss of 90 full- and part-time jobs and several million dollars for hospital investors.

According to the revocation letter by the state Health Department, Prairieville Family Hospital had too few inpatients to be considered a full-ﬂedged hospital.

In an interview with The Advocate last April, McLean said he met with state officials to pres-

il’s Swamp Lake is farther along than the environmental restoration work

“Clean Harbors has selected a contractor to perform the design of the remedy and will be submitting a work plan to EPA for review and approval,” said EPA spokesperson Joseph Robledo.

The EPA anticipates receiving the work plan in the fall, he added. Clean Harbors expects to begin work in the fall of 2026, according to the EPA

A spokesperson for Clean Harbors wasn’t available for comment.

Quisha Reed-Jones, who leads the Alsen St. Irma Lee Community Village group, said the EPA’s remediation and restoration plans aren’t doing enough to protect public health, leaving it to the state Department of Health.

“This approach overlooks the long history of environmental inequality tied to the site and lacks any acknowledgment of the adverse effects to communities,” Reed-Jones said. “Our communities deserve more than to be unheard, as if they do not exist.

They deserve comprehensive cleanup, ongoing health monitoring and full transparency at every step. This isn’t just about soil and sediment — it’s about restoring trust, health and doing what’s right.”

BY ELLYN COUVILLION Staff writer

The victim of a hit-and-run on Plank Road in Baton Rouge early Sunday morning has been identiﬁed as a 22-year-old woman by the Coroner’s Ofﬁce.

Laderica Stewart died at the scene of the crash, which happened around 3:15 a.m. near the

intersection of Plank Road and Brady Street, according to Baton Rouge Police. Stewart was walking with three other people when a vehicle hit them. The other three victims were taken to a hospital in stable condition.

Police homicide investigators are searching for the driver responsible for the crash.

of abuse at the hands of her father left her vulnerable to the influence of LaCaze, a drug dealer who forced her to shoot the Vus, she claims.

There has been little activity in her case since 2009, when Frank’s attorneys ﬁled a supplemental petition for post-conviction relief. They alleged that egregious actions by prosecutors and an ineffective defense lawyer denied her a fair trial The state never ﬁled a response.

After Gov Jeff Landry signed legislation last year restricting post-conviction relief, Frank’s lawyers ﬁled a supplemental petition “out of an abundance of caution,” they wrote But Murrill argued in the statement that Frank’s attempt to amend her petition isn’t allowed

“The state’s position is that she has exhausted her appeals,” she said.

Monday’s announcement came during a hearing at which Criminal District Court Judge Kimya Holmes granted the state an extension to respond to Frank’s claims, setting a hearing for April 14.

“The fact that no one moved on this for 16 years is shameful,” Holmes said.

Nalia Campbell, one of Frank’s attorneys, did not oppose the delay

level, compared to New Orleans at 6, Lafayette at 36 and Baton Rouge at 56 feet above sea level.

I ﬁnd Jackson fascinating with its interesting architecture. It was named in 1815 for Andrew Jackson, after he led troops to win the Battle of New Orleans. It was the original home of Centenary College — and some of the buildings are still there, maintained by the Louisiana Ofﬁce of State Parks.

These days, it’s also home to Cotton Fields Coffee Shop, owned and operated by the incredibly engaging Fields Day, which is a story in and of itself.

If you are in Jackson, stop by Cotton Fields Coffee for a boost of caffeine and spirit.

Email Jan Risher at jan.risher@ theadvocate.com.

ent a corrective action plan and thought it could have met the minimum benchmarks within six months. The state Department of Health rejected the proposal, he said.

“But I get it. They have the law They have to uphold what is written,” he said at the time.

Email Christopher Cartwright at christopher.cartwright@ theadvocate.com.

In response to similar comments the group made to the EPA, the agency says the environmental plan, by definition, is focused only on restoring the ecosystem but that work will include human uses of the environment.

Devil’s Swamp Lake is a human-made oxbow lake dug in the early 1970s to shore up a Baton Rouge Barge Harbor levee. The lake and surrounding swamp, which were used for hunting, fishing and swimming, have had fishing and swimming advisories since 1987 due to polychlorinated biphenyls, hexachlorobenzene and hexachlorobutadiene. In 2015, revised advisories against eating fish and shellfish were issued after scientists found polychlorinated biphenyls in crawfish and fish, which also contained mercury Polychlorinated biphenyls, hexachlorobenzene and hexachlorobutadiene are toxic chemicals that don’t break down but bioaccumulate in the food web. They have carcinogenic potential in humans and, for polychlorinated biphenyls, the potential rises as the chemicals bioaccumulate, according to the EPA. Commercial production of polychlorinated biphenyls has been banned since 1979. Commercial production of hexachlorobutadi-

STUDY

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Louisiana trails other states

Work-based learning gives students real-world job experience before they graduate, often allowing them to earn school credit at the same time. In recent years, Louisiana’s Education Department has promoted career education as an alternative for students who may not be interested in pursuing a four-year college degree, which proponents say will also help grow the state’s shrinking workforce. Under state policy, students must complete a minimum of 7,965 minutes in an internship to receive school credit, along with at least 106 hours of on-thejob training with an employer and a minimum of 27 hours of classroom instruction that focuses on skills such as financial literacy and workplace communication.

Though internship data for other states was incomplete, the report found that the number of Louisiana students who graduated with internship credits in 2023 was much lower than in Georgia and Tennessee, where data indicated at least 15-20% of students had completed an internship.

Apprenticeship data, which was more readily available, showed that Louisiana had among the lowest number of apprentices out of 16 states in the Southern region. Arkansas had the highest percentage, with about 9 in 1,000 students completing apprenticeships.

The only states with fewer apprentices than Louisiana were South Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma Still, Louisiana has seen its number of apprenticeships grow by more than 11% over the last ﬁve years, according to the report the third-highest improvement rate compared to peer states.

Louisiana’s apprentices are the lowest paid in the region, earning $14.90 per hour Pay in Mississippi, where apprentices earn the most out of all the southern states, averages a little over $20 per hour

ene was banned in 2021, though it mostly occurs as an unintended chemical byproduct.

Until a breach in 2020, the lowlying Devil’s Swamp Lake, which can be inundated when the river ﬂoods, had been contained by the harbor levee. But EPA reports say contaminated water from Devil’s Swamp Lake ran off into the harbor after the breach. The lake and its contaminated sediments are now mostly dry except in times of high water Rollins, which has already capped a section of the drainage ditch that is on its property, is one of several companies that contributed to soil, groundwater, surface water or biological contamination in the Devil’s Swamp region, parts of Bayou Baton Rouge or nearby upland areas on the river bluff, the EPA said.

Petro-Processors, another defunct hazardous waste facility, and Schuylkill Metals, later Exide Technologies, a defunct lead battery recycling plant, have been also blamed for contamination in the region. Their properties closer to the northern end of Devil’s Swamp have become their own Superfund sites.

Researchers found heavy metals, hexachlorobutadiene, hexachlorobutadiene and carcinogenic polyaromatic hydrocarbons

Expanding work-based learning

Some school district leaders have expressed worry about meeting the expectations set by the new accountability system if there are not enough internships or apprenticeships available to students. Kim Rider oversees career and technical education in the Allen Parish school district, a mostly rural community in central Louisiana where the poverty rate hovers around 85%. During a state school board meeting in October she said the district would struggle to provide students with work-based learning opportunities. Unlike urban areas with public transportation, Rider said students in her parish must be able to drive to jobs, which requires a car and driver’s license. She pointed out that a driver’s education course can cost families hundreds of dollars.

“I want to know how it is that I’m supposed to make this happen in an area where I don’t have industry,” Rider said. “We don’t have jobs. We don’t have internships.”

Knapp said his organization recommends that the state provide a “signiﬁcant incentive” to businesses to offer more opportunities to students. The report notes that Louisiana currently has two tax credits that are designed to support employers who hire apprentices or underprivileged youth. However, both are rarely used, the report says.

“We asked far and wide across the business community, and folks did not know that there was a tax credit,” Knapp said. “Some of it has been lack of marketing.”

Better Louisiana said it plans to propose legislation this session that would combine the two credits into a streamlined system that would encourage more businesses to participate.

The legislation would also reduce the number of hours that students must intern for businesses to get the tax credit, Knapp said.

“I think this is a really good moment to reconsider” that incentive, he said. Many students would beneﬁt from career training in high school, “yet there’s no motive in the tax code to drive this.”

came from Petro-Processors. The polychlorinated biphenyls have been tied to Rollins, the EPA said.

The 1984 court order that required Petro-Processors and its industrial customers to clean up the northern part of the Devil’s Swamp exempted it from southern portions near the lake, where polychlorinated biphenyls contamination from Rollins has been documented, but also hexachlorobutadiene and hexachlorobutadiene in lake ﬁsh.

Michael Tritico, a southwest Louisiana environmentalist who commented on the new restoration plan, faulted the plan’s determination to honor the courtordered exemption for PetroProcessors.

“To me that is a good example of how lawyers manage to lock in a culprit’s protection at the expense of protection of the public and our living natural resources,” he said.

LESLIE WESTBROOK

Instructor and chef Theresa Edwards helps Brielle Credeur make pralines Feb 6 at the W.D. and Mary Baker Smith Career Center in Lafayette.

LeMoine, Michael St Mark Catholic Church in Gonzales at noon

Berlin, Alfred E. 'Trey'

Alfred E. "Trey" Berlin III, 74, aresident of Baton Rouge, passed away unexpectedly at home on March 23, 2025. Born in Havre de Grace, MD, on November 23, 1950, Trey grew up in Alexandria, LA, and graduated from Bolton High School in 1968. He attended LSU-A before transferring to and graduating from LSU in Baton Rouge, which became his family home for the next 54 years. Trey is preceded in death by his parents, Alfred Elmer "Buster" Berlin Jr. and Mabel Protho Berlin; his sister, Belva Ann Berlin Dewey; hisbrother, John Berlin; his wife of 36 years, Mary Evelyn D. "Winkie" Berlin; and his wife of 10 years, Tanna Glaser Berlin. He is survived by his sons:Alfred Elmer "Bubba Berlin IV (Melanie) of Asheville, NC; Michael Berlin (Anne) of Asheville NC; and Brian Berlin (Mathilde) of New Orleans, LA. He is also survived by his grandchildren: Perry Berlin and MollyBerlinof Asheville, and John, George, and Bernard "Bear" Berlin of New Orleans.

Trey is alsosurvived by his stepdaughters: Allison Roberson of Baton Rouge, LA; Angela Andrus (Frankie)ofBaton Rouge, LA; Ashley Howard (Tim)of Spring, TX; and Amy Traylor-Nikolaus (Emily) of Baton Rouge, LA, along with their children. Additionally, he is survived by his dear and special friend, Susan van Bueningen.

Trey enjoyed asuccessful and fulfilling 50-year career with Coburn Supply Company. Starting in the warehouse in 1972, he quickly rose through the ranks due to his strong leadership and exceptional people skills. He retired in 2022 as Senior Vice President and amember of the Board of Directors. Trey was instrumental in the growth and success of Coburn's and was known throughout the company as amentorand friend—respected and beloved at every level of the organization.

An Eagle Scout, Trey took pride in his time with Troop 12 in Baton Rouge, where he encouraged and mentored young scouts in their journey toward the rank of Eagle. Trey loved fishing, cooking, music, skeet shooting, chess, traveling, and awell -made Old Fashioned. Family and Friends are invited Saturday, April 12 to Trinity Episcopal Church, 3552 Morning Glory Ave, Baton Rouge, LA 70808 for avisitation beginning at 1:30 PM until the start of the service Requiem Eucharist at 2:30 PM, followed by areception. Trey will be interred at alater date in Pineville Family and friends may sign the online guestbook or leave apersonal note at www.rabenhorst.com.

In lieu of flowers, the family asksthat donations be made in Trey's name to Coburn Cares (Coburn Cares, PO Box 2177, Beaumont, TX 77704-2177, attn: Melisa Winn) or to acharity of your choice.

Hopper, Robert

speech therapist and prominent actor with the Baton Rouge LittleTheater, and Alexa Williams Hopper, amaster preschool teacheratUniversity Methodist Church and a dedicated backstage contributor to the same theater. He was also the nephew of Dr. Hulen Williams and Dr.Virginia Williams, all long-time residents of Baton Rouge Mac attended Highland ElementarySchool and graduated from University High School in Baton Rouge in 1967. He earned his degree in Drama from the University of California Fullerton and went on to teach Speech andDrama while pursuing acareerin acting and othertheaterrelated endeavors.

Later in life,Mac settled in Iowa, where he deepened his Christian faith and continuedtoteach as long as he was able. He was an active member of English River Chapel in Kalona, where he also servedina security role. His life reflected hisdevotion to God and his generous spirit. Mac found great joy in spending time with his family. He cherished moments with hisstep-son Phil Radeboldt (wife Ashley) and theirchildren Dwight and Brooklyn, as well as his step-daughter Lillian Radeboldt and her cat Jack. To Mac, there were no "step" distinctions—he embraced them fully as his own, and they lovingly calledhim dadand grandpa. He is survived by his wife Penny and hisson Drew Mac's journey was one of faith, love,and service. May his memorybring comfort to those who knew him and peace in knowing he now rests in the presence of God.

Hudson, Linda Katherine Davis

Linda Hudson, née Davis, (Alexandria,Lake Charles, Louisiana, Knoxville, Tennessee) passedawaypeacefullyon March 24, 2025 in Baton Rouge,Louisiana. She is survivedbyher brothers, Wayne and Bruce Davis, her childrenMary, Meredith, Alyce,Mollyand Joseph Hudson, from her marriage to Joseph Samuel Hudson, by her grandchildren Emily, Sarahand Molly Adams, Alexandraand FitzwilliamGontard, and Caroline Faulkner,byher son-in-lawBrianCollaer, and by hergreat-granddaughter ZooeyCollaer. A lifelong teacherand learner, she held degrees from McNeese StateUniversity: BachelorofArts and Master ofArts in English, Master ofFine Arts inCreative Writing, and Master ofEducation. Linda isremembered for, among other things, hosting numerous Pig Roasts, Open Houses and NewYear'sEve parties, and forher devotion to Catholicism, inparticulartothe BlessedVirgin. Plans for areligious service will be made at alater date.

Profet, Dore James Funeral services for Dore James Profet will be held Wednesday April 2, 2025 at Saintsville COGIC, 8930 Plank Rd A public vis‐itation will be held from 10:00 a.m until 11:00 a.m with religious services be‐ginning at 11:00 a.m Inter‐ment: Louisiana National Cemetery, 303 Mt Pleasant Rd Zachary, LA. Profes‐sional services entrusted to Charles Mackey Funeral Home

Smith, Calista A

Calista A Smith. Proverbs 31:28-29 “Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.’” A beloved wife mother daughter, sister, grand‐mother great-grand‐mother, mother-in-law, aunt and friend will be missed by all who were blessed to know her. She passed away peacefully at the age of 93 at 6:02 p.m. Thursday, March 27 2025, surrounded by her loving children. Visitation will be at Zachary United Methodist Church on Wednes‐day, April 2, 2025, at 9:00 a.m. until religious services at 10:00 a.m conducted by Rev. Austin Rinehart. Burial in Port Hudson National Cemetery. Calista was born Mary Calista Adair in Carthage, Mississippi on November 19, 1931, to Arnold and Irene Adair She was the youngest of six children. She graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1953 with a Bachelor of Sci‐ence Degree in Home Eco‐nomics. Calista married Pearlie Smith of Mars Hill Mississippi in 1953 and they moved to Baton Rouge and settled in Zachary in 1966 where they raised their family Calista and Pearlie were married for 47 years until his pass‐ing in September 2001. Cal‐ista is survived by her three children: son, Kevin Smith and partner Sherrie (Zachary, LA); daughter, Angela Smith Lindsay and son-in-law, Duff (The Woodland’s, TX); daughter, Michelle Smith Dimattia and son-in-law Duane (Baton Rouge LA). Six grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren (with #15 on the way). Jessica Smith Rockenbaugh and husband, Greg (Baton Rouge, LA) Children: Gre‐gory, Charlotte, Thomas; Emily Smith (Baton Rouge, LA) Children: Cameron, James; Kyle Munn and wife Alicia (Prairieville, LA) Chil‐dren: Harlan, Olivia; Jason Munn and wife Holly (The Woodlands, TX) Children: Catherine Jude Caleb; Megan Lindsay Rufﬁn and husband Clif (The Wood‐lands, TX) Children: War‐ren, Elizabeth, Madeleine; Chad Lindsay and wife Andie (The Woodland’s, TX) Children: Charlotte Preceded in death by her husband Pearlie Smith and her daughter, Lisa Smith Guillot and son-in-law DR “Bo” Guillot (Zachary, LA). Pallbearers will be sons-inlaw Duff Lindsay and Duane Dimattia and grand‐sons Kyle Munn, Jason Munn, Chad Lindsay, Greg Rockenbaugh, Clif Rufﬁn. Honorary pallbearer sonin-law DR “Bo” Guillot. She was a faithful servant to our Lord and member of Zachary United Methodist Church Her family would like to express immense gratitude to The Lodge Memory Care staff and Hospice of Baton Rouge. She had many talents, but if you ask those that knew her best they will say she was the family’s matriarch and her greatest gifts have always been sharing her faith in God, her endearing love grace, sense of humor, and ability to per‐severe through life’s great‐est challenges with a posi‐tive outlook and Will to Live, even up to her last breath Share sympathies, memories and condo‐lences at www CharletFune ralHome com.

“Bo” Guillot (Zachary, LA). Pallbearers will be sons-inlaw Duff Lindsay and Duane Dimattia and grand‐sons, Kyle Munn, Jason Munn, Chad Lindsay, Greg Rockenbaugh, Clif Rufﬁn. Honorary pallbearer sonin-law DR “Bo” Guillot. She was a faithful servant to our Lord and member of Zachary United Methodist Church Her family would like to express immense gratitude to The Lodge Memory Care staff and Hospice of Baton Rouge. She had many talents, but if you ask those that knew her best they will say she was the family’s matriarch and her greatest gifts have always been sharing her faith in God, her endearing love, grace, sense of humor, and ability to per‐severe through life’s great‐est challenges with a posi‐tive outlook and Will to Live, even up to her last breath Share sympathies memories, and condo‐lences at www CharletFune ralHome com.

Steve Stevens passed away peacefully intothe arms of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ on March 25, 2025 at the ageof76. He was adevoted husband, loving father, grandfather and brother to his siblings by marriage. He was born in Baton Rouge, LA to Margaret Heath Stevens and Wayne W.Stevens, both of whom preceded him in death. Steve lived most of his life in Baton Rouge where he worked as aCPA,retiring in 2014 from the Louisiana Office of the Legislative Auditor.

Steve was akind man with awiry sense of humor who successfully strived to live in amanner of humility and honor. He was an avid baseball fan. Afavorite pastime was attending LSU baseballgames and following minor league baseball where he enjoyed tracking the careers of young professionals as they climbed the ranks to the major league. He had astrong faith that girded and sustained him through along and difficult illness. He was along -time member of CrossPoint Baptist Church where he quietly served in various capacities over the years -Church Treasurer, softball coach and nursery worker where he rocked babies for over fifteen years during Sunday morning bible study. Due to his illness, he transitioned to the children's department where he served until his final days.

Robert Mackenzie "Mac" Hopper passed away on March 22, 2025, in Kalona, Iowa, at the ageof 75. Born

teacher at University Methodist Church and a dedicated backstage con-

pastime was attendingLSU baseball games andfollowing minor league baseball where he enjoyed tracking thecareers of young professionals as they climbedthe ranks to the major league. He had astrongfaith that girded and sustained him through along anddifficult illness. He was along -time member of CrossPoint Baptist Church where he quietly served in various capacities over the years -Church Treasurer, softball coach andnursery worker where he rocked babies for over fifteen years during Sunday morning bible study. Due to his illness, he transitioned to the children's department where he served until his final days.

He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Charlotte Duplantis Stevens; daughters Tara Stevens and Melissa Stevens; granddaughter Lauren Stevens and grandson Shawn Portier. He is also survived by his father-in-law Wiltz Duplantis who was truly afather to him, brothers-inlaw David Duplantis (Mary) and Jed Duplantis (Tina) and sister-in-law Stacy Duplantis Lebouef (Gary) as well as many nieces and nephews.

Steve also formed may close relationships outside of his biological family and leaves behind many who have been grafted in as family. He has left behind a legacy of deep bonds and friendships that cross may generations. Steve's presence with us will be deeply missed by we rejoicethat he hasbeen taken into the arms of Christ where there is only joy -nomore pain, no more suffering.

Avisitation will be held at CrossPoint Baptist Church, 14965 AirlineHighway, Baton Rouge, LA 70817, on Saturday, April 5, 2025 beginning at 9amuntil aCelebration of Life beginning at 11 am.

Janice Keller Tilley was born on May 26, 1957, to the union of Louis andMinnie B. Keller in New Orleans, Louisiana. She peacefully departed this life on March 21, 2025. She dedicated over 30 years of service to the State of Louisianabefore retiring. Adevoted and hardworkingemployee, she always graced others with her warmth andpresence. To know her wasto love her Janice leaves to cherish her precious memories: her daughter, Jessica Tilley -Wright, and son-in-law, Damien "Mond" Wright, her beloved granddaughter, Jaycee Milan Wright, all of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; her sisters, Joann K. Pryerand Yvette Keller of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; herbrothers, James Keller, Henry Keller, and Napoleon (Felicia) Keller, all of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; as well as nieces, nephews, cousins, and ahost of other reladdear friends who her dearly.

Tilley, Janice Keller

Zimmerle, Marianne Marianne Zimmerle passed away 3/21/2025 at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital Lafayette La. Please visit the website of Pellerin Funeral Home in Breaux Bridge Louisiana to view the obituary.

StevensII, Joseph 'Steve' Leo

on October 29, 1949, Mac was the beloved only child of B.J. Hopper, a speech therapist and prominent actor with the Baton Rouge LittleTheater, and Alexa Williams Hopper, amaster preschool

OUR VIEWS

Johnston was epitome of bipartisan class

Former U.S. Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, who died March 25 at age 92, was a signiﬁcant player on national policy and an absolute giant of Louisiana politics. Both state and nation were better for his public service.

Johnston, a lawyer and Army veteran, began his political career in Caddo Parish with elections to the state House of Representatives in 1964 and the state Senate in 1968. In those days of notoriously indecorous (to put it kindly) state government, Johnston began forging a reputation as a quiet, serious legislator Given little chance when he entered a 16-candidate Democratic ﬁeld for governor in 1971, he tapped into a new voter hunger for reform to earn a runoff primary spot against then-U.S. Rep. Edwin Edwards.

Edwards’ scant 4,488-vote runoff victory, alas, kept Louisiana in the state-politics-as-entertainment business, but the skintight race had the effect of giving Johnston the statewide name recognition to easily win a U.S. Senate race in 1972. Johnston’s ascent to Washington, D.C., arguably was an inﬂection point, as he ushered in the decades-long era in which most Louisiana members of Congress began establishing reputations not as colorful Southern demagogues but as bipartisan workhorses often key to the agreements that just plain “got things done.”

Using affability more than raw power plays during his four full Senate terms, Johnston became arguably the single most influential legislator on national energy policy He did so without regard to party forging alliances with Republican presidents as well as Democratic ones Johnston pushed laws that encouraged energy exploration that greatly benefited Louisiana’s economy while helping keep energy prices low nationwide Between 1982 and 1998, the years when his legislative stewardship held most sway over national policy, inflation-adjusted energy costs declined steeply

Meanwhile, Johnston was a staunch and effective advocate for bringing federal money back home for Louisiana projects. He was a particularly diligent proponent of the Red River Project and Interstate 49, opening key transportation links between North and South Louisiana, and he helped deliver dozens of other projects to the state, including two national parks and seven wildlife refuges.

Johnston’s ﬁnal reelection campaign in 1990, was memorable for unfortunate reasons, as a late surge by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke vaulted Duke into an unexpectedly strong showing of 43.5% of the vote to Johnston’s 54%. Still, Johnston’s history of bipartisan comity helped keep the Klansman at bay, with eight Republican senators and Republican housing secretary Jack Kemp all endorsing the Democrat Johnston.

Both state and national politics could use much more of Johnston’s civility and bipartisanship today Meanwhile, Johnston leaves a legacy of responsible stewardship of the public weal Well done, and well lived.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR ARE WELCOME. HERE ARE OUR GUIDELINES: Letters are published identifying name, occupation and/or title and the writer’s city of residence The Advocate | The Times-Picayune require a street address and phone number for verification purposes, but that information is not published. Letters are not to exceed 300 words. Letters to the Editor,The Advocate, P.O Box 588, Baton Rouge, LA 70821-0588, or email letters@ theadvocate.com. TO SEND US

OPINION

YOUR VIEWS

Trump is the pragmatist we need in these times

Recent experience tells us that Americans are not well-served by ideologues in the White House. President Barack Obama articulated his ideological convictions in his highly regarded (but seldom read) autobiographical memoir, “Dreams From My Father” (1995). He followed that up with eight years in the Oval Office, which did little, if anything, to repair our divisions or quell our disquiet. President Joe Biden was not so much an ideologue as a willing tool of ideologues, to whom he tragically deferred. He was a political will-o’the-wisp during his entire lackluster public career, it is ironic that he was eventually undone by caving to ideological imperatives. It took only one term in the Oval Office to convince a disabused electorate that he was not fit for office. What the Greeks called “hubris”

(excessive pride/arrogance) affects both political parties, but Democrats seem to have the edge in attracting the ideological-minded. What makes Donald Trump anathema to his opponents on both sides of the aisle is that he is no ideologue. He is a hard-headed real estate businessman from Queens. His policy prerogatives are not propelled by some ill-deﬁned notion of goodwill but rather by whatever works. At bottom, this is what drives his opponents (and some proponents) crazy Ideologues are typically slow to grasp fundamental shifts in political reality and/ or social behavior which eventually undermines their respect. What follows is a kind of degradation that has already beset the legacy media and is now exacting a toll on the Democratic party

ROBERT HEBERT Baton Rouge

La. continues to vote for Republicans even though their policies harm us

As a lifelong resident of Louisiana, I can’t understand why this state continues to remain so adamantly Republican. We have a minimum of 20+ years of data on the Deep South regarding quality of life standards since the boot state went red. According to rankings by U.S. News and World Report, we are No. 50 overall, dead last. Crime and corrections No. 50, economy No. 49, education No. 47, health care No. 46, infrastructure No. 49, environment No. 49. I could keep going, but you get the point. The average Joe Six-pack loves to regurgitate the same old tired talking points of Fox News and the like and blames Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and their liberal policies on all of our ills, but the sad, sad truth is the fact that Louisiana has done this to itself. The Republicans that we keep reelecting have sold us all down the river The Republican Party represents big business and the top onepercenters.

Our state and its citizenry have been

cashed out like a poker chip. We have consistently trended in a downward spiral since the Republican Party has taken total dominance in our political sphere. This is truly a shame when you think of the resources we have: agriculture, petro-chemical industry, commercial seafood industry and much more. Our political leaders continue with the beatdown of organized labor and workers’ rights. Republicans refuse to raise the minimum wage, and Louisiana Republicans just recently cut your unemployment beneﬁts from 26 weeks to 12 weeks. Now with the election of Trump/Musk Inc., the clown show is getting crazier Trump tariffs are cratering the economy Efforts to abolish the Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are signaling the end of our protections. One good thing, at least we don’t have far to go until we hit rock bottom.

MARK WALOCK Walker

BR-area law enforcement agencies need fair division of revenue

The Advocate reported recently that the Baton Rouge Police Department is changing its policy and now will charge for parade and event security because of the budget shortfalls created by the creation of St. George.

When the Sheriff’s Ofﬁce was asked to help with the Spanish Town Parade, BRPD was told by the sheriff that it was not in their budget, even though tax revenue reported this year is up $10 million more than what Sheriff Sid Gautreaux even projected. Gautreaux’s revenue has considerably gone up while his calls for service and areas of responsibility, due to incorporation, have considerably gone down. Not so for the other policing agencies in the parish.

For 20 years, Central has been getting free policing from the sheriff. St. George expected the same. Central was told within the last few weeks that the sheriff can’t continue giving it free policing and is required to be paid a minimum of $2.5 million, with even more money for extra events. Gautreaux said he will be charging St. George even more, depending on the police work St. George requires.

Those in charge in Baton Rouge, Baker, Central, St. George and Zachary should send to the voters the opportunity to rededicate at least one of the sheriff’s ad valorem taxes back to their respective municipalities for their policing salaries. Central and St. George can take their tax revenue and pay back to the sheriff. Baton Rouge, Zachary and Baker can use their tax revenue for salaries for their ofﬁcers. If we do this, it helps reduce the budget problems for all the policing agencies at no additional cost to the taxpayer.

Ask your council members to bring that money back home for use with their city’s agency MARY JANE MARCANTEL Baton Rouge

Voters spoke loud and clear

Well, that was something. On Saturday, Louisiana voters batted aside four attempts to amend the state constitution, rejecting a late push from Gov Jeff Landry, who championed the measures, especially Amendment 2, which would have rewritten signiﬁcant sections dealing with taxes and revenue. The votes weren’t close either: Amendment 4, a fairly low-intensity change that would have tweaked election timing for state Supreme Court justices, came the closest to passing, and it earned a measly 36% of the vote in support. If these had been candidate races, we would be calling them landslides. First, the other numbers. Amendment 1, which would have allowed the Legislature to create more specialty courts, lost 65-35. Amendment 2 lost by the same margin. And Amendment 3, which would have made it easier for the Legislature to add to the list of crimes for which juveniles can be charged as adults, lost 66-34. Already, and even more in the coming days, campaign data wonks will be diving into the various numbers to ﬁgure out what they all mean Those insights will prove key going forward for candidates of both parties. But even now, I think there are some takeaways that are clear.

that Louisiana is a “state conditioned for failure.”

Beyond being insulting, this spin is hard to take seriously In 2023, when Landry won the “mandate” by winning the governor’s race without going to a runoff, about 36% of the state’s voters cast ballots

This election’s turnout was about 21%, so probably some of those who voted for Landry also rejected the amendments.

More than half of the voters in Landry’s home parish of St. Martin voted against Amendment 2, for instance.

Voters in Rapides, Concordia and Red River parishes, which went 68%, 64% and 63%, respectively, for Donald Trump just four and a half months ago, also rejected all four

While a coalition of left-leaning groups did mount a campaign to reject all the amendments, they were joined in opposition, at least to Amendment 2, by some prominent conservative voices.

The Rev Tony Spell, a politically conservative ﬁrebrand and onetime Landry ally, and Woody Jenkins, the chairman of the East Baton Rouge Republican Party, are not Soros plants. Both opposed Amendment 2 because of its complexity and the fact that it would have removed from the constitution tax exemptions on religious organizations, though those protections remain in state statute.

himself on the sharp end of it. Perhaps he thought he wouldn’t be poked by the stick he helped whittle. Presenting a massive, quickly pushed through constitutional change is not a way to build trust with voters.

And this is where we get to Amendment 3. That change would have made it easier for the legislature to add crimes to the list for which children can be tried as adults. It almost certainly would have resulted in more children getting sent to prison. Its presence on the ballot energized advocates for incarcerated people and helped drive turnout among Democrats and Black voters. It seems reasonable that once pulling the lever for No on Amendment 3, most decided to do the same on 1, 2 and 4. It’s a good win for Louisiana’s beleaguered Democrats, but let’s not get hasty Republican leaders may be licking their wounds, but that doesn’t mean they won’t remain in an extremely strong position. Defeating propositions is a lot easier than putting candidates in office. Republicans still hold every single statewide elected office and supermajorities in the Louisiana House and Senate. And that brings me back to Landry In a little more than a year in office, he has been effective in pushing through his agenda. But it is also possible that he got a bit out over his skis on this one.

labeling dilemma

Amid the blizzard of breaking news, a familiar irritation poked through: ethnic labeling. The issue unexpectedly emerged while the Senate considered a stopgap federal funding bill to keep the federal government running and avoid a possible shutdown.

After President Donald Trump said Democrats would be blamed and taxes would surge if Democrats didn’t vote for the bill, he suddenly lashed out at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, in an Oval Ofﬁce meeting.

“Schumer is a Palestinian, as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian,” Trump said. “He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.”

Say what? Where did that come from?

Sure, like anyone else who has been following this president very closely, I was shocked but sadly not surprised.

First, this was a stinging defeat for Landry and his allies in the Legislature, many of whom stumped hard in the closing days after early voting showed more Black voters and Democrats going to the polls (more on that in a minute). Landry’s post-election comments haven’t helped, either.

He said that the defeats weren’t “a failure” but blamed them on ”far-left liberals” spreading “propaganda and outright lies” and invoked the conservative boogeyman, George Soros, as the reason the proposals lost He said

Saturday night, Jenkins offered a stern rebuff to Landry’s election-night comments. They were “an insult to the people of this state” and said the governor’s credibility with voters is “obviously very low.” In other words, perhaps Landry shouldn’t just assume that Louisiana voters are “conditioned to failure,” but rather that they harbor a deep-seated suspicion of their government. The irony, of course, is that Landry has often stoked that sentiment, but now he ﬁnds

The question now is how he will respond. Will he retreat into a conservative bunker and insist that this defeat was the work of malign outside forces and his political enemies? Or will he work to build a plan that isn’t rushed through, isn’t massively complex, gets the deliberative time it deserves and builds trust with voters?

Let’s hope for the latter

Faimon A. Roberts III can be reached at froberts@theadvocate.com.

The liberalism that leaves many Americans out of ‘Abundance’

“Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city,” former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination.”

It’s a curious statement to ﬁnd one-third of the way into a book titled “Abundance.” Not 10% of Americans live or work in the middle of a city within walking distance of a passenger train station, but as co-authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson quickly make clear their focus is on “the land that matters in the hearts of our cities,” by which they mean the giant coastal metropolitan areas where one-quarter of the public live.

They make it clear as well that they’re writing for fellow liberals. They expect 4 to 6 degrees Celsius of global warming, a high-side estimate in my view, and assert conﬁdently that “the stocks of fossil fuels are ﬁnite,” even though fracking has shown that innovation can vastly increase the amounts recoverable. They decry “closing our gates to immigrants,” ignoring the nearly 1 million new U.S citizens every year

Nevertheless, “Abundance” is full of thoughtful analysis and useful perspectives on “the pathologies of the broad left.” They tell their intended audience — Klein writes for The New York Times, Thompson for The Atlantic things already familiar to readers of conservative publications: how former President Joe Biden’s multibilliondollar program produced just seven (or maybe 55) electric vehicle charging stations, how the Biden rural broadband project connected no one, how California’s high-speed rail program — authorized by voters in 2008 after spending unpredicted billions — is still struggling to connect the metropolises of Fresno and Merced. They understand why most voters think red states are governed better than blue states

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

In the process, they tell the story of how the government in the 1970s vastly improved the quality and healthiness of air and water — a story little appreciated today because conservatives don’t like crediting the government, and environmentalists like to raise money by lamenting that things are worse than ever Unhappily, federal and many state laws allowed, even encouraged, lawsuits challenging environmental infringement. Thus began, with leadership from many of my law school contemporaries, the environmentlawsuit-industrial complex.

The corollary to that has been what Klein and Thompson call “everything bagel liberalism.” The 2023 Biden semiconductor bill required an environmental questionnaire to assess environmental review, mandated an “equity strategy” for applicants, and required plans to include women and other disadvantaged people such as minorities, veterans and small businesses in their supply chains something for every Democratic Party constituency If you handed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite New Dealer, Harry Hopkins, that paper, he’d quickly draw a diagonal line crossing out everything but the amount appropriated and then send telegrams to people he knew could deliver and get the job done.

Klein and Thompson don’t advise anybody to do anything like that. In fact, they don’t have any recommendations for leaving any liberal constituency out in the cold. Nor do they make the point that Philip Howard makes in his several books that responsible individuals should make ﬁnal decisions and not leave them to endless committee deliberations and court processes. Instead, they point to what great things they think must be accomplished We need more solar and wind energy and high-transmission lines — they admit red Texas does better than blue California on this — and to double the electric grid because of artiﬁcial intelligence. Those solar and wind devices will require land the size of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee, plus Massachusetts and Rhode

Island. Then, “electrify everything,” replacing 1 billion machines “within the next few years.”

You will have to replace your accustomed gas stove with electric induction and your gas heat with an electric heat pump, both of which, they assure you, will work better One suspects that the several-thousand-dollar outlays will not be voluntary, at least for nonmembers of “everything bagel” constituencies. But just when you start wondering whether such things will ever happen, you read that the nation’s largest wind farm in Wyoming, which “if all goes well from here will be completed in 2026 — eighteen years after it was proposed.”

“The arc of history does not always bend toward our beliefs,” the authors admit in their conclusion. Americans are not lining up to turn in their gas stoves, and it’s apparent California’s electric car mandate won’t be met by 2035, as Democrats torch electric vehicles rather than buy them. American trust in expert scientists was frayed by the lies and misjudgments of Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, and others during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s hard to see America making the transition from spending money to reduce carbon emissions to realizing economic gains from doing so — and even harder to see how Democrats who want to build things cut through the pettifoggery of “everything bagel” constituencies’ vetoes and get to the authors’ promised land of low-carbonemissions abundance.

I guess that Klein and Thompson (brieﬂy a next-door neighbor, and a very nice one, in my Washington apartment building) wrote this book to show their fellow liberals the need to change, to stimulate on national issues the innovative success urban liberals have scored on revising big-city zoning to allow more housing. And without any of the hatred, contempt and snobbish disdain so many liberals show for the views and habits of their fellow citizens who do not share their views. Michael Barone is on X, @MichaelBarone.

Had Trump run out of things to say about the budget and taxes when a thought about the Middle East suddenly came to mind, sending him wandering away from the issues at hand?

Unfortunately this is hardly the ﬁrst instance of Trump questioning a political critic’s ethnic or racial identity As you may recall, his recent comments echoed his whoppers about then-Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2020 and about Barack Obama during his presidency. Trump saw ﬁt to question whether Obama and Harris were even natural-born American citizens.

In August 2024, during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, Trump falsely asserted that Harris had not identiﬁed before as both Black and Indian.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said during the NABJ interview. Suddenly, Trump took a topic that is so vexing for many that they try to avoid it, and turned it into a topic he could try to hide behind.

Trump’s campaign spokesperson eventually acknowledged Harris is a Black woman and cited donations that Trump had made to her earlier campaigns as evidence that he is not racist.

But not everyone is easily convinced. For example, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading Muslim civil rights group, was among the ﬁrst to express outrage that he called Schumer a Palestinian, calling Trump’s poisonous words beneath the dignity of his ofﬁce and, I would add, beneath the credibility of the chief executive in our “land of the free” and “home of the brave.” CAIR called Trump’s use of “Palestinian” to describe Schumer a racial slur That’s what it sounds like to me. Trump’s feigned confusion over Harris’ Black and Indian heritage and his belittling of Schumer as somehow not Jewish adds up to the same ploy: Trump gets to decide whose identity is authentic and whose is fake I’m not the world’s biggest defender of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs, and I believe they have so many well-known shortcomings. But it’s ironic that Trump’s critique comes from an administration that has waged a vigorous crusade against the programs without doing much to help our diverse population learn more about how to get along with each other

Why, I often wonder, do the people who really need some DEI coaching seem to be the last to receive it?

Or when they receive it, there’s no guarantee their teacher or coach knows how to teach it without making their students or trainees feel so defensive they just want to run and hide

Yet in a country as diverse as ours we could all beneﬁt from hearing each other’s stories on both sides of ethnic and racial conﬂicts. Considering how durable the barriers to peaceful reconciliation can be, it is not surprising that racial and ethnic misunderstandings persist, despite the guidance of our better angels.

But we shouldn’t be surprised to see some politicians play our divisions and suspicions against each other The best we can do is avoid those people or programs that aim to play us against each other, tribe against tribe, so we can ﬁnd ways to work together.

That’s what made America really great. Email Clarence Page at clarence47@pagegmail.com.

Faimon Roberts

Clarence Page

Michael Barone

Merry-go-round

BY REED DARCEY Staff writer

SPOKANE,Wash. — In case you needed a vi-

sual representation of how close the LSU women’s basketball team was to reaching the Final Four, coach Kim Mulkey provided one in her Sunday evening news conference.

Mulkey held her hands up near her microphone her right just an inch or two higher than her left

“You’re this close to another Final Four,” she said.

Mulkey has found herself in this posi-

BY MATTHEW PARAS Staff writer

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Sean Payton, in theory, should have every reason to back the Detroit Lions’ rule proposal that would change the NFL playoff format so that teams would be seeded based on record rather than winning their division.

You remember the Beast Quake, don’t you?

The year was 2011, and the 7-9 Seattle Seahawks ended up upsetting the reigning Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints in part because of a thunderous 67yard run from Marshawn Lynch that registered a small tremor because of the noise in the stadium. Perhaps it could have been avoided entirely if the Saints had gotten to host the game instead of Seattle, which won the NFC West despite being below .500. The Lions’ proposed rule change, in this scenario, would have beneﬁted the Saints.

But Payton is a traditionalist, through and through.

“I think winning the division is important to me,” said Payton,

tion before.

Over her 25-year head coaching career, she’s guided 13 teams to the Elite Eight. Five advanced to the Final Four and eight have fallen short, including each of her last two LSU squads.

The one Mulkey built for this season saw its promising season end Sunday against UCLA, a No. 1 seed that caught ﬁre from 3-point range and rode a hot shooting day to a 72-65 win and a trip to the Final Four in Tampa, Florida.

“As competitors,” Mulkey said, “nothing softens the blow Being old like I am, and being around awhile, I’ve learned

now the coach of the Denver Broncos. “I like how our playoff format is laid out, especially compared to any other sport. I think we would vote against (the proposal).”

It’s unclear how many other teams share Payton’s sentiment at the NFL owners’ meetings, but other veteran coaches such as Pete Carroll of the Las Vegas Raiders and Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers also came out Monday against changing the playoff format If the league does take a formal vote on the matter — and there’s no guarantee it will — then the owners are expected to weigh in on Tuesday

The Lions’ proposed change comes after their division rival, the Minnesota Vikings, ﬁnished with the NFC’s second-best record at 14-3 but ultimately lost in the wild-card round to the 10-7 Los Angeles Rams. The Rams, under the league’s format, hosted the game.

The Vikings’ predicament is one that occurs every so often

See NFL, page 3C

to keep perspective. Time will help me think about things through the course of the year that we did that were really amazing.”

LSU rattled off wins in its first 20 games, stringing together the secondbest start in program history, and it collected at least 30 victories for just the eighth time in the NCAA era. For the second year in a row, the Tigers won three tournament games before they fell in the Elite Eight and ﬁnished with a 31-6 record. Only three LSU teams since

BY KOKI RILEY Staff writer

After a rocky trip to Austin, Texas, LSU baseball bounced back at home last weekend by sweeping Mississippi State. The Tigers earned close victories on Thursday and Friday — 8-6 and 2-1, respectively before the bats came alive Saturday night in a 17-8 win. Here are ﬁve takeaways from the series:

Filling Herring’s role

Junior right-hander Zac Cowan and freshman right-hander Casan Evans undoubtedly have been LSU’s top relievers through three weekends of Southeastern Conference play

The two have combined to allow just two earned runs in 202/3 innings against SEC competition. They’ve struck out 32 batters and have surrendered only six walks (ﬁve of those by Evans). Their dominance hasn’t come in short spurts, either Like Griffin Herring a year ago, Evans and Cowan are shutting down opponents over multiple innings. Cowan threw four shutout innings Thursday before Evans matched that line Friday Evans also tossed 32/3 innings March 23 against Texas while Cowan had three shutout frames in the series opener against the Longhorns. Rest of the bullpen

It wasn’t as ugly as March 22 against Texas, but the LSU bullpen — outside of Cowan and Evans had its fair share of struggles against Mississippi State. The group surrendered five earned runs in 52/3 innings while allowing four hits, walking seven batters and hitting three others.

LSU coach Jay Johnson turned to six different pitchers within that group: Junior right-hander Connor Benge (twice), freshman right-hander Mavrick Rizy, junior left-hander Conner Ware, redshirt sophomore left-hander DJ Primeaux, freshman left-hander Cooper Williams and redshirt sophomore righthander Jaden Noot.

The best performance among them came from Noot, who tossed two shutout innings. After starting LSU’s last two midweek games, he has surrendered just two earned runs over his last nine innings. His ERA dropped to 3.07 after Saturday’s quality performance.

“Whatever coach has for me, that’s what I’m going to do,” Noot said around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. “... So I don’t get caught up in roles.”

Noot’s strong form, combined with a healthy Gavin Guidry and Ware, could be enough for Johnson to bridge the gap between the front half of his bullpen and Cowan/Evans.

But LSU needs a healthy Guidry for that to happen. The junior right-hander was once again listed as out on Saturday’s SEC availability report.

“We’ve won a lot of games in three whatever years here, and he’s been a big, big part of a lot of those wins,” Johnson said on March 6 about Guidry “So we need to get him back, which is why we have to do this right.”

Saturday’s lineup tweak

Since its trip to Frisco and Arlington

LSU men’s basketball gets first player out of portal

LSU men’s basketball attracted its ﬁrst player out of the transfer portal for the 2025-26 season with Mississippi State center Michael Nwoko, according to the player’s social-media account.

Nwoko started 32 of 34 games at Mississippi State this season. The 6-foot-10, 245-pound sophomore averaged 6.1 points on 52.5% from the ﬁeld and 4.6 rebounds in 15.4 minutes per game.

Tigers’ play Sunday perturbs Torina

BY JIM KLEINPETER

Contributing writer

LSU softball had another subpar Sunday, but this time it resulted in the team’s ﬁrst two-game losing streak of the season.

The No. 3 Tigers dropped 5-3 and 4-1 contests to South Carolina during a Sunday doubleheader despite winning big on Friday and coming within two outs of winning Sunday’s opener They have a chance to get back on the winning track with a nonconference game at McNeese State at 6 p.m Tuesday before hosting Alabama for a three-game series this weekend.

The previous Sunday, LSU had a chance to take over ﬁrst place in the SEC but were blown out at Georgia, 11-3, after winning the first two games. Last weekend, LSU crushed the Gamecocks on Friday 11-3 in ﬁve innings, but it looked like a different team Sunday LSU had another chance to move up in the standings and rankings but stumbled badly.

LSU BASEBALL

Continued from page 1C

in Texas, LSU had used the same lineup structure in every game leading up to Saturday.

But Johnson mixed things up a tad for the series ﬁnale. He moved sophomore Steven Milam into the cleanup spot and had junior Ethan Frey hit ﬁfth in the order

When Frey has started, he’s almost exclusively batted fourth against a left-handed pitcher But his start Saturday came in a new spot in the lineup and against a right-hander

Senior Josh Pearson and sophomore Jake Brown have been LSU’s regulars against righties. With Brown in right ﬁeld on Saturday, Pearson moved to the bench. Frey played well, going 2-for-5 with two RBIs. Milam also contributed as the No. 4 hitter, cracking a double and driving in two runs.

LSU scored 17 runs on 19 hits Saturday, so perhaps Johnson will stick with the tweak moving forward.

Coach Beth Torina wasn’t in the mood for silver linings after the games.

“No, losing sucks,” Torina said when asked whether the recent adversity would beneﬁt the Tigers later “Today has to be a decision about the team. I told them after the game true character is shown when things get hard.

“Is this a team that wants to step up and do something different next time, be better than how they were today? Or is this the kind of performance we can expect from them. They have to make a decision to show up and be better, get back in the cage and keep pushing.”

The Tigers (31-4, 6-3 SEC) committed a season-high four errors in the first game but still had a chance to salvage it. Pitcher Sydney Berzon had a 2-1 lead and allowed only one hit and an unearned run through the ﬁrst six innings. But the No. 10 Gamecocks

took the lead on back-to-back doubles and a base hit by Ella Chancey

The Tigers rallied to tie in the bottom of the seventh on a sacriﬁce ﬂy by Danieca Coffey, but they couldn’t push across another run to end the game. Then Berzon imploded, allowing two singles and a hit batter for one run and hit another batter with the bases loaded to give South Carolina an insurance run. In the second game, freshman left-hander Jayden Heavener got off to a rocky start by giving up a run without allowing a hit on three walks and a hit batter

She allowed ﬁve hits and struck out 10 but also walked ﬁve as the offense failed to generate consistent threats.

LSU batters walked seven times Friday but only ﬁve combined in two games Sunday

“We did some uncharacteristic things (Sunday) with the errors, we swung out of the zone more than we have,” Torina said. “It will be the coaches’ job to go back to the drawing board and

ON DECK

WHO: LSU (26-3) vs. Louisiana Tech (17-11)

WHEN: 6:30 p.m.Tuesday WHERE: Alex Box Stadium

ONLINE/TV: SEC Network+

RADIO: WDGL-FM, 98.1 (Baton Rouge); WWL-AM, 870 (New Orleans); KLWB-FM, 103.7 (Lafayette)

RANKINGS: LSU is No. 7 by D1Baseball; Louisiana Tech is not ranked

PROBABLE STARTERS: LSU — TBA; Mississippi State — TBA WHAT TO WATCH FOR: Redshirt sophomore right-hander Jaden Noot has started LSU’s last two midweek games, but he threw 27 pitches in relief against Mississippi State early Sunday morning He may be transitioning to a weekend role out of the bullpen. Louisiana Tech won twice in its three game series with Kennesaw State last weekend.

Koki Riley

A step forward?

Friday easily was Anthony Eyanson’s best start in SEC play The junior right-hander didn’t allow an earned run in ﬁve innings. After struggling to get through the Missouri and Texas lineups a second time the previous two weekends, Eyanson allowed just two singles in the fourth inning and had six strikeouts in the fourth and ﬁfth frames against Mississippi State. He had a crisp fastball to start his outing it was up to 96 mph — and then worked in his offspeed pitches more as the night progressed. “Worked on (the fastball) a lot in the fall, winter time,” Eyanson said Friday “It’s been a big em-

Nwoko played against LSU in the regular season and SEC Tournament. In the March 1 matchup, he had six points and six rebounds in 15 minutes. On March 12, he had eight points, five rebounds and five fouls in 14 minutes. The Tigers finished the season 1418 overall and 3-15 in the Southeastern Conference. Five LSU players have entered the portal.

Raiders sign former LSU LB White to 1-year deal

The Las Vegas Raiders added more help at linebacker, signing unrestricted free agent Devin White to a one-year contract Monday White, a former LSU player was a ﬁrst-round pick by Tampa Bay in 2019 and spent last season with Philadelphia and Houston, recording 19 tackles in seven games with the Texans. White had spent the offseason and ﬁrst month of the season with the Eagles before getting cut. White was a second-team All-Pro in his second season in Tampa Bay when he helped the Bucs win the Super Bowl against Kansas City White has played in 83 career games with 585 total tackles, 23 sacks, 40 tackles for loss, 64 quarterback hits, three interceptions, six forced fumbles and nine fumble recoveries.

Browns co-owner admits gaffe of acquiring Watson

Cleveland co-owner Jimmy Haslam admitted that the Browns “took a big swing and miss” with their 2022 trade for quarterback Deshaun Watson.

Haslam made the comments on Monday during a session with Browns reporters at the league meetings in Florida.

understand why that happened, where we failed in the prep of getting them ready to be better than that performance right there. That’s on us to answer those questions and solve that mystery.”

Torina said the high point was the play of Savanna Bedell, who had three hits — including her first career homer in the first game and the only RBI in the second. Bedell entered Sunday with just three career starts and three hits in 11 at-bats. She batted as the designated player a position Torina has shuffled among five players.

“Savanna Bedell was the bright spot for the weekend,” Torina said. “She did a really good job as we continue to search for somebody to fill that role, give us a little more power down there in the lineup.

“She’s kept going, been a part of the program for a year and a half now She’s continued to push and push the people around her to be better and wait for her opportunity.”

phasis for me, making that pitch better.”

Eyanson’s fastball has lost velocity the deeper he’s gone into starts.

But if he can locate his splitter, strong slider and curveball consistently — especially later in outings he’ll have more outings like Friday

Curiel’s streak

Freshman Derek Curiel’s on-base streak is alive, as he’s reached base in all 29 games this season.

He nearly lost the streak Friday, needing an eighth-inning single to keep it going. He quickly dispelled any possibility of losing it Saturday when he went 2-for-4 with a pair of walks. Curiel has a .555 on-base percentage and a .408 batting average this season.

“Very few guys have the talent, the skill and the mental game to be ready to do what he’s doing,” Johnson said on his radio show March 24. “And he’s got all those things.”

Email Koki Riley at Koki.Riley@ theadvocate.com.

“We thought we had the quarterback, we didn’t, and we gave up a lot of draft picks to get him. So we’ve got to dig ourselves out of that hole,” Haslam said.

The 29-year-old Watson has played in only 19 games since the Browns acquired him from the Houston Texans in 2022 and signed him to a fiveyear contract worth a fully guaranteed $230 million. Cleveland sent five draft picks to the Texans, including three first-round selections.

Stanford hires former NFL coach in interim capacity

Andrew Luck picked a familiar face to take over as Stanford’s interim football coach, hiring former NFL coach Frank Reich on Monday to replace the ﬁred Troy Taylor Luck moved quickly in his new role as general manager of the football program, hiring Reich less than a week after making the decision to ﬁre Taylor after a report that became public saying Taylor had been investigated twice for allegedly mistreating staff members. Reich coached Luck for one season with the Indianapolis Colts in 2018. Reich coached six years in the NFL for Indianapolis and Carolina.

Stanford is trying to rebuild its struggling football program after four straight seasons with a 3-9 record, including the last two with Taylor in charge.

Braves outfielder Profar suspended for 80 games

Atlanta Braves outfielder Jurickson Profar has been suspended for 80 games without pay for performance-enhancing drug use.

Major League Baseball announced Monday that Profar tested positive for Chorionic Gonadotrophin (hCG) in violation of the league’s joint drug prevention and treatment program. According to the Cleveland Clinic, hCG is a hormone that helps in the production of testosterone. The suspension of Profar is effective immediately Barring postponed games, Profar would be eligible to return June 29 against Philadelphia and would lose $5,806,440 of his $12 million salary He is also ineligible for the postseason.

Savanna Bedell is greeted by teammates at home

Sunday at Tiger Park.

coach Beth Torina said Bedell

Rookie Brooks capitalizing on shot with Pels

BY ROD WALKER Staff writer

It really hasn’t started to sink in for Keion Brooks.

Eventually, the undrafted rookie forward for the New Orleans Pelicans knows it will “It’ll probably hit me this offseason,” he said. “I just want to continue to stay in the moment Continue to learn and take it from there.”

The sample size may be small, but Brooks seems ready to seize his moment.

He played in just his seventh NBA game Sunday when the Pelicans outlasted the Charlotte Hornets 98-94 in the Smoothie King Center He scored a team-high 17 points, making him the 13th different player to lead the Pelicans in scoring in a game this season

Not bad for a guy who has spent more time in Birmingham, Alabama, with the Pelicans’ G League team than in New Orleans.

“It’s all about opportunity,” Brooks said. “When the opportunity came, I was prepared. I’ve been playing all year Down in the G League, the coaches down there made sure I was prepared for whenever my opportunity came. It’s just working and believing, and I have a lot of faith in God.”

Brooks scored the game-sealing basket Sunday on an assist from Jose Alvarado with six seconds left. The 17 points were a seasonhigh for Brooks, who came off the

Zion Williamson, right, of the New Orleans Pelicans celebrates a basket with teammate CJ McCollum during the first half against the San Antonio Spurs on Feb 2 in San Antonio.

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bench and played 26 minutes. It was his third straight game reaching double ﬁgures after scoring 11 points in Friday’s loss to the Golden State Warriors and 10 points in a win over the Philadelphia 76ers the game before that.

The game against the 76ers was his ﬁrst and only NBA start so far In that one, he found out he was starting shortly before tipoff. The late notice that night, he admits, was a good thing.

“It was definitely better that way,” he said. “I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep the night before.”

But his best game came Sunday as he stuffed the stat sheet. In addition to his 17 points, he also reached career highs in rebounds (eight), blocked shots (three) and steals (two). His two assists tied his season-best. He also made one of his four 3-point attempts. Pelicans assistant coach James

Zion, McCollum shut down for season

BY ROD WALKER Staff writer

Zion Williamson’s season is over So is CJ McCollum’s.

The New Orleans Pelicans announced Monday evening that they are shutting down their top two best remaining players for the remainder of the season. Williamson suffered a lower backbone contusion when he fell during a game against the Minnesota Timberwolves on March 19. McCollum was diagnosed with a right foot contusion after suffering the injury against the Detroit Pistons on March 23. Neither player has played since the injuries. Pelicans coach Willie Green was asked last week whether Williamson could be shut down for the rest of the season

“Not my call,” Green said. “That will be something that he decides or the organization decides collaboratively.”

The Pelicans (21-54) have just seven games remaining, starting with a trip to Los Angeles this week to play the Clippers on Wednesday and the Lakers on Friday Williamson played in just 30 games this season. He averaged 24.6 points per game. He also tied his career-high average in rebounds with 7.2 and set a new career-high in assists (5.3). Williamson’s season included the ﬁrst two triple-doubles of his career in wins over the Phoenix Suns and Clippers.

McCollum played in 56 games while averaging 21.1 points and 4.1 assists His season included a 50-point game against the Washington Wizards and three more games with 40 or more points.

The Pelicans now have five players who are out for the remainder of the season. Herb Jones suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in January Later that month, Dejounte Murray tore

his Achilles against the Boston Celtics. And on March 17, Trey Murphy’s season came to an end with a shoulder injury

The quintet of Williamson, McCollum, Murphy, Jones and Murray will miss a total of 196 games this season.

The Pelicans used their 42nd different starting lineup of the season in Sunday’s win over the Charlotte Hornets. Pelicans assistant coach James Borrego ﬁlled in for Green, who missed the game because of personal reasons.

“I’m not sure I’ve been a part of a season like this before,” Borrego said about the injuries.

“In totality, I have not seen this. You go through stretches in a season where you’re injured. Every team does. But to see it start to ﬁnish, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Email Rod Walker at rwalker@ theadvocate.com.

Payton says Moore a good ﬁt with Saints

BY MATTHEW PARAS

Staff writer

PALM BEACH, Fla. Sean Payton does see similarities between himself and Kellen Moore. When Moore was hired to coach the New Orleans Saints earlier this offseason, it didn’t take long for the comparisons to Payton to begin. Moore even joked that general manager Mickey Loomis “might have a type” when hiring. Both arrived in New Orleans, after all, with similar pedigrees, both lauded as innovative, young play-callers who would be tasked to lead a team for the ﬁrst time.

“We’re all, to some degree, as new coaches considered unknowns,” said Payton, the former Saints coach who is now with the Denver Broncos. But, at the NFL owners’ meetings Monday Payton said he thinks Moore will “do well” with

the Saints. The Broncos coach praised Saints owner Gayle Benson and the team’s front office, telling reporters that he believes they’ll provide the structure for Moore to succeed

Payton also indicated he believes Moore’s personality is a good match for the city

“Generally, you’re going somewhere it’s broken,” Payton said.

“And you’ve got to fix it quick.

And I think Kellen has that calmness about him. I think there’s a uniqueness to that city that maybe is not for everyone, but I think he’ll do well there.

“You can have impossible jobs or good jobs. And I think in this case, he’s got a good job.”

Payton knows what it’s like to fix a franchise quickly His 15year tenure in New Orleans began with a surprising 10-6 season that included an NFC championship game appearance, and the Saints

Borrego ﬁlled in Sunday for Willie Green, who missed the game because of personal reasons. Borrego likes what he saw in Brooks.

“Keion had a heckuva game,”

Borrego said. “His energy His physicality He can make shots. He’s a heady player Physical size to guard as well. We are going to need that moving forward. He’s trending in the right way

“Give him a ton of credit. It looks like he’s playing with a lot more conﬁdence right now as well. I’m really proud of him.”

But Brooks isn’t satisfied. He knows there is a lot more work to do. This time a year ago, he was finishing up his career at the University of Washington where he averaged 21.1 points and 6.8 rebounds on his way to earning first-team All-Pac-12 honors.

“I just want to continue to develop and show everybody that I’m a winning player and I make winning plays,” Brooks said.

“Use my versatility to impact the game in a whole bunch of ways, whether that’s scoring or defensively I just want to keep stacking them.”

His transition from G League to the NBA has been made easier by playing alongside several of his Squadron teammates who also have been promoted to the Pelicans because of all the injuries

“A level of comfortability helps

calm your nerves,” Brooks said “No matter what, this is a huge stage and you’re playing in the best league in the world. Having some familiar faces definitely helps calm you down and put you at ease.”

Brooks and the Pelicans now head on a road trip to Los Angeles to play the Clippers on Wednesday and the Lakers on Friday. He’ll be on the court with some of the biggest names in basketball in Kawhi Leonard and James Harden on Wednesday, and LeBron James and Luka Doncic two nights later

“I’m excited,” Brooks said. “This is what you dream of as a kid, playing against some of the best players in the world.”

This dream is just getting started.

“Honestly, it still hasn’t hit me yet,” Brooks said. “If I play good or bad, I have to practice or have another game the next day So I haven’t had time to sit down and really reminisce about it.”

The best is yet to come. Just ask Alvarado, who made the assist on Brooks’ game-winning play Sunday night.

“He’s showing that he belongs here,” Alvarado said. “It’s not only about scoring, but it’s about his effort in everything he does. Defensively and rebounding. Obviously the offense is going to show I’m happy for him. He’s going to be a good player in the NBA.”

Email Rod Walker at rwalker@ theadvocate.com.

Chio leads LSU gymnasts racking up All-America nods

BY SCOTT RABALAIS Staff writer

All season long it appeared LSU’s Kailin Chio was putting together one of the best freshman seasons in program history Monday’s All-America awards conﬁrmed it. Chio earned first- or secondteam All-America honors in all four individual events and the all-around, the Women’s Collegiate Gymnastics Association (WCGA) announced Monday She is the first LSU freshman ever with such a distinction and just one of four gymnasts in 2025 in the nation to be a ﬁve-time AllAmerican.

Meanwhile, ﬁfth-year LSU senior Haleigh Bryant earned three All-American honors, giving her 30 for her career and extending her program record.

Chio is a first-team All-American in the all-around, on vault and balance beam, and a secondteamer on uneven bars and floor Bryant is first team on vault and floor, and second team on bars.

Fourth-year senior Aleah Finnegan picked up four AllAmerica honors first-team allaround, and second-team vault, beam and floor — to give her 12 for her career Also honored from LSU were sophomore Amari Drayton (second team, floor) and Konnor Mc-

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won the Super Bowl in just his fourth season. In Denver Payton reached the playoffs in his second season at the helm.

Moore started being compared to Payton long before he was hired by the Saints. He received the comparisons as far back as 2019 when Moore was a ﬁrst-year offensive coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys. Payton also worked in Dallas, which was the coach’s last job as an assistant before the Saints hired him in 2006.

“In general, everyone has so much respect for what Sean has done in this league,” Moore said in February “Tons of respect and obviously the standard has been built based off his foundation, and we love that.

“We want to embrace it. I feel fortunate.”

Email Matthew Paras at matt paras@theadvocate.com

in the NFL. Payton recalled the Lions’ proposal being at least the third time in his coaching career that such a discussion is taking place, and he predicted it wouldn’t be the last time, either

“It has been discussed, but it’s been a little while, so it’ll be a fresh discussion,” said Atlanta Falcons CEO Rich McKay, who serves as the chairman of the competition committee. The NFL has made changes to the playoff format over the last few years. In 2020, it expanded the ﬁeld to 14 teams — meaning a third wild-card team in each conference was added to the ﬁeld. As a result, only one team per conference received a bye rather than two. The NFL also tweaked its overtime playoff rules, most recently in 2022.

If the Lions’ proposal gains momentum, the change could end up hurting the Saints in the short term. The NFC South, the Saints’ division, was among the league’s worst and could be again in 2025. Since the Seahawks won their division with an under .500 record,

Clain (second team, bars), giving the Tigers a total of 14 All-America honors. First-team All-America honors go to the top eight ﬁnishers, plus ties, during the regular season in the all-around and all four events, according to each gymnast’s National Qualifying Score (NQS). Second-team honors go to gymnasts in ninth through 16th place.

Po st se as on A ll -A me ri ca awards also will be handed out after the semiﬁnals of the NCAA championships on April 17 in Fort Worth, Texas.

Chio finished the regular season second in the nation on vault, tied for fifth in the all-around, tied for sixth on beam, tied for 11th on floor and 16th on bars. Bryant tied for seventh on vault, tied for eighth on floor and tied for ninth on beam.

Finnegan was eighth in the allaround, tied for ninth on beam, tied for 10th on vault and tied for 14th on ﬂoor

LSU, which goes into NCAAs as the No. 1 overall seed for the ﬁrst time, opens competition at 6 p.m. Friday in the Pennsylvania regional at Penn State. The meet will be streamed live on ESPN+.

For more LSU sports updates, sign up for our newsletter at theadvocate.com/lsunewsletter

there have been only three teams to match that feat.

Two of them — the 2014 Carolina Panthers and 2022 Tampa Bay Buccaneers — won the NFC South.

But the strength of the divisions also can change in a hurry A year after the Washington Commanders won the NFC East in 2020 with a 7-9 record, the Dallas Cowboys (12-5) and Philadelphia Eagles (9-8) made the playoffs. In 2022, three teams from the division clinched a playoff spot.

On last week’s call, McKay said that during one of the last times the league contemplated altering its playoff format, then-Panthers owner Jerry Richardson sold his colleagues on the importance of winning a division.

That’s an argument that still seems to bear weight years later Carroll, who was the Seahawks coach in 2011, said the Seahawks experiencing the “rigors” of making it through their division helped them upset the Saints.

“The reward for coming out of your division should be that you get to play a playoff game at home,” Carroll said “I like that tradition.”

Email Matthew Paras at matt. paras@theadvocate.com

LSU starter Smith enterstransferportal

BY REED DARCEY Staff writer

LSU women’s basketball starter

Sa’Myah Smith played the best basketball of her career in the women’s NCAA Tournament.

Now she’s entering the transfer portal. A source confirmed on Monday that Smith, a redshirt sophomore, is searching for a place where she can play out her last two seasons of eligibility Her decision will force LSU to replace both of its front-court starters. Star senior Aneesah Morrow exhausted her eligibility when the Tigers’ season ended Sunday with an Elite Eight loss to No. 1 seed UCLA, so LSU already knew it would have to replace at least some of Morrow’s production. The need to replace Smith arrives as more of a surprise, especially because she was playing so well in the NCAA Tournament that coach Kim Mulkey couldn’t take her off the floor on Friday in the Tigers’ Sweet 16 win over No. 2-seeded North Carolina State. In that game, the 6-foot-2 forward played 40 minutes for the first time in her career “I played her because she was playing good,” Mulkey said on Saturday “She wasn’t in foul trouble. She’s playing with unbelievable

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1982 have won more contests than Mulkey’s last two did, and they each advanced to the Final Four. This LSU team had a chance to get there, even though a couple of late regular-season losses cost it a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament as both Flau’jae Johnson and Aneesah Morrow battled injuries in the lead-up to the postseason For the second year in a row, LSU just couldn’t climb back over the Elite Eight hump. In 2024, the Tigers let Caitlin Clark get loose and wreck their title defense. In 2025, they got All-American UCLA center Lauren Betts in foul trouble but failed to take advantage. Across a pivotal second quarter, the four-point lead LSU built by the end of the ﬁrst quarter turned into a six-point halftime deficit. The Bruins drained four of the six 3-pointers they attempted in that quarter, then grew their lead to 14 by hitting a couple of more to start the third.

conﬁdence, and we needed her to win the game. So that’s why she played 40 minutes.”

Smith posted impressive numbers throughout the tournament.

She scored 20 points, grabbed 11 rebounds and assisted six shots in LSU’s second-round win over No. 6-seeded Florida State, then notched 21 points, 11 rebounds, two blocks and two steals in the victory over the Wolfpack.

Before those games, Smith had scored at least 20 points and grabbed at least 10 rebounds in only one of her previous 76 career contests.

On Sunday in LSU’s loss to the Bruins, Smith scored only four points, but she did snare 10 rebounds and steal four possessions, mostly while she defended AllAmerica center Lauren Betts in the low post.

Now Mulkey and her staff won’t have a post player of Smith’s experience on next season’s roster unless they make a push to land a forward or two in the transfer portal.

LSU can return Jersey Wolfenbarger and Aalyah Del Rosario, and it will soon enroll the top freshman class in the country But three of those four recruits are guards Forward Grace Knox, ESPN’s No. 6 overall prospect is the only interior player signed as part of that group.

Smith started 30 games across

three years and two seasons at LSU. As a freshman, she played 15 minutes per contest for the 2023 national championship team. Then her sophomore year ended after only seven games when she suffered a season-ending knee injury on a trip to the Cayman Islands.

That injury cut short what could’ve been a breakout season. Smith scored 16 points in LSU’s season-opening loss to Colorado that year then added two 20-point outings before she went down. She also converted 66% of her ﬁeldgoal attempts.

Once the 2024-25 season began, Smith was back on the ﬂoor But she didn’t begin to reclaim her pre-injury form until the Tigers began playing in the NCAA Tournament.

“I’m 100% glad I stuck with it,”

Smith said after the win over NC State, “and battled what I battled, mentally and physically I don’t say it a lot, but I’m kind of proud of myself. It’s starting to pay off, and I’m happy about that.” Smith finished the year with averages of 6.6 points and 6.4 rebounds per game. She converted 57% of her ﬁeld goals. In the tournament, she averaged 13.8 points, 10.3 boards and 2.3 steals while shooting 64% from the ﬂoor

So far, Smith is the only LSU player who’s entered the transfer portal.

Booker helps Texas reach ﬁrst Final Four since ‘03

BY ALANIS THAMES AP sportswriter

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Madison Booker scored 18 points and No. 1 seed Texas used its stiﬂing defense to reach the Final Four of the women’s NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2003, beating well-traveled point guard Hailey Van Lith and second-seeded TCU 58-47 on Monday night.

The Longhorns (35-3) will face defending champion South Carolina on Friday night in Tampa, Florida, for a spot in the national title game.

Texas won a regional ﬁnal for the ﬁrst time in four tries under coach Vic Schaefer, who previously made two Final Four trips with Mississippi State.

The Longhorns’ 35 wins are one more than its only national title-winning squad had in 1986 under Jody Conradt, who was in the stands Monday night and led Texas to its three previous Final Fours.

Van Lith scored 17 points in her collegiate finale for TCU (34-4), but Texas neutralized the Horned Frogs’ star center, Sedona Prince, who had four points and nine rebounds before fouling out with 6:32 left in the game.

TCU had never made it past the second round of March Madness, but Van Lith helped the Horned Frogs make program history while taking her third school to the Elite Eight. Booker, Texas’ offensive dynamo, scored 14 points in the second half. Rori Harmon added 13 points, 11 in the ﬁrst half.

Nothing came easy for the Horned Frogs’ high-scoring trio of Van Lith, Prince and Madison Conner Van Lith shot 3 of 15 from the ﬁeld but made 10 of 11 free throws. The 6-foot-7 Prince attempted only four shots, and Conner scored nine points.

The Longhorns forced 21 turnovers and had nine steals and six

AP PHOTO By GERALD HERBERT Texas forward Madison Booker shoots against TCU guard Donovyn Hunter during the first half of an Elite Eight game Monday in Birmingham, Ala.

blocks, but they didn’t pull away until center Kyla Oldacre intercepted Van Lith’s pass and went coast-to-coast early in the fourth quarter

The 6-foot-6 Oldacre was fouled by Prince and made the free throw, energizing the Longhorns and the announced crowd of 12,175 that made the trip to Alabama. The three-point play put Texas ahead by double digits for the ﬁrst time.

After falling behind by 14, TCU pulled within six with 2:42 remaining on four straight points from forward Deasia Merrill. Consecutive jumpers from Booker and Harmon put the Longhorns back up by 10, and the Horned Frogs never got any closer Harmon had two steals in the ﬁrst seven minutes as the Longhorns held the Horned Frogs to just nine points in the opening quarter The Longhorns went up by nine before TCU closed the second quarter on a 7-0 run that made it 23-21 at the half. Oldacre scored nine points, all in the second half, to help Texas outscore TCU 35-26 after the break.

LSU lands touted PG from UNLV out of portal

BY TOYLOY BROWN III Staff writer

LSU coach Matt McMahon has a lot of needs while forming the LSU men’s basketball team for the 2025-26 season, but none bigger than point guard. McMahon not only found his new lead guard but earned a commitment from one of the best players in the transfer portal on Monday in UNLV sophomore Dedan Thomas, according to multiple sources. Thomas averaged 15.6 points, 4.7 assists and 1.7 turnovers per game during his sophomore season at UNLV. He shot 41.3% from the ﬁeld and 35.3% from the 3-point line.

The 6-foot-1, 185-pound guard joins sophomore center Michael Nwoko as part of the new additions for the Tigers. Thomas is ranked fourth on the 247Sports

transfer portal rankings and is the No. 19 player on The Athletic’s rankings.

Thomas, who is a two-time All-Mountain West Conference player, is the most highly touted player McMahon has acquired in the transfer portal The best player he acquired last season was Cam Carter who in his last year at Kansas State averaged 14.6 points per game on 39.1% ﬁeld-goal shooting. Point guard play was an area of concern this season LSU had poor shooting and playmaking from fifth-year senior Jordan Sears and freshman Curtis Givens. The three players that are conﬁrmed to be on LSU next season are Thomas, Nwoko and junior Jalen Reed, who missed most of the season after tearing his ACL on Dec. 3 Reed said he will be back next season with the Tigers.

man — Grace Knox, ZaKiyah Johnson Divine Bourrage and Bella Hines — comprise the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class. Contributors such as Gilbert, Poa and Jersey Wolfenbarger can return, but both Day-Wilson and Morrow exhausted their eligibility And on Monday, redshirt sophomore post player Sa’Myah Smith entered the transfer portal. Williams will be back for her junior year But Johnson must decide between a move to the WNBA or one more season in purple and gold. Then there’s the transfer portal, which likely will spin a player or two down to Baton Rouge How many will LSU lose? How many will it add?

Mulkey started asking herself those questions before she even left Spokane Arena on Sunday, not long after she demonstrated just how agonizingly close her Tigers had come to returning to the Final Four

Johnson almost willed a miraculous comeback, but her 24 secondhalf points weren’t enough to nullify LSU’s 15 turnovers or UCLA’s 10 3-pointers. Johnson ﬁnished with 28 points, and Morrow had 15. Mikaylah Williams shot 4 of 13 from the

“I would have to go back and look at the shots,” Mulkey said.

and 0 of 3 from beyond the arc to finish with 10 points. No other LSU player scored more than four points.

“We missed just wide-open shots. We knew going in the paint that there would be opportunity for (Betts) to alter shots and block shots, but some of the shots we

just missed.” Last offseason, LSU retooled its roster in hopes of earning a return trip to the Final Four. Hailey Van Lith and two freshman guards hit the portal, leaving the Tigers with clear needs for a lead ballhandler and backcourt depth The three transfer guards they signed — Shayeann Day-Wilson, Kailyn Gilbert and Mjracle Sheppard — assumed those responsibilities. Day-Wilson traded lead point guard duties with Last-Tear Poa. She started 21 games and posted a career-high assist-to-turnover ratio but averaged only 3.5 points per contest while shooting just 28% from the ﬁeld and 20% from 3-point range all career lows. Gilbert hit two game-winning shots When LSU opened Southeastern Conference play, she scored at least 15 points in three straight contests, giving the Tigers valuable bench scoring it didn’t have the year prior Then Gilbert cooled off. The junior notched at least 15 points just two more times across LSU’s last 19 matchups. In four NCAA Tournament games, she scored only 16 total points on 5-of-27 shooting (19%). Against UCLA, she missed all seven shots she took. Next season, both LSU’s nucleus of stars and its supporting cast will look different. The Tigers’ four incoming fresh-

“It’s time to get in the portal,” Mulkey said. “This one leaves, this one goes, this one comes. So next year we’ll start this thing up again and see what kind of team you have and go to work.” Email

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STAFF PHOTO By MICHAEL JOHNSON

LSU forward Sa’Myah Smith holds the LSU name tag to be placed in the Sweet 16 slot on the bracket after a win over Florida State in the women’s NCAA Tournament on March 24 at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center Smith entered the transfer portal on Monday.

Forman of Southern Lab named top Class 1A player

BY RODRICK ANDERSON

Written for the LSWA

Hamilton Christian’s Javon Vital displayed skills beyond his years while leading the Warriors to their ﬁrst LHSAA championship Southern Lab’s Shaila Forman battled back from an injury to close her high school career with another LHSAA title.

Though their individual stories are different, the players now share a common bond They were selected as the Outstanding Player award winners on the Louisiana Sports Writers Association Class 1A all-state teams.

Forman missed her junior season with an ACL injury but pushed through recovery in time for her senior season. She led the Kittens to their third state championship in four seasons.

The Lamar University signee averaged 22 points, ﬁve rebounds and two assists for Southern Lab. The Division IV select title-game MVP scored 24 points in the ﬁnal as Southern Lab beat Cedar Creek 67-57.

Only a sophomore, Vital was the linchpin to the Warriors’ ﬁrst state title in program history In the other Division IV select ﬁnal, Vital earned title-game MVP honors with 20 points, nine rebounds, seven assists and three steals In

the Warriors’ semiﬁnal win over Crescent City, the 5-foot-9 multisport athlete posted a triple-double with 16 points, 10 assists and 11 rebounds.

Vital was hard to stop. Even when teams would converge on him in the lane, he had the vision to find his teammates. He averaged 15 5 points, nine rebounds, seven assists and four steals with six triple-doubles.

Hamilton Christian’s Dexter

Washington and Lakeview’s Dewaskie Fuller are the 1A boys and girls Coach of the Year, respectively

After several great seasons over the last six years, including a five-point loss to Oakdale in the finals in 2023, Fuller led the Gators to their first state championship. The Gators (30-4) finished the season on a 22-game win streak and beat Arcadia 38-34 to win the Non-select Division IV title.

Washington also led the Warriors to their ﬁrst state championship on their seventh trip to Marsh Madness since 2017. Five years after Hurricane Laura heavily damaged their school and lost several potential starters leading up to this season, the Warriors went 20-7 and beat postseason rival Southern Lab 61-58 in the Select Division IV state championship game.

Young St. Amant softball team not easy pickings

BY ROBIN FAMBROUGH Staff writer

This was supposed to be the “we gotcha” year for opponents facing the St. Amant softball program.

Former Gators stars Addison Jackson (Boston College) and Alix Franklin (LSU) have been among Louisiana’s top players. With seven new starters, there were legitimate questions about whether St Amant can win a fourth title in a row in the top nonselect class.

“When you get a group of young ones like this you see how fun they can be,” St. Amant coach Amy Pitre said. “We also have a senior and a couple of juniors who have waited for their turn

“There is definitely the unknown here. When you put a group like this out there that does not have as much varsity experience, you never know how they’ll perform. The season started with a tough loss. Since then, we’ve adjusted and they’ve grown.”

The Gators (17-6) have put themselves in postseason conversations again. And the challenges continue. St. Amant travels to Walker (15-5) for a key District 5-5A contest set for 5 p.m. Tuesday St. Amant is third in the latest Division I nonselect power ratings, just ahead of No. 4 Walker When Pitre says the Gators got off to a rough start, it’s no exaggeration. They lost their season opener to Hahnville 12-3, and they were 1-2 after three games.

St. Amant starting pitcher Braylee Decoteau pitches during the LHSAA Division I nonselect state softball championship game at Frash Park in Sulphur on April 27.

A 12-1 loss to Sam Houston (202) last week halted a five-game winning streak. Sam Houston is

No. 1 in the Division I nonselect power ratings. Also of note, the Gators beat

Quitman’s Cali Deal — a lefthander who has committed to LSU — four games earlier That score was 2-1.

“One of the biggest things is keeping them mentally focused and treating every game the same,” Pitre said. “They’re learning to handle those things as we go through them.

“When you see this St. Amant team walk on the ﬁeld, you know it’s the smallest team physically that we’ve had in 10 years. We do have to manufacture runs. And we have used three pitchers.”

Bailey Ducote leads the Gators with a .505 batting average and 42 runs scored from the top of the order. Ducote is a junior who moved from the outﬁeld to shortstop.

Franklin’s replacement at third base, Olivia Johnson, has nine home runs and 41 RBIs. Catcher

Brooke Rabalais has a .405 batting average with eight triples and 41 RBIs.

Braylee Decoteau, the winning pitcher in the 2024 title game, is 10-1 in the circle, and she has a complementary staff. Haley Hebert (5-1) and Brently Bourque (11) also get their turns in the circle.

“Everybody goes to work every day,” Pitre said. “All the teams. And that’s what we’ve done.

“There is no guarantee who will make it to that last weekend (LHSAA tourney at Sulphur). You have to take it one game at a time.”

Email Robin Fambrough at rfambrough@theadvocate.com

Torpedo bat designer makes new models about the players

By The Associated Press

MIAMI For the MIT-educated physicist behind the torpedo bat, it’s more about the talent of the players than their lumber at the plate.

The torpedo model a striking design in which wood is moved lower down the barrel after the label and shapes the end a little like a bowling pin — became the talk of major league baseball over the weekend.

The New York Yankees hit a team-record nine homers that traveled a combined 3,695 feet on Saturday Paul Goldschmidt, Cody Bellinger, Austin Wells, Anthony Volpe and Jazz Chisholm Jr all went deep using a torpedo bat. New York’s 15 homers through the ﬁrst three games matched the 2006 Detroit Tigers for the most in major league history

“At the end of the day it’s about the batter not the bat,” said Aaron Leanhardt, a former physics professor at the University of Michigan who is being credited with the design. “It’s about the hitter and their hitting coaches. I’m happy to always help those guys get a little bit better but ultimately it’s up to them to put good swings and grind it out every day So, credit to those guys.”

Leanhardt, 48, a ﬁeld coordinator for the Miami Marlins, said the origin of the bat dates to 2023, when he worked for the Yankees. He said several versions were tested that didn’t create the desired effect.

Leanhardt was approached by major league and minor league players early in the design stage, seeking information on the bats.

“I’ll let the players always talk about their own experiences I’m not going to drag anyone into this,” Leanhardt said Monday “But there were deﬁnitely guys on the major league side and on the minor league side in 2023 that were deﬁnitely asking me questions and offering design advice and demoing them.”

Leanhardt said the past couple of days had been “surreal.” Some of Miami’s players joked around with him as he answered questions from the media before their game against the New York Mets.

STAFF PHOTO By

MICHAEL JOHNSON

Southern Lab wing Shaila Forman, right, soars to the hoop past Cedar Creek guard Mary Hawkins in the fourth

quarter of the LHSAA Division IV select championship game on March 8 in Hammond.

Spring into action

Pull up winter weeds now to prevent problems down the road

Louisiana gardeners just never seem to catch a break from weeds. While one season’s weeds are maturing and preparing to drop seeds, the next season’s weeds have already started germinating. And that’s where we ﬁnd ourselves now In March, many of our warm-season weeds are beginning to crop up, and cool-season weeds are ﬂowering and setting seeds.

If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty there’s something you can do to prevent having as many weeds next winter: Simply pull them up

Remove all the top growth that has seeds on it now before warmer temperatures hasten seed maturity and the dying of top growth. If the seeds drop into your landscape beds or lawns, they will lie dormant over the summer and start germinating again as early as September.

Hand pulling this late in the season is the most effective method, as seeds can still drop from plants killed with postemergent herbicide. If the weeds haven’t set seed yet, then it’s safe to spray and forget.

BY HANNAH LEVITAN | Staff writer

In a turn of events, the eastern monarch butterﬂy population — which was put on the list of endangered species just a few years ago — nearly doubled this year, according to a March report from the World Wildlife Fund, an international conservation organization. With summer approaching, it’s almost time for Louisianans to start planning for the famous insect’s arrival in their yards.

By late June and early July, people can expect to begin seeing the butterﬂies in Louisiana as they migrate north.

Eastern monarchs are known to leave their roosts in the second week of March, searching for milkweed plants to lay their eggs.

Just a few years ago, the eastern monarch was considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature after populations decreased over 80% in the last 30 years. The species may be beginning to rebound, though, and last year, the butterﬂy occupied almost twice as much forest habitat

tiny sample of all the winter weeds we have in Louisiana.

CLEAVER: Cleaver is sometimes referred to as bedstraw, and its appearance is somewhat like green straw climbing and covering your desirable plants. The bright green weed grows quickly once February gets here. It is very fuzzy and clingy, almost like hook-andloop fasteners. It produces tiny white ﬂowers that mature into fuzzy seed capsules that attach to seemingly everything

LSU AG CENTER PHOTO

The many problems with ‘No gifts, please’

Dear Miss Manners: I attended a bridal shower where the brideto-be asked for “no gifts, please.”

Half the attendees showed up with gifts anyway and the ones who honored her request and didn’t bring a gift were left to feel cheap It was awkward for everyone, including the bride-to-be, who wasn’t sure if she should open the gifts or not What should she have done?

Judith Martin MISS MANNERS

Gentle reader: This is why Miss Manners keeps rejecting this frank and seemingly simple way of avoiding receiving presents: It doesn’t work.

Some people simply ignore it. Others interpret it as a coy prompt to be sure to give presents, or as a request for cash in-

stead of goods. It creates a burden on the gift recipient, who must then protect the guests who respected her wish from feeling that they were in error The bride should absolutely not have opened the presents in front of them. She should have brieﬂy thanked the donors, put the unopened packages aside, and written her thanks after opening them privately But doesn’t anyone realize that, by deﬁnition, showers feature presents? So do birthday parties. Surely this accounts for the problem guests have with these gift bans. Can’t friends gather without applying those labels?

Try money-saving hint

Dear Heloise: As a money-saver for me, I use a vacuum sealer everyday to close packages of chips and brown sugar, as well as ingredients for recipes that go in the freezer so that I can close the openings and preserve their freshness For example, as a senior citizen, I can buy larger packages of chips at a better price and maintain its freshness by closing the packages as I remove the items.

room should have a light that ﬂashes during an emergency

Hints from Heloise

I also use a pair of scissors to cut open the tops to prevent the bags from being destroyed — Hallie, in Virginia

Adding to hints

Dear Heloise: A recent column of yours was very informative. Here’s how I can add to the suggestions:

n I’m going to try the method of checking car lights that Steve suggested. We try to make it a point to check them on the ﬁrst of every month.

n The lady whose hearing aids ran out of power during the ﬁre, submitted in the letter by Paul, is of great concern. I’m going to write my congressman and urge him to make it a law that each

MARKET

Continued from page 1D

been in the coffee business for over 20 years. In preparation for the opening, he said he talked to neighbors and residents about what they hoped to see in the space and worked to give it to them.

According to Isadore, people said they wanted a place where they can purchase light groceries, breakfast sandwiches and coffee

n There was an interesting comment about spinach, and your response included other vegetables with oxalates that are not often mentioned at the doctor’s ofﬁce The letter was submitted by Joan.

n I’m glad to read that ants don’t like vinegar (thanks to A.B.) and to get conﬁrmation on orange yolks, too.

n I do believe you could list all the different and creative cheese-wrapping suggestions in your column for a week. I’ve tried many of them. Marcy, in Menifee, California

Reading house numbers

Dear Heloise: In addition to packages getting delivered at the right house, how about when there’s an emergency at your home? It’s vital to have your house numbers clearly visible — even at night — for the police, ﬁre department, and emergency medical services. It could mean life or death besides your packages going somewhere else. — Mike,in Mandeville

Send a hint to heloise@heloise. com.

Spanish Town Market and Cofe is also going to carry specialty meats, fresh bread, and eventually sell pizza Isadore has also hired a chef who will serve lunch daily, and to-go meals will be available. Isadore is hoping to expand after he gets the store off the ground and running. In a few months, he’s considering adding beer and cigarettes to the market’s offerings, and he plans to expand the hours to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Email Serena Puang at serena. puang@theadvocate.com.

Cleaver is a common sight in gardens this time of year. This weed is fuzzy and clingy.

WEEDS

Continued from page 1D

lavender-to-purple ﬂowers that mature into recognizable peapod shapes.

WILD GERANIUM: Just as common in lawns as turfgrass, wild geraniums produce deeply lobed leaves and grow in a rounded or mounding shape. They’re also sometimes called Carolina geraniums They have small pink ﬂowers that produce seed capsules that end in a distinct point that resembles a crane or stork’s bill.

CHICKWEED: Small leaves and small white ﬂowers are found on this weed that grows like a low mat. It’s notorious for popping at the soil surface when pulled. Make sure you get under all the stems and get a good grip on the

Dear Miss Manners: I’m a cashier in a grocery store, and we’re required to wear a name tag with our ﬁrst name printed boldly

It feels creepy when customers, often the male ones, address me by saying my name in a domineering way I’ve tried taking a deep breath to resist the urge to say something insulting, but I really wish I knew how to respond.

I resent being spoken to by a stranger this way, especially when I’m trying to be of service. Any suggestions for me?

Gentle reader: Address your supervisor That is, mention the problem while offering a solution: workplace pseudonyms.

Miss Manners can imagine your having fun with this. “Cashie the Cashier,” perhaps?

After all, the real purpose of name tags in commercial situations (as opposed to your school reunion, when faced with your inexplicably aged classmates) is for the rare case when the customer needs to identify you: “In the aisle, Ryan told me this was on sale, but now Lila tells me you have to buy three cases to get the discount.”

Dear Miss Manners: When I am invited to stay in someone’s home, and that home isn’t very clean, may I leave it cleaner than I found it?

I assume that my hosts are already overwhelmed and I wouldn’t want to add to their stress by impugning their housekeeping. It would be a nonissue for me to clean a bathroom (sweep the dust and hair from the

ﬂoor, wipe down the countertop and mirror, etc.) or to remove the exploded spaghetti from the inside of the microwave before I warm up my coffee. Would that count as being a good guest, or as being judgmental?

Gentle reader: Your choice. A good guest would do this so quietly that the hosts might even think that they had left things cleaner than they supposed. A bad one would make sure that they knew

Send questions to Miss Manners at her website, www missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.

BUTTERFLIES

Continued from page 1D

According to Zack Lemann, Curator of Animal Collections at Audubon Insectarium, environmental conditions were better this year compared to last, when much of the U.S. battled with drought.

“There was more food for the larvae and fewer trees were lost,” Lemann said. Still, the monarchs’ long-term health is not where it needs to be, WWF says. Due to the increased use of herbicides in the U.S., milkweed, a plant vital for monarch reproduction, has declined, ultimately harming the butterﬂy population.

How to help

The WWF recommends people incorporate milkweed in their yards and gardens to attract the iconic, orange butterﬂies.

Before buying milkweed, nature lovers should know what variety is native to their area, since different regions have various species. The Southeast region has ﬁve main spe-

Milkweed usually comes with instructions and tips, like to avoid windy areas and opt for spots with direct sunlight. But the best tip, according to Lemann, is to avoid planting tropical milkweed altogether

“Tropical milkweed will not drop down in the winter like other species, creating a situation where monarchs lay eggs while heading south for the winter,” Lemann said. “You can create a local population problem by having tropical milkweed.”

cies, including the butterfly and whorled milkweed.

In Louisiana, the most commonly available species are aquatic milkweed (Asclepias perennis), butterflyweed (A. tuberosa), common milkweed (A. syriaca), fewﬂower milkweed (A. lanceolate), swamp milkweed (A. incarnata) and whorled milkweed (A. verticillata).

Most plant nurseries carry milkweed and can advise butterﬂy enthusiasts on the right species to buy for their yard. The Monarch Watch Milkweed Market also offers online milkweed orders and can ship different species to your door

If you do have tropical milkweed, make sure to cut it down on Nov 1 and don’t let it grow until March 1, he said.

Butterfly migration

Eastern monarch butterﬂies migrate north from Mexico in the spring, and back south once fall hits They begin to breed in the spring and those that migrate south will live longer than the others, which typically live for two to six weeks. Migrating monarchs can live up to nine months. The monarch butterflies will stick around in the south through September

center point of the plant. This plant loves to grow in between desirable winter annual flowers, making it a tedious weeding task. It produces many seeds. THISTLES: Winter in Louisiana allows us to observe numerous species of plants commonly called thistles. These weeds appear as a uniform rosette of ground-level leaves for much of the winter and will send up a tall bloom spike as the season wears on. After the flowers have faded, the seeds mature and are carried far and wide by the wind, so it’s important to pull your thistles before you notice the white cottony tips of mature seeds emerging where the flowers were. Be careful not to shake the plant because it might release some of the seeds. Wear gloves and be careful most thistle species have thorns on the leaves!

By The Associated Press

Today is Tuesday, April 1, the 91st day of 2025. There are 274 days left in the year This is April Fool’s Day

Today in history: On April 1, 1945, American forces launched the amphibious invasion of Okinawa during World War II. (U.S. forces succeeded in capturing the Japanese island on June 22 after a battle in which more than 240,000 died, including as many as 150,000 Okinawan civilians.)

Also on this date: In 1924, Adolf Hitler was sentenced to ﬁve years in prison for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. (Hitler would serve just

TODAY IN HISTORY

nine months of the sentence, during which time he completed the ﬁrst volume of “Mein Kampf.”)

In 1946, a magnitude 8.6 earthquake centered near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands triggered a tsunami that pounded the Hawaiian Islands with waves up to 55 feet tall, killing 159. In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon signed a measure banning cigarette advertising on radio and television beginning in January 1971. In 1976, Apple Computer was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. In 1984, singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father after Gaye intervened in an argument between his parents at their home.

In 2001, the Netherlands became the ﬁrst country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. In 2003, American troops raided a hospital in Nasiriyah, Iraq, and rescued Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who had been held prisoner since her unit was ambushed on March 23. Today’s birthdays: Actor Ali MacGraw is 86. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is 75. Actor Annette O’Toole is 73. Filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld is 72. Singer Susan Boyle is 64. Hockey Hall of Famer Scott Stevens is 61.

A monarch butterfly feeds on a bloom at the Independence Park Botanical Gardens in Baton Rouge.

ARIEs (March 21-April 19) Speak up, ask questions and leave no room for error or misunderstandings. Clarity is essential if you want to maintain your integrity and reputation. Invest in yourself and your future.

tAURUs (April 20-May 20) Finish what you start. Refuse to let second-guessing confuse or disorient you regarding what you should or shouldn't do. Keep your motives to yourself, and concentrate on your target.

GEMInI (May 21-June 20) When doubt kicks in, take a pass. Do whatever it takes to avoid compromising your position, reputation, or emotional or financial security. Refuse to let anyone take advantage of you.

cAncER (June 21-July 22) Put your time and energy into your work. Doing the best job possible will lead to rewards. Redesign your skills and how you market yourself to suit today's economy and needs.

LEo (July 23-Aug. 22) Keep adding to your qualifications and maintain technological savvy to ensure your job safety and prospects. An innovative approach to life and learning will pay off

VIRGo (Aug. 23-sept. 22) Market yourself for success, whether it's personal, creative or financial gains you want to achieve. Advocate for yourself, and you'll encourage others to support your efforts.

LIBRA (sept. 23-oct. 23) A break will give you the boost you need to bring about

positive change. Setting up a space to do something you enjoy will give you the motivation and opportunity to excel.

scoRPIo (oct. 24-nov. 22) Call the shots instead of letting someone else dictate what you can and cannot do Change begins with you; if you want something, go after it wholeheartedly.

sAGIttARIUs (nov. 23-Dec. 21) Only open doors that have meaning to you. Your time is precious, so let those who try to take advantage of you know it isn't going to happen. Turn the tables by doing what's best for you.

cAPRIcoRn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) Honesty is the best policy, especially when it comes to being truthful with yourself. Put greater emphasis on relationships, equality and the time you want to spend with others.

AQUARIUs (Jan 20-Feb. 19) Channel your energy into learning something new through communication, conferences and research. It will change your plans and perspective regarding how you use your time, energy and skills.

PIscEs (Feb. 20-March 20) Don't sell yourself short; strive for a better lifestyle and personal satisfaction. Don't sit back when you should be moving forward. Take what's yours and follow your heart.

FAMILY CIrCUS

Celebrity Cipher cryptograms are created from quotations by famous people, past and present. Each letter in the cipher stands for another.

toDAy's cLUE: P EQUALs D

CeLebrItY CIpher

For better or For WorSe

SALLY Forth

beetLe bAILeY

Mother GooSe And GrIMM

LAGoon

bIG nAte

Sudoku

InstructIons: Sudoku is a number-placing puzzle based on a 9x9 grid with several given numbers. The object is to place the numbers 1 to 9 in the empty squares so that each row, each column and each 3x3 box contains the same number only once. The difficulty level of the Sudoku increases from Monday to Sunday.

Yesterday’s Puzzle Answer

nea CroSSwordS La TimeS CroSSword

THe wiZard oF id

BLondie

BaBY BLueS

Hi and LoiS CurTiS

By PHILLIP ALDER

The best improvement in bridge in the last 20 years is the employment of “useless” cards to send suit-preference signals. Without this style of defense, West would have to guess what to do in this deal. With suit preference, it is easy. How should the play and defense go in four spades after West leads the diamond king?

South has four losers: three hearts and one diamond. (West cannot have the ace and king of hearts, because his opening lead would have been the heart ace,notthediamondking.)ButSouthhas 10 potential tricks: five spades, two diamonds and three clubs. His best play is to take the first trick and immediately to leadbackhisdiamondjack.Todefeatthe contract, West must win with his queen and shift to a heart. But how will he know that is right instead of a club switch?

At trick one, East plays his diamond two, discouraging. But on the second round, he can play the seven or four. Wantingaheartshift,hedropstheseven, the higher card asking for the higherranking of the other two side suits. Now West knows exactly what to do.

If you have only low trumps, you can also use those to send suit-preference

signals.Inthisdeal,ifSouthimmediately draws trumps, East can play eight-sixthree-two, always the highest calling for a heart. The snag with these signals is that you andyourpartnerhavetowatchthecards very carefully. But if you do, you will defeat more contracts. © 2025 by NEA, Inc., dist. By Andrews McMeel Syndication

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