News

September 2019 will be the 100th anniversary of what has come to be known as the Elaine massacre in Eastern Arkansas’s Phillips County. A century ago, white posses and U.S. soldiers shot and killed what may have been hundreds of African Americans, most of them tenant farmers, over a period of four days. The black farmers’ crime: The men were unionizing to obtain fair prices for their cotton, and in some cases trying to buy their own farms.

Maumelle police say a 17-year-old shot in the head Friday at a Maumelle apartment died Sunday from the wound.

The people rule is the state motto. The Farm Bureau and Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce have a different idea.

KARK reports on a hospital interview with one of those wounded in a late night club shooting in Little Rock who said security checks were made of those entering.

New York Times reports today on the trickery of the tobacco lobby in advancing the cause of e-cigarettes and vaping, including recent legislation in Arkansas.

Three people were shot in a nightclub fight on West Roosevelt early this morning.

Think Progress reports on the results of 13 states, including Arkansas, requiring drug testing for recpients of a welfare program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It's a waste of money.

Little Rock's Pettaway neighborhood, once plagued by gang activity, is amid a revival, thanks to incomers and novel construction. New residents say they want the area to remain as diverse as the architecture.

The 25th edition of the Arkansas Times Academic All-Star Team was another impressive assembly of Arkansas high school seniors.

Suggestions from thinking people on how to improve life in Arkansas.

Arkansas news roundup for Friday, April 26.

At a Little Rock Planning Commission meeting on Thursday afternoon, commissioners unanimously voted to recommend the city board of directors approve an ordinance presented by the Heights Neighborhood Association that would create a design overlay district in the Heights. 

The Kansas Supreme Court today ruled that the state Constitution protects a woman's right to abortion, a decision that will drive a push to amend that state's constitution.The case has some relevance to Arkansas.

The Observer first saw an alligator snapping turtle in the wild when we were about 5 — a massive old sumbitch one of our distant kinfolks had transferred from the Arkansas River to a 6-acre stock pond up near Quitman as a kind of joke a few years before John Kennedy was felled in Dallas.

A third federal judge has found constitutional problems with a state law, this time in Texas, aimed at punishing those who won't pledge not to participate in boycotts against Israel.

A federal judge in Washington has blocked a Trump administration rule aimed at crippling health providers of family planning services who also provide or even talk about abortion.

The newly released file on the investigation of a police officer's fatal shooting of Bradley Blackshire indicates he has no memory or "blacked out" in the critical moments when the shooting began.

A federal court jury in Little Rock has convicted Rodrigo Pineda Gomez, 44, of charges related to the assault of three U.S. airmen in Japan.

Here's the daily open line. And click the video for a headline/comment roundup.

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge has announced the arrest of Chirie Bazzelle, owner of New Beginnings Behavioral Health Services, on Medicaid fraud charges related in part to contracts with others arrested previously in the sprawling public corruption probe involving Preferred Family Healthcare.