On Tuesday, October 31, 2023, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bombed a Palestinian refugee camp with 100,000 inhabitants, producing a hellscape of casualties, 50 dead, 150 injured, with buildings in collapse at the periphery of  massive bomb crater.   The stated public intention was to kill a single Hamas commander.

There are two million Palestinians warehoused in the sliver of land 26 miles long and between 2-7 miles wide, a containment camp holding indigenous peoples of the region hostage, known as the Gaza Strip. 

Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which is estimated to have at least 40,000 members.  If the ration of 50 -1 holds up, that is 50 Palestinians will die for every Hamas member killed -- then every single Palestinian in Gaza would be killed.  This is not without possibility, perhaps the colonizers’ plan.

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.

She is the founder and CEO of Heartbeat Movement Inc, a multiracial, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit social justice organization directed solely by Ohioans. Heartbeat Movement focuses on legislative and policy change to end systemic racism, institutionalism, injustice, and inequality.  

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.

We focus in the GREEP Zoom #155 on the in-your-face crisis at California’s Diablo Canyon nuke reactors.

While the 39-year-old Unit One is shut for refueling, a growing public movement demands the obvious—test this crumbling old nuke for embrittlement and much more BEFORE it’s allowed to re-open.

After four decades of blasting heat, pressure and radiation, Diablo’s Reactor Pressure Vessels are fried to the point of shattering like glass should they be flooded with coolant water in an emergency.

In other words….if the “brakes” are applied at uninsured Diablo during a major accident, the whole place will blow up.

Steam, Hydrogen and fission explosions will blast apocalyptic radioactive cloud into the steady breezing blowing south to Los Angeles.

Then it’ll go west into the Central Valley, then north to the Bay Area….and all across the continental United States.

LINDA SEELEY of the Mothers for Peace explains how her long-lived, incredibly persistent group is fighting to keep Diablo shut in the court system, regulatory agency and Public Utilities Commission.