Ten years ago, Demetrious Smith hoped to buy a building and work as a landlord after non-work-related injury ended his 13-year career with General Electric, but getting financed on the strength of his monthly $1,182 disability check seemed unlikely. Then a postcard arrived in his family’s mailbox from a company called National Mortgage Funding, which promised home financing for anyone.  

A citizen-initiated statute has reached the Ohio General Assembly after eight years of protests and a two-year signature drive by an Ohio volunteer group called the Coalition to Ban Ohio Dog Auctions (CBODA). The statute would ban the sale of dogs through auctions or raffles, as well as all trafficking in dogs from out-of-state auctions.   

In preparing to interview newly elected Cincinnati City Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, I was repeatedly visited by the temptation to ask him, “Are you as squeaky-clean as you seem?”      

A series of 12 unusual earthquakes in northern Ohio reached a 4.0 magnitude on New Year’s Eve, shaking homes in Youngstown and intensifying nationwide opposition to fracking, a controversial natural gas extraction process.   

Michael Budkie has lasted 15 years in a career most people wouldn’t touch with a pooper-scooper: He studies the day-to-day life stories of animals stuck in laboratory experiments. 
  

In a move almost as confusing as its monthly bills, Duke Energy has proposed a 10-year rate plan that would impose a new “capacity” fee on both its own customers and those who have switched to other electricity providers. While the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) evaluates the proposal, Cincinnati residents are considering an unrelated ballot measure that would enable them, as a group, to take their business away from Duke and give it to a lower bidder.  

If Cincinnati were Paris, Ellen Bierhorst would be its Gertrude Stein. In July the 71-year-old psychotherapist-poet ended her Lloyd House Salon, a gathering in Clifton where some of the city's most engaged citizens grappled with local leaders and each other about politics, art, life and death. Open to anyone and any topic, the salon convened every week “come hell or high water” for 10 years.  

Among a standing-room-only crowd at a former Catholic church in South Cumminsville, a swath of pointedly green t-shirts sprang up Aug. 16 on residents opposing a budget proposal that would dismantle Cincinnati's Office of Environmental Quality (OEQ). Among those who addressed council, 18 spoke in support of continuing to fund OEQ, with two using the phrase “penny-wise and pound-foolish” to describe the proposal; none defended it.  

Within two hours of helping stage a loud protest outside a spring convention of conservative policymakers, Over-the-Rhine resident Aliya Rahman got a telephone call that has now triggered a media groundswell. “I have information about ALEC,” said a voice. Six weeks earlier, 29-year-old Rahman had been a Miami Univeristy Ph.D. student and labor organizer who wondered why an Ohio budget clause threatening to deregulate wages.  

Three years ago, floodwaters engulfed Iowa and swept hundreds of pigs down the Mississippi River, sparking a rescue effort that moved over 60 survivors to new lives on sanctuaries. Last week Iowa's levees burst again, and its pigs took the national spotlight once more, to tell a different story. A hard-to-watch undercover video from the Ohio-based group Mercy for Animals (MFA) was released on June 29, showing live piglets getting sliced, slammed and thrown across a building in a small Iowa town.