Associated Press Posted February 21st 2012   CLEVELAND: Ohio’s largest county has decided to expand health care benefit access for gay county employees to include their partners’ children. The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland reports the Cuyahoga County Council voted 6-4 to approve the change Tuesday. The county doesn’t give the same benefits to the [...]

Associated Press Posed February 20th 2012   COLUMBUS: Ohio lawmakers who want public schools to wait until after Labor Day to start classes say the state’s tourism industry loses business when kids go back to school too early. State Rep. Bill Hayes, a co-sponsor of the proposed legislation, says one reason for the bill was [...]

Associated Press Posted February 19th 2012   Cleveland casino should open in May Ohio’s first casino should be open in time for the Memorial Day weekend. The Ohio Casino Control Commission said the Cleveland casino will open the week of May 14. Ohio’s second casino will open two weeks later in Toledo. Commission Executive Director [...]

TheNewYorkTimes.com By Brian Stelter Posted February 17th 2012   OPRAH WINFREY routinely reminds her nearly nine million followers on Twitter to tune into her one-year-old channel, OWN, and chats along with viewers on premiere nights. Those informal messages create a direct connection between one of the most famous women in the world and her fans. [...]

HuffingtonPost.com By Arthur Delaney Posted February 16th 2012 (PHOTO: REP-JACK KINGSTON R-GA, FIRST CONGRESSMAN TO PROPOSE DRUG TESTING REQUIREMENT FOR UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS)   WASHINGTON — The maximum duration of unemployment insurance would gradually fall from 99 weeks to 73 weeks over the course of the year under the payroll tax deal sought by congressional negotiators, [...]

Associated Press Posted February 14th 2012   COLUMBUS: The consultant studying whether the state should lease the Ohio Turnpike would be paid $2.85 million under a proposed contract, well above the $1.5 million the state initially estimated last year in a request to the federal government. Austin, Texas-based consulting firm KPMG Corporate Finance will analyze [...]

TheNewYorkTimes.com By Nick Bilton Posted February 14th 2012   SAN FRANCISCO – By my calculation, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owes me about $50. Without me, and the other 844,999,999 people poking, liking and sharing on the site, Facebook would look like a scene from the postapocalyptic movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: bleak, [...]

Associated Press Posted February 12th 2012   CLEVELAND: Cleveland’s mayor wants to make performance a key factor in deciding how much teachers are paid and to eliminate seniority in deciding who is laid off in the shrinking district. Mayor Frank Jackson controls city schools through an appointed board. He outlined his proposals to teachers and [...]

Yahoo.com The Daily Meal-Shine Foods Posted February 10th 2012   This week, Taco Bell rolled out its long-awaited breakfast menu at 750 locations in 10 states across the country. The Tex-Mex titan of fast food, whose parent company is Yum! Brands Inc., spent the past five years developing the 11-item menu, known as “FirstMeal.” Breakfast [...]

OhioDailyBlog.com By AnastasiaPantsios Posted February 9th 2012   By now maybe you’ve heard that our beloved gov. delivered yet another headscratcher of an off-the-cuff State of the State speech yesterday in Steubenville. For an hour and a half he rambled, he self-congratulated, he uttered cryptic non sequiturs, he issued random, impromptu shout-outs. And he got [...]