Local

Monday, November 6 through Sunday, December 17, 2023, 8:00 AM
World Beyond War's online courses are self-paced, using videos and texts and graphics, available on your schedule, 24-7, and discussion forums in which you can use videos and texts and graphics to discuss and gain feedback, as well as to submit optional assignments for feedback. There are also a few optional zoom calls. Those are the only parts of the course that are scheduled. Everything else is simply available on your schedule. 

Course fee: $100 (Pay less if you have to, more if you can.) There will be a limit of 150 tickets sold for this course.  Everyone registered for the course will receive a PDF of David Swanson's book The Monroe Doctrine at 200 and What to Replace it With, which will provide additional reading to those who want to go beyond the written, video, and graphic materials provided in the course.  

The Free Press is honoring Alicia Jean (AJ) Vanderelli with our Activist Artist Award at a ceremony Thursday, November 9. AJ is the owner and manager of the Vanderelli Room, an art gallery that has served as a showplace and safe space for activist artists – and it is the location of the Free Press Awards dinner.

AJ was born in Los Angeles, California and was raised in Panama City, Florida. After graduating high school in 1993, she left the small beach community in search of one that provided both the comforts of a small town with the diversity of a city. In 2003, she settled in Columbus Ohio. She earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a concentration in oil painting in 2008 from the Columbus College of Art and Design, graduating Magna Cum Laude.

The Free Press is honoring Alicia Jean (AJ) Vanderelli with our Activist Artist Award at a ceremony Thursday, November 9. AJ is the owner and manager of the Vanderelli Room, an art gallery that has served as a showplace and safe space for activist artists – and it is the location of the Free Press Awards dinner.

AJ was born in Los Angeles, California and was raised in Panama City, Florida. After graduating high school in 1993, she left the small beach community in search of one that provided both the comforts of a small town with the diversity of a city. In 2003, she settled in Columbus Ohio. She earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a concentration in oil painting in 2008 from the Columbus College of Art and Design, graduating Magna Cum Laude.

The Free Press is honoring Alicia Jean (AJ) Vanderelli with our Activist Artist Award at a ceremony Thursday, November 9. AJ is the owner and manager of the Vanderelli Room, an art gallery that has served as a showplace and safe space for activist artists – and it is the location of the Free Press Awards dinner.

AJ was born in Los Angeles, California and was raised in Panama City, Florida. After graduating high school in 1993, she left the small beach community in search of one that provided both the comforts of a small town with the diversity of a city. In 2003, she settled in Columbus Ohio. She earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a concentration in oil painting in 2008 from the Columbus College of Art and Design, graduating Magna Cum Laude.

Far south side unhoused to be evicted from their makeshift homes; mutual aid group Heer to Serve asks community to help advocate for those affected.

The City of Columbus, along with Columbus Police and private contractors, will soon evict more than 30 unhoused individuals living in tents and other makeshift shelters on the Southside of Columbus. This is far from the first camp sweep the city has been involved in in 2023, a year that has seen the eviction and bulldozing of dozens of camps. 

Mutual aid group Heer to Serve has been providing necessary and emergency items to and conducting outreach and programming with people who are unsheltered on the Southside for the past three years. The group is asking fellow community members to help advocate for their neighbors whose homes the city plans to bulldoze. “Housing is a human right,” said Heer to Serve founder Emily Myers. “People should not be dying on our streets due to exposure to the elements and yet it happens every year, with both extreme heat and cold. 

Friday, November 3, 5:30-6pm
WGRN 91.9FM community radio, wgrn.org
Nationally renowned peace activist David Swanson is interviewed by Free Press Board member Mark Stansbery in the program discussing our world's current ways and how to move to a world beyond war. 

David is a regular guest at the Free Press Zoom salons and his weekly articles can be found on freepress.org. His podcast also plays on the local community radio station WGRN 91.9FM. David was one of the first to point out the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the war and the hypocrisy of the United States lies about them.

The Free Press is honoring Cynthia Brown of the Ohio Coalition To End Qualified Immunity with our annual “Libby” Award at a ceremony Thursday, November 9. Cynthia Brown is a regular speaker at the Free Press salons and championed as a Free Press Hero online. The Free Press honors community activists annually with a "Libby" Award for Community Activism, named for a former Free Press editor, Libby Gregory, who lost her life in 1991 in an airplane accident. 

A Youngstown native, she studied criminal justice and political science at Columbus State Community College, media and communications and African American studies at Youngstown State University, and public policy and African American studies at Mesa Community College.

After I exposed Ginther’s habitual hollow phrase, “Our top three priorities are neighborhoods, neighborhoods, neighborhoods” at my press conference on Thursday (Columbus Dispatch, October 27, 2023, “Motil Questions Ginther’s support for neighborhoods; Ginther cites millions invested”), we can all add yet another false claim to the endless growing list. The marketing research firm that Andy paid $97,000 to tell him what important to voters, apparently did not do any research about their client.

Ginther’s dishonest campaign TV ad and mailers falsely present my own positions on excessive use of the police force. This refers to the one night in the Short North when he ordered 150 law enforcement, bicycle and foot patrols, canine units, helicopters, drones, motorcycles, and horses. He quotes me completely out of context. He next, lies about his gun buyback event claiming it “took 300 guns off our streets.” With no evidence at all, the campaign also claims that Andy is a "champion" of “Mental health and addiction treatment.” None of this is true.

I grew up in a church-going family. In fact, for my entire life we either lived next door or one street over from Hilltop United Methodist Church. In 1976, I converted to Catholicism. I grew up down the street from St. Aloysius Catholic Church, and it is across the street from the elementary school my siblings and I attended. I always wondered what was going on in there, and after graduating from high school in 1974 started going to services, making sure to sit in the back of the church. I thought the service–the mass–was lovely.

There was a Black priest who during the service admonished the congregation to put a little more oomph in their responses; in fact, he suggested that we answer as heartily as people cheer at OSU football games. Several weeks later, I went by the church to see if I could talk to that priest about converting, and while he wasn’t there, the priest who answered the door offered to give me instruction.

Today’s news overflows with concerns about the cost and benefits—“is college worth it?”--about higher education itself, its price, public vs. private, preparation of both students and professors, on the one hand, and fears about the maturation of Gen Z caught between social media, AI, and uncertain futures, on the other hand.

Parents and most others assume that established universities are relatively safe spaces for late-teenagers and young adults (now 18-26, no longer 18-22, years old) to grow and learn. They are often not. Irregular reports or alarms do not connect the different elements.

My focus is the failure of public universities because of their commitment to corporate profiteering, sloganeering, and private interests over public, image and finances over student lives. What I describe is true for most universities. My major example is The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, Ohio, an especially egregious example of all-too-common problems. It is a very large institution that admits to none.