50 ★ States
ALABAMA Montgomery: The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday challenged a state law making it a felony for doctors to treat transgender people under age 19 with puberty-blockers or hormones to help affirm their gender identity.
ALASKA Juneau: Republicans in the state House have removed Rep. David Eastman from their caucus, the minority leader said Friday, citing tensions that have built over time with the Wasilla Republican. Eastman also was removed from two committees.
ARIZONA Phoenix: Former Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel, who recently resigned amid controversy over her job performance, died Saturday of unspecified health complications, her family said. She was 45.
ARKANSAS Little Rock: The federal retrial of a former state lawmaker accused of bribery and wire fraud has been delayed to November. Ex-Sen. Gilbert Baker is a former chairman of the state Republican Party who ran unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010.
CALIFORNIA San Francisco: A mask mandate for commuter rail passengers is back by popular demand in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system had decided last month to drop its rule in line with a federal court ruling, but that decision prompted an outcry, spokeswoman Alicia Trost said Friday.
COLORADO Canon City: An equine influenza virus is the likely cause of a respiratory disease outbreak that has killed about 100 wild horses at a federal holding facility, Bureau of Land Management officials said.
CONNECTICUT Hartford: A wideranging bill aimed at reducing vehicle emissions in the state, including the likely adoption of California’s clean air standards for certain trucks and a requirement that all school buses be emission-free by 2040, was advanced Friday to Gov. Ned Lamont’s desk.
DELAWARE Dover: While the First State’s overall unemployment rate is on a steady decline, with more jobs than job-seekers, Delaware’s disabled community isn’t seeing the same job growth. Unemployed, disabled Delawareans total about 3,300 people, and 34,000 are not in the workforce, based on U.S. census figures.
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Washington: A long-sought curbside composting program is one step closer to becoming a reality with a D.C. Council committee’s proposal to fund a pilot project, WUSA-TV reports.
FLORIDA Tallahassee: State Supreme Court Justice Alan Lawson announced plans Friday to retire this summer, which gives Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis the opportunity to have appointed four of the seven justices.
GEORGIA Savannah: A warehouse along the Savannah River is holding historical treasures that evidence suggests remained lost for more than 240 years – a cache of 19 cannons researchers suspect came from British ships scuttled to the river bottom during the American Revolution. Now officials with the U.S. and British governments, as well as Georgia’s, are working together on an agreement to preserve the newly found guns before putting them on display.
HAWAII Honolulu: A committee of state senators and representatives on Friday agreed on legislation creating new management for Mauna Kea, the site of some of the world’s most advanced telescopes and demonstrations against the construction of a new observatory atop the mountain.
IDAHO Boise: Former state Rep. Aaron von Ehlinger was convicted Friday of raping a 19-year-old legislative intern after a dramatic trial in which the young woman fled the witness stand during testimony, saying, “I can’t do this.”
ILLINOIS Oak Brook: At least two twisters reportedly touched down briefly as part of a storm system that rolled across northeastern Illinois on Saturday. One EF-0 tornado snapped tree branches and uprooted some trees as it traveled about 2 miles on the ground west of Chicago in Oak Brook, WLS-TV reports. The second EF-0 was confirmed in Candlewick Lake in northern Boone County.
INDIANA Indianapolis: A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Friday ordering a Martinsville middle school to allow a transgender student to have access to the boys’ restroom.
IOWA Des Moines: It is not a crime for a trailer hitch to partially obscure one figure on a license plate, according to the Iowa Court of Appeals, which ruled Wednesday that an Altoona police officer was wrong to pull over a truck for that reason.
KANSAS Topeka: The state will be tightening its rules for adults receiving food assistance even though critics have warned that its new law is so sloppily written that it will apply to thousands more people than supporters intended. The Republican-controlled Legislature on Thursday overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a GOP bill imposing a new job-training requirement for non-disabled adults.
KENTUCKY Louisville: The largely red state has the most popular Democratic governor in the nation, according to a new survey. Polling firm Morning Consult put Gov. Andy Beshear’s approval rating at 59%.
LOUISIANA New Orleans: The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival is honoring the many musical icons who have passed since the festival was last held three years ago. Jazz Fest, which began Friday and will conclude May 8, will feature onstage tributes, as well as jazz funeral processions that will cross the Fair Grounds and conclude with the unveiling of the honorees’ likenesses alongside the other so-called Ancestors in a memorial garden.
MAINE Augusta: State lawmakers have extended a historic preservation tax credit to try to rehabilitate properties in downtown areas.
MASSACHUSETTS Holyoke: The leader of a veterans’ care center where 76 veterans died after contracting COVID-19 in the spring of 2020 lacked both the leadership skills and temperament to run such a facility when he was hired in 2016, according to a blistering state inspector general’s report out Friday. MICHIGAN Detroit: Drug overdose deaths are at record numbers, yet only slightly more than half the pharmacies in the state have signed on to a program allowing them to dispense the opioid overdose antidote Narcan without a prescription.
MINNESOTA Minneapolis: The state Department of Health said it’s investigating several severe cases of hepatitis among children and has reported the cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
MISSISSIPPI Jackson: The state’s medical examiner system has long operated in violation of national standards for death investigations, accruing a severe backlog of reports and autopsies, according to an Associated Press analysis based on state data and documents and interviews of officials and residents.
MISSOURI Jefferson City: Republican state lawmakers on Thursday pushed to restrict transgender children’s participation in sports, with the House passing a ban and the Senate debating a bill to strip funding from schools that allow transgender girls to play with other girls.
MONTANA Helena: Over five years after a former supervisor at a juvenile detention facility was fired, a jury has awarded him $182,000 in damages in a wrongful termination case, faulting the state for allowing an employee who had expressed bias against him to investigate the incident that led to his termination.
NEBRASKA Lincoln: State employees will get an added job perk starting this summer that will allow their dependent children to attend instate community colleges for free.
NEVADA Las Vegas: The newly constructed Holocaust Memorial Plaza at King David Memorial Cemetery was unveiled as part of the commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day celebrated April 27 to correspond to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar on the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
NEW HAMPSHIRE North Conway: Three people, including two firefighters, were injured in a windswept blaze that ripped through the landmark Red Jacket Mountain View Resort on Saturday afternoon.
NEW JERSEY Atlantic City: A union representing casino dealers is calling on lawmakers to prohibit smoking in their workplaces. The United Auto Workers wrote legislators last week asking them to hold hearings on a bill that would close a loophole in state law that leaves casinos as virtually the only indoor workplace where smoking is permitted.
NEW MEXICO Las Vegas: Over 1,000 firefighters backed by bulldozers and aircraft battled the largest active wildfire in the U.S. on Sunday after strong winds pushed it across containment lines and closer to the small northern New Mexico city.
NEW YORK Albany: A judge ordered Friday that the state’s congressional and state Senate primaries be delayed until Aug. 23 to provide time to replace district maps that were ruled unconstitutional last week.
NORTH CAROLINA Greensboro: A Madison County music legend has reclaimed a stolen gun after 43 years. Sheriff Buddy Harwood presented Bobby Hicks, a former fiddle player with bluegrass titan Bill Monroe, with the pistol Hicks lost in 1978, after a Greensboro Police Department detective called him and told him of the pawn shop finding.
NORTH DAKOTA Bismarck: The state Supreme Court has ruled that thousands of documents related to security during the construction of the heavily protested Dakota Access Pipeline are public and subject to the state’s open records law.
OHIO Columbus: Advocates of marijuana legalization say in a lawsuit filed Friday that Republican legislative leaders are trying to keep the issue off the November ballot. Some GOP lawmakers are instead focused on a bill that would expand Ohio’s medical cannabis program in the hopes that those changes will dissuade stakeholders from funding the adult-use initiative.
OKLAHOMA Oklahoma City: The second-degree murder conviction of a former police officer who fatally shot a man threatening to set fire to himself in 2017 was upheld by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.
OREGON Portland: Mayor Ted Wheeler plans to propose spending $3.9 million to add 28 unarmed public safety specialists to the Police Bureau. He said the goal is to free up sworn police for higher-priority calls.
PENNSYLVANIA Norristown: Former state Attorney General Kathleen Kane, who served jail time for leaking grand jury material and lying about it, was taken into custody Friday on an alleged probation violation, more than a month after she was charged with drunken driving, officials said.
RHODE ISLAND Warwick: Parents of special-needs students spoke at a rally Saturday at the Warwick Center of the Arts in support of state legislation that would create an independent special education ombudsman to help parents of special-needs children navigate what can be a daunting and discouraging process.
SOUTH CAROLINA Columbia: The state House has approved a bill that would require doctors to tell women seeking abortion-inducing medication that there is a way to reverse the procedure, even though that claim is unproven and disputed by doctors.
SOUTH DAKOTA Rapid City: Military officials are preparing to put on an air show at Ellsworth Air Force Base for the first time in seven years. The Rapid City Journal reports the Ellsworth Air & Space Show, set for May 14-15, will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the base north of Rapid City, as well as the 80th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid and the 75th birthday of the Air Force.
TENNESSEE Nashville: Gov. Bill Lee declined to sign off on a new law requiring governments and businesses to treat immunity from a previous COVID-19 infection as equal to getting vaccinated in their policies. The legislation became law Friday without the Republican’s signature, taking effect immediately.
TEXAS Canton: Van Zandt County Sheriff Steve Hendrix said he will resign following his arrest and indictment on allegations that he lied to investigators about witnessing one of his deputies punch a handcuffed inmate in the face.
UTAH St. George: Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Southern Utah University graduates to find purpose in what they do as they leave SUU and enter the next phase of their lives during the annual commencement ceremony Friday. Rice acknowledged the class of 2022 faced additional challenges because of the outbreak of COVID-19 but told them they have been better prepared for the future by the crisis.
VERMONT Montpelier: A bill that would set the state on a path to a “clean heat standard” was approved by the Vermont Senate on Friday. The proposal aims to regulate businesses that import fossil fuel heat.
VIRGINIA Hampton: A tripod-mounted prototype sensor is tracking the sun on the roof of NASA-Langley Research Center’s just-opened Measurement Systems Lab. The prototype’s size opens the possibility of deploying sensors in small satellites to scoop up more data over much wider geographies.
WASHINGTON Spokane: The Spokane Valley City Council, in an unusual move, has banned newspapers from the City Hall lobby, with some members arguing in favor of the move because of campaign ads and election coverage in the papers.
WEST VIRGINIA Charleston: The state Department of Environmental Protection is seeking public comment on its draft water monitoring and assessment report, which includes a list of impaired stream and lake assessments across West Virginia.
WISCONSIN Milwaukee: A jury has convicted of a hate crime a white man who was accused of throwing acid on a Latino man’s face in a racist attack in 2019.
WYOMING Casper: Four county-level GOP groups are accused of violating bylaws and enforcing rules selectively, in favor of hard-line conservatives, the Casper Star-Tribune reports.