General Assembly

State lawmakers will closely follow 2019 criteria for the drawing of new district maps based on 2020 census data.

Population numbers from the U.S. Census are due out Thursday. Those granular numbers will help North Carolina lawmakers decide how to carve up political maps for Congress and state legislative districts.

A group of North Carolina businesses concerned about climate change says lawmakers should start over on an energy reform bill making its way through the General Assembly.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed legislation Friday that would have ended additional federal benefits created during the pandemic for North Carolina’s unemployed before the program expires nationwide. His action counters trends by Republican governors to no longer accept the supplemental payments.

A proposed medical marijuana law for North Carolina cleared its first significant hurdle on Wednesday as a Senate committee approved bipartisan legislation that creates a patient, manufacturing, licensing and sales structure for its use.

Children as young as 6 can be prosecuted in North Carolina juvenile court — the lowest age set by law in the country — but a bipartisan effort would raise the minimum age of delinquency to 10 and move the state out of its status at the bottom.

Legislation that includes more than $2 billion in tax reductions over the next two years and the phaseout of North Carolina's corporate income tax by 2028 received bipartisan approval again in the Senate on Thursday.

North Carolina senators approved a bill on Thursday to bar women from getting abortions on the basis of race, sex or a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.

Individual income taxes would fall again, the corporate rate would be eliminated over time and $1 billion in federal aid would be earmarked for pandemic relief to businesses and nonprofits in legislation given initial approval Wednesday by the state Senate.

GOP negotiators in both chambers said this week that they remained hundreds of millions of dollars apart on a dollar amount they'd agree to spend to operate state government for the next fiscal year starting July 1. The actual difference depends on how the spending is calculated but remains small relative to the $24.5 billion projected to be spent this year.