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They wandered and they loitered. They appeared to shop. They ate ice cream. They hung around for much of the day by political booths including the Spore Infoshop, an anarchist bookstore and community space, and the Ohio Rights Group, an organization attempting to place a pro-medical marijuana and industrial hemp initiative on the ballot. They were not, however, your average Comfest attendees. They were agents of the Ohio Investigative Unit (OIU) of the Ohio Department of Public Safety (ODPS) who may have been working for or with the Department of Homeland Security.
When a Comfest visitor took a camera phone picture of a badly handmade Harley Davison T-shirt stretched over the central girth of one of the agents, the other agents swarmed and the unfortunate photographer was arrested.
The Comfest visitor was charged with disorderly conduct for taking photos of the agent.

In May Ohio’s Eighth District Court of Appeals in Cuyahoga County upheld a common pleas court’s decision ordering the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (“BWC”) to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to up to 264,000 businesses. Under the decision in San Allen v. Buehrer, some businesses were owed more than $1 million, and many were owed six-figure amounts.

A few weeks after appealing the decision to the Ohio Supreme Court, BWC agreed in July to settle the class-action lawsuit for $420 million.

The appeals court said the case involved a “cabal” of lobbyists and BWC bureaucrats who “rigged” the workers’ compensation premium rates paid by Ohio employers. It found that BWC developed and maintained “an unlawful rating system under which excessive premium discounts were given to group-rated employers at the expense of nongroup-rated employers.”

The common pleas court said BWC “even admitted” to violating statutory requirements in setting premiums. The court also said BWC was “aware of the inequity in the system” and “aware it was violating the statutory mandate.”

Did you ever wonder where Columbus ranks in police shootings? We’re Number Two among the major cities in the United States. Only Las Vegas police officers kill more citizens per capita than Columbus.



 With the explosion of demonstrations and activism in Ferguson, Missouri over the police shooting of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, the Free Press investigated the likelihood of police killings in Columbus. Although it is often difficult to get precise statistics that depend on state and local police cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Free Press obtained FBI data for so-called “justifiable homicides” from 2012. The results may surprise many.

 In the United States, 410 people died from police shootings. The 410 people were not in police custody at the time of the shooting, but were running away.

 This is a different measure than what the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) calls “custody or arrest-related deaths.” There were 4813 “custody or arrest-related deaths” in the nation between 2003-2009.

Bernadine Kennedy Kent and James Whitaker have filed suit against the city of Columbus, including its police chief, city attorney and chief litigator Glenn Redick, over being placed on the Columbus Police Department’s Chronic Complainers List. Kent and Whitaker are widely acknowledged for helping to break the data scrubbing scandal at the Columbus Public Schools. Also, they initiated the investigation by Ohio Auditor David Yost into the theft of federal No Child Left Behind funds earmarked for tutoring centers servicing low-income children. One felony conviction of a tutoring “vendor” has resulted from their whistle-blowing activities.
  Kent and Whitaker run a nonprofit advocacy service called Parent Advocates for Students in School (PASS). In 2006 when Kent and Whitaker alerted school officials of data manipulation, school attorney Loren Braverman called the cops on the couple. The police subsequently placed them on a “Chronic Complainers List” designed to ignore any criticism of police behavior.

Columbus citizens may assume they now have and will continue to enjoy clean air, soil and drinking water. A group of concerned citizens aren’t so sure, and are currently organizing to make sure the Columbus environment stays healthy.

 This group is working towards passing a local “community bill of rights” in response to the toxic threats caused by fracking in the state. The group is collecting signatures on a Columbus Community Bill of Rights petition, an amendment to the Columbus City Charter, that would ensure the rights of Columbus citizens to a clean environment.

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Josh Roberts was a fairly ordinary guy, living a fairly ordinary life. The one day in June it was all taken away from him. He went to visit his girlfriend, Andrea Ferguson age 37, in the nursing home where she was temporarily under care and found she had been moved. He was not permitted to know where she had been taken. He returned home to their two children, Anna and Noah, ages 2 and 1. Two days later Andrea's adoptive mother arrived with five Worthington police officers and took his children. There was no police report and the police showed him no paperwork. He was given a choice of losing his children or going to jail and losing his children.

Organizers from Columbus and the OSU campus communities brought hundreds of protesters to the Ohio Statehouse on Sunday August 18 to show solidarity with the people of Gaza currently under siege by the Israeli Defense Force. The rally brought people from around the state and as far away as Pittsburgh and Kentucky.

Some protesters expressed a general support for the people of Palestine while for others the rally was more personal. Reema Al-Waritat, an organizer with family still in Palestine, spoke about what they have been through: “I stand in front of you today on behalf of my family who resides in Hebron, Palestine. On behalf of my mother, my brothers and my siblings, all of them. I stand in front of you on behalf of my husband who was kidnapped by the Israeli police, excuse me soldiers, brutally beaten and imprisoned for months at a time and starved.”

The Supreme Court of Ohio will decide whether Columbus citizens’ basic constitutional rights, in place since before World War I, will survive.

Citizen’s initiatives, the favorite tool of the Progressive Era to defeat robber barons and political bosses, are being arbitrarily rejected by the one-party Democratic machine in Columbus.

The Columbus Coalition for Responsive Government filed a “Verified Petition for Writ of Mandamus” on Wednesday, August 6 with the Ohio Supreme Court. The Coalition is suing to have their initiative signatures counted concerning their “Columbus Fair Campaign Code.”

The initiative calls for public financing of elections for Columbus City Council and Mayor.

The current city charter only requires 4,478 valid signatures to get an initiative on the ballot. The Coalition submitted petitions 16,205 signatures. But Columbus City Clerk Andrea Blevins, on the advice of City Attorney Richard Pfeiffer, refused to verify the signatures as per the usual procedures.

MRSA, or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a bacterial infection that is resistant to most antibiotics, contagious and potentially deadly. Commonly found in hospitals and afflicting health care workers, it leads to large pusfilled masses on the skin which must be incised and drained. A specific, special antibiotic regime must be followed to cure the infection and prevent blood poisoning. As of the time of this writing, July 24, 2014, according to sources at least one inmate in the Franklin County Jail has this infection, is not being treated as per the orders of doctors at Grant Hospital, and is in the general population with a fist-sized hole in her chest oozing black pus. Pictures smuggled from the jail show the wound without gauze or a bandage on her emaciated body. The pictures are included in this story.