Catching Our Eye News Roundup, Aug. 31, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Social Security. NPR’s Ashley Lopez is reporting, “The Social Security trust fund is running out, and yet it’s not a top campaign issue.”Congress has about six years to shore up the Social Security trust fund, which is expected to run out of reserves by the end of 2032.Enacting a solution is liable to be a significant political battle, likely involving cutting benefits for some Americans or raising taxes on higher earners, or both.

  And so far, congressional leaders haven’t made it a top-tier issue.

  Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno proposed raising the payroll tax for some Americans. Revenues from the tax go into the trust fund. But that bipartisan effort was immediately panned by conservative groups, and little else has emerged as a serious solution.

• Civil Rights. Ideastream’s Conor Morris is reporting, “Why one Ohio civil rights activist’s sacrifice still matters today.”

  Fifty years ago this month, a federal judge ordered Cleveland schools to desegregate.But it took decades of activism by parents and others — and the loss of one activist’s life — to get to that point.

  The Rev. Bruce Klunder, a young white Cleveland Presbyterian minister, died in 1964 when protesting schools that remained de factor segregated in Cleveland, years after the Brown v. the Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision deemed segregation unconstitutional.

• Lake Ontario. KOSU’s Sarah Liese is reporting, “Lake Ontario name change erases Indigenous history, Wyandotte Nation leader says.”

  Chief of the Wyandotte Nation, Billy Friend, took offense to Trump’s decision to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. The tribal nation is now headquartered in northeast Oklahoma, but has history in the Great Lakes region.Trump’s executive order claims to restore names that honor American greatness, but Friend said it is another act of forced removal and erasure. He said his ancestors, who spoke Wendat, gave Ontario its name, Ontari’io, which means “the lake is big” or ‘the lake is beautiful.”

  “It’s not about politics; it’s about history,” Friend said in a phone interview. “It’s about respecting a tribal name and the people whose language gave that name to the lake.”