Governor Mike Beebe yesterday officially issued the call for a special session of the state legislature. The Federal Reserve Bank released its quarterly Burgundy Book, which provides some insight into the health of the state's economy. hundreds of volunteers associated with World Changers are descending upon Fort Smith to help with some repairs to homes in the city. And the city of Fayetteville recently released a new Web application to help city residents find city information applicable to where they live in the city.
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The Principal Fellows program at the U of A yesterday announced it had received a $1.9 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation. A recent report suggests that in coming years, the northwest Arkansas economy will be among the fastest growing in the U.S.. And the Bentonville City Council gets ready to fill two vacancies.

UA Professor Angie Maxwell argues that the attention the South received throughout the 20th century in regards to three particular events has shaped the Southern Identity that exists yet today. She discusses her book The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiorty, and the the Politics of Whiteness with Ozarks’ Christina Karnatz.
Latest Edition of Ozarks at Large
July 4th Weekend, 2014
For this holiday weekend we listen again to music recorded inside Firmin-Garner Performance Studio during the first six months of 2014. We hear from:
Pearl Brick
Cletus Got Shot
Sweetwater Gypsies
Isayah Wofford
The Riverblenders
Xcluded
Sons of Otis Malone
Finvarra's Wren
Dick Johnson
Elephant Revival
And a weekend update of things to do from Becca Martin Brown from Northwest Arkansas Newspapers.
The Ozarks Genealogical Society's annual conference is scheduled for Sept. 13-14 in Springfield, Missouri, and the featured speaker is D. Joshua Taylor (http://www.djoshuataylor.com).
The first event outside of Eureka Springs for the Creative Energy Project will bring yarn, and plenty of it, to Bentonville.
Link: For more about Yarnology or the Creative Energy Project, www.creativeenergyproject.com
Officials with hunger relief organizations in Arkansas express concern over recent efforts to remove SNAP funding from the federal Farm Bill. Central Arkansas leaders request information from ExxonMobil regarding a stretch of pipeline in the Lake Maumelle Watershed. The Arkansas House and Senate Education Committees discuss the new Common Core curriculum, set to take effect when schools start in about a month. And the Fayetteville Public Library board of directors moves forward with an offer to purchase the former City Hospital property.
"Cut Me Loose" by T Model Ford
In the first of our series on the deployment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in Arkansas, Cynthia Crone, the state’s insurance department deputy commissioner, explains the fundamentals, including getting an early look at Arkansas’s insurance exchange, now referred to as marketplace.
Early next month the organization called the Military Order of the Purple Heart of the U.S.A. Inc. will hold its annual convention in Rogers. We talked to John Bircher, National Spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart.
Link: To learn more about the Military Order of the Purple Heart, visit www.purpleheart.org