BATON ROUGE SUPER REGIONAL: GRAND SLAMS LIFT LSU OVER WVU
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S u n d ay, J u n e 8, 2025
EXTRAORDINARy
GIFTS
Quiet billionaire MacKenzie Scott’s $180 million in surprise donations bolstering La.’s neediest families
$2.50X
Widened use of facial recognition proposed
NOPD asks City Council to loosen near-ban on technology BY JOHN SIMERMAN Staff writer
A powerful tool for catching criminals in New Orleans isn’t being used these days by local police. But after the New Year’s Day attack on Bourbon Street and last month’s jailbreak by 10 Orleans Parish detainees, some civic and elected leaders say it’s time the city loosened the reins on the Police Department’s use of facial recognition technology. At the request of NOPD, City Council members Oliver Thomas and Eugene Green are sponsoring a rewrite of a 2022 ordinance that has kept the department’s use of facial recognition in check, following a near-ban on it before then. The proposed changes come after NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick in April halted the ability of her officers to receive alerts on facial recognition hits for wanted subjects through Project NOLA, a privately run network
ä See FACIAL, page 9A
STAFF PHOTO By DAVID GRUNFELD
Heavenly Care Child Development Center 3 employee Kenyia Boyd reads to Noah Hall at the center in Alexandria on May 30. Hall is able to attend the center for free thanks to a grant from MacKenzie Scott. BY JENNA ROSS Staff writer
ALEXANDRIA — The day care center’s door opened before Ananda Flanagan and her son, Noah, reached it. “Good morning, Noah!” the center’s director sang to the 1-year-old, her arms stretched out to him. “How are you today?” Noah beamed. When Flanagan was pregnant, she had planned for family to help with child care. But after her aunt’s schedule shifted, the Colfax resident found herself shuffling Noah to work with her, setting him in a pack-and-play. Desperate for an alScott ternative, she came across an online ad for an early childhood education grant. “It was God,” she said. It was also MacKenzie Scott. In late 2023, flush with a surprise, $14 million grant from Scott’s charity, now known as Yield Giving, the Alexandria-based Rapides Foundation decided to help school districts in Rapides, Grant and Natchitoches parishes match dollars from the
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Challenges, opportunities await LSU’s next president Board preparing to launch national search for new leader BY PATRICK WALL Staff writer
grants on unsuspecting nonprofits, the money has taken root in communities across Louisiana. It is giving organizations — some upstart, some well-established — the rare chance to hire, to launch, to expand. To help more people. Xavier University received $20
William Tate IV’s final months as president of LSU, leading up to his May announcement that he would step down to become president of Rutgers University, had been — to put it mildly — eventful. In January, LSU’s general counsel resigned and was soon followed by two more of Tate’s top lieutenants. In February, Tate testified in the high-profile case of a law school professor who was suspended from the university Ballard after making crude classroom remarks about Gov. Jeff Landry and President Donald Trump. In March, Tate enacted a systemwide hiring freeze due to “unpredictable” federal
ä See GIFTS, page 8A
ä See LSU, page 10A
STAFF PHOTO By BRETT DUKE
Café Reconcile CEO Kheri Billy, center, chats with customers Deidre and Anthony Webb at the restaurant on May 22. The Central City nonprofit received a $4 million grant from MacKenzie Scott. Louisiana Early Childhood Education Fund. That $2.13 million helped 380 infants, toddlers and preschoolers attend an early childhood center — in Noah’s case, for free. In the five years since Scott, a billionaire philanthropist, novelist and former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, began bestowing big, flexible
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12TH yEAR, NO. 300