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Data centers take center stage in Ohio

Ohio’s House of Representatives seems to have a sense of urgency in digging into the question of data centers in the state. Having already passed House Bill 646, which would create a data center study commission, lawmakers also are launching a bipartisan joint data center committee. HB 646 now sits in the state Senate committee. But while those details are worked out, the new committee will invite data center workers, residents and even companies such as Google and Meta to testify, according to a report by the Ohio Capital Journal. Leading the committee will be co-chairs Rep. Adam ...

Read ‘Pig Book’ and weep

It’s the time when Citizens Against Government Waste releases its annual “Congressional Pig Book Summary,” exposing some of the most outrageous, ridiculous and in many cases unconstitutional spending one can imagine. I guarantee you won’t be able to imagine most of it. Why should you when it’s not their money they are spending and borrowing, which has driven the debt to unprecedented and dangerous levels. According to CAGW, the number of earmarks, which is spending that avoids going through the normal appropriations process, “totaled 140,826, costing $484 billion.” ...

Decluttering till death do we part

Margareta Magnusson was an artist in Stockholm who wrote a bestselling book, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.” Decluttering, the removal of unnecessary items from our living spaces, had already become an international obsession. That was doubly so for Americans, whose large houses became easy repositories for the cheap goods arriving by container ship from low-wage countries. We declutterers had already gotten going 15 years ago, when Marie Kondo, Japan’s high priestess of neatness, came out with her big book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” I tried to ...

Don’t kill Ohio’s growth by banning data centers

Eighty years ago, Piketon, Ohio, stood at the center of a defining national challenge. The uranium enrichment facility on that site helped secure American victory in World War II. Last month, I sat in that same community and listened to SoftBank leaders outline a new era of investment in southern Ohio. We are in a race for global leadership in artificial intelligence, one with significant national security implications. China is investing aggressively to dominate this space. The United States must meet that challenge head-on, and the infrastructure that makes AI possible — data ...

Screen culture is destroying our children

We’ve been having a debate about “book bans” in recent years, but given the steep decline in student literacy, the deeper question is how anyone would notice whether a book is available in a school library or not. The New York Times published an eye-opening report on a study by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford documenting steep declines in student test scores, especially in reading. Over the past 10 years, reading scores have declined in 83% of school districts. What looked like a COVID-driven catastrophe is, instead, part of a long-running trend. Reading ...

ATHENA Award winner, nominees make Valley proud

As of last week, a highly accomplished and well respected executive of Howmet Aerospace in Niles has joined the pantheon of amazing women trailblazers and changemakers worldwide enshrined as an ATHENA Award winner. Gina Govojdean, vice president of sales and supply at Howmet, is in great company with the likes of such other ATHENA goddesses as former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, legendary tennis icon Billie Jean King and NASA astronaut Christina Koch. Govojdean received the Mahoning Valley’s 2026 ATHENA Award ...