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A group of civil rights attorneys is accusing University Medical Center New Orleans (UMC) of violating the city's “ban the box” law when it fired employee Devon Jones in April, allegedly due to his criminal background.

The ban the box law prohibits public employers from discriminating against job applicants and current employees because of past arrests or convictions. While the law allows those employers to conduct criminal background checks, they have to show that a past conviction would directly interfere with an applicant or employee’s job duties.

In an Aug. 12 letter addressed to the city’s Chief Administrative Officer Joe Giarrusso and circulated to New Orleans City Council members, attorneys representing Jones allege that he was fired from his position as a violence interrupter based solely on his conviction for a 2009 armed robbery.

Jones’ “conviction bears no relationship to his job duties — his lived experience was, by the program’s own account, a basis for his hiring — and he has an extensive, documented record of rehabilitation,” the letter reads.

Dr. Evelyn Griffin had led a life out of the spotlight until she testified at the Louisiana statehouse five years ago and experienced what she called her “great awakening.”

The state health department wanted to add Covid vaccines to the school immunization schedule, a move no state has ever implemented. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then known as a leading vaccine skeptic, had already claimed the Covid shot was “the deadliest vaccine ever made” during a poster board presentation at the legislative hearing.

Dr. Griffin, a longtime obstetrician, relied on nearly identical images during her own blistering testimony against the proposal. After the hearing, she expected splashy headlines about Mr. Kennedy’s assertions, shifting the public debate over Covid policies and vaccines. But that did not happen; one news outlet dismissed him as a promulgator of propaganda. Dr. Griffin was shocked.

That is “when I saw how the world worked,” she recalled in a podcast interview. Dr. Griffin said she and her husband, a vascular surgeon, decided to take action and “shine light on things.”

Now, Mr. Kennedy is the nation’s health secretary, and Dr. Griffin holds prominent roles that position her to help carry out his vision.

Last September, Mr. Kennedy appointed her to the advisory panel for federal immunization policy, where she voted to recommend limiting access to Covid vaccines and ending universal newborn immunizations for hepatitis B, steps that a federal judge has blocked. In December, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a conservative Republican and ally of President Trump, named Dr. Griffin as the state’s surgeon general.

That makes her the top public health physician in Louisiana, which has the worst health outcomes in the nation.

She is an unconventional choice. Dr. Griffin has no background or specialty training in infectious disease or public health. She is aligned with alternative health movements — including Make American Healthy Again, or MAHA — and has hosted some speakers promoting fringe medical views.

Dr. Griffin declined interview requests for this article. “My vision as Louisiana’s surgeon general is to help shift our health care system toward preventing disease, not just managing or treating it,” she said in a statement.

It's back-to-school season for New Orleans students, and the kids are kicking off the school year in style 😎

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In 2024, more than a third of the state’s early childhood education centers didn’t serve children under four years old, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Education. The younger a child, the fewer the options parents have for placing their child in a program. 

While Louisiana’s early education system manages to serve 92% of the four year olds in need, only 18% of children age three or younger have access, according to the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children, a nonpartisan, independent source of data and research for policymakers. 

During a news conference on Thursday (Aug. 6), child advocates, early child care providers and elected officials called for more public investment in the state’s early childhood care to increase access for infants and toddlers in need. 

Early last year, the Trump administration ended two Biden-era programs that gave state and tribal governments federal funding to purchase food for food banks and schools from local farmers.

Farmers who had been relying on the sales panicked.

Margee Green, the Executive Director of the Louisiana Food Policy Council, responded with a plan. For a relatively low price, the state could provide grants for farm equipment and infrastructure, such as coolers, soil inputs and packing machines, that would help farmers scale up their operations and serve larger clients like restaurants and food banks, with or without federal subsidies.

State lawmakers responded, appropriating $3 million to the Food Policy Council for “direct farm purchasing.”

But in the year since, the state has made a number of adjustments to the program, reducing the allocation to the Food Policy Council by two-thirds, with $2 million going to other organizations. Thus far, the Food Policy Council has only been able to access $50,000 from the state.

Green is frustrated with the lack of transparency around the implementation of this program, called Farmers First, and worries that it has negatively impacted critical partnerships and in the process, harmed local food systems.

Following a meeting between public officials and law enforcement, New Orleans Police and the Louisiana National Guard have been sweeping busy corners near the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library.

A mix of people — commuters, unhoused people and library patrons — cycle through the area, especially directly in front of the library, which also operates as a cooling center during the scorching summer months.

But during a July 21 meeting, community members met with officials from the city of New Orleans, the Regional Transit Authority and state and local law enforcement to discuss safety concerns, including the effect of criminal activity, emergency medical calls and sanitation on RTA passengers who use the main library stations.

Within a week of that meeting, officers from NOPD and National Guardsmen were spotted conducting sweeps of the area around noon and 5 p.m., which are some of the busiest transit hours in that corridor.

Exonerated after more than four decades in prison, Elvis Brooks thought he had an airtight case when he applied for compensation from the state of Louisiana. Under a state program, he’s eligible for up to $480,000 from a special fund to compensate wrongfully convicted people.

But state Attorney General Liz Murrill has vigorously fought Brooks’ compensation claim, asserting in court filings that he is still guilty and therefore should not receive any money at all.

It isn’t just Brooks: Since Murrill took office, she’s done the same for nearly every claim — 22 out of 23 — that has come before her. These include cases in which men were exonerated through DNA or blood evidence and others in which police were accused of fabricating evidence.

Murrill’s opposition doesn’t necessarily mean that Brooks and other exonerees won’t eventually be compensated, as claims are decided by district court judges. But it ensures that a process the law says is allowed to take no more than five months could instead drag on for years, exacting financial hardship and emotional pain on people who have already endured decades of both, a senior law professor said.

Read our full investigation with u/propublica_**:** https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-wrongful-conviction-compensation-liz-murrill-elvis-brooks

The state attorney general’s office declined to answer questions regarding her approach.

Many parish-level leaders and volunteers for Louisiana Deserves Better, the statewide campaign to force recall elections against Gov. Jeff Landry and state Attorney General Liz Murrill, have left the organization due to alleged financial mismanagement and poor leadership on the part of its chairperson, Marian Gbaiwon.

Louisiana Deserves Better formed in early May when Marian Gbaiwon and Katilyn Stepter filed the petition to advance the daunting task of collecting more than 500,000 signatures within 180 days for the recall.

But now the former parish-level leaders, who still are committed to trying to recall the officials, say Gbaiwon has failed to be transparent on how donations are being spent and has not provided any accounting of the number of signatures collected so far.

Sinnidra Taylor started Friends of Codey’s in 2020 to meet the needs of her business, Crazy Waffle Bar. At the time, renting kitchen space was often too expensive for the startup business.

She had the idea of opening a kitchen with other entrepreneurs who also don’t need a store front to share the cost of overhead.

Today Codey’s leases kitchen space and equipment to 30 tenants and goes beyond offering kitchen space to help target pain points for entrepreneurs. Under Taylor’s guidance, tenants are pushed to outgrow the need for Codey’s and be self-sustaining.

New Orleans is facing dangerously hot conditions. Heat indices, or “feels like” temperatures in and around the city could soar to 115 degrees on Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service, which has issued an extreme heat warning for the area.

For those without easy access to air conditioning at home or in a workplace, the city of New Orleans offers some refuge from the heat in the form of cooling centers — air conditioned public buildings open to anyone seeking relief.

But on Tuesday afternoon, as the heat index neared 110 degrees in the city, a number of those sites were closed. According to a recent announcement from the New Orleans Recreation Development Commission (NORD), eight of the city’s 13 recreation centers — which double as cooling centers during the summer — are offline for “post summer maintenance.”

“Each year, NORD schedules post-summer maintenance and deep cleaning at recreation centers that serve as summer camp sites. This work takes place immediately following the conclusion of our summer camp season to prepare the facilities for year-round programming and ensure they remain clean, safe, and well-maintained for the public,” Emily Oliver, NORD’s Public Outreach and Communications director, said in a statement to Verite News.

Closed until Saturday, Aug. 1

• Joe W. Brown Park
• Morris F.X. Jeff Park
• Lyons Recreation Center
• Rosenwald Recreation Center
• St. Bernard Recreation Center

Closed until Monday, Aug. 10

• Milne Recreation Center
• Cut-Off Recreation Center
• Treme Recreation Center

About 1,563 people experience homelessness across Orleans and Jefferson parishes, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. While the point-in-time counts estimate just over a quarter of unhoused people are unsheltered, people can often fall in and out of the gaps of New Orleans’ safety net.

Like the rest of the nation, Orleans Parish has seen warmer maximum morning temperatures — meaning those who remain outside have less recovery time from the heat, according to research from the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program (SCIPP). Barry Keim, an environmental health professor at LSU who is a former state climatologist, called humidity a “killer” as it interrupts people’s natural ability to cool off.

Seniors and people with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to heat, according to Joe Heeren-Mueller, a coordinator for the Louisiana Advocacy Coalition on Homelessness. Over the past six years, seniors — aged 65 and older — are the fastest growing unhoused population with a 78% uptick in homelessness, according to a recent study from Unity of Greater New Orleans.

Over the past decade, Louisiana hospitals began stocking specialized carts designed to treat hemorrhages, one of the most common pregnancy complications in the state. The plug-in cart can be wheeled from room to room and holds surgical tools and lifesaving medications to stem blood loss.

A state law passed in 2024 forced hospitals to remove a key drug — misoprostol — from the medical cart and keep it locked in a secure room designated for controlled substances. 

The drug is also the second in a two-pill procedure that millions of people have used to have medical abortions. Because of that use, Louisiana lawmakers reclassified misoprostol as a controlled substance, a category typically reserved for addictive drugs. 

Now, physicians have gone from reaching over to the cart to grab misoprostol to waiting at least two minutes while a nurse sprints to retrieve the medication, said New Orleans obstetrician-gynecologist Nicole Freehill. 

“ You could literally have someone lose, like, a liter of blood or more in that time frame,” Freehill said. “You could have a significantly worse hemorrhage for literally someone running to this medicine and running back because it can’t be on that cart 2 feet from you while you’re treating the hemorrhage.”

She said the reclassification of misoprostol as a controlled substance has set back progress to decrease the frequency of postpartum hemorrhage and blood transfusions. Under the law, her preliminary research found, hemorrhage rates have worsened statewide, she said. 

The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office has repeatedly denied requests for public records from Innocence & Justice Louisiana, a nonprofit, pro bono law firm that has helped free dozens of wrongfully convicted prisoners.  

Internal case records held by the DA’s office are critical to the firm’s investigative work, said Jee Park, executive director of Innocence & Justice Louisiana, which was previously known as Innocence Project New Orleans.

Park said that Innocence & Justice routinely requests records for its clients, which can be challenging for incarcerated people to access particularly because of the costs associated with obtaining them. 

“We rely on state actors to comply with Louisiana’s public records laws in the interest of transparency, accountability, and revealing the truth,” Park said. 

The DA’s office did not respond to multiple requests from Verite News for comment.

Nearly 50 businesses applied to receive relief funds from the city of New Orleans’ Business Stabilization Fund, created to help companies that have been negatively affected by a monthslong construction project on Decatur Street in the French Quarter.

“We know many Decatur Street businesses have faced significant challenges, and we appreciate the resilience they continue to show,” Jonah Gilmore, the communications director for the city said. “This fund is an important first step in our ongoing commitment to helping businesses recover and thrive.”

Businesses were able to apply for up to $5,000 in relief funds. However, some business owners said the money would not be enough to compensate for the loss of revenue.

Five years after she first was appointed to the post, the question of whether New Orleans Independent Police Monitor Stella Cziment will be reappointed to the role is in doubt.

Some current staffers and community members are worried that a consultant brought in for the appointment process — who has criticized the direction the office has taken under Cziment’s leadership — might sway members of the city board responsible for the decision against her.

While Cziment has sought to bolster the office’s role as an easily accessible resource for residents concerned about police abuse, the consultant — Loyola University Emeritus Professor Michael Cowan — has characterized her approach as “activism” rather than traditional police monitoring.

On Tuesday (July 21), the New Orleans Ethics Review Board will decide whether to reappoint Cziment to a second four-year term — or go with someone new.

Political analyst Robert Collins writes:

There has been tension between New Orleans and the rest of the state for a long time. It’s a blue city in a red state. But what we’re witnessing now isn’t just tension, it’s open warfare.

As the relationship between the state and the city deteriorated, last week Mayor Helena Moreno withdrew a request for the Louisiana Bond Commission to allow the city to issue $110 million in bonds to borrow funds from private banks. The mayor said she withdrew it because denial was imminent. 

The governor then went on social media and accused the city of using the state as an ATM.

The governor’s comments were notable because many in New Orleans would argue that the opposite is true. It might be the state using the city as an ATM.

The City of New Orleans is Louisiana’s most valuable asset. It is the only city with the ability to host major events such as the Super Bowl, the College Football Championship, and the Final Four. 

The Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism, in their most recent annual report on state tourism spending by parish, stated that New Orleans sent $467 million in direct state taxes to the general fund. The next closest parish in direct state taxes was Baton Rouge at $122 million. That’s only counting direct state tax collections, not the multiplier effect from total visitor spending. 

According to CRT, New Orleans accounted for $5.1 billion in total visitor spending, followed by Jefferson Parish in second place at 1.9 billion. 

New Orleans tourism tax revenue is shared by all Louisiana parishes.

Louisiana has one of the most punitive HIV exposure laws in the country. Before the state’s law was updated, public health experts and advocates for people living with HIV said the law was too broad, prohibiting exposure “through any means or contact.” The provision allowed people to be threatened and prosecuted for actions that couldn’t transmit the virus.

The new law maintains much of the existing language and penalties, but narrowed the ways people could be considered exposed to the virus. Now, a person living with HIV can only be held liable for exposure if the contact “posed a substantial likelihood of transmission,” including sexual contact and sharing needles.

The updated law was the product of more than a decade of grassroots advocacy, and Sean McCormick, a staff attorney for the Center for HIV Law and Policy, said the campaign in Louisiana serves as a model for groups in other states, especially those in the South, that want to reform their laws criminalizing HIV.

Orleans Parish schools have been recognized by the state of Louisiana as a top growing school system for the third year in a row, according to LEAP testing results released last week (July 6). The percentage of students scoring at grade level increased from 28% in 2025 to 31% in 2026, reflecting growth in all subject areas. 

With 39% of students achieving reading proficiency in New Orleans, the district is closing the gap between itself and the statewide average pass rate, which has hovered at 43% for the past two years. Students scored highest in English and social studies, but lower in math and science, according to state data. 

In most states, standardized testing scores are still recovering from post-pandemic learning loss. But an analysis by the Education Scorecard, an education research institute, found that Louisiana was the only state to surpass 2019 scores in both reading and math.