By Elise Plunk | Reporter
Let’s jump right into what’s making news this Thursday morning.
From left, Louisiana Public Service Commissioners Davante Lewis, Eric Skrmetta, Jean-Paul Coussan, and Mike Francis listen to testimony at an Aug. 12, 2026 hearing in Baton Rouge. (Wes Muller/LAI)
By Wesley Muller
The Louisiana Public Service Commission has overruled its administrative judge’s order that required Meta to disclose how it calculated publicized job projections and electricity needs for its Hyperion artificial intelligence data center campus in Richland Parish. Consumer and environmental advocates say Meta has yet to specify its exact needs for the sprawling facility it’s still building and already plans to expand.
Idaho Democratic state Rep. Brooke Green, her toddler Bridger Byington, and baby Bryson Byington at the Boise River in Boise, Idaho, on Aug. 6, 2026. (Otto Kitsinger for Stateline)
By Kelcie Moseley-Morris
In the past two years, Republicans in five states have added specific anti-IVF language to their state party platforms, and some anti-abortion groups have become increasingly outspoken in their opposition to both IVF and surrogacy. Some advocates for IVF say conservative opposition is just as much about trying to prevent same-sex couples from accessing fertility treatments as it is about an objection to embryo destruction.
An executive order President Donald Trump signed earlier this week says the attorney general will take legal action against states that do not provide “religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.” (Parker Michels-Boyce for the Virginia Mercury)
By Tim Henderson
Three media outlets that sued LSU to obtain records that detail how its athletics department spends public money on student-athletes have agreed to end the case now that a new state law shields that information from disclosure.
By Greg LaRose
Three media outlets that sued LSU to obtain records that detail how its athletics department spends public money on student-athletes have agreed to end the case now that a new state law shields that information from disclosure.
COMMENTARY
By Andrea Hagan
Louisiana is reopening a juvenile detention facility at the center of more than four dozen lawsuits and 33 years of abuse allegations. Applied to Louisiana’s juvenile facilities, the Department of Justice’s own findings aren’t isolated bad actors getting caught. They’re documentation of structural violence, logged again and again, against the same state institutions.
D.C. DIGEST
NEWS FROM THE STATES
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