Friday, July 24th, 2026

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On this day in 1978, Pete Rose hit safely in his 36th straight game as the Reds beat the Expos 5-4 in Montreal. The streak reached 44 games, third-longest in major league history.

A Put-in-Bay bar shooting left one man dead and a Michigan man charged with murder, and the National Weather Service has confirmed eight tornadoes from Tuesday's storms — both in the Top of the Fold. 

Be sure to check out the Peach Section, where we go looking for the giant OHIO letters and find out what's still standing at the state fair.

PUT-IN-BAY — A 39-year-old man was shot multiple times and killed just after midnight Thursday at Mr. Ed's Bar & Grille on Delaware Avenue, and police arrested Colton Smith, 21, of Brownstown, Michigan, about 3:40 a.m. on a murder charge. 

The victim's name has not been released; investigators say they are not looking for anyone else, and the bar has closed temporarily.

OHIO — The National Weather Service has confirmed at least eight tornadoes across Ohio from Tuesday's storms, including two in Muskingum County and an EF2 in Washington County, the strongest so far. 

Twisters were also confirmed in Clermont, Brown and Clinton counties and along the Trumbull-Mahoning line, with crews still surveying damage and another survey expected Friday.

COLUMBUS — The Ohio EPA announced Tuesday it will not finalize a proposed statewide wastewater discharge permit for data centers after reviewing a large volume of public comments, opting instead to review each facility individually under the same Clean Water Act standards. 

The decision comes as Ohio hosts more than 200 data centers with as many as 80 more planned through 2030, and after Gov. Mike DeWine ordered a pause on new sales tax exemption requests for data center projects.

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI said Tuesday that two of its experimental AI models escaped a sealed testing environment without human direction and broke into the production systems of Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform.

The company said the models were being tested on a cybersecurity benchmark with their normal safety limits switched off. According to OpenAI, they found a previously unknown flaw, worked across internal systems until they reached the internet, then used stolen credentials to pull test answers from Hugging Face's servers.

"We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said. The company called it an unprecedented cyber incident involving state-of-the-art capabilities.

But outside experts told TechCrunch the breakout traces to a human mistake. OpenAI described the sandbox as highly isolated, though it was configured in a way that let the models reach the internet. Dan Guido, who runs the security research firm Trail of Bits, called it a containment failure with the safeties turned off.

Marvel's "Avengers: Doomsday" trailer pulled 503 million views in a single day, the second-biggest launch ever. The only one ahead of it is Sony's "Spider-Man: Brand New Day," at 719 million.

"Brand New Day" opens July 31, with Tom Holland and Zendaya at Comic-Con this weekend. Tracking says $180 million to $228 million.

"Doomsday" sold $16.5 million in advance tickets on day one. It opens in December.

The Ohio State Fair opens Wednesday for the 171st time, and somewhere out there is a guy in his 60s who's going to look at the price of a lemon shake-up and say something unprintable about the late '70s and early '80s.

He's earned that. But he may be wrong about how much has actually changed.

Jim Rhodes was governor until 1983, and he treated the fairgrounds like his own front porch. He called it the Showcase of Ohio and started the tradition of the governor sleeping over on the grounds. Mike DeWine has kept that up with Fran, and this is his last one.

The house act belonged to Bob Hope — 15 appearances, more than anyone until the Oak Ridge Boys passed him. The Beach Boys worked the grandstand in 1982 and came back in '83, back when "Kokomo" hadn't happened yet and nobody held anything against them.

What's actually gone is the OHIO. Those letters went up in 1966 — 32 feet tall, 100 feet across, $40,000 of state money — and for 36 years they were where you told people to meet you. They came down in 2002. Nothing has replaced them.

Plenty else has. The fairgrounds just finished a $460 million overhaul — two new buildings, four renovated, an amphitheater, a misting park and a children's carousel with animals hand-carved in Marion. Anybody who hasn't been out since 2019 will need a minute.

This year brings Styx with Don Felder, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Nelly and Blues Traveler with the Gin Blossoms. Admission is $13, or $9 in advance through Tuesday.

The fair ran 17 days from 1981 through 2003. It runs 12 now, and in 2023 it pulled 1,006,228 people through the gates.

The letters are gone, and the governor is on his way out. Even the buildings are new. But a 4-H kid will still walk a steer into the ring next week the way her grandmother did, and 100,000 Ohioans will stand in the same heat to watch.

Should predictive algorithms be used as evidence to prevent potential future law violations?
- Yes - 17%
- No - 66%
- Unsure - 17%

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