The Human Rights Campaign kicked off its “” on Wednesday in Columbus. The tour aims to highlight stories from LGBTQ+ people who live in red states, and advocate for the preservation and advancement of LGBTQ+ rights.

Despite Ohio's historical status as a swing state, in the past decade, the state has shifted to the right. With that shift, a wave of new laws targeting LGBTQ+ people have been enacted, particularly against transgender individuals.

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said that the choice to start the tour in Columbus was deliberate, based on the city’s and Ohio’s past queer activism.

“Ohio tells the story of our country, the story, a place where equality felt almost inevitable for a time. I mean, it's the home of Jim Obergefell, right?” Robinson said. "And yet now, there's a historic backlash taking place with forcible outing bills that are being passed around schools, people feeling less safe, even in the three Cs.”

Robinson said there is currently a nationwide backslide of LGBTQ+ rights. , with nearly 600 bills this year, already exceeding last year's count.

“These laws that are being passed, I actually believe that the laws that are being cast right now, they're not about our kids. They're actually about grading fear and building political power for folks that pushes some of us under the bus and we're not going to let it happen,” Robinson said.

The tour’s focus on red states is also deliberate. The tour is set to stop in 12 cities across the country, including visits to Texas, Nevada, Georgia, Tennessee and Washington D.C.

“It's important that we don't only share the stories of what's happening in places like California and New York and even Washington D.C., but that we go to the heart of it all, to the heartland,” Robinson said. “I think this is one of those places that shows that queer people and trans people are everywhere fighting for not only our survival, but also fighting to build the power that we need to shift the trajectory of the state.”

Robinson and other campaign organizers met with local leaders and activists for a roundtable on Wednesday. The Columbus visit also included a community celebration with Congresswoman Joyce Beatty and a “Voices for Equality” storytelling training session.

The start in Columbus also emphasized longer fought battles in the LGBTQ+ community, including inaccessibility to care for HIV and examining how recent budget cuts have affected the LGBTQ+ community.

“We are seeing just devastating impacts already of these tremendous cuts,” Robinson said. “Federally, we've actually seen $3 billion in federal funds slashed towards things like HIV prevention to work toward the 988 hotline that was a crisis line for LGBTQ+ youth. We are seeing a tremendous impact on the infrastructure that's been created for our communities to survive and to thrive.”

However, Robinson remains hopeful. She said the campaign hopes to gather 1 million pledges in support of LGBTQ+ rights.

“The majority of Americans, the majority of Ohioans, are not inherently anti-trans or anti-LGBTQ+, but we do have to engage with them and tell our stories so they know who we are,” Robinson said. “There's a real opportunity here, even in the midst of this tremendous political backslide that we're seeing.”

Columbus will be the home of a professional football team starting in the spring 2026 season, according to a spokesman with the United Football League.

League spokesperson Mike Wade confirmed Columbus will be the home of a new team for the spring football league. Wade said more details about the team will be available at a later date.

The league did not say whether the team will be an expansion of the league's eight teams or if an existing team will relocate to Columbus.

after interviewing league investor Mike Repole.

A spokesperson for the Columbus Crew confirmed the UFL team will play at Historic Crew Stadium.

The spokesperson issued the following statement:

“The UFL selecting Historic Crew Stadium to host a team’s home games is a further testament to the first-class fan experience at our venue, as well as advances our commitment to bringing unique major events to Columbus that highlight our city and promote economic impact in the region. It’s also the result of Columbus’ continued growth and its long-standing passion for supporting sports.”

Mayor Andrew Ginther said, "Columbus is an attractive market and we’re supportive of new enterprises that promise to bring prosperity and investments to the city."

The UFL started in 2024 after the XFL and United States Football League merged. There are currently eight teams in the league:

• Birmingham, Alabama
• Houston, Texas
• Memphis, Tennessee
• Detroit, Michigan
• Arlington, Texas
• Washington D.C.
• San Antonio, Texas
• St. Louis, Missouri

Each team consists of a 50-man roster. Several former NFL players play in the league.

A Franklin County grand jury has indicted former Ohio State lineman Kirk Barton on charges of aggravated vehicular homicide and two counts of operating a motor vehicle while impaired after a fatal crash in Dublin.

Dublin police said that Barton, 40, of Lewis Center was driving the wrong way on Route 33 around 3 a.m. on June 21 before correcting his direction. He then headed eastbound toward historic Dublin.

Just west of Franklin Street, Barton's pickup truck struck a car driven by 24-year-old Ethan Perry of Columbus. Perry died from his injuries. Police said Barton's truck finally stopped 900 feet from the crash.

Police said Barton had glassy bloodshot eyes and slurred speech. Officials also said Barton was unable to answer questions about the evening and admitted to consuming alcohol.

Barton was released June 23 on a $500,000 bond.

A formal arraignment on the charges is scheduled for Aug. 13.

Barton played for Ohio State from 2003-2007.

A Dayton man has been accused of threatening to kill a U.S. congressman.

Jeffrey Dorsey, 60, was taken into custody Tuesday evening and appeared in U.S. District Court in Dayton on Wednesday afternoon.

A U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson wouldn't name the congressman.

Federal prosecutors alleged Dorsey left a voicemail on the congressman’s main office phone line threatening to kill him if he voted

He's been charged with interstate communications with a threat to injure. If convicted, it's punishable by up to five years in prison, according to prosecutors.

A federal public defender has been appointed to represent Dorsey.

When Amanda Wilson relapsed, she lost everything: her home, her stability, custody of her daughter Willow.

After treatment, she was determined to rebuild, but she struggled to map a way forward.

“I'm six months pregnant, so I was starting to stress out about finding a place, working and then spending the time with Willow to bring her home,” Wilson said.

She didn’t have a place that was safe for her children and for her to recover from addiction – until she found Brighter Beginnings, a new sober-living house in Warren that’s designed for families. The home opened in March with funding from OneOhio Recovery Foundation, the state's private nonprofit distributing opioid settlement dollars.

Recovery can be especially hard for mothers, like Wilson, who are trying to regain custody of their children. Brighter Beginnings, a partnership of Trumbull County Children’s Services and First Step Recovery, gives them a chance to start over with their children beside them.

“Parenting is hard, period,” said Jeannie Gurich, Brighter Beginnings house manager with the treatment center First Step Recovery. “And then you come in: you’re early recovery, you have to start working and you still have treatment goals.”

A stable home

Every room of the Brighter Beginnings house shows signs of family life. A crib sits in the corner of one bedroom. The kitchen table boasts a booster seat. A small spiderman bicycle with its training wheels is parked outside on the patio, ready for play.

“It's a good feeling when you know they're comfortable and they've made this their home,” Gurich said, as she toured the three-bedroom home.

Three families live here, and more are waiting for space to open up.

To live at Brighter Beginnings, moms must complete at least 90 days of treatment. They agree to attend meetings and counseling. All the while, their children are slowly reintroduced into their life through supervised visits and overnight stays, with the ultimate goal of reunification.

“It's a transition to bring children back in your life when you haven't had them there for so long,” Gurich said

And, she said, having support staff and peers goes a long way.

“The women are all going through the same journey. Just knowing there’s other people out there like you, having the same struggle, it’s great.”

Barriers to getting custody back

Around 75% of the cases that come to Trumbull County Children Services are connected in some way to substance use, according to Megan Martin, the department’s director of out-of-home services.

But, even after recovery, finding affordable housing remains a huge roadblock to reunification, said Angela Cochran, a caseworker with the department. Safe, stable housing is hard to come by, especially since families are working against tight deadlines.

In Ohio, agencies are required to seek permanent placement for a child who has been in their custody for 12 out of 22 consecutive months.

“Recovery timelines don't match up with child welfare timelines,” she said. “It's really hard for our agency to make a decision to put children in the home when there isn't a home established for that family in order to reunify.”

Yet, despite the need, recovery housing that focuses on families hasn’t existed in the county and remains rare across Ohio, Cochran said.

“We have a wealth of treatment, sober-supportive housing for men and women. But, it didn't exist for women with children.”

A ‘firm foundation’

Heather Setser waited for months to participate in a similar program in Lorain County, west of Cleveland. When she finally participated, she said it changed her outlook.

“Losing my children is not something that I ever wanted to have happen … but knowing they were safe where they were, I was able to work on myself and get my head and my heart back on the same page and get a firm foundation under me before having that full time responsibility of being a mom, too,” Setser said.

Setser is sober and she’s regained full custody of her children. Now she’s a peer support specialist at the Brighter Beginnings house, answering the residents’ questions on which recovery meetings allow kids and how to get through the terrible twos.

Wilson is hoping for that same outcome. Hopefully, by the end of the year, her daughter Willow will move in and they can learn to be a family again before her baby brother arrives.

In her view, losing custody hasn’t stopped Wilson from being a mom: It’s fueled her to work toward being a healthy one.

“It is a cycle and I really want to break the cycle,” she said.

Two Democratic state lawmakers want to ban any drilling for oil and gas under public state lands or the bed of Lake Erie, although the bill is unlikely to secure backing from the majority party caucus.

Last Thursday, Reps. Christine Cockley (D-Columbus) and Tristan Rader (D-Lakewood) introduced , which would bar the director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) or “any other state authority” from awarding permits or leases to drill under designated parks.

In early 2023, Gov. Mike DeWine signed a law clearing hurdles for drilling companies to obtain leases to extract resources from public lands and parks, although drilling under them has been legal since 2011. GOP proponents have said it was done to increase natural gas accessibility and bolster tax revenue, but opponents have decried the decision since.

Since his first term, President Donald Trump has been pushing to accelerate access for fracking under federally-protected parks.

“I thought we had this agreement across society, Teddy Roosevelt really started this a long time ago where we’re going to set aside a certain amount of land,” Rader said in an interview Tuesday. “There’ll be no commercial activity on that land, it will not be for sale, and it is for everybody to use and to enjoy.”

Though he’s against fracking generally, he also worries about how close the infrastructure to do so is to protected lands that draw local naturalists and visiting tourists.

“You can only drill so far laterally, right?” Rader said. “You have to put those facilities pretty darn near the park.”

ODNR was poised to benefit from more than $30 million in bonus royalty payments from the drilling going on under its parks, but the biennial state budget ties that money to the agency’s already-existing bottom line instead.

In June, the legislature cut ODNR’s parks and recreation budget—financed by tax revenue in the General Revenue Fund—by 50% in fiscal year 2026 and 13% in fiscal year 2027, according to Legislative Service Commission documents and then redirected the royalties to fill those holes.

Aside from HB 399, Rader plans to push for other efforts he said his colleagues across the aisle may be more willing to sign onto that he believes would “minimize” the harms.

Leaders at Anduril, the California company promising to build automated, weaponized drones in Pickaway County starting next year, joined Ohio economic development officials in downtown Columbus Wednesday.

Hosted by , hundreds of people bought tickets to connect with others interested in doing business with the defense company that prides itself on behaving like a technology company.

"So this is a massive, massive undertaking," said Zachary Mears, Anduril's senior vice president of strategy.

Anduril is expected to invest more than $900 million at the site. A JobsOhio grant will cover about a third of that.

He said the company started hiring this year and refabricating an existing building that will be used for manufacturing at the 500-acre Arsenal 1 complex on the southwest side of Rickenbacker International Airport.

Mears said there's more to come next year, including the actual start of manufacturing. Also in 2026, Anduril plans to add 300 new employees and build a warehouse.

"This thing will keep moving in parallel. We will open next year. We will be producing product. We will be delivering product to customer as we build the site. It is not sequential," he said.

The company plans to ramp up construction and hiring for a decade until it has 4,000 central Ohio employees spread across seven buildings.

The company plans to have one building used as a training hub in 2027.

Mears said the company expects to need employees with various levels of education.

"As we partner with those locally and across the state, both four-year, two-year and technical schools, we're going to want a place where we can continue to check (and) re-check the relevant skills that our workforces bring into our production facilities. And that will predominantly happen at the hub," Mears said.

He said people interested in working for the company can As of Wednesday, the form was accepting resumes in the following areas of interest:

• manufacturing engineer
• manufacturing leadership
• manufacturing operations
• manufacturing technician

Mears said there will be opportunities for local vendors to contract with the company.

Companies interested in finding out more information can

Intel is now saying its chip plants in New Albany will likely be canceled if the company can't find new customers as local officials are voicing their frustrations with the chip making company.

Intel says it may need to stop all work on its Ohio facilities if it doesn't get get more customers for its manufacturing division. Intel was originally supposed to start production on the plants this year, bringing an expected 3,000 jobs to the community.

The manufacturer announced last week it would be "slowing" construction on the $28 billion project in western Licking County.

The potential work stoppage is based on a node technology called 14A. The new technology won’t debut until 2027, so Intel will have some time to try and acquire the customers it needs.

Gov. Mike DeWine was among officials last week who expressed hope that Intel was still committed to building in Ohio. DeWine said "Intel has affirmed its commitment to Ohio."

Unlike DeWine and other officials, Licking County Commissioner Tim Bubb doesn't have as rosy of a view on the situation. Bubb said he, other county commissioners and the community are extremely disappointed in Intel.

"I don't mean to say that somehow they deliberately pulled the wool over anyone's eyes, but I think they made promises they couldn't keep. And that's okay if it's someone else, but it isn't someone else. In Licking County's case, it's us and it's Ohio," Bubb said. "This can't be more disappointing."

Bubb said he has seen first hand how work is slowing down. He said contractors working on the project are already finding work elsewhere in the county.

"We feel like the rug has been pulled out just a little bit. If you think about it, there is investment out there. It is a beautiful sight and it's partially complete, but construction is slowing down rapidly," Bubb said.

Bubb said the news doesn't come as a surprise given Intel's recent actions as a company. He said Intel has canceled dividends, announced several layoffs system-wide, canceled other projects and summarily fired their previous CEO.

"All of a sudden, we have two partially completed plants, one where there's some steel going up, and it could be under roof at some point in the next year if construction continues, the other not far along," Bubb said. "And we have the basis for two huge plants in western Licking County, but there's no plans to occupy them or to put the equipment in there to make chips or to hire those people to work there."

Bubb said he's frustrated because of all the money local communities in central Ohio have sunk into workforce development and infrastructure improvements around the site.

In November, the Biden administration said it was releasing $7.865 billion in CHIPS act grant money for Intel projects in New Albany and three other states. That includes $1.5 billion for the New Albany project.

Bubb said he understands why DeWine and others are more optimistic about the plants' future. He expects it's possible for Intel to either sell the plants or partner with another company that will make computer chips.

Intel has struggled to keep up with rivals such as Nvidia Corp.

Bubb said he is optimistic about other projects in Licking County that he said are "setting the world on fire" with new construction. He said that while Intel has slowed down, he is pleased with other major development activity.

"(Licking County) is a destination right now for a lot of companies," Bubb said.

A group of conservatives has pulled back on calling for followers not to help the effort to put an amendment abolishing property taxes before voters, because of social media posts from one of the amendment effort's leaders. But the group now said it will continue to assist with gathering signatures to put the issue before voters next year.

Citizens for Property Tax Reform has been circulating petitions to put the property tax abolition proposal before voters in November 2026. The group Ohio Conservatives PAC raised questions on its Facebook page about posts blasting President Trump, U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and others from one of the property tax effort's leaders.

Brian Massie with Citizens for Property Tax Reform said the effort is nonpartisan and is not backed or supported by any political party.

“This is truly a grass-roots issue," Massie said. "I will welcome Republicans, Democrats and independents to help us get the petition signatures that we need to get this on the ballot."

Ohio Conservatives PAC with an update that reads: "We were contacted today by the leader of the official ballot initiative committee to abolish Ohio's property tax and we'll be a member of the coalition to support this movement."

But Massie said Citizens for Property Tax Reform is finding some people are reluctant to sign petitions because they are afraid of the impact of abolishing property taxes on schools and local safety services.

"I'm not sure we should replace it dollar for dollar," Massie said.

"Do we need 611 school districts in the state of Ohio? In Lake County, the county that I live in, we have nine school districts. Why don't we think about a county-wide school district where we have one superintendent, one curriculum director?" Massie asked.

Massie said he's found voters are more willing to sign once he explains that the abolition proposal would require more accountability and efficiency of local services provided. But critics of the proposal have noted there's nothing in the amendment to explain how the dollars would be replaced, and some lawmakers have said they're very concerned about what would happen if the amendment gets to the ballot and succeeds.

Citizens for Property Tax Reform will have to gather about 440,000 valid petition signatures by July 2026 to put the issue on the statewide ballot next November.

Columbus police didn't notice a missing girl who was in a car during a traffic stop earlier this month.

A 12-year-old girl was reported missing on Wednesday, July 16. The following Monday, July 21, the girl was a passenger in a vehicle that police stopped, but officers didn't notice that she had been reported as missing. They allowed her to leave the scene.

CPD's Missing Persons Unit later found out about the traffic stop, and were able to track down the adult woman who was seen with the missing girl during the stop. Police found the girl and the woman on Tuesday, July 22 in the area of West Broad Street and North Burgess Avenue.

The girl was unharmed and was returned to her parents. The 36-year-old woman was charged with not having a valid driver's license and was arrested for an outstanding misdemeanor warrant for disorderly conduct.

CPD spokesman Sgt. Joe Albert said Columbus Division of Police recognizes "the serious nature of this incident and the concerns it raises."

"Every missing person report is treated seriously, and we expect officers to take every step necessary to ensure the safety and well-being of all juveniles involved in any police interaction," Albert wrote in a statement.

CPD's Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating to see if any policies or procedures were violated during the traffic stop.