Muslims in New Orleans worried about discrimination
Good morning. It's Saturday, Jan. 11, 2025, and in this weekend's edition, we're covering, New Orleans area Muslims worried about Islamophobia after Bourbon Street attack, the removal of four more books from South Carolina's public schools, municipalities owning their own grocery stores and much more.
Media outlets featured in this edition: Verite News, South Carolina Daily Gazette, Mississippi Today, The 51st, Governing, Oregon Capital Chronicle
by Safura Syed January 10, 2025
Muslims in the greater New Orleans area are worried about increased discrimination following the New Year’s Day attack on Bourbon Street that killed 14 people and injured dozens more.
Law enforcement officials have said the perpetrator of the attack, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American citizen and military veteran from Texas, claimed allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group in videos posted to social media in the hours leading up to the attack. A day after the attack, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in an Instagram caption that the state “does not cower to radical islamic terrorists.” And there has been an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment nationally since the attack.
There are around 24,000 Muslims in Louisiana and 6,000 in Orleans Parish alone, according to estimates from the Association of Religion Data Archives, with thriving communities on both banks of Jefferson Parish.
The New Orleans Police Department said it has not heard of any threats against the mosques in the area and that no one has requested extra security. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office did not respond in time for publication. Still, several Muslims who spoke with Verite News for this story worry that language falsely conflating Islam with terrorism will spark retaliatory violence against their communities, as such rhetoric did in the aftermath of 9/11.
Laith Shalabi, a Gretna native who now studies in New York, voiced frustration with the media and political focus on the perpetrator’s religious identity. Shalabi flew back to New Orleans on Jan. 1, the day of the attack, and said he is worried about attacks against his community.
“He was just one rogue actor, and no one wanted to focus on the fact that he was a U.S. [military] veteran who had several other issues,” Shalabi said.
4 more books slated for removal from SC K-12 libraries
By: Skylar Laird - January 9, 2025 5:41 pm
COLUMBIA — Four more books should be removed from South Carolina public schools for including graphic descriptions of masturbation and sex, a State Board of Education panel decided Thursday.
The five-person committee voted to keep two books — “Bronx Masquerade” and “The House on Mango Street” — on shelves and in the classrooms where teachers use them for assignments. Those two were held over from a prior meeting.
The four books the committee voted to remove aren’t used in classroom lessons, though they are available in some school libraries. They will join seven others barred from school library shelves since a state regulation forbid public schools from using or allowing students access to books containing “sexual conduct.”
Since October, the board has decided three books and a textbook can remain. It made one novel, “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins, available only to high school students with parental permission.
The full, 15-member Board of Education will take up the recommendations at its Feb. 4 meeting. If a majority agrees, the books would have to be removed.
The four books newly reviewed Thursday came from a challenge by parent Ivie Szalai, who says her children attend Beaufort County public schools. According to her appeal form, she again asked the school district to consider removing the books after the regulation took effect.
A district committee had already reviewed the books between 2022 and 2023 as part of a list of 97 titles, almost all of which Szalai brought before the school board. The committee voted to remove five of the books, leaving the four Szalai challenged Thursday available to high school students, according to the district website.
The district board had 90 days to take up her appeal before it went to the state education board, based on deadlines set in the regulation.
This is the first time a book has gone through the appeals process laid out in the regulation. The first 11 titles were curated by agency staff, and the next three bypassed the process because they were being taught in classrooms instead of just available in the library.
Three of the books reviewed Thursday were among the 10 most commonly challenged titles nationally in 2023, according to the American Library Association.
-- South Carolina Daily Gazette
Data center plans to invest $10 billion in Meridian
by Michael Goldberg January 9, 2025
A Dallas-based data center developer will locate its next campus in Meridian, a $10 billion investment in the area, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Thursday.
The company, Compass Datacenters, will build eight data centers in the Meridian area over eight years, Reeves said. The governor said the data centers would support local businesses and jobs in a fast-growing industry that Mississippi has tried to attract.
“Through our pro-business policies and favorable business environment, we continue to establish our state as an ideal location for high-tech developments by providing the resources needed for innovation and growth,” Reeves said.
The Mississippi Development Authority will certify the company as a data center operator, allowing the company to benefit from several tax exemptions. Compass Datacenters will receive a 10-year state income and franchise tax exemption and a sales and use tax exemption on construction materials and other equipment.
In 2024, Amazon Web Services’ committed to spend $10 billion to construct two data centers in Madison County. Lawmakers agreed to put up $44 million in taxpayer dollars for the project, make a loan of $215 million, and provide numerous tax breaks.
Wilson Building Bulletin: A predictable start to 2025
Colleen Grablick
Jan 9, 2025
It was a quiet and largely predictable start to a new legislative session at the Wilson Building this week. The councilmembers, joined by the newest addition to the dais – Ward 7’s Wendell Felder — breezed through a slim, agreeable agenda in Tuesday’s meeting.
Of note:
The legislators extended rent-stabilization protections into 2025. This is a continuation of legislation penned in 2023, when record-high inflation levels resulted in lofty rent hikes for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. Two years ago, the CMs passed a bill capping rent increases at 6%, with more aggressive limits for elderly and disabled renters. That original bill went into effect in July 2023 and was set to expire early this January, so Councilmember Robert White introduced an emergency amendment Tuesday to extend these protections through July of this year.
Also on Tuesday, councilmembers unanimously approved the collective bargaining agreement between the D.C. Public Schools system and the Washington Teachers Union, which represents more than 5,000 teachers employed by DCPS. The five-year contract includes wage increases over the next several years, expansions of dental and optical care benefits and paternity and maternity leave, and improvements to working conditions, like expanded planning time. “Most impressively, this deal was done within 10 months of active negotiations,” said At-large Councilmember Anita Bonds, commenting on what has historically been a years-long bargaining process. The WTU ratified the contract in the fall, so the council’s approval was the final step to put the agreement into effect.
Should Cities Open Their Own Grocery Stores?
Jan. 10, 2025 • Jule Pattison-Gordon
By now, most people are familiar with the concept of food deserts — areas where residents lack ready access to fresh foods. Should local governments step in to operate grocery stores in neighborhoods that don’t have them? Aside from ideological questions over whether governments should get involved with operating retail establishments, there are a number of practical hurdles that are difficult to overcome.
Zohran Mamdani, a member of the state Assembly who is running for mayor of New York, calls for a network of city-owned grocery stores. He promises to bring such stores to every one of the city’s five boroughs. “Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers,” according to a campaign statement.
In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson has been exploring a similar idea, following multiple grocery closures in historically underserved neighborhoods. A disproportionate share of Chicago’s Black and Latino residents are food insecure.
This is an idea that has already been put into play in a handful of rural communities that have lost their last grocers. Having a local store not only improves food access but makes residents more likely to stay or move there. But getting such businesses off the ground and sustaining them has not been easy. The city-owned store in Erie, Kan., simply didn’t attract enough customers — or, at least, not enough customers willing to do most of their shopping there. Last year, Mayor Butch Klingenberg said the grocery store would break even if each customer spent an average of $50 per month — but customers were only averaging $14.
Last fall, the city revised its approach: It began leasing out the building to a private operator that would take over operations and management, while the city retained ownership. “When you're a municipality and you own a business like that, there's a lot of overhead. And so it was costing the city quite a bit of money and the city funds," Erie City Clerk Jamie Janssen said in September. "And so we started to look at different avenues of what we could do to alleviate that, but still keep a grocery store in town.”
Oregon moms in the Legislature are driven by a passion for kids
By: Hannah Wallace - January 9, 2025 6:00 am
Children are a top priority for the moms in the Legislature and a big reason why many of them are there.
Take Emerson Levy, a renewable energy attorney in Bend. When she ran for the Legislature for the first time in 2020, she was motivated by her 4-year-old daughter, June. A self-described policy nerd, she wanted to support good policies in Salem, particularly those to protect children.
“I felt this huge obligation to my young daughter,” Levy told the Capital Chronicle.
Levy lost in 2020, but she won in 2022 and now she’s headed back to Salem after winning a second term representing the Bend-based 53rd District. She is among several mothers in the Legislature, both Democrat and Republican, who juggle the demands of raising children while representing their communities in Salem. Some even have other jobs as well.
Serving in the Legislature is supposed to be a part time job, with 35-day sessions in even-numbered years and 160-day sessions the others, but the work spills into the rest of the year.
“The Legislature may be part time, but our constituents are not part time,” said state Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, a mother of four who represents Corvallis in Salem. “Nobody has part-time constituents.”
Being a legislator in Oregon has become a full-time job, with jam-packed “legislative days” in Salem outside sessions to discuss policies and hear from state officials, experts and Oregonians. Lawmakers also serve on task forces and spend time leading up to sessions working on policies. And they need to be available to constituents, to listen and respond to their needs.
Being a mom is also a full-time role. Balancing both is challenging and time-consuming and the legislative job is not well paid.
But Oregon’s legislator moms are passionate about their roles and fighting for issues that impact Oregon kids the most.
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