A Hilliard City Council member aligned with “America First” is now linked to a serious. privacy breach of Hilliard students.

When the vice president of Hilliard’s City Council, Republican Omar Tarazi, recently requested all disciplinary records of Hilliard City School students over the previous five years, he was accidentally also sent the students’ identities, roughly 4,200 names, a serious privacy violation to say the least.

Especially when you consider the data was copied to school board members and that Councilmember Tarazi admitted to forwarding the data to “a number of others who were similarly interested in looking at the data,” as he told the Columbus Dispatch. Hilliard is increasingly becoming one of Central Ohio’s most diverse suburbs.

One serious question is, did Tarazi send the data to politically like-minded friends (some MAGA?), and did these friends then do the same?

Watch salon video

The inspiration for the April 2022 salon was Earth Month and WGRN 94.1 community radio’s Earth Day birthday celebration. Mark Stansbery facilitated the salon, first pointing out how back in 1970, Free Press folks helped start the first Earth Day in Columbus and have continually been at the forefront advocating for environmental issues.

Suzanne Patzer briefly reiterated the history of WGRN, which began in 2016 around Earth Day as an environmentally-focused, women-oriented, all-volunteer community radio station. Most of WGRN’s programming was put together by former Program Director Victoria Parks. Tim Chavez, WGRN programmer and scheduler, spoke about the diversity of WGRN’s current programming as a Pacifica affiliate with Democracy Now, the Thom Hartmann Show; the many national programs, and local producers.

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When Russian and Ukrainian delegations meeting in Turkey on March 29 reached an initial understanding regarding a list of countries that could serve as security guarantors for Kyiv should an agreement be struck, Israel appeared on the list. The other countries included the US, the UK, China, Russia, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy and Poland.

To your surprise, perhaps, my answer is an emphatic, unqualified NO. In this Busting Myths column, I will be schematic, but I am prepared to expand my understanding of both city and state in response to readers’ questions. For background, I refer you to my essays on the city and state published in Columbus Free Press since September 2021, available on the website.

Is Columbus really a City: That’s capital “C” City as in legally established, organized, managed?

Despite ranking 14th in the United States and growing, Columbus has no identity or sense of itself as an urban place. It has no agreed-upon landmark(s). Consider the Columbus Dispatch’s amateur “historians’” flailing efforts. Being one of innumerable Columbuses or Columbias across the nation is only one indicator. Its media are well below average. And, it has no signature professional sports team or mascot. Brutus Buckeye and “Carmen, Ohio” don’t cut it.