State of the States LOUISIANA
Musk Builds New Spaceport • Elon Musk’s space company plans to spend $100 billion to build a new spaceport to launch rockets. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said the deal was a big win for the state, likening its impact to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. “Today is nothing short of
a transformational moment,” he told lawmakers and others at a special event in August to celebrate the deal. The spaceport will be
located on 125,000 acres along Louisiana’s southern coast, about 200 miles west of New Orleans. The location provides key advantages, state oficials said, including access to abundant natural gas and the ability to launch to a wide range of trajectories. The site could support thousands of launches each year.
NEBRASKA
Schools Ban Electric Gloves • Omaha police agreed to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of the state’s largest public school district.
The decision affecting
most Omaha middle and high schools came after The Associated Press revealed Immigration and Customs
Enforcement’s plan to give oficers the gloves, known as G.L.O.V.E.s, or generated low output voltage emitters. Omaha Public Schools
Superintendent Matthew Ray requested that school resource oficers stop using the gloves. Omaha police agreed. However, the suburban
Bellevue Police Department that patrols two Omaha schools and the large Bellevue district said its oficers will continue carrying the gloves.
CALIFORNIA
Newsom to Protect Utilities • Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to broker a deal with lawmakers to shield utilities from financial trouble if their equipment sparks a wildfire. His push comes as Southern
California Edison faces claims from the state’s second-most destructive blaze, a 2025 fire that killed 19 people outside of Los Angeles. Investigators ruled it was sparked by one of the company’s transmission towers. The most destructive
wildfire in state history, a blaze that killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 buildings in Northern California, started two days after Newsom won the governorship in 2018. Investigators blamed Pacific
Gas & Electric equipment. Newsom’s plan could limit
The generated low output voltage emitter, G.L.O.V.E., “is a less-lethal tool intended to provide oficers with an additional option when responding to resistance or a potentially volatile situation,” according to the Omaha Police Department.
the amount electric and gas companies have to
pay victims and attorneys. One of the goals is to stabilize the state’s electricity rates, which are among the highest in the nation and have continued to climb in recent years.
NEVADA
Water Cuts Challenged • Oficials challenged the Trump administration’s Colorado River plan that would require Nevada to cut water use by about 17% over the next two years and authorizes even larger cuts during dry years. The 10-year plan for managing the Colorado River and the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, comes amid drought and record-low water storage. Nevada will have to give
up 50,000 acre-feet of its Colorado River allocation over the next two years. An acre- foot is equal to 325,851 gallons. Additionally, Arizona will
be required to reduce its water use by 760,000 acre-feet, while California will have to cut about 440,000 acre-feet.
SOUTH DAKOTA
FBI Tackles Native American Violence • The FBI established a minimum reward of $25,000 in cases where people went missing or were killed in Indian Country, part of a broader effort to address high rates of violence affecting Native American communities. The new minimum applies
to more than 50 unsolved homicides and missing person cases in tribal communities.
Most of the cases are less
than 10 years old, though a dozen have been unsolved for more than two decades. The FBI’s National Crime
Information Center recorded just under 1,500 active cases last year involving missing Native Americans.
MICHIGAN
Pride Flag Ban Upheld • A federal appellate court upheld a decision allowing the city of Hamtramck to ban pride flags on city-owned property. Two former city oficials
had raised the flag in 2023 in defiance of a city council resolution limiting flags on city property to the American flag, the Michigan flag, and flags representing the native countries of immigrant residents. The ban on the pride flag
was enacted after Hamtramck elected an all-Muslim city council in 2021, becoming the first city in the U.S. to do so. Although the ban the
council subsequently passed also prohibited religious, ethnic, racial, and political flags, the target of the effort was the LGBTQ+ pride flag, which many local Muslims said was against their religious beliefs.
OCTOBER 2026 | NEWSMAX 29
G.L.O.V.E.S./NIKOS FRAZIER/OMAHA WORLD-HERALD VIA GETTY IMAGES / MISSING/JASON CONNOLLY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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