A fire at a Springfield fuel distribution company is now under control as 50 agencies, including every fire department in Clark County battled the blaze since it started late this morning.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the fourth week of Middle Spring, the week of Cross-Quarter Day, April 21st.

Surely, there is a great Word being put together here, writes Wendell Berry, "I begin to hear it gather in the opening of the flowers and the leafing-out of the trees.... in my thoughts, moving in the hill's flesh.

The great Word Berry invokes continues to be spoken throughout this week of Cross Quarter Day, when the sun enters Taurus and reaches halfway to equinox and when, on the same day, the old Cabbage Butterfly Moon becomes the new Frog and Toad Mating Moon, moving high overhead at noon, and telling every gardener and farmer to be planting.

If you've got unused prescription drugs in your medicine cabinet, Ohio doctors, pharmacists, businesses, and police are hoping you'll turn them in April 28. 

The controversies generated by climate science in recent years center around the human relationship with the natural world and with natural resources. This month, historian John Brooke puts that critical question in historical perspective—deep historical perspective. For most of human history, our species had to struggle to survive powerful natural forces, like climate and disease. In the past three centuries, however, things have changed dramatically: that struggle has been reshaped by the unprecedented growth of the human population—from under one billion to now over seven. John Brooke's essay forces us to ask whether our population can continue to grow given the current Malthusian pressure on resources and on the earth system itself.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the third week of Middle Spring

The Great Dandelion Bloom is the most common and the most radical marker for the third week of Middle Spring Of course a few dandelions started blooming in February and March. Now, however, comes the GREAT Dandelion Flowering that begins in the Deep South - where Middle Spring comes much earlier than it does in the North - and it spreads up through the Border States like robins, reaching the 40th Parallel, the lateral midline of the United States in April, and then creeps up to the northern states in May.

Ohio has picked managed care organizations for new state Medicaid contracts that will provide health care services for more than 1.5 million poor and disabled people.

State officials say they selected Aetna Better Health of Ohio, CareSource, Meridian Health Plan, Paramount Advantage and United Healthcare Community Plan of Ohio.

Medicaid beneficiaries will be offered five managed care plan choices, up from the current two or three.

Ohio is also upping performance expectations in the contracts by linking a portion of each Medicaid managed care plan's payment to standards aimed at making people healthier.