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Ohio senators successfully passed a two-year budget Thursday filled with anti-choice amendments that could severely restrict access to birth control, accurate medical information, and safe abortion care. Attempts by pro-choice senators to strip some of the most extreme measures from the budget were unsuccessful, and the final version of the budget passed 23-10.

President Obama urged a large crowd of Ohio State University graduates to "reject" cynicism about government in an age of legislative gridlock and political divisiveness.

Witnesses say the 25-year-old man accused of walking into an Ohio church and fatally shooting his father after an Easter service Sunday was yelling about God and Allah after the killing.

"Witnesses at the scene said the shooter entered church and made some references to Allah, but we are not sure if that was a motive or if there was a family problem," Stell said. "There is no indication that the father and son had a bad relationship. Everyone thinks this was very surprising."

Wearing a t-shirt with "killer" scrawled across it, a teenage boy cursed and gestured obscenely as he was given three life sentences Tuesday for shooting to death three students in an Ohio high school cafeteria. T.J. Lane, 18, had pleaded guilty last month to shooting at students in February 2012 at Chardon High School, east of Cleveland. Investigators have said he admitted to the shooting but said he didn't know why he did it.

At one point, he swiveled around in his chair toward the gallery where his own family members and those of the slain teenagers were sitting and spoke suddenly, surprising even his lawyer."The hand that pulled the trigger that killed your sons now masturbates to the memory," he said, then cursed at and raised his middle finger toward the victims' relatives.

On Friday, marriage equality opponent Rob Portman (R-OH) abruptly changed his opinion on gay marriage after finding out his son is gay.

House Speaker John Boenher (R-OH), who is leading the defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court, addressed Portman's position change on ABC's This Week on Sunday, telling host Martha Raddatz he "can't imagine" ever supporting the idea of gay marriage.

Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman is now supporting gay marriage and says his reversal on the issue began when he learned one of his sons is gay.

Ohio's junior senator disclosed his change of heart in interviews with several Ohio newspapers and CNN. In an op-ed published Friday in the Columbus Dispatch, he said the decision came after a lot of thought.

Before his sentencing, Samuel Mullet Sr. told the judge he had been accused of running a cult. Mullet, his ankles in chains and a white beard down to mid-chest, said that if his community is seen as a cult, "Then I'm going to take the punishment for everybody."

Over one million workers in this industry have no health insurance. 90 percent of direct caregivers are women, and many are primary breadwinners in their families. Caregivers are paid minimum wage or, if they are lucky, just slightly above. Earning such low wages with no health insurance means that 46 percent of direct caregivers rely on some type of government program, such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing, child care, energy assistance, or transportation assistance.

If the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program is not reauthorized, the share of jobless workers receiving unemployment insurance in the United States will likely decrease to approximately one in four.

In an interesting break from bureaucratic business as usual, the City Council of Cincinnati has used an incident in which subcontractors were not paying the prevailing wage to spark a conversation about how the city can better monitor city-funded projects.

It’s a classic case: a prime contractor on a large project hired a subcontractor who then contracted out more work and along the way someone didn’t get paid fairly. The prim...

Those kinds of bullies are at work in Latino and African-American neighborhoods in places like Milwaukee and Cleveland this month. They’ve posted billboards calculated to discourage people from voting, warning that anyone involved in voter fraud can be sent to prison and hit with a hefty fine. The messages carry no signature and the billboard owner says the “family foundation” that placed them insisted on anonymity.

You’d think a public official whose job is to supervise free and fair elections would be focused on ensuring that every eligible voter has a meaningful chance to vote and that every vote is counted as cast. Sadly, in Ohio, you’d be wrong.

Jon Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, is making it his business to gum up the machinery of democracy in the Buckeye state. He’s been fighting for months to limit access to early voting, which helps tens of thousands of Ohioans with disabilities, or jobs that keep them busy during normal voting hours, participate in elections.