Arkansas

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Asa Hutchinson said Saturday that the campaign manager for his beleaguered bid for the Republican presidential nomination is departing, but the former Arkansas governor said he is not dropping out of the crowded race.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday.

U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) — An enslaved man who fled Arkansas in 1841 seeking freedom in Canada, only to be forcibly returned to the U.S., has been honored with a historical marker and a new street sign in the city where he once labored.

(AP) --- The body of a Missouri emergency room doctor who has been missing for more than a week has been found in northwest Arkansas, his brother told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Dr. John Forsyth was last heard from in text messages around 7 a.m. May 21. His brother, Richard Forsyth, said authorities called the family Tuesday night to say his brother was found deceased. He said he and other family members were waiting for more details from detectives.

Messages left with the Missouri State Highway Patrol were not immediately returned.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Asa Hutchinson, who spent two terms as governor of Arkansas, will seek the Republican presidential nomination, positioning himself as an alternative to Donald Trump just days after the former president was indicted by a grand jury in New York.

In an interview that aired Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Hutchinson said Trump should drop out of the race, arguing “the office is more important than any individual person.”

WYNNE, Ark. (AP) — Residents across a wide swath of the South and Midwest on Sunday raced to assess the destruction wreaked by storms that dropped possibly dozens of tornadoes and killed at least 27 people in small towns and big cities, as severe weather moved into parts of the Northeast.

Earlier storms tore a path through the Arkansas capital, collapsing the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois and stunning people throughout the region Saturday with the damage’s scope.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — A monster storm system tore through the South and Midwest on Friday, spawning deadly tornadoes that shredded homes and shopping centers in Arkansas and collapsed a theater roof during a heavy metal concert in Illinois.

At least one person was killed and more than two dozen were hurt, some critically, in the Little Rock area, authorities said. The town of Wynne in northeastern Arkansas was also devastated, and officials reported two dead there, along with destroyed homes and people trapped in the debris.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders painted a dystopian portrait of the country in her rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, leaning heavily into Republican culture war issues and accusing Biden of pursuing “woke fantasies.”

Speaking from the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Sanders sounded a lot like her former boss, Donald Trump, as she warned of a nation whose ideals are under attack and whose citizens are fighting for their freedoms.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, once a White House press secretary for President Donald Trump, is set to return to the national stage when she delivers the GOP response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

Sanders, 40, is giving the speech Tuesday night less than a month after being sworn in as the first female governor of Arkansas. The daughter of former Gov. Mike Huckabee, she is also the first Arkansan to deliver the response to a president’s State of the Union since Bill Clinton as governor in 1985.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Free-speech advocates asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn a federal appeals court ruling that upheld an Arkansas law requiring state contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel.

Contractors that don’t sign the pledge must reduce their fees by 20%. Republican legislators who drafted the 2017 law have said it was not prompted by a specific incident in the state.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of the Arkansas Times, a Little Rock-based alternative weekly newspaper.