And both she and her husband, Felix DeJesus, had talked about the need for poor, working-class neighborhoods like theirs to band together to raise and protect children.

The Spanish-language Mass at St. Michael the Archangel was packed on Sunday. Weary after a week of media scrutiny, parishioners prayed for the freed women, and for their neighborhood to protect its own.

The church on Scranton Avenue is just three blocks from the house where Ariel Castro allegedly held three women hostage for a decade. The young women – Gina DeJesus, Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight—have all returned home since their rescue a week ago.

Time to heal

On Sunday morning – Mother’s Day—attorneys for the three asked well-wishers and the media to give them time to heal and reconnect with their families.

“There may be a time in the future when Ms. DeJesus, Ms. Berry and Ms. Knight are ready to tell their story. Let me make this very clear: that will not be while the criminal proceeding is pending, and it will not be until they tell us they are ready to do so,” said attorney Jim Wooley.

And overall, the media and crowds seem to be starting to give them that room.

A Return to Normalcy

Just a few cameramen remain perched on Seymour Avenue as police cars allow access to the block for residents. William Johnson used to live nearby, and was attending St. Michael’s with his wife, who grew up in the largely Hispanic neighborhood. Like many in the past week, he’s asking himself how three young women could go undetected for a decade.

“Nowadays, I just notice people are more into themselves and minding their own business,” he says. “They’re not as neighborly as they used to be. We have a lot of foreclosed homes in the city. And this is how things like this happen,” Johnson said.

Prevention

Preventing this from happening again has been a topic of discussion in the neighborhood for the past week. Lillian Lequay says she’s doing her part.

“Now when I see something weird, I say, ‘Oh, let me check that guy.’ I think everybody has opened their eyes. In everybody’s mind, they’re more protective of their kids. I have a 17-year-old and I’m afraid for her to even step out of the house.”

“If you see something, say something.”

During a prayer vigil last week, community leaders like activist Khalid Samad urged residents to be more vigilant in the future.

“Let’s continue to understand: if you see something, say something. It’s not snitching. It’s telling the story. It’s reporting a crime.”

Gina DeJesus, Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight were allegedly abducted by Ariel Castro when they were 14, 16 and 20-years-old. Castro has been charged with three counts of rape and four counts of kidnapping.

One of the kidnapping charges applies to the now 6-year-old daughter he fathered with Amanda Berry. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor plans to file additional charges.

And once again, they’re indicating they’ll keep blocking his permanent appointment to head that agency.

Richard Cordray was sharing the witness table at the Senate Banking Committee with Mary Jo White, President Obama’s nominee to head the SEC. It was her first appearance, and she got most of the questions.

Cordray’s been here before — a year and a half ago, when Obama first nominated him to head the consumer bureau.

Now, as then, senators praised his intellect, cooperation and thoughtful approach to government. Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee even extended the compliments to Cordray’s 14-year-old twins.

“Mr. Cordray, once again your family has been a great asset to you today. Your son and daughter are acting perfectly in the back and even sometimes act like the questioners are asking intelligent questions. So I do want to say if you can get people dealing with consumers in the financial world to act like they are, you’ll do a very good thing for our country.”

But Corker and the other Republicans continue to raise questions about the whole structure of the new agency, which they want to be run by a board and answerable to Congress for its budget, not the Federal Reserve.

That’s why Senate Republicans blocked his appointment last year and are threatening to do it again.

Republicans are raising some new questions. Sen. Mike Johanns of Nebraska wanted to know why more than half the consumer bureau’s budget last year went to contracted services. Cordray said those were start-up costs, and the contracts were largely with the Treasury Department.

“I think we have a right, as U.S. senators to probe into this kind of information because it’s important that we be able to tell our taxpayers, our constituents, ‘Don’t worry this money is being spent wisely and thoughtfully and carefully and we dug into it and we can say that,” Johanns said.

“We are quite welcoming of that, and we understand,” Cordray responded. ”

As I said in the beginning. I served in the Legislature in Ohio. I appreciate and understand the importance of congressional oversight . I think it is a meaningful check on our agency. … We try to be as transparent as we can and as we’ve grown as an agency, we are able to do that more. We are completely committed to doing that.

During the two-hour hearing, Cordray — a one-time Jeopardy champion — responded with specific answers to specific questions or with promises to find the answers.

But Democrat Jeff Merkley of Oregon stymied him. Merkley noted that, in some ways, Cordray’s agency faces more limits on its budget and regulations than other federal agencies.

These are extraordinary, then, measures related to the CFPB, and yet all we hear about is the CFPB actually has fewer restrictions than other banking agencies. Why is there so much confusion among some of my colleagues on this point?

I don’t know, Senator.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown introduced Cordray and condemned Republicans for blocking a qualified nominee because they don’t like the agency he’d head.

The strongest defense of Cordray came from U.S. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, the former advisor to President Obama who first hired Cordray.

And she had originally been expected to be the one to head the consumer bureau —until Republicans made it clear they would never confirm her.

I see nothing here but a filibuster threat against Director Cordray as an attempt to weaken the consumer agency. I think the delay in getting him confirmed is bad for consumers. It’s bad for small banks; it’s bad for credit unions; it’s bad for anyone trying to offer an honest product in an honest market. I hope you get confirmed. You have earned it Director Cordray.

There was a hint of a thaw from Tennessee Sen. Corker.

“Mr. Cordray,…I do appreciate the way that you’ve dealt with our office and I would say most people here. And I do hope that over the course of the next short period of time we’re able to figure out a way for the entity to function in a way that makes everyone on both sides of the isle feel comfortable,” Corker said.

Cordray told the Banking Committee his agency has handled 130,000 complaints from every state, including ones related to credit cards, mortgages and student and veteran loans.

Cordray is also one of the Ohio Democrats whose name has been tossed around for a potential run for governor next year. That’s considered a lot less likely if he’s confirmed by the Senate for the consumer protection job.

Big Data – according to Charlie Lougheed –is all about the three V’s: volume, velocity, and variety.

“So if you think about an organization like Google, they have massive amounts of volume coming at them. If you think about a large bank, there are a lot of transactions coming through, that’s velocity, it’s coming at you very quickly. If you think about a healthcare org. there’s a huge degree of variety in the data.”

Lougheed is president of Explorys, a Cleveland start-up that has created a Google-type tool for the medical industry to help make sense of the tsunami of data sloshing around.

From a volume standpoint today we’ve curated 85 billion clinical, financial, and operational data facts, and those are the data facts that make-up the process of care.

Every time you see your family doctor, or take a drug, or enter the hospital you generate potentially useful data that, taken together, could lead to better treatment for you, and a way for hospital administrators to streamline care.

Lougheed says Explorys uses anonymous patient information in the aggregate to do basic research to “more or less have a conversation with your data, because that’s what’s always been missing within large sets of healthcare data, it’s taken a long time to ask a basic question.”

Explorys got its start three years ago from an idea hatched by a Cleveland Clinic physician who mined the hospital’s database to uncover trends and insights for his practice. The company incubated in a suite at the Clinic’s business development arm before landing last November in the spacious digs of the former MOCA galleries and hiring 85 employees.

Cleveland Clinic Innovations director Chris Coburn says Explorys is a response to enormous changes happening in the healthcare industry.

What we’re heading in to is an era where information management is going to dominate healthcare – the groups, the companies, the hospitals that best manage data are going to come out on top.

Explorys CEO Steve McHale says the value of big data comes from the Affordable Care Act’s shift from piece-meal payments, or ‘fee-for-service’ patient care, to a lump-sum, outcome-based system.

McHale says today’s hospital leaders are facing a steep learning curve.

“They need to now prepare for new payment models and new care models, the fee for service model will become a thing of the past. Now the key is, how do you transform yourself into that new model without going under.”

And like the airlines, banking, and other industries, he says healthcare is undergoing rapid consolidation.

There’s not going to be all these little mom and pop systems and hospitals. It’s going to come down to mega-systems we think.

McHale predicts about a-third of hospitals will be gone, or absorbed in mergers over the next seven years.

Right now Explorys counts 13 hospital chains in its network, including the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, MetroHealth, Akron General, Summa and Catholic Health Partners.

The network tracks 31 million patients and 120 hospitals, and 85 billion data points.

McHale says analytic tools like Explorys could give providers an edge in the new era of slimmer profit margins, and higher risk.

Big data-driven healthcare is his prescription for hospitals hoping to survive this coming revolution.

Dozens of shop owners were busily prepping their booths over the weekend, scrubbing surfaces, arranging shelves and fixtures and receiving fresh orders of meat and cheese.

Baked goods were being made throughout the night and into this morning.

It’s all part of the recovery effort after a fire early on the morning of January 30. Now, the operative words being used to describe the rest of the one-hundred-year old landmark are “clean” and “bright.”

“I’ve never seen it this clean on the inside,” says Patrick Hearn, who’s served customers in the building on-and-off for 30 years.

“I have a new appreciation for some of the items. Like the area around the clock. And the little freezes that are in the archways. They’ve been pretty bad for years.”

Along with the building itself looking different, many business owners followed Vince Bertonaschi: The owner of Vince’s Meats used the down time to study, reinvent and improve his operation.

“Going to try to have a new floor put in. Got rid of a lot of things. Things that you don’t think of. Fix this. Try to make things easier. You don’t do that when you’re open.”

But that’s a small silver lining after discarding smoke-damaged food, sifting through insurance paperwork, and guesstimating how many thousands of dollars have been lost.

Bob Holcepl owns City Roast and says insurance will cover his lost product, but not lost wages or sales.

“Everything in the market is fresh this week, for sure. ‘Cause everything’s been replaced.

“I lost 500 pounds of tea, I lost you 240 pounds of coffee. I lost thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of other products and other equipment. And the frustration of not being able to serve your customers. You just want to get back to work.”

Over the weekend, customers were trying to peek through the dozens of locked doors for a glimpse of the repair efforts.

James Howard works nearby and says traffic has been slow since last month. He’s thrilled the market is re-opening, both for his business and his palette.

“I’m waiting for my favorite cheese stand lady to open up. And I get some of my meats there. I like getting my cheese better there than from Dave’s.

“It’s softer, and it stays in your refrigerator a whole month without going bad. They got a lot of good fresh meat, pretty meat. And I miss getting my sweet things out of there, like brownies and cookies and things.”

Many merchants thought the re-opening would take months, and say their selection and variety might take a few days to get back to normal. No cause has yet been determined for the fire, which started at Sebastian’s Meats and spread to a neighboring stall.

That could bode well for Ohio.

Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican Rob Portman are among the 20 senators who will be taking the closest look at everything from taxes to trade agreements, Medicare, Social Security and the overall economic well-being at the United States.

University of Kansas political scientist Burdett Loomis edited a book called “The U.S. Senate: from Deliberation to Dysfunction.” Despite the title, he says the Senate has been a more bipartisan and functional place than the House in recent weeks, and having Portman and Brown on the key committee is a bonus.

“I do think that you’ve got two very different senators but both senators are smart, and I think can work to the advantage of Ohioans across the board. And in that sense, I think you’re very lucky,” Loomis says.

Loomis says much of the advantage may be behind the scenes, but expects key interests of the Buckeye state – such as the auto industry – will get attention from the powerful Senate Finance Committee.

Bill Johnson upset Democratic incumbent Charlie Wilson two years ago. The 6th Congressional District was sprawling then, hugging the Ohio River from Mahoning County to the southernmost tip of the state. Now it stretches even further, cutting inland deeper into other parts of Ohio’s coal country.

In this year’s rematch with Wilson, Johnson says he’s been far more active than Wilson in his 2 terms.

“You know as a freshman legislator I’ve had five pieces of legislation pass the House of Representatives on a bipartisan basis,” Johnson says.

One of the bills Johnson sponsored is the Stop the War on Coal Act, the final piece of legislation to pass the House this year.

The bill removes the Obama administration’s rules governing the handling of coal dust and waste and removes new protections for streams impacted by mining. It’s part of Johnson’s war on regulations.

Keeping the EPA out of the oil and gas industry, stopping the EPA and agencies like the Department of the Interior that also has the war on coal.

Johnson’s anti-war efforts go way beyond coal. His bill undoes the EPA’s efforts to regulate green-house gases and tail-pipe emissions. The Democratically controlled Senate has not taken up the measure.

Johnson’s opponent, Charlie Wilson declined to be interviewed for this story. But back in 2010, he, too, defended coal.

86 percent of our electricity comes from coal. We rely on it to power our homes and businesses, but in Washington, they just don’t get it.

Scott Miller is an energy policy analyst with Ohio University, acknowledges the Obama administration has not been overly coal friendly. Instead, the past four years have seen support for alternative energies like wind and solar by the White House.

“And it has also chosen, which previous administrations had not chosen, to fully enforce regulations that have been on the books for quite a while,” Miller says.

The coal industry is contracting in Ohio and neighboring states, but Miller asks “Is that really because of regulatory forces or is that because of market forces? And it’s a mixture of both.”

Miller note that new regulations are cutting into the bottom line of the coal industry, but so is competition from cheap natural gas.

Six years ago nobody thought we’d be producing more natural gas in the United States than Russia, but we are.

The 6th District’s new boundaries now cut into the heart of the Utica shale region of eastern Ohio’s Carroll County, where there’s little concern about coal or who’s running for Congress.

Ron Minast voted Republican in early voting.

“Give me a name,” Minast says.

Reporter: “Well, you’re in the 6th district.”

Minast: “I don’t know who’s where…”

Reporter: “Bill Johnson – that’s the Republican candidate.”

Minast: “Well that’s who I voted for.”

Carroll County is shale country. And Carrollton’s John Dendak, like Manist, supports whichever candidate will keep the shale gas boom pumping.

This is a poor community, it’s been a poor community, and these people— it’s the first time they’ve had money to do anything other than pay their taxes and buy a plot to be buried in.

The importance of energy jobs is one of the few things both incumbent Bill Johnson and challenger Charlie Wilson agree on, according to political writer David Skolnick at the Youngstown Vindicator.

“I do see this as being a close race,” Skolnick says.

The redrawn 6th District leans 54 percent Republican. But Wilson’s home turf is the heart of coal country, Belmont County.

So I think that was maybe somewhat of a strategical error in the part of the Republicans when they were redistricting to include that part in the new 6th District.

Skolnick says the sprawling district covering eastern Ohio’s shale gas and coal mining corridor could be the only true Congressional toss up in Ohio come November 6th.

Dennis Gunther graduated from Kent State University three years before Ohio National guardsmen open fired on protestors, killing four and wounding nine others.

But he was living in town when Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder died, and he lives with that legacy.

“I can’t go anywhere without saying I graduated from Kent State. And the first thing they want to talk about is the shootings,” Gunther says.

Today Gunther lives in Toledo. He came back for this weekend’s Kent State homecoming, and to reflect at the new May 4 Visitors’ Center. He feels some empathy for the guardsmen and the students protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War with the invasion of Cambodia.

“I think the guys that did this, didn’t want to do what happened. But it was just a very unfortunate thing and I don’t really know that you could say who’s to blame.”

His former classmate, Dick Hoyne, lived in Stow at the time and didn’t know what to think.

“Back then you joined the National Guard to get out of the service. They had no training, whatsoever. They were young and stressed out,” Hoyne says.

Taylor Hall is next to the field where the guardsmen fired. Its exhibit features three parts: social context, the shootings themselves, and reaction.

The social context section includes three period TV sets running a loop of pop culture and news footage: everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Smothers Brothers to Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.” On the walls are magazines, album covers and photographs that tell the stories of the Cold War, music and sports of the 1960s.

Thomas Grace is a history professor in Buffalo, but in 1970 he was one of the nine students wounded. He’s writing a book about the roots of Kent’s student political organizations throughout the 1960s.

“It’s often felt that the only place where these kind of activities were occurring was on the campuses that had more academic prestige than Kent. But that was not the case. Kent can seem to be home, in retrospect, to the long 60s every bit as much as a place like Berkeley or Columbia, even if it never achieved that level of notoriety, ” Grace says.

Grace says civil rights protests in the City of Kent by students starting in 1960 planted the seed that blossomed into campus anti-war protests by the end of the decade.

Two of his close friends, Jimmy Riggs and Marcella Hartzler, came to the preview from Wooster.

“We were here that day. We were running from the shots,” Hartzler says.

“We were here through all four days of demonstrations. The whole country was divided. There was a lot of polarization and alienation and the big generation gap,” Riggs says.

Hartzler says “I felt like I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Riggs says “We felt patriotic.”

“We as students did not do anything wrong,” Hartzler adds. “And if students today wouldn’t rise for such an occasion, I’d be shocked.”

The students in 1970 were protesting a war. Hilary Crisan, a journalism major who toured the Visitors’ Center with her father, hopes her fellow students might apply that spirit today.

“I feel like a lot of people that I’ve spoken to, at least, feel very differently about our government than what’s going on. But they’re not being vocal about it. So I think that they need to start being vocal, and I hope that this inspires them, and I’m glad that this is up,” Crisan says.

The second gallery is mostly a billboard-sized video screen running a documentary about the 13 seconds that helped change public consciousness of the war. It’s a somber room, which gives way to a corridor filled with the aftermath of the event.

English professor Judy Davis is director of the Visitors Center and says the third gallery will continue to grow.

“People can actually become part of writing the history of May 4 by stopping at one of two response stations and answering one of several questions about May 4,” Davis says.

“And their words will be displayed on a monitor for people to read over the ages. So that’s really a part of the recording of the history of May 4 and the impact that it’s had.”

Alan Canfora was shot in the wrist on May 4, 1970, and has remained a critic of what happened that day, and the investigations that followed.

As with most of the people who were there then and returned over the weekend, he says the galleries serve an important purpose well.

“I think the purpose of a visitor’s center is to create a historical context so people can understand what happened; the basic facts. So I think if any member of the public came through here, it would be a very emotional and educational experience.”

After the shootings, President Nixon appointed a commission that said some protests leading up to the shootings – including the burning of the ROTC building—were criminal and dangerous. But it also called the training, weapons and actions of the National Guard – quote – “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.”

It was Earth Day 2011 when visitors noticed the first of thousands of dead turtles, frogs, troutlings and other fish along the East Branch of the Rocky River. They called investigators, who determined that just about all of the fish in a three-mile stretch in that area of the Mill Stream Run Reservation were dead.

Later, they figured out they’d been poisoned with cyanide. And now, according to an indictment released by a federal grand jury, they think they know who did it.
Mike Tobin is spokesman for the U.S. attorneys office.

“Renato Montorsi runs a company called Kennedy Mint, which is located in Strongsville. That company sells collectable coins, but used to be involved in metal plating. And because of that, they had a 55-gallon drum of liquid cyanide that was used in the plating process. In April, according to the indictment, Mr. Montorsi tried to dispose of the 55-gallon drum in the dumpster, but the drum was labeled as toxic, it had a skull and crossbones on it, and the trash company refused to take it,” Tobin says.

“So according to the indictment Mr. Montorsi takes the 55-gallon drum, moves it to spot in his parking lot over the storm sewer, punches a hole in it and lets the liquid cyanide drain into the storm sewer which then goes directly into the Rocky River.”

Crews from state, federal and local agencies worked on the spill and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District used dye testing to figure out that the chemical was cyanide and where it came from.

Tobin says the emptied drum was found at Montorsi’s home, after he and his wife, Teresina, had denied knowing where it was.

That’s why they’re facing charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

The Montorsi’s attorney, Richard Blake, declined to comment, saying he hadn’t had time to review the indictment.

Tobin says the case is unusual, but not unique.

“I don’t recall one as direct cause and effect, where you punch a hole, the liquid drains in, and then you have the dead fish. But, the sad reality is that we do deal with companies all the time discharging all sorts of waste.”

The area of the fish kills is stocked each spring and draws sports fishermen from throughout the region.

If he’s convicted Montorsi could be facing up to 20 years in prison.

Republican Jim Renacci made his name and fortune as the owner of nursing homes, car dealerships and sports teams – and as the mayor of Wadsworth—before he ran for the 16th Congressional District two years ago. He unseated one-term incumbent and Democrat John Boccieri.

Betty Sutton, a labor lawyer, state lawmaker and Democrat, is seeking a sixth term in a Congress, after GOP lawmakers wiped out her district and merged some of it into Renacci’s. Theirs is one of only two congressional races in the country pitting incumbents of opposite parties. And that’s translated into big money and lots of attention, including that of the 300 people packed into the City Club of Cleveland debate.

Like a microcosm of the presidential race, Sutton voiced support for the Affordable Care Act and for raising taxes on wealthy people. Renacci says higher taxes would strangle small business owners, while Obamacare creates too much uncertainty for all businesses.

“Now there were some good things in the bill. Pre-existing conditions; I agree with some of those things. But we could have done that in four or five pages. We don’t have to throw a 2,400-page bill on the table and say ‘We need to pass it to know what’s in it.’”

But Sutton supports the health-care act and says Renacci, and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have talked of replacing it but won’t say how or with what.

On economic development, Sutton repeatedly touted her anti-corrosion initiative to develop the $400 billion rust-prevention industry in Northeast Ohio.

“Making sure that when we build that infrastructure, we can use American iron, steel and manufactured goods to get those ripple effects and those good jobs for our folks. We can also close those loopholes that my opponent has consistently voted for, that encourage outsourcing of our jobs. We could also rein in Chinese currency manipulation, something that I would ask my opponent to join me in calling on Speaker Boehner to put on the House floor, because that could mean a million jobs.”

That drew a pointed a response from Renacci, who has supported eliminating taxes on profits American companies make overseas if they re-invest that money in the U.S.

“Congresswoman Sutton talked about loopholes. I’m a CPA. To send jobs overseas, I’d love for her to tell me one of those loopholes she’s talking about. I don’t know what those deductions are to send jobs overseas. I’d love to hear them someday. I believe that we need certainty and predictability for those job creators. She talked about what she believes. I believe the job creators are the ones we should be listening to.”

The candidates also diverge sharply on what should be done about the $1.2 trillion in cuts in defense and domestic spending that is coming Jan. 1. Congress agreed on the cuts in August 2011 to resolve an impasse over the national debt.

“I voted against the sequestration in the first instance because I knew it would get us into this place.”

Renacci voted for the cuts, but then supported an alternative this summer that would lessen the cuts to defense.

Most talk about debt and deficits in the races this year for president, Senate and Congress includes an argument over whether Bush-era tax cuts for the the wealthiest Americans should expire.

This debate was no different.

Renacci says no, contending many of those who would be affected are small-business owners, whom he calls job-creators.

Sutton says the cuts should expire for income above $250,000.

“My name is Rob Portman, and they say I was on Gov. Romney’s short list of vice presidential candidates. Apparently, it wasn’t short enough.”

Then Portman launched into President Obama on economic issues ranging from the national debt to free trade.

You have to liberate the productive power of the American people through policies that encourage innovation, risk taking, investment and jobs. And you have to compete and win in the global economy. Gov. Romney understands this.

He claimed President Obama has been too distracted by expanding the size of the federal government in other areas to pay attention to developing trade agreements.

“Now why is this important? Because 95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside our borders. And to create jobs, our workers and our farmers need to sell more of what we make to those people.”

Portman was the U.S. trade representative under former President George W. Bush, as well as his budget director. His speech didn’t touch on that, nor did it mention the last Republican president. But in a flurry of responses, Democrats gave prominent attention to both.

Obama for America – Ohio Press Secretary Jessica Kershaw called Portman “a dedicated out outsourcer of American jobs to China and chief architect of the failed Bush economic policies.”

She also pointed to a Dayton Daily News analysis that shows Ohio exports hit a record level of nearly $25 billion in the first half of this year.

But Republican delegates, like former Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomers say Portman’s resume adds weight to his criticism of President Obama.

“This is a really moving convention. Now that sounds odd to be in the middle of all this hoopla and say it’s moving. But because we are really addressing the most important election inour lives, listening to these people who are speaking from the heart, this isn’t alla bout winning and election, it’s about returning America.”

Portman’s speech was the last prominent role during this convention for Ohioan speakers. But Ohio will continue to get plenty of attention from both Mitt Romney and President Obama. In a span of three days, beginning Friday with a visit to Lordstown by Vice President Joe Biden, all four presidential and vice presidential candidates will be in Ohio.