Arkansas

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders ordered that Arkansas flags and United States flags at state buildings be raised to their full height on Jan. 20 for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Flags were previously ordered to half-staff until Jan. 28 by President Joe Biden in honor of former President Jimmy Carter after his death on Dec. 29.

A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22314576

Summary

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders proposed a $6.5 billion budget for the next fiscal year, with half of the $182.5 million spending increase allocated to a school voucher program.

The plan boosts funding for private and home-school expenses to $187 million and sets aside $90 million in reserves for the program.

Critics warn the program could divert resources from public schools, potentially leaving them underfunded as voucher costs grow

The budget also includes $13 million for maternal health, $50 million for corrections, and $3 million to raise state employee pay, but some lawmakers criticized reliance on one-time funds.

Bills filed in the Arkansas legislature on Wednesday would repeal the requirement for fluoride in the Natural State’s drinking water.

Senate Bill 2 would repeal Arkansas Code § 20-7-136 that mandates the use of fluoride and places the Department of Health in charge of setting limits. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Clint Penzo (R-Springdale) and Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest), with cosponsors Rep. Matt Duffield (R-Russellville) and Rep. Aaron Pilkington (R-Knoxville).

As of 11:47 CT, Baker is beating Wood for Chief Justice.

For anyone that was following the abortion measure that got removed from the ballot, Baker wrote the minority opinion that normal procedure is for clerical issues to be fixed and that the measure should be allowed to continue. Wood wrote the majority opinion that it needed to be removed because rules are rules.

Issue 1 passed by a large margin, allowing lottery scholarships to be given at vocational and tech schools.

Issue 2 passed by a somewhat close margin, blocking the casino from opening in Pope County. Of note, Pope County voted a majority against this measure. This is notable because part of the explanation for the measure was Pope County previously voting against the casino.

Nearly 5,000 students who received vouchers in Year One continued into Year Two of the program. They were joined by more than 9,000 new enrollees who joined the program this year, for a total enrollment of 14,297. As with Year One, the overwhelming majority of the new enrollees — 83% — did not attend public school in the prior year.

Either way, the program has to date mostly provided vouchers to students who are not moving over from public schools. These results fit a consistent pattern in other similar statewide voucher programs nationwide. Most of the public cash doled out winds up boosting the bank accounts of families who were never in the public school system to begin with.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30511343

A doctor who had confirmed the diagnosis was apologetic but insistent: the state’s laws meant he could be fined or jailed if he performed an abortion. In the wake of the US supreme court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Arkansas activated a so-called trigger law that made all abortion illegal except if a woman was in an acute medical emergency and facing death. There are no other exceptions: not for rape victims, minors or fatal fetal anomalies.

A failed petition to ban voting machines in Saline County has been referred to an ethics committee after issues were found with the way signatures for the petition were collected. Members of the Arkansas Legislature made the decision Monday at a Joint Performance Review Committee Meeting.

The ballot measure would have mandated votes in the county be made without a machine and counted by hand. Restore Election Integrity Arkansas is led in part by Col. Conrad Reynolds, who told Little Rock Public Radio before that he does not trust voting machines.

Reynolds has said voting machines could be flipping votes to select more moderate Republicans over more conservative candidates. Little Rock Public Radio has not been able to verify these claims, and critics of hand counting say its expensive, costly and prone to error.

The legislators brought up a Facebook post by a man named Joshua James, whose profile says he lives in New Mexico. James posted on Facebook in July “The Arkansas PAPER BALLOT initiative is in need of 15-20 full time signature gatherers for 2 weeks.”

My personal favorite part :

The legislative committee Monday also alleged that canvassers or representatives from the group may have been altering documents. Under each signature page the canvassers collected, the address was blacked out and replaced with the same Conway hotel address. Two notaries testified that they did not see the alterations to the documents when they notarized them.

Sen. Jonathan Dismang, R-Beebe, called the situation ironic since the argument for paper ballots is that they are more secure : “The same group that wants paper ballots is okay with altering notarized documents before submission.”

The Arkansas Supreme Court has ordered the secretary of state’s office to continue counting signatures for an amendment to expand medical marijuana.

The high court on Wednesday ordered the secretary of state to continue validating roughly 18,000 signatures collected to put the amendment on the ballot. Those signatures had previously been thrown out over a paperwork issue, meaning votes on the amendment in November wouldn’t count.

Wednesday's order says Thurston must continue counting signatures until slightly exceeding the threshold of 90,704 signatures needed to place proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot. Earlier this week, Thurston said some signatures collected during a 30-day "cure period" in August should not be counted, meaning the amendment didn't meet the threshold. The group behind the amendment filed a lawsuit challenging the decision on Tuesday.

The signatures were disqualified because they were collected by paid canvassers. The group behind the amendment, Arkansans for Patient Access, hired a third-party company to then hire paid signature-gatherers. Representatives for the company, instead of the amendment sponsor, then signed off on some required paperwork for canvassers, in violation of state law.

Morgan Nick was six years old when she was abducted from a baseball field in Alma in June 1995. In a news conference Tuesday, Alma Police Chief Jeff Horner said a former person of interest in the case, Billy Jack Lincks, is now the main suspect in Nick’s abduction.

“The most important thing here is Morgan is still missing, but we’ve reached a point where we can concentrate on one suspect to determine the circumstances surrounding Morgan’s abduction,” he said.

Lincks died in 2000 while serving a prison term for sexual indecency with a child. He attempted to abduct a child about 12 weeks after Nick’s disappearance, about eight miles away from where she was last seen.

Arkansas sued YouTube and parent company Alphabet on Monday, saying the video-sharing platform is made deliberately addictive and fueling a mental health crisis among youth in the state.

Attorney General Tim Griffin’s office filed the lawsuit in state court, accusing them of violating the state’s deceptive trade practices and public nuisance laws. The lawsuit claims the site is addictive and has resulted in the state spending millions on expanded mental health and other services for young people.

In addition to tossing the abortion amendment previously.

A measure looking to further open medical marijuana access in Arkansas looks to now be off the November 2024 ballot.

Officials with Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston’s office sent a notice to Arkansans for Patient Access on Monday stating that the qualified signatures submitted during the extra “curing” period following the original deadline were not enough to place the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment in front of voters. Arkansas medical marijuana sales broke all records for 2023

The letter from Thurston’s office stated that 10,521 of the new submissions “were deemed valid” and would be combined to the earlier total. However, the letter continued, that combined amount would only be 88,040, which falls below the threshold set for the November ballot of 90,704.

Leaders with Arkansans for Patient Access claim that the group had far surpassed the ballot threshold, saying they had submitted more than 150,000 signatures that came from every county in Arkansas.

Youtube link.

Description :

Arkansas is emerging as a key player in U.S. lithium production, with major investments from companies like Exxon Mobil, Albemarle and Standard Lithium. The state’s lithium-rich brine in the Smackover Formation holds the potential to power millions of EVs and reshape energy storage. But, challenges like volatile lithium prices and unproven direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology could impact its growth. CNBC visited Magnolia and El Dorado, Arkansas to explore why the state is emerging as a key player in the lithium market and to examine the economic, technological, and strategic impacts of its extraction initiatives.

The annual Six Bridges Book Festival, hosted by the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), is taking place across Little Rock libraries next week.

This year’s program runs from September 22 through the 29th and features a range of events, such as writing and cooking workshops, author talks and social gatherings.

An Arkansas lawmaker on Tuesday renewed his vow to file legislation to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs at the state’s colleges and universities.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Jonesboro Republican and co-chair of the Arkansas Legislative Council’s Higher Education subcommittee, last August requested a DEI study to be completed by the end of 2024 with the intention of proposing legislation during the 2025 legislative session.

Sullivan announced the conclusion of the study Tuesday at the subcommittee’s meeting on Arkansas State University’s Jonesboro campus, though no formal report was presented. During a brief three-minute discussion, Sullivan said officials would post links online to legislation in Florida and Texas that will be used as models for an Arkansas bill in 2025.

Arkansans would be able to carry guns at a number of new locations, including school campuses and bus stops, under potential bills to be introduced in next year’s legislative session.

Arkansas is a “constitutional carry” state, in which licenses are not required for residents to legally carry a firearm, either openly or concealed. Despite that, some conflicts exist with federal gun laws, especially surrounding certain public facilities like schools.

One change would allow Arkansans to carry firearms onto the campuses of K-12 schools. Little Rock resident Anna Morshedi spoke against it, noting a fatal mass shooting at a Georgia high school had taken place just hours before Wednesday’s discussion.

At a rate of nearly 19%, Arkansas has the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the nation, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released Wednesday.

The annual study, which was conducted by the USDA’s Economic Research Service, found that Arkansas was one of seven states where the prevalence of food insecurity surpassed the national average of 13.5% in 2023, an increase from 12.8% in 2022.

Arkansas was one of six states where the prevalence of very low food insecurity was higher than the national average of 5.1%, according to the report. State level data was calculated using estimates for the 3-year period of 2021-2023, lead author Matthew Rabbitt said during a webinar Wednesday.

The court ruling states that the group Arkansans For Limited Government (AFLG) failed to meet the stated guidelines for submitting documentation that paid canvassers had been trained on state election laws, meaning signatures gathered by those canvassers could not be considered for the total required.

The future of a ballot initiative to restore abortion rights in Arkansas could come down to just who counts as a “sponsor” signing a piece of compliance paperwork about paid canvassers. But court filings last week suggest that Secretary of State John Thurston is applying the rules on that issue in very different and contradictory ways, preemptively striking down the abortion petition, while allowing the very same issue to slide for petitions regarding a casino license and medical marijuana, both of which also used paid canvassers.

There's a lot more information in the article but I didn't want to quote the entire thing : )