More than 50 people in northeast Arkansas were arrested on Tuesday on firearms and drug charges in a major federal investigation that lasted a year and a half, U.S. prosecutors said.
The governing board of Arkansas’s capital city on Tuesday adopted an ordinance forbidding discrimination against gays and transgender people in municipal hiring, setting the stage for a legal confrontation with the state government which has banned such regulations.
Lawmakers in the Republican-dominated statehouses of Indiana and Arkansas on Thursday approved fixes to religion acts that had provoked a storm of criticism from rights groups and big U.S. companies because the measures were seen as allowing for discrimination against gays.
Indiana Republicans pledged on Monday to clarify a new "religious freedom" law, while similar proposals stalled in Georgia and North Carolina after businesses and activists said such measures could be used to discriminate against gays.
U.S. authorities are considering imposing tougher restrictions in Arkansas to contain a virulent strain of avian flu in the heart of America's poultry region in a bid to minimize international trade disruptions and contain the virus.
Former President Bill Clinton returned to Arkansas on Monday for two days of rallies aimed at energizing Democratic voters in state political races including a U.S. Senate contest seen as crucial to maintaining the party's control of that chamber.
U.S. fast-food workers staged protests in some 150 cities on Thursday in a fight for higher pay, and organizers said more than 450 were arrested from Manhattan's Times Square to Los Angeles.
