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A small, quiet Arkansas town home to just 11,100 people is set to become the epicenter of the US 'white gold' boom. Magnolia, a blue-collar town in the state's southern region, was once a locus for oil but is on track to become a major producer of lithium, dubbed 'white gold' because of its soft, silvery-white look and the fact it powers most modern tech - from cellphones to laptops and electric cars. Exxon Mobil is planning to build one of the world’s largest lithium processing facilities near the town, with a capacity to produce 75,000 to 100,000 metric tons...

Chip and Joanna Gaines of HGTV "Fixer Upper" fame donated $1,000 on Wednesday to Shannon Braun's campaign for the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District (GCISD) School Board - a candidate who is against critical race theory, The Dallas Morning News reported. Critical race theory is the notion that traditional liberal approaches to dealing with racial inequalities need to be reconsidered because laws favor white supremacy. Braun, who is Chip Gaines's sister, is running in the June 5 runoff election against incumbent trustee Mindy McClure. ... In 2017, it was reported that the Gaines family attended a church known for its anti-LGBTQ+...

Soon, Joanna Gaines’ "perfect" biscuits will be available to buy online, according to reports. The Magnolia co-founder and lifestyle guru revealed the recipe for her biscuits in January on her cooking show "Magnolia Table." But if cooking isn’t your thing, Magnolia will be selling frozen biscuit dough starting April 1, Travel and Leisure reported Wednesday. According to the website, fans can buy the frozen dough from the Magnolia website and it will be shipped from the Gaines’ restaurant, Magnolia Table. Travel and Leisure reported that a dozen frozen biscuits cost $25, plus another $15 for shipping.

The south facade of the White House will undergo a dramatic change this week: the historic Jackson Magnolia, a tree that has been in place since the 1800s, is scheduled to be cut down and removed. The enormous magnolia, one of three on the west side of the White House and the oldest on the White House grounds, extends from the ground floor, up past the front of the windows of the State Dining Room on the first floor and beyond the second-level executive residence. The tree has had a long and storied life, yet has now been deemed too...

"Fixer Upper" star Chip Gaines is being sued by two former business partners in a million-dollar fraud lawsuit. According to court documents obtained by KWTX, John L. Lewis and Richard L. Clark, former co-owners of Magnolia Realty, claim Gaines bought them out of the company two days before HGTV picked up "Fixer Upper" which "prominently featured the 'Magnolia' brand name." Lewis and Clark filed their 24-page lawsuit Wednesday in state district court in Waco, Texas, and are seeking more than $1 million in damages and non-monetary relief, KWTX reports. The scorned business partners say Gaines bought their shares of Magnolia...

Chip and Joanna Gaines are hot right now... but they’re also in the hot seat. The entrepreneurial couple’s HGTV show Fixer Upper has captivated the hearts of a diverse set of viewers, garnering them much media recognition. But after an article unearthed the pro-traditional marriage position of the Gaines’ pastor, fans are calling for the couple to reveal their own stance on the issue. While running Magnolia, their home goods and construction business, Chip and Joanna Gaines were contacted by HGTV about the possibility of creating a home transformation show. In 2013, that dream became a reality with Fixer Upper.

PASTOR PATRINELL WRIGHT was just a 20-year-old country girl from Carthage, Texas, who didn’t know what she was getting into when she migrated to Seattle in 1964. She grew up one of seven children in the Walnut Grove community, to be exact, a nearby farming enclave designated for blacks. That’s how it was in Southern towns back then. If you were black, you knew where you belonged, and it sure wasn’t around white people, unless you happened to be working for them. Seattle had its own form of segregation, with blacks clustered mainly in the city’s Central District because of...

Muhammad Fethullah Gulen is a Turkish Islamist, writer and preacher with a secret plan for bringing Shariah law to America. Arguably Turkey's most influential spiritual leader of the past 50 years, Gulen left that country in the late 1990s and now directs his cult-like Islamic movement from a guarded compound in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Part of his empire consists of a thriving network of more than 140 charter schools in 26 states that sell themselves to parents as a secular and more academically rigorous alternative to public schools. As the second largest chain of charter schools in the...

Columbia County, Ark. — There’s no sign of it here in Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’ insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective...

Magnolia-area residents took a close look at Southwestern Energy's Fayetteville Shale operations in Faulkner County on Wednesday. *BREAK* The interest in SWN stems from the company's involvement with oil exploration in the Lower Smackover Brown Dense, a rock formation under South Arkansas and North Louisiana. Southwestern Energy has just begun drilling the second of a dozen test wells into the Brown Dense to learn if marketable amounts of oil can be produced. Southwestern Energy is the largest driller of natural gas wells in the Fayetteville Shale of North Central Arkansas. It plans to use the same rock fracturing and horizontal...

Need help from you arborist FReepers in identifying what kind of tree this is. Right now it's got a bunch of pussywillow-esque buds on it, but from what I've seen online of pussywillows they look more like bushes, not trees. During the fall it produced a weird-looking pod of some sort. Sorry, don't have a photo of that.

Not many birds or critters around right now, I have to go looking for new things to shoot at. These are seed cones on a Southern Magnolia tree.

The Southern belles sip from fine antique china on a linen-covered table, lamenting that their husbands can hardly squeeze into their Confederate costumes for Pilgrimage season. Elizabeth Boggess, her sister Anne McNeil, and Nancy Williams are typical of this small town on the shore of the Mississippi River, a place that hovers in a dreamy antebellum bubble as if the Civil War were yet to come.In this politically correct era, when the Walt Disney Company buries its 1946 "Song of the South" because of racist overtones, the town - and this group of Natchez faithfuls - are anachronisms in antique...

The owner of the towboat whose barge collapsed the Interstate 40 bridge near Webbers Falls has asked a federal court to limit its liability. The injured and the families of the 14 people killed in the May 26 bridge collapse would be unable to receive more than a combined total of about $1.2 million for their losses if a judge approves the petition filed Monday by Magnolia Marine Transport Co. If the petition succeeds, that total also would apply in case the state and federal governments seek monetary damages for the bridge. "We filed a petition for exoneration and/or...