In the aftermath of the Saturday killing of off-duty Cuyahoga County Corrections Officer Timoteo Cruz, the sheriff’s department is pausing some off-duty work for officers. Sheriff Christopher Viland acknowledged in a statement released Tuesday the popularity of off-duty security jobs among officers. “Suspending secondary employment involving the sale, possession, and/or use of alcohol is a measured, temporary respite so that I can review the current policy and consider officer safety and reasonable expectations,” Viland wrote.

Restaurants and bars in Greater Cleveland are emphasizing safety ahead of Wednesday’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Not much will change for the holiday at Market Garden Brewery or its partner establishments, including Nano Brew, Bier Markt and Bar Cento, said co-owner Sam McNulty. The Ohio City restaurants have been outfitted with barriers and other social distancing measures for months, all of which will remain in place for St. Patrick's Day revelers.

For the next eight weeks, thousands of people will visit the Wolstein Center in Cleveland to take a shot at preventing COVID-19 and ending the pandemic. On Wednesday, March 17, the clinic, which is Ohio’s first mass vaccination site, officially opens to the public at 8 a.m. Officials hope to vaccinate about 3,000 people the first day and eventually ramp up to 6,000 vaccines per day by Friday.

In response to a prompt at a writing workshop, Laura Maylene Walter imagined a world where moles and freckles on the bodies of women and girls predict the future. “There would be a lot of tension over who gets to control the future, who gets to read the future,” Walter said. “It's on women's bodies, but are they really controlling it?”

Cleveland City Council approved Mayor Frank Jackson’s $1.8 billion budget Monday afternoon, increasing operating spending slightly after the COVID-19 pandemic dented last year’s revenues. The city’s income tax revenue took a hit last year and the pandemic wiped out much of Cleveland’s revenue from taxes on hotel rooms and event admissions. Revenue in those areas is expected to recover this year, but still fall short of 2019 levels.

A third round of stimulus checks is on its way to aid those impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, but that money could be difficult for individuals fleeing domestic abuse to access.

When the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) fund was set up in 1984, it was meant to be a lasting resource for crime victims, with a dedicated funding stream outside of partisan budget fights – part of every fine collected in a federal criminal conviction went into it. Every year, those federal VOCA funds go to state attorneys general to disburse to support groups that assist victims with counseling, attending court, paying medical bills, providing child care and making up for lost wages.

The mass COVID-19 vaccination clinic at the Wolstein Center in Cleveland officially opens Wednesday, but certain groups have been offered shots there already. Some employees of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Cleveland office, as well as some members of Cleveland-area community organizations and churches, received their first doses at the site Monday.

When Ted Carter announced he was moving from Cleveland to Anchorage, Alaska, he got sarcastic nods. "Everybody said, 'Yeah, right, yeah sure,'" he remembers friends and family saying. If anything, their skepticism drove him on. Within weeks of retiring from his job as a Cleveland public school teacher, he booked a flight. Within months, he packed five bags and was on his way. He arrived in February 2020, in the dark of the far northern night and with the thermometer reading minus 11.

Lakewood painter Arabella Proffer’s art is out there. Her portraits of punks depicted as medieval royalty have international fans. But some of her most compelling work overlaps with her own health struggles. "Evangeline" [Arabella Proffer]