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Tuesday, January 7th at 6:00pm
Buckeye Environmental Network will be holding an informational webinar for the community and media to learn more about the ARCH2 project and its implications. Presenters include: eastern Ohio-based environmental scientist and retired chemistry teacher Dr. Randi Pokladnik, who will be presenting the health and environmental impacts, and Sean O’Leary, a researcher with the Ohio River Valley Institute, who will discuss the economic impacts of hydrogen and how the region has already suffered economically from fracking.
Register for the webinar at the following link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vduyqrzsrHt0C6ZX8B9f5CQDFQBv605Ya#/registration

The freezing cold bites hardest on those who don’t have a home to head to at the end of the day. It doesn’t stop. Some may be lucky enough to have an abandoned home (“bando”) that provides shelter but not utilities. There are encampments with tents around the city that provide strength in numbers. Shared resources last longer and different hustles combine to provide more varied goods. But not long enough if the City of Columbus bulldozes your encampment after threatening “trespassers” with arrest.

On the night of the Winter Solstice – the longest night for those with nowhere to go – candlelight vigils are held across the US mourning and remembering the unhoused residents who have passed. According to the Columbus Coalition for the Homeless, 112 local unhoused passed in 2024 in Franklin County. The Coalition believes 400 unhoused passed over the previous three years.

I’m personally honored to inform you that Palestine’s entry to this year’s Academy Awards, the brilliant film FROM GROUND ZERO, has recently been voted by the members of the Motion Picture Academy — one of only 15 films worldwide — for this year’s Oscar shortlist for BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE. I am a proud Executive Producer of this acclaimed movie — AND IT OPENED TODAY in theaters across America.

Check it out here

FROM GROUND ZERO, the first film ever from Gaza to be elected to the shortlist for the Oscar in the category that honors what used to be known as the Best Foreign Film of the Year, is unlike any movie you’ve ever seen — filmed during a mass slaughter of over 50,000 civilians, the vast majority of them children, women and the elderly. In a brisk and powerful one hour and fifty-two minutes, it weaves together 22 short films made by 22 courageous Palestinian filmmakers living and surviving in Gaza over this past year — all of it told in under 2 hours!

President Trump may commute the sentences or pardon convicted criminals who have broken the law for him.  Anyone involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital may get these considerations. Rudolph Giuliani may get a pardon so he won't have to pay out any of the millions of dollars of claims against him. The president may even pardon himself and other close friends and relatives for crimes they may have committed. He might not even reveal these pardons publicly until they are needed like having a "Get out of jail free" card. As a result, he might not have to pay E. Jean Carroll anything or anyone else who has ever had a judgement against him. We may only be able to call him a "former" 34-time convicted felon.

Many farmers who supported Trump may be surprised when he helps put them out of business. New INS raids will deplete fields of migrant workers who do agricultural labor that no American would do. Many of these farmers may also be arrested for trying to help poor people support their families. Expect food prices to skyrocket.

With the genocide in Gaza far advanced, and having lost the recent election when supporting peace might have won it, the Biden administration -- on its way out the door -- has told Congress it wants to send yet more weapons to Israel, the majority of which it would take a year or several years to deliver.

The incoming Trump administration plans to continue the slaughter and destruction.

Is this last-minute proposal from Biden part of a competition for greatest support of mass killing? Or is it a move to demonstrate bipartisanship before the storm, by doing something that most of both parties' elected officials support?

Either way, this is a time to make clear to everyone in Washington that the demand for peace and compliance with laws and basic human decency has not gone away, that -- on the contrary -- it is growing.

Sundays, January 5, 12, 26 and Feb 2, 2025, 3:00 - 4:30 PM
The Israeli war on Gaza – widely considered genocide – did not begin on October 7, 2023. This series will look at the background of Zionism and colonialism that laid the foundation for ongoing wars and today's violence in the Middle East. Palestinian dispossession, we will see, began more than a century ago.  

Jan 5: CONQUEST AND COLONIALISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST DURING THE 20TH CENTURY: The roots of the contemporary Middle East go back to the First World War and its aftermath; the birth of Zionism as a political movement.

Jan 12: MANDATES AND REPRESSION IN PALESTINE AND BEYOND: The failure of the British colonial attempt to shape Palestine in conformance with the Balfour Declaration; Palestinian resistance and the first proposals for partition; Zionist terror; British, French colonialism in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.  

Jan 26: ISRAELI INDEPENDENCE AND “NAKBA”: The UN proposed partition of Palestine, Israeli declaration of independence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from 1947 to the present; Arab and Palestinian resistance.  

Last night at 5:49 p.m., the Antrim, Ohio, volunteer fire department chief posted the first of four videos on its Facebook page of a raging fire at a well pad just off State Route 22. 

The location is a 5.7 miles – a seven-minute drive along SR 22 – from the entrance to Salt Fork State Park.

Information soon emerged that the fire was caused by an explosion at the Groh well pad (GIS coordinates 40.110854 N, 81.370555 W), owned by Gulfport Appalachia. Drone footage found one tank had completely collapsed with a second tank breached, the fire chief said.

As flames shot 100 feet into the air, authorities in consultation with Gulfport decided to let the fire burn itself out. SR 22 was closed and would remain closed for several hours.

This article first appeared on the Ohio Capital Journal

Ohio and the United States have a big problem with infant mortality. But the state government can take measures to significantly lessen it, the vast majority of Ohio economists surveyed on the matter said.

When infants die at high rates, it isn’t just a tragedy for them and their families. It also is expensive and it saps economic growth, a group of researchers reported last year in the peer-reviewed Cureus Journal of Medical Science. 

This article first appeared on the Buckeye Flame

Let’s face it: 2024 ended pretty terribly for LGBTQ+ Ohioans. 

On December 19, Ohio’s Republican lawmakers passed a bill that will force teachers and school staff to out LGBTQ+ youth and limit the mentions of LGBTQ+ identity in school curricula. 

This 11th-hour blitz capped off a two-year legislative session that saw Republican lawmakers advance a national trend to restrict the lived experience of LGBTQ+ individuals, and specifically transgender youth. Bills passed into law included:

Today, January 1st, 2025, is the first day in the new life of the Octagon in Newark (Ohio) as it opens to full public access after being besieged by a golf course over the previous century.

This Native American-built geometric structure, which has an adjoined circle with an observation mound, is arguably Ohio’s second most popular and mysterious First Nation earthwork when compared to Serpent Mound in Peebles, Ohio. Fascinating is how the Octagon, believed to be a ceremonial pilgrimage site used hundreds if not thousands of years ago, aligns with the northernmost moonrise which occurs every 18.6 years, and 2024 was that year.

Back in October at the Octagon during a public event on a night when the moon aligned nearly perfect with the Octagon (pictured above), the Ohio History Connection’s Dr. Bradley Lepper told the crowd those Native Americans who built and celebrated the Octagon did so to connect to the “rhythm of the cosmos so they would not feel alone.”