Saturday, December 5, 12-6pm
299 King Avenue
In coordination with the Dennison Place Neighborhood Association, the Short North Block Watch is asking residents to donate extra food to give back to the NNEMAP Food Pantry this season. (www.nnemappantry.org)

The family of Julius E. Tate will gather on North Champion Avenue and Mt. Vernon Avenue on December 7th at 3 pm to commemorate and raise awareness of Julius’s untimely death at the hands and guns of Columbus police. It will be his death’s second anniversary, and a utility pole on this corner has been decorated in his honor.

According to Columbus police, Julius’ death was the result of a sting operation to apprehend an armed robber who was doing swap-and-sell meetings. Questions linger, however, regarding Julius’s actions before his death. Even so, the sting should have been handled in a way so not to kill the teenager.

Police in plain clothes claim Julius pulled a gun on them, and then a sharpshooter in hiding fired. But Julius’s girlfriend claims he was unarmed, testimony she gave in a sworn affidavit. Days later the girlfriend, Masonique Saunders, was charged in connection with his killing.

At the time, Saunders’s mother told WBNS 10TV the charge was an attempt to silence her. Masonique is currently serving a three-year sentence in state prison after taking a plea deal.

It is not often that one can agree with the pronouncements made by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan, but his tweeted comment on the killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh suggesting that the incident “…was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict. Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits” was both restrained and reasonable. Or it was at least so until sentence two, which was clearly intended to attack Donald Trump and praise the incoming Joe Biden administration, which Brennan just might be seeking to join.

Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has nothing to worry about as the man who will directly handle America’s foreign policy in the Middle East is a loyal friend of Israel. Crisis averted. 

President-elect, Joe Biden’s appointment of Antony J. Blinken as his Secretary of State was a master stroke, according to the Biden Administration. Blinken is a State Department veteran, a strong believer in a US-led Western alliance and a true friend of Israel. 

What's new with the Columbus Dispatch?

The news is old at the former "Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper." The late afternoon deadline imposed to accommodate the closing of the Columbus printing plant and its shift to Indianapolis means that much that happens on Tuesday gets in Thursday's paper.

The content of the print product is becoming more feature stories and

and less news coverage. We journalism professors define "news" as matters that readers need to know and that affect their lives and "features" as stuff to entertain and amuse.

The Dispatch is publishing more articles from its sister newspaper USA Today and labels them and locally generated content as from the "USA Today Network." If the paper is trying to cut its print circulation and push people to its digital product, it is succeeding in the former. An Oct. 1 legal advertisement showed print copies sold had dropped nearly one third in a year, from about 78,000 daily to about 504,000.