Ohio GOP Chairman Triantafilou Rallies Allen County Republicans with New Party Vision

Alex Triantafilou, the newly elected head of the Ohio Republican Party, stopped in Lima for the Allen County Republican Party’s monthly luncheon to discuss his vision of what the party can anticipate this year.

According to Triantafilou, they will strive to keep Ohio a “red” state and will concentrate on removing U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and President Joe Biden from office.

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Norfolk Southern Releases Statement After Train Conductor Fatally Injured in Cleveland

Norfolk Southern released a statement Tuesday after one of its employees was killed aboard one of the company’s trains that collided with a dump truck at a flat-rolled steel-producing facility in Cleveland, Ohio. A Norfolk Southern conductor identified as Louis Shuster was fatally injured early Tuesday morning at the Cleveland-Cliffs Cleveland Works property when a dump truck struck the train as it was moving through a crossing at the facility, according to a press release by the company.

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Big Ag Set to Crush Family Farmers with ‘Climate-Smart’ Carbon Markets: Report

Family scale farmers in the Midwest may lose a lot to large agribusinesses through carbon markets, a new report says.

According to the report, “Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab” by Open Markets Institute and Friends of the Earth, carbon markets programs will entrench chemical-intensive farming practices and increase corporate control of agriculture rather than reduce greenhouse gas emissions like politicians assert.

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Tennessee AG Skrmetti Leads 46 States to Demand China-Based TikTok Comply with Multistate Investigation

Forty-six attorneys general joined Tennessee in requesting that a state court force TikTok to comply with an ongoing multistate investigation into the platform’s impact on children.

Following TikTok’s failure to comply with a Request for Information (RFI) last week, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a motion Monday to require the Chinese-owned social media company to preserve documents and internal messages, his office announced. Colorado and 45 other states also filed an amicus brief Monday in support of Skrmetti’s motion, arguing that TikTok’s failure to respond impedes “the State’s ability to protect their citizens.”

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Norfolk Southern Unveils New Safety Plan Following Second Ohio Train Derailment

After its second train derailment in Ohio within a matter of weeks, Norfolk Southern on Monday unveiled a “six-point strategy” to increase safety.

Although Norfolk Southern claimed there were no dangerous commodities on the train, around 20 of a 212-car train derailed on Saturday in Springfield, Ohio. The incident happened about a month after a derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which contained hazardous materials and required hundreds of nearby residents to evacuate for several days.

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Commentary: ‘Geofence Warrants’ Threaten Every Phone User’s Privacy

The last time your phone asked you to allow this or that app access to your location data, you may have had some trepidation about how much Apple or Google know about you. You may have worried about what might come of that, or read about China’s use of the data to track anti-lockdown protesters. What you probably didn’t realize is Google has already searched your data on behalf of the federal government to see if you were involved with January 6th.

But last month, the federal district court in DC issued an opinion in the case of  one of the many defendants who stands accused of sacking the Capitol in the wake of the 2020 election.

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Commentary: Your Tax Dollars at Work in Ukraine in Six Charts

According to a report by Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, since Russia’s invasion in February of 2022, Ukraine has become far and away the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid. It’s the first time that a European country has held the top spot since the Harry S. Truman administration directed vast sums into rebuilding the continent through the Marshall Plan after World War II.

Since the war began, the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have directed about $75 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which includes humanitarian, financial, and military support. The number is documented in a report by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research institute, analyzed by Masters and Merrow. 

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Ohio to Invest in Train Derailment Training for Small First Responder Departments

The state of Ohio intends to invest almost $1 million on training small, rural first-responder teams to respond to train derailments.

On March 1st, Governor Mike DeWine announced that he had discussed the necessity of more extensive train derailment response training for first responders with the CEOs of both Norfolk Southern and CSX railroads.

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Commentary: Class Divisions Versus Factions, and the Role They Play in a More Perfect Union

We live in politically divided times. How we describe the sources of our divisions, though, varies. Some focus on principles such as equality, justice, liberty, and order. Some take up policy disputes related to those principles while others look to economic class, race, or even geography.

Does using these lenses to view our divisions violate our founding principles? Since humans will disagree about justice, especially its application, one can defend principled lines. Indeed, our Founders created mechanisms of elections and deliberative bodies to adjudicate those differences. Moreover, one can rightly conclude that race presents a troubling source of division in light of our commitment to human equality.

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Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hit Record High

Global carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high of more than 36 billion tons in 2022, although emissions grew more slowly than anticipated, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported Thursday.

Emissions from coal surged by 1.6%, to a record breaking 15.5 billion tons, as Europe turned to coal after Russia slashed exports of natural gas following its invasion of Ukraine, the IEA reported. Growth in renewable energy sources mitigated more than half a billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, helping keep emissions growth below expectations, and accounted for roughly 90% of all new power generation.

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‘Corrupt’: Ramaswamy Says Consultant Promised Second-Place Finish in CPAC Poll for ‘a Few Hundred Thousand Dollars’

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Monday he was offered second place in the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll if he paid a consultant.

“One of the things you see as an outsider is how corrupt the system is. You know something funny about this? I’ve attended CPAC before. I didn’t know it works this way,” Ramaswamy told Fox Business host Stuart Varney. “A consultant calls my campaign shortly after I declared, says ‘Hey, we can get you up to number two on there if you pay us a few hundred thousand dollars.’ I was shocked, you know … there’s a lot of people making money not only off of me, but every presidential campaign.”

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