Each week, syracuse.com will look back at some of our most important and valuable journalism from the previous week. Here are six stories for the week of Oct. 5, 2025.

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Meet ‘Aunt Rhonda,’ whose years of persistence will bring a store to a Syracuse food desert

Government help and cheap rent were not enough to convince A.K. Kaid to open a grocery store in Syracuse’s Valley neighborhood. Instead, the Buffalo entrepreneur’s decision to invest in an impoverished area shunned by corporate supermarket chains came down to one person: Rhonda Vesey. For more than five years, Vesey — a soft-spoken daughter of a 1950s Civil Rights pioneer — drove a relentless grassroots campaign to replace the long

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