The Arkansas House
voted today to override Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe’s veto of the earliest abortion ban in the nation, 12 weeks of pregnancy, just weeks after voting to override a similar veto on a law banning abortions after 20 weeks.
[more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Mar 6, 2013 -
63 comments
JERICHO, Ark. — It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn't hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps. The response from cops?
They shot him. Right there in court.
posted by finite
on Sep 3, 2009 -
151 comments
Be a hero on your own time (VIDEO) When McDonald's employee Nigel Haskett
interceded to stop a man who was beating a woman in the restaurant, the assailant went outside, retrieved a gun from his car and shot Haskett – “multiple times,” as the employee stood at the door to keep the assailant from re-entering the restaurant. $300,000 in medical bills later, McDonald's insurance says no dice: "we have denied this claim in its entirety as it is our opinion that Mr. Haskett's injuries did not arise out of or within the course and scope of his employment."
posted by thisisdrew
on Feb 19, 2009 -
104 comments
Every One That Hates Billy....” It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”
Billy, busy building a miniature house, didn’t see it coming: the boy hit him so hard in the left cheek that he briefly lost consciousness. [His mother] remembers the family dentist sewing up the inside of Billy’s cheek, and a school official refusing to call the police, saying it looked like Billy got what he deserved.
[more inside]
posted by orthogonality
on Mar 23, 2008 -
267 comments
Through a Lens Darkly - on September 4, 1957, when 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford tried to enter Little Rock Central High, she was blocked by the National Guard and surrounded by a screaming mob of 250:
"Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her.
Photos. Dramatic
news footage. Ernest Green, another of the Little Rock 9
recalls the first day of school.
[more inside]
posted by madamjujujive
on Sep 25, 2007 -
48 comments
"I am under censure for mentioning numbers...." "I am instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD... but I am NOT to say that these Ordovician rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old."
Essentially, they are not allowing Bob to teach a certain set of scientific data in order to protect their ability to provide students the good science curriculum they do teach. The directors... have heard from them more than enough times that teaching evolution would be "political suicide".
In Arkansas,
even supporters of teaching evolution feel they must
hide, obfuscate, and water-down evolution.
posted by orthogonality
on Mar 23, 2006 -
111 comments
Mirrors. Documentarian
Bruce Jackson found "a group of about two hundred 3x4" identification photographs made between 1914 and 1937... in a drawer in the Arkansas penitentiary in the summer of 1975"; this (
slideshow) is the online record of an exhibition.
It is impossible to look at these images and not think about the persons depicted there. But, save for one fact that is a given—and what we find in or infer from these images—we know nothing about those persons, and never will. The given is that they are all prisoners: for whatever reason, they have been deprived of liberty, the single piece of enduring proof of which is the image at which we presently gaze. The conclusions we draw, the feelings we have, the narratives we suppose—they are all our own. The images are mirrors, resonating with aspects of our selves we perhaps never before encountered.
Many of them are haunting;
this one has been turned by time into a work of art. (Via
Ramage.)
posted by languagehat
on Dec 21, 2004 -
34 comments
Junkscience: Top Ten "Most Embarrassing Moments" of 2004 Whoops: "10. University of Arkansas researchers attacked the Atkins Diet in January with a report linking a high-carbohydrate diet with weight loss, saying it was possible to lose weight without cutting calories and without exercising. What they didn’t reveal, however, was that the study subjects who lost weight actually ate 400-600 calories per day less than those who didn’t lose weight." I don't see the big deal behind number 6.
posted by skallas
on Dec 5, 2004 -
45 comments
Sticking to the gay stuff: The ACLU is threatening legal action against a middle school in Arkansas whose administrators have gone to extraordinary lengths to punish a student for being gay, including outing him to his parents, forcing him to read passages of the Bible, calling him "abnormal" and "unnatural," and disciplining him for mentioning between classes to a female friend that he thought another boy was cute.
(via CalPundit) [more inside]
posted by grrarrgh00
on Mar 16, 2003 -
29 comments
