Morning Briefing | Plans emerging for NATO assembly in Dayton

Plans are emerging for the NATO Spring Parliamentary Assembly happening in Dayton next May.

In today’s Morning Briefing, we tell you who will be hosting the three-day event and discuss it’s expected impact on the city. We also fact check Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate.

If you have thoughts or feedback on this newsletter or other news tips, please let me know at Greg.Lynch@coxinc.com.

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The newsletter should take about 4 minutes, 42 seconds to read.

Dayton venues ready to welcome NATO assembly in 2025

CareSource properties and the Benjamin & Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center will host the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Spring Parliamentary Assembly next Memorial Day weekend, with a possible closing celebration at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

• Background: U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton and Dayton advocates first announced in July that NATO parliamentarians would visit the area next year to mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords.

• The assembly: The three-day assembly is an inter-parliamentary organization that unites legislators from NATO member countries to consider security-related issues of common interest and concern.

• Visitors: The event will bring 300 officials to Dayton, with an expected 1,000 people total.

• The cost: It will be expensive. Turner said, “It’s going to be big. We’re piecing that together. It will be in the millions.”

• What they are saying: “I never in my wildest imagination thought we would be part of something so cool and quite frankly historic,” said Erhardt Preitauer, president and chief executive of CareSource.

Fact-checking the vice-presidential debate: JD Vance and Tim Walz

Credit: NYT

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, squared off Tuesday in the only vice-presidential debate of the 2024 election and made plenty of questionable statements. Here’s a closer look at some questionable claims of the night.

Fact-checking Vance:

• “I think you can make a really good argument that (Trump’s policies) salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along,” Vance said.

On his first day in office Trump signed an executive order calling for prompt repeal of the Affordable Care Act. He also cut funding for programs advertising and promoting ACA insurance marketplaces and supported a lawsuit to end ACA, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law.

• “There’s an application called the CBP One App where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand,” Vance said.

Harris does not make the decision about who can enter the U.S. The CBP One phone app was launched by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2020 when Trump was president and was expanded by the Biden administration.

• “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January 20 as we have done for 250 years in this country,” Vance said.

Vance’s comment ignores the Jan. 6, 2021 violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, which happened after Trump called for them to come to Washington D.C. on the day Congress was to certify Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election.

Fact-checking Walz:

• Walz on abortion registry: “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies.”

Project 2025 mentions abortion 199 times and pregnancy more than 30 times but doesn’t call for an agency tasked with registering pregnancies.

• Moderator Brennan: “You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989.”

A photo taken on May 16, 1989 put him in the United States working at the National Guard Armory in Alliance on the day of the massacre. A Nebraska newspaper also quoted him as saying he was leaving for China on a date more than two months after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

• Walz has also misstated the number of times he’s visited China. The campaign previously said he visited the country more than 30 times. However, the campaign now says he was there closer to 15 times.

What to know today

• One big takeaway: U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has called on the U.S. Air Force and the Department of Defense to take “immediate” and “aggressive” action to try to protect the Dayton region’s drinking water supply from PFAS, often known as “forever chemicals.”

• Tip of the day: The cocktail lounge in the basement of Cherry Street Bottle Shop in Troy will be transformed into a Christmas pop-up bar this holiday season.

• Big move of the day: Medical products company MedShip LLC is celebrating its new Preble County headquarters.

• Stat of the day: Dayton has been the site of 137 NCAA tournament games since 1970. The NCAA has extended an agreement for First Four games to stay at UD Arena through at least 2028.

• Thing to do: The Yellow Springs Film Festival returns in October with premieres and special guests.

• Photo of the day: Sierra Nevada Corp. celebrated the opening of its new 100,000-square-foot aircraft maintenance hangar and plans to build two more which will be larger. Read the full story.

Credit: Jim Noelker