Last Top Stories: Field-trip policy in Columbus schools may be altered yet again | The Columbus Dispatch

• Field-trip policy in Columbus schools may be altered yet again | The Columbus Dispatch

  

  It’s an age-old rule: You can’t go on the field trip unless you turn in the consent form, signed by a parent.But Columbus City Schools made it much more complicated. Under a new policy the school board approved this past summer, no one could go on a field trip unless the Board of Education voted in advance to approve it.After that policy prevented a high-school marching band from performing Downtown in the Columbus Veterans Day Parade on Friday, the board appears ready to admit that, with m..

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• Judge suspends J.T. Barrett's license, imposes $400 fine for OVI...

  

  Ohio State quarterback J.T. Barrett apologized to the “football program and also Buckeye Nation” on Tuesday as he pleaded guilty in a Franklin County courtroom to a misdemeanor charge of operating a motor vehicle while impaired.Barrett, 20, was fined $400 and his driver’s license was suspended for 180 days by Municipal Court Judge H. William Pollitt Jr, who also ordered him to attend a three-day driver-intervention program by Feb. 15.The judge granted Barrett driving privileges to attend cl..

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• Fed program to offer foreclosed homes in Columbus to nonprofits first | The Columbus Dispatch

  

  Nonprofit housing groups in Columbus and five other Ohio cities will have the first shot at homes repossessed by the federal government under a program announced on Tuesday.Through the Neighborhood Stabilization Initiative, most foreclosed homes owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be available at a discount to community and housing groups for 12 days before being offered to the public through Fannie Mae’s HomePath and Freddie Mac’s HomeSteps websites.The goal is to give nonprofits a ch..

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• Columbus lawyer is suspended a 2nd time | The Columbus Dispatch

  

  The Ohio Supreme Court indefinitely suspended a Columbus lawyer on Tuesday.David C. Watson Jr., who began practicing law in 1985, was suspended with conditions after he failed to comply with a rule stating that retainers must be held in a client trust account instead of in a general business account.Watsonpreviously was suspended for a year in 2012after the court found him in violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct for mishandling client funds.The board based its decision on several ..

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• Solving MIA case from World War II creates family tie

  She had heard the stories, knew that the Germans had shot down her grandfather’s B-26C Marauder two days before Christmas 1944.She knew that Army Air Forces 1st Lt. William O. Pile, a former cabdriver from Circleville, was among the tens of thousands of men from World War II whose names were written on the rolls of the missing and unaccounted for.But that’s about as far as Elizabeth Dorstewitz’s family history lesson had gotten until the day the caller ID on her phone lit up with “Departmen..

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• Restored clock tower reset in Logan County

  

  BELLEFONTAINE, Ohio — Kids came with toy cranes and binoculars. Parents held babies. And military veterans sat beside Old Glory.They huddled under blankets and awnings. They sat on curbs and held camera phones.By 10 a.m., despite shifting winds, the first of four sections, the base of the clock tower, rose 223-feet skyward to the top of the Logan County Courthouse. By noon, the steel framework followed. It would support for another hundred years the original tower, erected just after the Ci..

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• GOP legislator proposes cutting aid to Ohio's jobless

  

  A Republican plan to overhaul Ohio’s unemployment compensation system would cut benefits to jobless workers while making it more difficult to qualify for help at all.Legislation introduced in the House by Toledo-area Rep. Barbara Sears would reduce the maximum number of weeks a worker could receive from the current 26 weeks to 12 to 20 weeks, depending on the state’s unemployment rate.Under a proposed sliding scale, if Ohio’s unemployment rate is less than 5.5 percent, as it is now, jobless..

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• Northland High School sophomore killed in shooting

  

  The victim of a fatal shooting on Monday night in the parking lot of a North Side convenience store was identified as a Northland High School student.Tykeem Eskridge, 16, died in what police described as an exchange of gunfire outside the Woodland Express store at 1785 Woodland Ave.Witnesses began calling 911 at 6:33 p.m., saying they heard multiple gunshots from what sounded like at least two guns.Eskridge had been shot in the head. One caller said he was bleeding heavily and that there wa..

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• Bomb threat closes Reynoldsburg's Waggoner Road Junior High

  

  Reynoldsburg's Waggoner Road Junior High School reopened at about 10:40 a.m. after a bomb threat. The school was evacuated early Wednesday morning, before students even began arriving for school. An anonymous person called in a bomb threat against the school to the Reynoldsburg Police Department sometime before 8 a.m.Reynoldsburg police and the Columbus Bomb Squad searching the building, according to a Reynoldsburg schools spokesman, and declared it clear as of about 10:40 a.m.Ealier, the j..

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• 3 charged in data thefts from financial companies

  

  NEW YORK — Two men held in Israel and one U.S. citizen thought to be living in Moscow have been charged with stealing the contact information of more than 100 million customers of U.S. financial institutions to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits, authorities said on Tuesday.The summer 2014 theft of data such as names, addresses, emails and phone numbers of more than 83 million customers of JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation’s biggest bank by assets, was described ..

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