Local
We know what kind of changes can kill a city, particularly in the so-called Rust Belt. But what does it take to bring that city back to life?
According to The Place That Makes Us, it takes activists who are passionately devoted to their hometown, even if they’re too young to know what it was like in its heyday. Karla Murthy’s 70-minute documentary focuses on a small group of such people who are working to revive Youngstown, Ohio.
When the industrial burg’s steel mills started closing down in the 1970s, thousands of residents were left without work. Many left in search of employment, while others stayed but were unable to find jobs that could support them and their families. The result is a city filled with abandoned and neglected homes, including many that are beyond repair.
“It kind of overwhelms me…all the work we have to do,” says Ian Beniston, one of the doc’s featured activists. As executive director of the nonprofit Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, Ian focuses on restoring areas of town marked by boarded-up windows and other signs of blight.
The Republicans in the Ohio legislature voted to take over the operation of the State Health Department so that Gov. Mike DeWine could no longer order Ohioans to wear masks, stay 6-feet apart and stop congregating.
The governor was too concerned about avoiding the mass die-in of unprotected Buckeyes and offended the backwoods Neanderthal GOPers who possess veto-busting margins in both the Ohio House and Senate.
The legislature remains in the grip of Jim- and Jane-bos who inhabit the small cities and rural bastions of Ohio and decorate their outdoors with now tattered Trump signs and dilapidated Stop the Steal banners.
The Republicans can't manage their lawmaking chambers, let alone administer the state government, the governor's job. They still haven't removed the indicted State Rep. Larry Householder.
Imagine if the incompetent GOP legislators took over other branches of Ohio government.
The public schools would be closed except for the boys' sports teams.
The COVID would be ravaging the unvaccinated masses.
Half of the highways in the state would be closed due to giant potholes.
The story of how medical marijuana helped one man's virus symptoms and how Michigan is whupping Ohio
From December 2019 to mid-February of 2020, he was a long hauler. It’s just the flu, he told his concerned family. Anyway, he had to keep working at his warehouse job at Rickenbacker.
Luckily he had health care, this fan of the Free Press told us. But two rounds of antibiotics didn’t help. Five to ten days of illness, a few days of what seemed like a recovery, but over and over it crept back. The coughing, the body aches, the constant sweating, the stomach issues refused to cease.
He remembers how his doctor wasn’t sure if it was the flu or possibly that new virus emerging on the other side of the world. The doctor shook her head, asking again, “Have you left the country?”
“I can’t afford a trip overseas,” the former long-hauler told us.
Finally, our unnamed source was fully back to feeling normal. It was the end of February 2020, suffering through three months of a COVID-19 infection.
Those days were a blur, says the source. But he does remember this –there was only one medicine that helped the symptoms. A natural remedy. In some ways like a mask. So simple, so effective.
Sunday, March 28, 2021, 2:00 PM
Saturday, March 27, 2021, 1:00 PM.
Join us in showing solidarity with workers in Bessemer, Alabama, who are organizing to form a union. They are up against a massive anti-union campaign being pushed by Amazon. Let's go all out to support winning a union in Alabama, and to laying the groundwork for unionizing Amazon workplaces everywhere! Location: 2114 N High St, Amazon Hub Locker. Columbus Socialist Alternative. Facebook.
An Earth without art is “meh.” In the last year, since COVID lockdowns and restrictions began, artists have turned to creating art to cope with isolation. The arts community in Franklinton marked the one-year anniversary of the global pandemic with a special art show, which was all about change.
The March exhibition at 400 West Rich, “Evolution in Isolation” was a tribute and a reflection on the year that showcase some of the artistic changes that have taken place since the Pandemic began. Artists have had to find ways to create meaningful pieces of work over the last year.
The description that 400 Square gave in promoting this exhibit could be comparable to our everyday lives since the pandemic began: “There was a ‘before’ the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is not yet an ‘after.’ Everything has changed, and these changes are reflected nearly everywhere we look, including our artwork.”
London, Ontario – Members of anti-war organizations World BEYOND War, Labour Against the Arms Trade, and People for Peace London are blocking railway tracks near General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada, a London-area company manufacturing light armoured vehicles (LAVs) for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The activists are calling on General Dynamics to end its complicity in the brutal Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen and calling on the Canadian government to end arms exports to Saudi Arabia and expand humanitarian assistance for the people of Yemen.
Today marks the sixth anniversary of the Saudi-led, Western-backed coalition’s intervention in Yemen’s civil war, leading to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.