Biden and Trump score decisive wins in Louisiana primaries: Latest updates

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump won Louisiana’s primary on Saturday, collecting more delegates after they already clinched their party nominations.

Biden also appeared in Missouri’s Democratic primary, with results not expected to be reported until next week.

None of the races were in suspense. Biden and Trump have already beaten their major competitors. But the primary races are still closely watched by insiders for turnout and signs of protest voters.

For Biden, some liberals are registering their anger with Israel’s war against Hamas following the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack. More than 30,000 people, two-thirds of them women and children, have been reported killed by Gaza authorities since Israel launched its offensive. A protest movement launched by Arab American communities in Michigan has spread to several other states.

Trump is his party’s dominant figure and has locked up a third straight Republican nomination. But he faces dissent from people worried about the immense legal jeopardy he faces or critical of his White House term, which ended shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection mounted by his supporters and fueled by his false theories of election fraud.

Saturday’s primary was the Missouri Democratic Party’s first party-run presidential contest since a new law took effect in August 2022. Louisiana’s primaries, meanwhile, come almost four years after the state was the first to postpone its primaries due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Former US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer appeared to endorse ending lifetime appointments to the bench in an interview aired on Sunday.

In a pre-recorded interview, which aired on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Mr Breyer was asked by Kristen Welker about imposing a term limit, or age limit, on Supreme Court justices.

“I don’t think that’s harmful,” he responded.

Vice President Kamala Harris toured the bloodstained classroom building where the 2018 Parkland high school massacre happened on Saturday, then announced a program to assist states that have laws allowing police to temporarily seize guns from people judges have found to be dangerous.

Harris saw bullet-pocked walls and floors still covered in dried blood and broken glass left behind from the 14 February 2018 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 14 students and three staff members and wounded 17.

The halls and classrooms inside the three-story structure remain strewn with shoes left behind by fleeing students and wilted Valentine’s Day flowers and balloons. Textbooks, laptop computers, snacks and papers remain on desks. She was told about each victim who died.

“Frozen in time,” Harris said repeatedly about what she saw. She was accompanied on the tour by victims’ family members, some of them pushing for more spending on school safety and others for stronger gun laws.

A partial government shutdown was averted on Saturday when President Joe Biden signed a $1.2 trillion federal spending package, just hours after Congress passed the long overdue legislation.

“This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted,” the president said, in a statement. “But it rejects extreme cuts from House Republicans and expands access to child care, invests in cancer research, funds mental health and substance use care, advances American leadership abroad, and provides resources to secure the border that my Administration successfully fought to include. That’s good news for the American people.”

The White House said that Biden signed the legislation at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he is spending the weekend.

In a revealing court filing on 18 March, lawyers for Donald Trump said that he has tried to get help from at least 30 companies who can post a bond in excess of $454m after he lost a civil fraud trial in New York earlier this year.

But none of them could, and now he faces the “practical impossibility” of coming up with the money before the state’s imminent deadline to enforce the judgment against him, according to his attorneys.

The extraordinary circumstances also raise the prospect of the GOP’s presidential nominee being a convicted felon on the hook for tens of millions of dollars he doesn’t have when voters cast their ballots in November.

Mr Trump also cannot get rid of debts obtained by fraud by filing for bankruptcy.