Monday, August 31st, 2026

Welcome to Monday’s edition of The Pennant. To listen to this newsletter, click the “Listen Online” link in the top right corner of this email.

On this day in 1997, Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris while fleeing paparazzi in a tunnel.

Ohio State Football starts its season this weekend, with its first game against Ball State on Saturday. See the rest of their schedule in the Top of the Fold.

Also, while both gubernatorial candidates have plans for data centers in Ohio, neither answers the hard questions. Read more about this in our Editorial.

COLUMBUS — The No. 1-ranked Buckeyes, per both the AP and Coaches polls, open the season against Ball State before facing what analysts call one of the toughest schedules in the country. 

Ohio State travels to Texas on Sept. 12, to USC and to Indiana later in the year, and hosts Oregon and Michigan on Nov. 28. 

Ohio State added more than 50 new players this offseason and returns preseason All-American Jeremiah Smith and Heisman finalist Julian Sayin. 

Home games give Columbus's economy an estimated $20 million boost.

CLEVELAND — The Nepali American Organization of Ohio has canceled its annual Teej celebration, which had been scheduled for Saturday at University Church near Kent State University, as members focus on relief efforts for catastrophic flooding in Nepal that has killed nearly 400 people and left more than 1,000 missing. 

Organizers said the women's festival, typically marked with traditional attire, food, music and dancing, didn't feel appropriate to hold while Nepal faces the disaster. 

The group is offering refunds to those who had registered for the event or the option to redirect their payment toward flood relief, and is also collecting donations through its Facebook page. 

The cancellation comes as other members of Northeast Ohio's Nepali community, including a Case Western Reserve University student, search for missing friends and family and raise funds to help those affected.

Three people were arrested at a Westlake wedding last week after a brawl broke out and injured several guests.

Fighting allegedly began in the parking lot of La Centre Banquet Facility between members of two families with a long-running feud.

One of those arrested, Raed Mahmoud Sulaiman, 46, faces charges of assault and tampering with evidence after police accused him of threatening guests with a butter knife and discarding it once officers arrived.

When it comes to the future of AI and data centers in Ohio, some people have a vision. Others can't see past November.

Ohio's next governor will decide how the state handles the data center boom, and both leading candidates have plans built to suck in the base rather than answer hard questions. Strip away the rhetoric and the substance underneath is thin — and the stakes are bigger than either campaign is willing to admit.

Look no further than Amy Acton's pledge to require data center developers to use union labor exclusively. It appeases people who pack a union hall but leaves the 90 percent who are not trade union members outside the discussion.

Union density in Ohio's construction trades sits at roughly 11 percent, according to federal labor data. The way Acton's plan actually works is to hand the opportunity to roughly 40,000 union tradespeople while leaving more than a quarter of a million nonunion Ohio construction workers to go find other projects.

Mandate all-union labor, and Ohio doesn't get an Ohio jobs boom. It gets a narrow slice of the workforce protected by political fiat, and leaves everyone else locked out — or it gets out-of-state union workers bused in to hit a target Ohio's own union ranks can't fill.

The property rights problem is worse, and nobody on the trail wants to touch it. If a farmer wants to sell his land to a data center developer, the state has no business standing in the way. That land is his. A moratorium sounds clean in a press release, but the moment it's used to block a willing landowner from selling to a willing buyer, it stops being a regulation and starts being a violation of his legal rights.

Continue reading the editorial here.

Have you ever used a mail-in ballot during an election?
- Yes - 54%
- No - 46%

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