To the Editors: As a former member of the Oberlin City Council, I appreciate the effort of The Oberlin Review to report on local community issues, such as last week’s article headlined “Local Petitions Challenge REC Choice Fund Options” (March 31, 2017). However, both the headline and the story miss the point of the petitions. The issue the petitioners want to put on the November ballot is whether 85 percent of the money the City earned from trading its renewable energy certificates should be used for “community-based, utility-related, environmentally-friendly initiatives,” as City Council determined in passing the Sustainable Reserve Program Ordinance in 2007, or instead diverted into an artificial reductio...

What a few weeks ago was just a political crisis within Ukraine has now morphed into a power struggle between the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France and Germany over the fate of Eastern Europe. Contradictory stories of the events in Ukraine have been presented — one by the Western world and independent journalists and the other by the Russian government. The facts are these: In the last few days of February, unmarked Russian troops moved into the Crimean Peninsula, an autonomous and majority Russian region of Ukraine. More moved in shortly thereafter, and by March 1, thousands of Russian troops had poured into the region. Although the Russian government continues to assert that these were...