The Arkansas Supreme Court stayed efforts to depose to lawmakers and seek documents related to the state's ban on local measures banning discrimination against LGBT people.

The Walton Family Foundation has offered a grant of nearly $100,000 to study the future options for Lake Bella Vista and its dam. The dam was declared failed in 2008 after it was topped by flooding. The city originally planned to rebuild the dam using FEMA disaster funds, but ran into opposition from Friends of Little Sugar Creek, an organization that wants to see the dam removed. The grant from WFF will go to the Watershed Conservation Resources Center and Ecological Design Group.

Johnson County residents heard a pitch from Jason Henson, Arkansas's top industrial swine breeder, October 19th, who plans to build an 18,000-head swine breeding confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) on the Arkansas River Watershed just outside of the town of Hartman. This will be Henson's second hog factory farm. In 2013 he opened his first swine breeding CAFO in Newton County on the Buffalo National River Watershed, which certain conservationists and recreationists oppose. Henson supplies

This weekend downtown Springdale hosts a new festival that is an Ozarks take on a fall tradition. Ozarktober Fest begins tonight with a train ride and continues through Sunday afternoon with music, hayrides and beer.

Local businesses that have popped up along Government Avenue in south Fayetteville across from the Walmart Neighborhood Market are taking up the name Quicktown, but the nickname is not new. The area was called Quicktown nearly a hundred years ago when a man named James Quick sold more than a dozen parcels of land in that part of town creating one of Fayetteville's first suburbs in the 1880s.

Apple Seeds began 12 years ago as a program initiated by Ozark Natural Foods. The program has grown into a nonprofit organization that now provides school garden education to thousands of Northwest Arkansas students. In 2014, the group broke ground on a teaching farm near Ozark Natural Foods and this year Apple Seeds established a new teaching farm at Fayetteville’s Gulley Park.

Pastor Clint Schnekloth discusses the 500th anniversary of The Reformation. Good Shepherd Lutheran Church will observe the anniversary with a guest lecture Friday morning at 10:30 on the University of Arkansas campus in the Graduate Education Auditorium, a dinner Saturday night at the church and services Sunday. Also, Sunday afternoon at 4:00 First Presbyterian Church in Bentonville, on J Street, will host a Reformation Hymn Festival with a mass choir, brass and pipers and drummers from Lyon

Victims of Hurricane Maria are weighing the possibility of a fresh start in Arkansas this winter. The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is among a handful of schools on the United States’ mainland offering tuition help to Puerto Rican students whose universities were damaged and closed after the storm. Violeta Lorenzo-Feliciano, a Spanish professor who studies literature from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, raised the idea with the university’s administration after hearing on social media

Mercy broke ground on a $40 million multispecialty clinic on 31 acres in Springdale. The two-story, 60,000-square-foot clinic will feature 29 exam rooms dedicated to primary care and 34 exam rooms for specialty care including cardiology and orthopedics. The clinic will also feature a 24-hour emergency department with 12 exam rooms and one trauma room.

In our weekly survey of live music performances in the region, we hear about a local superstar, a country superstar, and even a countrified version of the music from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.