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      DeSantis Signs Law Deleting Climate Change From Florida Policy

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      The law also stops programs designed to encourage renewable energy and conservation in a state that is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.Florida’s state government will no longer be required to consider climate change when crafting energy policy under legislation signed Wednesday by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican.The new law, which passed the Florida Legislature in March and takes effect on July 1, will also prohibit the construction of offshore wind turbines in state waters and will repeal state grant programs that encourage energy conservation and renewable energy.The legislation also deletes requirements that state agencies use climate-friendly products and purchase fuel-efficient vehicles. And it prevents any municipality from restricting the type of fuel that can be used in an appliance, such as a gas stove.The legislation, along with two other bills Mr. DeSantis signed on Wednesday, “will keep windmills off our beaches, gas in our tanks, and China out of our state,” the governor wrote on the social media platform X. “We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”Florida is one of the states most vulnerable to the costly and deadly impacts of climate change, which is largely driven by the burning of oil, gas and coal. Multiple scientific studies have shown that the increase of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has contributed to sea level rise and more flooding in the state’s coastal cities.Last year was the hottest in Florida since 1895, and the waters off its coast heated to 90 degrees during the summer, bleaching corals and scorching marine life. Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Aug. 30 near Keaton Beach and caused an estimated $3.6 billion in damages. The year before, Hurricane Ian was blamed for more than 140 deaths and $109.5 billion in damages in Florida, becoming the costliest hurricane in state history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      8 Killed After Bus Carrying Farm Workers Crashes in Central Florida

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      Another 40 passengers who had been on the bus were taken to nearby hospitals to be treated for injuries, the local authorities said.At least eight people were killed and dozens of others were injured on Tuesday after a bus carrying farm workers collided with a pickup truck in Central Florida, the local authorities said. The bus was carrying 53 farm workers when it sideswiped a pickup truck, drove through a fence and overturned in Ocala, Fla., according to a spokeswoman for the Florida Highway Patrol, which is investigating the incident.About 40 passengers were taken to nearby hospitals to be treated for injuries, the spokeswoman said. She did not say the extent of their injuries.The authorities did not confirm where the bus was traveling, but the local station WCJB reported the bus was carrying migrant workers employed at a watermelon farm in the area.The Marion County Sheriff’s Office said a stretch of State Road 40, where the incident occurred, would be closed for most of the day.This is a developing story. More

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      Se está postulando al Senado con una historia de migrante humilde. Te contamos el resto

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      Bernie Moreno, el republicano que se enfrenta al senador Sherrod Brown en Ohio, cuenta una historia de rico venido a menos que volvió a ser rico. Pero la realidad no es tan clara.Se está postulando para el Senado de EE. UU. como un migrante exitoso. Está contactando a los votantes de Ohio con una historia conmovedora, de alguien que superó los obstáculos por sus propios medios, y que solo pudo haberlo hecho en un lugar como Estados Unidos al llegar siendo un niño desde Colombia, arriesgarse con un negocio que estaba en dificultades y luego al convertirlo en un éxito rotundo, volviéndose multimillonario en el proceso.Bajo la bandera del movimiento político populista de Donald Trump, Bernie Moreno, el republicano que está retando al senador Sherrod Brown, se autodenomina humildemente un “tipo que vende automóviles en Cleveland” y relata las modestas circunstancias de su infancia, cuando su familia migrante empezó de cero en Estados Unidos.“Llegamos aquí sin absolutamente nada —llegamos aquí de manera legal– pero llegamos aquí, nueve de nosotros en un apartamento de dos habitaciones”, contó Moreno en 2023, en lo que se convirtió en su discurso característico. Su padre “tuvo que dejarlo todo atrás”, ha dicho, recordando lo que llamó el “estatus de clase media baja” de su familia.Pero hay muchas más cosas que Moreno no dice sobre sus antecedentes, su educación y sus poderosos vínculos actuales con el país que lo vio nacer. Moreno nació en una familia rica y con conexiones políticas en Bogotá, una ciudad que nunca abandonó del todo y donde algunos de sus familiares continúan disfrutando de gran riqueza y estatus.Brown en Dayton, Ohio, en marzoMaddie McGarvey para The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Florida is a prime example of Trump’s vise grip on state Republican parties

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      In practical terms, Barron Trump’s truncated stint on the political stage as a Florida delegate to the Republican party’s national convention was little more than symbolic. His father Donald Trump’s third successive presidential campaign as the Republican nominee was all but certain anyway, and the names of those who will confirm it are essentially inconsequential.It did affirm to many analysts, however, how the former president has maneuvered to seize almost total control of the party’s state apparatus nationwide. Nowhere is that more apparent than Florida, where the capitulation was completed by the choice of delegates for July’s convention in Milwaukee.Even though 18-year-old Barron Trump has now stepped down, ostensibly after his mother, former first lady Melania Trump, discovered a pressing prior engagement, there will be plenty of other family members as representatives. Barron’s step-siblings Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany are named, along with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr’s fiancee.Tiffany’s husband, Michael Boulos, and an assorted slew of other notable Trump acolytes and loyalists, are also on the list.The parallels in Trump’s subjugation of the national Republican party, and the installation of Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, as its co-chair, are hard to miss – especially as it was Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, who was once seen as a potential “Trump killer” in the party’s nomination race until, of course, Trump quickly vanquished him.“The big, sort of under-the-radar story in American politics over the last couple of years was the way Trump and his people had taken over state parties across the country,” said Dan Judy, a senior analyst for North Star Opinion Research, a Republican guidance and consultancy company based in Virginia.“Even early in the primary process, a year and a half ago when Ron DeSantis was riding high and leading a lot of the polls, I was always thinking: Trump has control of the state parties, he’s got his people in, and they are, for lack of a better word, going to attempt to rig the process in favor of Donald Trump.“If you look at it, that’s exactly what happened. A lot of state parties changed their rules to make their primaries winner-takes-all, which absolutely helped Trump, especially as it came down to a one-on-one with Nikki Haley. It was clear that she was going to have to win some of these things outright to get any delegates at all, and she couldn’t do it.“The fact that the Florida GOP has also been completely taken over by Trump folks is really indicative of a trend that has happened everywhere.”Judy pointed to how easily Trump took down DeSantis in the primary race, humiliating the governor he disparaged as “Meatball Ron” in his own state. DeSantis’s efforts to cajole Florida’s congressional delegation were ultimately futile, and he dropped out in January to avoid a spanking in the state’s March primary.“As high as he was riding after his huge re-election victory, just any hope that he would have had of continuing to be top dog in the Florida GOP went out the window when he failed to get any traction at all in the presidential race,” said Judy, who has worked for the winning campaigns of several Republican politicians, including DeSantis and the Florida senator Marco Rubio.“He’s not the kind of person who cultivates relationships, who builds relationships, who builds a party, an organization, and an apparatus. He’s just not that guy, and if you’re going around Florida looking for Ron DeSantis people, there are shockingly few of them.“But if Donald Trump is re-elected, there might be a place in the administration for him. If he wants to have a future in the current Republican party, he cannot be an enemy of Donald Trump, and you’re seeing him do the things that he needs to do to remain in good standing.”Those actions include a full-throated endorsement of the man who repeatedly demeaned and insulted him, and cozying up to him at a breakfast meeting near Miami last month, in which Trump claimed DeSantis pledged total fealty.In a similar vein, a succession of other senior state Republicans have fallen in line. Junior senator Rick Scott, a former Florida governor who faces a potentially tricky re-election battle in November, appeared last week alongside Trump to support him at his hush-money trial in Manhattan.And an elected member of the Florida cabinet, the chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, seemingly cannot do enough to champion the twice-impeached former president currently facing dozens of criminal charges in cases around the country.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatronis, who was thwarted by DeSantis in January when he floated a bill to hand $5m of Florida taxpayers’ money to Trump for his legal bills, returned last week with an alternative proposal: he wrote to Trump announcing he was due $54,000 in “unclaimed property” that Patronis hoped he would use to fight “some very, very nasty people coming after you”.To observers of Florida politics, all of this, and particularly the surfeit of Trumps among the slate of delegates, is telling.“It does illustrate in pretty stark terms how effectively the former president has his hand on the state Republican party, and his influence on what goes on,” said Kevin Wagner, associate dean of Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F Schmidt college of arts and letters.“It’s not unexpected that the likely presidential nominee has significant influence in his home state, but even by that standard there’s a level of control over the party that’s pretty distinctive.“As a practical matter, the party is going to be united behind a former president, at least through an election year. And I think you’ll see that in the way that political leaders on the Republican side are behaving in Florida.”Wagner said voters were unlikely to care about Trump’s children carrying the state party’s flag in Milwaukee, with or without Barron Trump.“Among the Republican base that is very supportive of the former president, I don’t think any of this matters. In fact, they probably would approve,” he said.“Some Republicans might be bothered, but there’s no evidence in Florida right now that this is a particularly close race so it probably doesn’t matter a whole lot. The caveat is we are in May and the election’s in November.“But right now, I’d say that Donald Trump has a very strong position in the state of Florida, and that’s reflected by how political leaders in the state are responding to him, and also by the amount of deference that the party gives.” More

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      Barron Trump will not be a delegate at Republican National Convention after all

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      Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump, won’t be serving as a Florida delegate to the Republican National Convention after all, his mother’s office said on Friday.“While Barron is honored to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican party, he regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments,” Melania Trump’s office said.The chair of the Republican party of Florida, Evan Power, had said on Wednesday that the 18-year-old high school senior would serve as one of 41 at-large delegates from Florida to the national gathering, where the GOP is set to officially nominate his father as its presidential candidate for the November general election.Power did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.In an interview earlier on Friday on Kayal and Company on Philadelphia’s Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, Donald Trump was asked about Barron joining the Florida delegation. “He’s really been a great student. And he does like politics,” Trump said. “It’s sort of funny. He’ll tell me sometimes: ‘Dad, this is what you have to do.’”Barron Trump has been largely kept out of the public eye, but he turned 18 on March and is graduating from high school next week. The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York said there would be no court on 17 May so that the former president could attend his son’s graduation.Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany, are part of the Florida delegation to the convention taking place in Milwaukee from 15 July to 18 July. More

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      Florida Sheriff Releases Footage in Police Killing of Airman Roger Fortson

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      The footage shows that the airman was holding a gun when he opened his door to a deputy, who then began firing. The airman’s family has called the killing unjustified.Under mounting pressure to offer a justification for the fatal police shooting of a U.S. Air Force senior airman in his own apartment last week, a Florida sheriff on Thursday released body camera footage of the deadly encounter.The footage shows Senior Airman Roger Fortson, 23, answering the door of his apartment in the Florida Panhandle and immediately being shot by a deputy from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office. The video also shows that Airman Fortson was holding a gun, and the authorities have maintained that the deputy “reacted in self-defense.”The release of the footage came amid growing questions from the airman’s family and their lawyers — including Ben Crump, who has represented the family of George Floyd — who had accused the deputy of entering the wrong apartment, of not knocking or announcing himself and of bursting through the door.Some of those accusations appeared to be undercut by the body camera video. The lawyers said they were based on information from Airman Fortson’s girlfriend, who had been on a video call with him during the episode. They did not dispute that Airman Fortson was armed but said that he had every right to be as a legal gun owner in his own home.Asked if he believed the outcome would have been different if Airman Fortson was not Black, Mr. Crump said, “That is something that America has to answer.”The footage released Thursday shows that the deputy, who has not been identified, had been told by a woman at the apartment complex in Fort Walton Beach, in the Florida Panhandle, that he should go to apartment No. 1401 because of an apparent domestic dispute there.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Barron Trump Is Picked to Be a Florida Delegate at the Republican Convention

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      After years in which his privacy has been fiercely guarded and he has been kept out of the political arena, former President Donald J. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, was chosen to be one of Florida’s delegates to the Republican National Convention.Barron, who turned 18 earlier this year and will graduate high school this month, will be one of 41 at-large delegates at the party’s national meeting in July, when the G.O.P. is expected to officially nominate his father as the Republican presidential candidate. His selection was reported earlier by NBC News.The youngest Trump will be joined in the delegation by his two more politically active brothers, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both of whom have appeared on the campaign trail or done interviews to support their father’s candidacy.Mr. Trump’s younger daughter, Tiffany, will also be a Florida delegate. Ivanka Trump, his eldest child, was not on the list.Though politicians’ children often hit the trail to stump alongside their parents, Barron Trump has largely been absent from his father’s campaign this year. It remains to be seen whether he will give a speech at the Republican convention, as his siblings did in 2016 and 2020.For the past several years, Barron has been attending a private high school near Florida. His graduation, on May 17, became a point of contention in Mr. Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan because it overlaps with the court schedule.The judge in the case initially delayed a decision on whether court would be in session that day, prompting complaints from Mr. Trump, but he eventually agreed to allow the day off from court.The Florida party’s list of delegates further demonstrates the extent to which the Trump family and Mr. Trump’s supporters have moved to the center of Republican politics. His daughter-in-law, Lara, who is married to Eric Trump, was made co-chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this year.The Florida delegation list also includes Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., and Michael Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s husband. Other longtime Trump allies were also chosen, including Isaac Perlmutter, the former Marvel Entertainment chief executive who is a major donor, and the real-estate investor Steve Witkoff, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump.Michael C. Bender More

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      Former Soldier Convicted in Killing of Pregnant Army Private Two Decades Ago

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      A federal jury found the former soldier, Shannon L. Wilkerson, 43, guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Pvt. Amanda Gonzales on Nov. 3, 2001.A former U.S. Army soldier has been convicted of murdering a pregnant 19-year-old fellow soldier on a U.S. base in Germany more than two decades ago, the Justice Department said Tuesday.The former soldier, Shannon L. Wilkerson, 43, was charged last year with one count of first-degree murder in the death of Pvt. Amanda Gonzales. He beat and strangled her to death on Nov. 3, 2001, in her barracks room at Fliegerhorst Kaserne, then a U.S. Army base, in Hanau, Germany, the department said on Tuesday.On Monday, a federal jury found Mr. Wilkerson guilty of second-degree murder, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.“Many dedicated law enforcement officers and prosecutors persisted for years, pursuing every available lead and never wavering in their search for evidence to hold the victim’s killer to account for his heinous crime,” Nicole M. Argentieri, a principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department, said in a news release on Tuesday. Timothy R. Langan Jr., an executive assistant director with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that Mr. Wilkerson had believed that Private Gonzales was pregnant with his child.Mr. Wilkerson’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday evening. Details surrounding the murder remained unclear, and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for more information on Tuesday evening.Gloria Bates, the mother of Private Gonzales, said by phone on Tuesday that the conviction felt “like a dream. I still can’t believe it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More