Columns & Opinions

It is rare that a public news conference is opened with a prayer by a mayor or any public official. The mayor of Memphis didn’t open his public news conference with a prayer after the Tyree Nichols killing. He asked people to pray, but he did not engage in facilitating a prayer meeting at city hall. It is unusual to see a mayor of any city ask the gathered media and their acolytes to bow their heads, and let’s pray.

This large crowd was concerned about the impact of the funding cut, and the resultant reduction of SporTran services that would inconvenience travel to and from Bossier City by residents on both sides of the river.

The Federal Reserve System (“Fed”) is the central bank of the U.S. It was established by Congress in 1913 in the wake of the Great Depression with the primary functions of conducting the nation’s monetary policy, maintaining stability of the financial system, and supervising and regulating banking institutions. The Fed is considered independent but is subject to congressional oversight.

Good news on the state office building downtown!

If bad theater is what you like, go back and look at the first hour of the Shreveport City Council work session on Monday, Feb. 13.

The recent shooting in the Martin Luther King area on Sugar Street is something that no neighborhood should have to experience. Eight people were shot, with young children the ages of 3 and 5 respectively being shot. A 33-year-old young Black woman died from her wounds, and several others are still recovering from their wounds. Many of us can’t imagine what it feels like to have someone shoot up their house. It is really unconscionable and cowardly. This is not just a Black problem, it is an American problem.

It was in early March of last year that homes and businesses located on Cross Lake received substantial flooding from the lake between March 8 and March 10, causing millions of dollars of losses that have not been recovered either from homeowner’s and business insurance or from FEMA. Many allegations have been made as to what steps could have been taken by the city of Shreveport to either prevent, or at least to ameliorate, the flooding. An extensive (and expensive) review by an expert hydrologist is summarized below.

Attorney General Jeff Landry started an interesting conversation statewide this week with his Protecting Innocence document, along with his press conference announcing its release. I quickly read the document first and thought, “Most libraries do a lot of this stuff already.” Then I watched a recording of the press conference, where it was said library policies across the state are antiquated with no restrictions on juvenile borrowing. Children borrowing Penthouse magazine was used as an example of circulation practices across the state.