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The 1970 killings by National Guardsmen of four students during a peaceful anti-war demonstration at Kent State University have now been shown to be cold-blooded, premeditated official murder. But the definitive proof of this monumental historic reality is not, apparently, worthy of significant analysis or comment in today's mainstream media.

After 37 years of official denial and cover-up, tape-recorded evidence, that has existed for decades and has been in the possession of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has finally been made public.

It proves what "conspiracy theorists" have argued since 1970---that there was a direct military order leading to the unprovoked assassination of unarmed students. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents show collusion between Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes and the FBI that aimed to terrorize anti-war demonstrators and their protests that were raging throughout the nation.

Ten days after Governor James A. Rhodes assumed office on January 14, 1963, a Cincinnati FBI agent wrote Director J. Edgar Hoover a memo stating: "At this moment he [Rhodes] is busier than a one-armed paper hanger . . . . Consequently, I do not plan to establish contact with him for a few months. We will have no problem with him whatsoever. He is completely controlled by an SAC [Special Agent in Charge] contact, and we have full assurances that anything we need will be made available promptly. Our experience proves this assertion."

Why would the FBI assert that the newly-inaugurated governor of Ohio is "completely controlled"? Media sources like Life magazine noted the governor’s alleged ties to organized crime and the Mafia in specific. Gov. Rhodes’ FBI file, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, suggests that it may be because of the FBI’s extensive knowledge of Rhodes’ involvement in the numbers rackets in the late 1930’s that the Bureau could count on his cooperation.

I have followed the films of Michael Moore since "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x;" target="_blank">Roger & Me came out while I was in grad school. "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x;" target="_blank">Fahrenheit 9/11 looked at what happened to civil liberties in this country after 9/11, and "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x;" target="_blank">Fahrenheit 11/9 looked

Well, it's mostly nonsense---17 minutes of it---Bob Dylan rasping pleasingly over a simple rolling piano figure, relaxed, but often tastelessly and grotesquely describing JFK's gruesome assassination November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

'Murder Most Foul' could've been groundbreaking. It could've been a golden ager's autumnal 'Sympathy For The Devil.'

But instead the casualness of the rhyming patterns, the bloody references to bullets hitting the Kennedy noggin and the President slumping into Jackie's lap and THEN the autopsy at the hospital in a bit of gory detail---well, it's all a bit much.

It does get interesting when Dylan brings legendary '60s radio d.j. Wolfman Jack into the picture and then spends the last third of the song making requests for him to play a Who's Who of r'n'b and blues favorites while mention Marilyn Monroe.

Sort of Dylan's way of waxing nostalgic about the America he loved, gone and not being taught. Talk about an untapped cultural goldmine.

Back in March when The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center set up a makeshift Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) donation center to supply its frontline healthcare workers, fear swept through the hospital’s staff. Would they have enough PPE to protect themselves from the coronavirus?

“It definitely sent a shock through the hospital,” says Rick Lucas, president of the Ohio State University Nurses Organization (OSUNO), the union that represents 4,000 OSU nurses. “Things were tightening up. We were having issues getting cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment to the front-line staff.”

Lucas says management began telling staff, “we are in a really good spot and we have all these supplies on hand.” 

“Then they put out the donation request,” says Lucas, also a registered nurse at the hospital.

He says long before the pandemic, management at the Wexner Medical Center was growing “very tall” – they kept adding upper level positions, layer after layer. 

As the effects of coronavirus still ravage the globe, many people have noted that this is the fourth major crisis of the 21st century. Some even say that coronavirus is a composition of all our most recent crises combined. After all, the 2000s began with a good deal of tragedy -- 9/11 occurred only a year in and was followed by Hurricane Katrina shortly after. Both showcased a lack of preparedness by the U.S. government for such major emergencies, whether they were created by nature or man-made. Things would eventually turn for the worse economically right as the country started to recover, as the financial crisis of 2008 -- created by the pure greed and deregulation on Wall Street -- wreaked havoc across the country, more so than any natural or manufactured tragedy had up until that point.
 

Essential workers in the Central Ohio region will go on strike for health protections and workplace reform on May 1st. Workers will be picketing and car parading outside of the CMH1 Amazon Fulfillment Center in Etna, Ohio (11999 National Rd SW, Etna, OH 43062). The action will take place from 9:15 AM to 11 PM.Parking will be available in a church just outside the facility at-10 first Ave SW Etha, OH 43062.

Columbus, Ohio - This May Day, Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, Target, Walmart and FedEx workers throughout the nation will be walking out of work to call attention to workplace safety and issues during COVID. As a coalition of “essential workers” across different companies, we all agree that our employers are putting their profits before our lives, as they continue to amass incalculable amounts of wealth while our lives are put at risk daily. Although our organization’s share varying demands for workplace reform, we all share the common platform for essential health protections as well as sick and hazard pay. 

Let’s spare a recital of COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic’s facts and figures. Simply put, they are sickening, staggering, scary, unprecedented, unfathomable, unimaginable, hellish, horrific, historic. The human suffering combined with the collapsing economy finds one of the greatest countries on earth quaking under enormous challenges, the most pressing of which may be hunger.

The virus has frayed the fragile fabric that holds America together. Loss of employment leads to lost income, leaving little left over for even basics like shelter and food. It reveals a tattered and torn safety net that subjects the vulnerable not only to the illness, but also to the scourges of homelessness and hunger.

The Columbus Dispatch appears bound and determined to break the daily newspaper reading habit in central Ohio.

First, management keeps jacking up the price of home delivery and single copies of the print product.

Second, the newspaper keeps getting thinner and thinner as less news and information is provided compared to the past.

Third, the deadline for the next day's paper keeps getting earlier and earlier. It was around 9 or 10 o'clock at night for the early edition until the printing plant in Columbus was closed and moved to Indianapolis in January. Then the deadline was moved up to 7 p.m., ostensibly because it takes nearly three hours to truck the papers to Columbus.

I did some checking and found out that 7 p.m. was also the deadline for the Indianapolis Star, a sister newspaper of the Dispatch under the new merged company called Gannett.

What?

Why would the Star be stuck with such an early deadline when there is no 3-hour trucking imperative?

A reasonable deadline for the Star would be 2 a.m. Allowing for trucking time, a reasonable deadline for the Dispatch would be 3 hours earlier, at 11 p.m.

On January 23, 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced they were approving a “fourth line of production” at the Mid America Conversion facility. Mid America is located on the 4,000-acre Portsmouth Nuclear Site at Piketon, Ohio.  The new fourth line would make Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (DUF4.)

Translate that to English, you say?  There is no use for DUF4 other than to make depleted uranium munitions, explosive devices, and armored vehicles. The Defense Department wants a more refined form of depleted uranium to make heavy nosecones for the B-61 bomb, a surprisingly small “earth-penetrating” thermonuclear weapon. And what would be the target?  Iran has its uranium enrichment facilities underground. This would be illegal under international law. And the DUF4 process will cause more radioactive contamination in and around the Portsmouth site.