Feature
With dozens of union wins over the past two months, a wave of Starbucks worker victories continued Wednesday as workers at the Reynoldsburg location at 8070 E Broad Street voted to join Starbucks Workers United. They joined partners at twenty stores who voted to join this week and more than 10,500 workers at more than 430 stores nationwide who have unionized with Starbucks Workers United in the past three years. With a vote of 10-2, partners at the store became the 22nd Starbucks location in Ohio to join Starbucks Workers United.
"If I go to my manager for help, nothing happens. If we all go together, Starbucks has no choice but to listen- that’s why we’re unionizing." said Ash Wearly (he/him), a barista at the East Broad store.
On Sullivant Avenue, the block begins at Columbian and pretty much ends at Hague. If you don’t know what the block is, you might be better off. If you do know the block, you likely have an opinion of it. If you’re reading this article (that is to say, someone with regular internet access, time to read an article with some leisure, and sharp enough to follow the Columbus Free Press), and know the block, odds are that your opinion is strong. The block is a tough place. As someone familiar with tough spaces, I don’t know many like this one.
The police will tell you all kinds of things about Sullivant Avenue but a good deal of it is just to boost their funding. It works, too. They got a million dollar boost to sweep the streets of the Hilltop. I have walked the streets, the alleys, and gotten to know a large number of people there in the last few years, I haven’t had much of an issue with anyone but the cops.
After a conversation with the Columbus Landmarks Foundation, the Free Press can report that City representatives working on the “Zone In” project had limited contact with the region’s foremost preservation effort as they overhauled Columbus’s zoning code.
The Columbus Landmarks Foundation’s CEO Dr. Rebecca F. Kemper told the Free Press that Zone In reps did approach the Foundation a handful of times over the previous two years, and they also recently connected with a few Foundation board members to go through Zone In’s public gallery at 141 N. Front Street, which closed June 10. But there were no official sit-downs or any peer review of the major changes being made to Columbus’s zoning code.
A group of consumers and environmental and democracy organizations held a press conference at the Thomas Worthington Center on May 29 to demand that Ohio Attorney General David Yost dissolve FirstEnergy Corporation for its central role in the massive bribery scheme to pass House Bill 6. Members of the FirstEnergy Accountability Coalition at the Ohio Statehouse urged Yost, who has filed a civil suit against the company, to dissolve the company pursuant to the Ohio Revised Code 2923.34(B)(3).
Activists dressed as Ida B. Wells and 1920s reporters pointed out to the crowd that citizens have the right to dissolve corporations.
On a recent warm evening at the Runaway Bay apartment complex in Grandview, a middle-aged woman in a rowboat was chased by a gaggle of white swans, geese, mallards and who knows what else. They pursued her over the quarry’s still waters as she throws them crumbs. It is a sight to be seen, but only a few are able to enjoy this private quarry filtered by the nearby Scioto River because its surrounded by condos, apartments and ugly office buildings built a few decades ago. Irony is how this quarry is also home to Hidden Lake Condominiums.
In 2022, the Free Press published a flippant story on how a section of this quarry should be returned to the public and made into a beach with boats or kayaks to rent (pictured above).
We’ve reached a turning point in the legal efforts by the Ohio History Connection to reclaim the Newark Octagon for the public. The trial to determine the compensation the Ohio History Connection (OHC) must pay to Moundbuilders Country Club (MCC) to buy back their leasehold on the Octagon is scheduled for May 28.
The Ohio Supreme Court in 2022 ruled that the OHC could use eminent domain to buy back the lease which had allowed MCC over a century ago to build an 18-hole golf course within and around the Octagon itself, and thus play a game on this sacred structure. The court’s ruling was necessary for UNESCO to name the Octagon and other Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks as Ohio’s first World Heritage site, which it did in 2023.
The Octagon was originally purchased by the citizens of Newark and Licking County to preserve them so to ensure they were kept and held “free to visitation at all times on the part of the public at large under reasonable rules and regulations.”
So Soon We Forget
I offer these thoughts because I'm told by many that people, especially young folks, have little to no memory or knowledge of these essential learnings from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Understanding these hard lessons allows us to see through the demonic joke of ‘clean and green' nuclear power supposedly saving us from climate change.
Chernobyl
April 26, 2024, was the 38th anniversary of Chernobyl, which is still considered by some to be the worst nuclear accident in history. That disaster exposed millions of people all over the planet to harmful ionizing radiation and its long-lasting humanitarian effects and severe social and political impacts contributed heavily to the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is about 81 miles north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and about 12 miles south of the border with Belarus. The disaster site, still intensely radioactive, is now in the Ukrainian war zone, compounding the risks.
So Soon We Forget
I offer these thoughts because I'm told by many that people, especially young folks, have little to no memory or knowledge of these essential learnings from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Understanding these hard lessons allows us to see through the demonic joke of ‘clean and green' nuclear power supposedly saving us from climate change.
Chernobyl
April 26, 2024, was the 38th anniversary of Chernobyl, which is still considered by some to be the worst nuclear accident in history. That disaster exposed millions of people all over the planet to harmful ionizing radiation and its long-lasting humanitarian effects and severe social and political impacts contributed heavily to the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is about 81 miles north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and about 12 miles south of the border with Belarus. The disaster site, still intensely radioactive, is now in the Ukrainian war zone, compounding the risks.
Across Ohio, students are gaining momentum in the movement to end the ongoing genocide of Palestinians at the hands of extremist Israeli powers. This comes as part of a wider wave of direct action on college campuses nationally as young people call for change.