Arkansas
Arkansas' Sanders, Cotton promote Trump's candidacy in RNC speeches • Arkansas Advocate
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton praised former President Donald Trump’s leadership and compassion in short speeches Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention.
Cotton’s remarks in Milwaukee focused on immigration. He criticized President Joe Biden’s immigration policies and said Trump’s policies during his term in office made the United States more secure.
“Our choice is a border secure for everyone or Biden’s open border,” he told the crowd in the FiServ Forum.
Cotton was one of several speakers Tuesday who contrasted Trump’s border and foreign policies with that of the Biden administration.
“Donald Trump will secure our border once again,” Cotton said. “Donald Trump will protect America once again.”
Sanders, who was Trump’s press secretary from 2017 to 2019, spoke about how she was vilified by some in the media and denied service at a restaurant, saying that Trump defended her and told her, “They attack you because you’re good at your job.”
“That’s the Donald Trump I know and will always respect,” she said.
“The left doesn’t care about empowering women,” Sanders said, repeating a statement she’s made before that they “can’t even tell you what a woman is.”
“President Trump believes in empowering every American, and that our country is worth fighting for,” she said.
Under Trump, she said, “America was safer. The world was safer. It felt like the next generation would have a chance at the American Dream. President Trump did the job that Kamala won’t and Joe Biden simply can’t. Every American knows we were better off under President Trump…”
Sanders, elected governor in 2022 at age 40, took a swipe at Biden’s age when she recalled taking her 4-year-old son Huck to “Bring Your Kid to Work Day” at the White House “— much like Jill now drags Joe to Bring Your Husband to Work Day.”
Sanders, whose father Mike Huckabee is a Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor, ended her remarks with religious tones that echoed other speakers.
“We are not called to stand still in the face of great danger. You and I were put on this earth, at this moment in time, to charge boldly ahead. We can’t know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future in His hands.”
Referring to Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump, she said God spared him “because God isn’t finished with him yet.
“He isn’t finished with America yet either. With God as our Guide, and President Trump back in the White House, we will show the world that America is the place where freedom reigns and liberty will never die.”
LITTLE ROCK (KATV) — A major milestone has been reached in Arkansas’ highly anticipated lithium boom—its first customers.
Smackover Lithium has secured the first binding offtake agreement with a commercial client for lithium extracted in Arkansas.
“So this lithium from Arkansas will find its way into global markets, ex China,” said Jesse Edmondson, Standard Lithium’s director of government relations.
Commodity trading firm Trafigura Trading has just signed a 10-year agreement to buy 8,000 metric tonnes of battery-quality lithium carbonate per year from Smackover Lithium’s South West Arkansas Project, a joint venture between Standard Lithium and Equinor, a Norwegian company.
For context, the U.S. as a whole only produces about 5,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium a year.
“The SWA project, once in full production, will produce 22,500 tonnes per year,” Edmondson said. “So this 8,000-tonne-per-year agreement is significant, right? That’s over a third of our annual offtake.”
Last year, Standard Lithium received a $225 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to advance lithium extraction from the Smackover Formation, a briny aquifer beneath southern Arkansas that many hail as what could be America’s best domestic source of the critical mineral.
Beating companies like Chevron and Exxon to the punch, Standard Lithium pioneered direct lithium extraction and since 2020 has operated a demo plant in El Dorado. The company is building a larger facility in Lafayette County that is set to begin operation in 2028.
“We’ve got the only proven technology that works in the Smackover that’s been done through our commercial demonstration plant in El Dorado since May of 2020. And really that has been the proving ground which has unlocked a lot of the federal opportunities for us. So we’re the largest recipient of a DOE grant in the critical mineral space in this hemisphere,” Edmondson told KATV.
“So [we’re] really excited to bring lithium production to the state of Arkansas and really back to the United States. The U.S. used to be a leader in lithium production 40, 50 years ago. So it’s time to reclaim that status,” he said.
The market price of a tonne of battery-grade lithium is volatile, but has recently ranged between $10,000 to $12,000, so the value of what Standard Lithium alone is expected to produce could exceed a quarter of a billion dollars annually.
That’s not counting what Exxon, Chevron, and other companies may produce once they get up and running.
Arkansas
Congressional subcommittee to hold hearing in Little Rock on ‘failures’ of local housing authority | Arkansas Democrat Gazette
Joseph Flaherty
Joseph Flaherty covers the city of Little Rock for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. A graduate of Middlebury College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, he has worked for the newspaper since 2020.
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