With the dog days of summer just ahead, there is a new place in town to head to when you need a cool down. The Rotary Splashpad at Spring Lake Park was made official with a ribbon-cutting Thursday but has already been attracting people to get their splash on.  Last weekend, 300 children used...

GRAPEVINE, Texas—The Boy Scouts of America threw open its ranks Thursday to gay Scouts but not gay Scout leaders—a fiercely contested compromise that some warned could fracture the organization and lead to mass defections of members and donors. Of the roughly 1,400 voting members of the...

A federal judge has denied a request by a loyal Tony Alamo follower to delay a hearing concerning ownership of six Fort Smith, Ark., properties associated with the controversial ministry. U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Bryant ruled last month that the properties could be sold by the U.S. Marshals Serv...

Imprisoned evangelist Tony Alamo was moved recently from a federal prison in Marion, Ill., to the Bureau of Prisons Transfer Facility in Oklahoma City. Federal prison officials won’t say why Alamo, whose given name is Bernie LaZar Hoffman, was moved or where his final destination might be. A...

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama sought Thursday to advance the U.S. beyond the unrelenting war effort of the past dozen years, defining a narrower terror threat from smaller networks and homegrown extremists rather than the grandiose plots of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. In a lengthy a...

A few good men spent the last 24 days walking 1,800 miles southwest, carrying American flags in honor of men and women who carry much more. The group arrived Thursday afternoon in Texarkana, Ark., having accomplished 90 percent of their 2,000-mile goal as they reached the last 10 percent of their t...

A 24-year-old Nashville, Ark., man has been arrested for negligent homicide for allegedly causing a three-car crash that killed a Nashville couple in Hope, Ark.  Andrew Whitaker of Nashville was arrested on two counts of negligent homicide by Nashville police at the request of the Hope Police...

Investigating a pickup abandoned in a pasture and stuck in mud uncovered a methamphetamine lab and brought about the arrest of suspects in burglaries in Hempstead and Nevada counties. Barry Leon Richardson, 58, and Ursula Schlemmer, 46, were arrested Wednesday morning in a pasture near state Highwa...

Little River and Sevier County 4-H Clubs will be collecting items to help Moore, Okla., tornado victims. “Prayers always help, but these people have physical needs that you can help supply,” said Roxie Jones, administrative support supervisor for the Little River County Extension Servic...

Poodle Patch Rescue Inc. will host a Meet & Greet for adoptable pets from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at PetSmart. All of the rescue agencies’ pets have been in private foster homes, so they are socialized and evaluated. They have also been house trained and spayed or neutered, vaccinated...

NEW BOSTON, Texas—The Dogwood Garden Club and Bowie County Master Gardeners will host an Agriculture and Horticulture Show next month. Registration will be at 9 a.m. June 8 at the T&P Trailhead Park in New Boston. Presentations will start at 10 a.m. Gardening enthusiasts are invited to b...

HOT SPRINGS, Ark.—The former Majestic Hotel in Hot Springs is up for sale. The hotel closed in 2006 after serving customers for more than a century and through the bathhouse heyday. The Sentinel-Record reports that the hotel includes more than five acres at the intersection of Park and Centr...

TULSA, Okla.—A preliminary report on a Northeast Oklahoma boat crash that killed two University of Arkansas students says excessive speed, driver inattention and alcohol use contributed to the accident. Grand River Dam Authority police said in a report Wednesday that the driver of a 21-foot b...

• A fish dinner fundraiser with all the trimmings will be 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at McNab City Park, 3630 Arkansas Highway 344 S. Plate prices are $7.50 for all catfish, $6.50 for catfish and buffalo or $5.50 for all-bone buffalo. Proceeds will be used for McNab Community Center. Delivery i...

Eight of 15 cities with the fastest growth in the United States are in Texas, according to the latest data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.  Estimates released Thursday also show that half of those cities in the nation with the largest total population increases are in Texas. And Houston ad...

LITTLE ROCK—Arkansas’ two largest university systems voted Thursday to ban faculty and staff from carrying concealed handguns on campus, joining a growing number of schools in the state opting out of a new law allowing the firearms. The University of Arkansas and Arkansas State Universi...

LITTLE ROCK—State police have identified a man accused of scaling a fence at the Arkansas Governor’s  Mansion and entering the grounds. State police spokesman Bill Sadler says 32-year-old Ramon Taylor of Little Rock climbed the fence at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday and broke into a ci...

NACOGDOCHES, Texas—A man who claimed self-defense has been sentenced to life in prison for grabbing a razor and slitting the throat of an East Texas barber during a robbery. Jurors in Nacogdoches (na-kuh-DOH’-chihs) earlier convicted Timothy Blanton of Garrison of aggravated robbery. Th...

TYLER, Texas—An East Texas lawyer convicted in a mail and medical fraud scheme has been sentenced to more than three years in prison.  A federal judge in Tyler on Wednesday also ordered 55-year-old Steven Rushing of Longview to repay more than $929,000. Rushing in February pleaded guilty...

Today is Friday, May 24, the 144th day of 2013. There are 221 days left in the year.  Today’s Highlight in History: On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge, linking Brooklyn and Manhattan, was dedicated by President Chester Alan Arthur and New York Gov. Grover Cleveland.  On this dat...

DALLAS—A father who told two of his sons to pretend they were swimming as he drowned them in a Dallas-area creek was sentenced to death on Thursday. The Dallas County jury took about 3 1/2 hours to sentence Naim Rasool Muhammad. The same jury had taken less than 10 minutes to find Muhammad gu...

• Solar Impulse, piloted by André Borschberg, is pushed onto the tarmac prior to the second leg of the 2013 Across America mission, at dawn, Wednesday at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. The plane’s creators, Bertrand Piccard and Borschberg, said the trip is the first a...

LITTLE ROCK—Arkansas Medicaid officials said Thursday the state will submit its request to use federal money to purchase private insurance for thousands of low-income residents by August. Department of Human Services Director John Selig told lawmakers that the state would draft its waiver nex...

LITTLE ROCK—Longtime music industry figure and Arkansas native Bill Carter is set for a speaking engagement in Little Rock. Carter is to speak June 5 as part of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies’ Legacies and Lunch series. Carter grew up in Rector and built his career as an attorn...

Ever wonder what it would feel like to suddenly wake up in another universe? You could find out, perhaps, by joining the next space mission to another galaxy, or, slightly easier, you could go to your local multiplex and watch “Fast & Furious 6” without having seen the first five mo...

“Daring” isn’t a word you would use very much to describe 2011’s “The Hangover Part II,” the disappointingly lazy, beat-for-beat rehash of the wild and wildly successful original “Hangover” from 2009. And yet, here we are with “The Hangover Part...

NEW YORK—The idea of Michael Douglas playing Liberace might seem nearly as outrageous as Liberace himself. Liberace, forever hailed as “Mr. Showmanship,” was the excess-to-the-max pianist-personality whose onstage and offstage extravagance were legendary, and who wowed audiences i...

HUSBY, Sweden—Some 200 youths hurled rocks at police and set cars ablaze in a largely immigrant suburb of Stockholm on Tuesday, the second day of rioting triggered by the fatal police shooting of a man wielding a knife.  Dozens of windows were smashed, 10 cars and several containers were...

VATICAN CITY—El Salvador’s president gave Pope Francis a relic of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero on Thursday amid mounting indications that the Vatican might soon move to beatify him. President Mauricio Funes flew from El Salvador to Rome for a 12-minute meeting with Francis to en...

MOORE, Okla.—A massive tornado was carving its way through town. There was no time to hesitate. LaTisha Garcia had to get to her children. ¶ And so she raced against the storm. She had 30 miles to cover from her job in Edmond to Plaza Towers Elementary School, where her 8-year-old daughte...

WASHINGTON—Dismissing a veto threat from President Barack Obama, lawmakers in the House passed legislation that links student loan rates to the ups and downs of the financial markets in a vote largely along party lines. The Republican-backed bill would allow students to dodge a scheduled rate...

NEW YORK—For decades, people have been getting rid of cockroaches by setting out bait mixed with poison. But in the late 1980s, in an apartment test kitchen in Florida, something went very wrong. A killer product stopped working. Cockroach populations there kept rising. Mystified researchers...

DENVER—In the most prominent challenge of its kind, Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. asked a federal appeals court Thursday for an exemption from part of the federal health care law that requires it to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill. The Oklahoma City-ba...

LONDON—A man seen with bloody hands wielding a butcher knife after the killing of a British soldier on the streets of London was described as a convert to Islam who took part in demonstrations with a banned radical group, two Muslim hard-liners said Thursday. Police raided houses in connectio...

WASHINGTON—Reading, writing, arithmetic—and PE?  The prestigious Institute of Medicine is recommending that schools provide opportunities for at least 60 minutes of physical activity each day for students and that PE become a core subject. The report, released Thursday, says only...

CLEVELAND—The man who famously put down his Big Mac to help rescue three women held captive for years in a Cleveland house will get free McDonald’s for the next year, a company spokeswoman confirmed Thursday. Local franchisees in Charles Ramsey’s neighborhood have offered him free...

It’s almost a cliche. First, someone talking about blacks makes reference to fried chicken, watermelon, monkeys or dogs—or even uses the indefensible N-word. Then, along with the inevitable apology, comes the kicker: I’m not racist. The latest denial is from golfer Sergio Garcia....