Middletown resident Donna Ballinger said she can't leave her windows open.
"There's usually smells — chemical smells, rotten egg smells — that burns your eyes and gets in your throat," she said. "It doesn't go away."
Toward the end of each month, you may hear people who are pulled over complain about police officers needing to meet a ticket quota.
As of today, that practice is illegal in the state.
The Village of Alger in west central Ohio is small: Just about 800 people call the community home.
"We have nothing. We have nothing to hang our hat on," said Village Administrator Paul Osborne. "We're surrounded by what they call the muck around here."
That muck was once good for onion farming, but these days, the village is gaining notoriety for something else.
Before Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, pitcher Ray Brown was making a name for himself in the Negro Leagues.
Today, he's one of just a few dozen Negro League players recognized in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Space is dirty. Filthy. It's littered with asteroids, and rocks, and dust. Some of that material falls to the earth. When it enters the atmosphere, we call it a meteor. If it lands, it's a meteorite.
John Ventre usually keeps his meteorites locked away in a safety deposit box. This weekend, he'll put them on display for other collectors and the public.
The James M. Gavin Power Plant in southeast Ohio is one of the largest coal-fired electricity plants in the country. It's also one of the nation's top emitters of greenhouse gases, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Ohio is better prepared for future bird flu outbreaks after curbing the most recent epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza that started last December. That's according to Jim Chakeres, executive vice president of the Ohio Poultry Association.
This article was originally published on August 6, 2025 by Source Media Properties as part of the series, 'It Takes a Village: Why Child Care is Everyone's Business.' Read the full series
This conversation is based on the Source Media Properties series 'It Takes a Village: Why Child Care is Everyone's Business.' Read the entire series at richlandsource.com, ashlandsource.com or knoxpages.com.
Two years ago, eight earthworks became Ohio's first UNESCO World Heritage site.
