Over 50 people marched from Bicentennial Park to the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center today to demand the release of Masonique Saunders, 17, who was incarcerated last December. Saunders is being charged with felony murder after Columbus police shot and killed her boyfriend, Julius Tate, in an undercover operation. Saunders was not involved in the murder.

Singing and chanting, the marchers carried drums, instruments, and noisemakers so that they can be heard from inside the jail.

“Masonique did not murder Julius, the police did. They need to be held accountable, she needs to be with her family and community in her home and school,” said Lainie Rini, a member of the Coalition to Free Masonique Saunders.

Saunders has been in the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center since last December. She has not been granted any bail. The Coalition has held actions and demonstrations for the past several months to demand the release of Saunders, including a sit-in in city prosecutor Ron O’Brien’s office last Monday.

Sun, April 7, 2-4pm
399 S. Front St.
Gathering at Bicentennial Park (233 S Civic Center Dr, Columbus, OH 43215) at 2pm and marching over to the Franklin County Juvenile Jail (399 S Front St, Columbus, OH 43215-5038, United States) to demand justice for Masonique! Bring your instruments, be ready to sing and chant.

All the cool politicians are backing it; President Trump is mocking it: it’s the Green New Deal. The Democratic Socialists (DSA) spring issue of Democratic Left is totally dedicated to reporting on the Green New Deal. Perhaps DSA’s most famous member currently is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), or as Time magazine calls her on its cover, “The Phenom.”

It was AOC more than any other elected official who brought the Green New Deal into vogue. First, a week after the 2018 midterm election, the Sunrise Movement held a sit-in over climate change at Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Representative Ocasio-Cortez stopped in to chat up and support he demonstrators. Soon after, she went beyond that as she introduced House Resolution 109 – the Green New Deal – in the newly seated 116th U.S. Congress. Senator Markey (D-MA) introduced similar legislation with Senate Resolution 59. Their legislation reveals that the Green New Deal in essence is a jobs stimulus program centered around solving the problems of climate chaos and economic inequality.

Many hardworking and successful marijuana connoisseurs have dreamed of one day working a legal and legitimate job in the cannabis industry.

For Ohioans that dream can finally become a reality. According to many Ohio medical-marijuana industry experts, there is a shortage of skilled workers as the state’s medical marijuana program takes off like John Glenn in a rocket.

Indeed, some Ohio medical marijuana companies have looked far and wide to find experienced workers. Standard Wellness near Sandusky, one of the state’s first cultivators and processors of medical marijuana, started with four employees and now has 45, said CEO Erik Vaughan recently to Cleveland.com.

“We had to go out of state to find specialists and managers for our cultivation business,” says Vaughan.

Also telling is how many cannabis careerists have had to leave Ohio to make their career dreams a reality. But staying near to home is now possible as the only state-approved career school for cannabis education east of Colorado – The Cleveland School of Cannabis or CSC – is opening a second location in Columbus this April and currently enrolling students.

[NOTE: This review may contain plot spoilers.]

As the United Kingdom is embroiled in the Brexit imbroglio about Britain leaving the European Union, two Brits living on the Continent ponder returning to not-so-Merry-Olde-England. Alice (Miranda Wynne) and Fiona (Ashley Romans) are expats who have been living in the Dutch titular port city, Rotterdam, and as the rest of the U.K. struggles with the Brexit divorce from the EU (which goes completely unmentioned in Jon Brittain’s two act play - perhaps because the characters are too obsessed by their own personal problems to give a tinker’s damn about what’s happening in, like, you know, Earth?), they are contemplating the return of the “natives.”