New power outages in Northeast Ohio
About 9,000 customers in Northeast Ohio remain without power. Most are FirstEnergy customers who were  knocked out this morning when the latest round of fast moving thunderstorms rolled through the area.

Meanwhile, heat and other severe weather advisories remain in effect today with the heat index reaching as high as 102 degrees. 

Chinese trade tension touches on Ohio
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown is pushing for more enforcement of trade rules ahead of his visit to Parma with President Obama tonight. 

He announced a new bill last week to strengthen Congressional oversight of trade agreements. The bill would require that the administration provide Congress with more information about the trade practices of potential partners before it approves trade deals. 

But Brown also is praising the Obama Administration for filing unfair trade complaint today against China, which is imposing some $3.3 billion in new tariffs on American-made cars, including the Jeep Wrangler, which is made in Toledo. 

“The Chinese have kept out, those vehicles out of the Chinese market. We’re simply saying these tariffs aren’t fair under international trade law. They’re breaking the law. We want the law enforced, which will mean a leveler playing field, which will mean that we will be able to sell more into their market as they sell into our market.”

The president is underscoring the rescue of the American auto industry during his bus tour through Ohio today, saying it helped add nearly a quarter of a million auto jobs over the last three years. But China says the bailout is a government subsidy that is illegal under the rules of the World Trade Organization.

It's one of the issues on the President's Ohio bus tour
The Obama campaign bus tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania is on its way to Sandusky, before stopping in Parma this evening. And the battle of the campaign surrogates is already well underway.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s supporters -- Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty -- are tracing the president’s path, and plan to speak in a parking lot in Parma this afternoon about unemployment.

Democrats are countering with Parma State Rep. Nick Celebreeze and Harriet Applegate, the executive secretary of the North Shore Federation of Labor, who say Romney’s economic record is one of outsourcing American jobs.

Ohio tank plant is at the center of a political and international debate
A tank plant in western Ohio is at the center of a fight between the administration and Congress over military spending.

Some 800 people work at the plant in Lima, making the Abrams tank. The Pentagon says it has nearly enough of the tanks, and wants to shut down the plant until 2016.

Ohio’s Republican Sen. Rob Portman is fighting that.

“The administration has proposed mothballing the facility for a period of time until the new generation of tanks are ready to be produced. I think that would be a huge mistake for the taxpayer. It would be much more expensive thatn continuing the modernization effort, getting more foreign sales like the Israeli sales.”  

During a visit to the Middle East last month, Portman pushed Israel to do more business with the Lima plant, which already makes parts for Israeli armored personnel carriers.  

And some members of Congress are pushing a defense spending bill that includes more money for the tanks. President Obama is threatening a veto, saying that would run counter to an agreement made last year to reduce the deficit.

Cleveland Browns Fujita goes to court 

The NFL players’ union is suing the league, challenging the suspension of Browns linebacker Scott Fujita and two other players.

The three are accused of being part of a bounty system while they were playing for New Orleans, a system that paid for particularly brutal hits on other teams’ players.  The players deny that.

According to the Associated Press, the federal lawsuit says Commissioner Roger Goodell violated the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement. It accuses him of having made up his mind publicly even before he held an arbitration hearing on their cases.  It wants the judge to throw out Goodell’s decision and appoint a new arbitrator.