Trade Center Will Impact Economy - The Rogers skyline won’t feature a 110-story building anytime soon but the impact of last week’s’ announcement that a World Trade Center will be established in the city could have more effect than any skyscraper.

Lessons from UN’s Week - One of the lessons of this past week is that the international system is broken. The world community might make declarations-on preventing Iranian and North Korean nukes, disarming Hezbollah, or preventing genocide in Darfur-but when it comes to actually uniting to take action, words and resolutions lead nowhere.

The second big lesson of the past week is that five years after 9/11, we are farther from reaching a consensus on the nature of the threat than ever before. Instead of clarity, there is a cacophony of theories that attempt to explain the extremists-emphasizing religion or ideology or feelings of historic humiliation or some combination of all three.

Diversifying - In the burst of enthusiasm over the shale gas arrival early this year, we had brief thoughts of Conway becoming the center of activity, of our town being an Arkansas version of Midland, Texas. Didn’t happen. Won’t happen. Not to that extent. But what is happening and what apparently will continue to happen is that the economic benefits of this natural gas thing will spread across several counties in our area and not be centered in any one location.

It’s the Palestinian problem, stupid -  That’s logical. The U. S. has consistently supported Israel rather than forcing the Israelis to settle fairly with the Palestinians, and most of the oppressive regimes in the Middle East are American allies, including for some years Saddam Hussein’s.This somehow got lost in the 9-11 Commission’s final report, and the American people were stuck with President Bush’s false and ridiculous claim that we were attacked because “ they hate freedom. ”