The new Louisiana law will outlaw abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can come before a woman knows she’s pregnant. The law doesn’t contain exceptions for pregnancies from rape or incest.

The law won’t limit the state’s three abortion clinics anytime soon. It takes effect only if Mississippi’s law is upheld by a federal appeals court.

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Edwards, a Catholic running for reelection this year, didn’t hold a public bill signing, instead announcing his action through his office.

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— Associated Press

NEVADA

State rejects national popular-vote pledge

Nevada will not join other U.S. states that have pledged their electoral college votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.

Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) announced Thursday he had vetoed the measure, even though it had been approved by most Democrats in the legislature.

Sisolak says the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact “could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests.”

More than a dozen states have agreed to put their votes toward the winner of the popular vote.

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It was Sisolak’s first veto since taking office.

— Associated Press

MISSOURI

Priest admits abusing 2 boys in early 1990s

The man who became the first U.S. priest to be labeled sexually violent for crimes in Illinois has admitted abusing two boys in Missouri.

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Fred Lenczycki pleaded guilty Wednesday to two counts of sodomy for crimes that occurred in the early 1990s, when he was serving at a parish in north St. Louis County. Church and court files show that Lenczycki admitted abusing up to 30 boys in Illinois, Missouri and California over 25 years.

Lenczycki, now 74 and living in suburban Chicago, admitted in the latest case to grabbing the genitals of one boy and trying to force the other to expose himself. The crimes occurred from 1991 to 1994. Lenczycki was charged in February, and he is scheduled to be sentenced in August.

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Lenczycki was removed from the ministry in 2002, when he was charged with sexually abusing three boys in the 1980s at a church in Hinsdale, Ill.

He pleaded guilty in 2004 and was sentenced to five years in prison. In 2008, a year before his release, he became the first U.S. priest to be labeled sexually violent when he was committed under Illinois’ Sexually Violent Persons Commitment Act.

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— Associated Press

Teacher placed on leave over mock slave auction: A fourth-grade teacher in a northern New York school district has been placed on administrative leave after being accused of having white students bid on black classmates during a mock slave auction. The mother of one of the black students told WWNY the incident happened Tuesday at North Elementary School in the Watertown City School District. A fifth-grade teacher at the Chapel School in Bronxville in Westchester County was fired in March after parents complained she held mock "slave auctions."