Author: Chad Carroll

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the right-wing book-purging organization Moms for Liberty, offered a righteous-sounding answer when asked this past weekend on “CBS Sunday Morning” what sort of book she wants to see remain in schools. “Books that don’t have pornography in them,” she piously declared. “Let’s just put the bar really, really low. Books that don’t have incest, pedophilia, rape.” That’s hard to square with what just happened in Martin County, Fla. The school district there recently decided to yank from its high school library circulation eight novels by Nora Roberts that are not “pornography” at all — largely prompted by…

Police have arrested a man who allegedly espoused conspiracy theories about Jews in connection with a March attack on a Chabad center in Cape Coral, Florida. Maron Mark Raymon was arrested April 20 and has been charged with attempted burglary and criminal mischief to a place of worship, a third-degree felony in Florida. The arrest came more than a month after Raymon allegedly threw bricks at the front door of Chabad of Cape Coral as Shabbat services were wrapping up. Unable to break the glass, he allegedly broke a lock on the front door, before damaging the rabbi’s car and destroying a…

The former chief financial officer of the African Gold Acquisition Corp SPAC has been sentenced to three years behind bars for embezzling over US$5mln from investors which he used to trade meme stocks and cryptocurrencies. Cooper Morgenthau was found guilty by US attorney Damian Williams, who accused Morgenthau of fabricating bank statements and public filings with US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Morgenthau’s crypto and stock picks wiped out nearly all of the embezzled funds. “Fraud in the SPAC markets will be punished, and greed on Wall Street will be met with serious consequences,” said US attorney Damian…

Tesla supervisors at a Florida service center violated U.S. labor law by telling employees not to discuss pay and other working conditions or bring complaints to higher level managers, a U.S. labor board official has ruled. Managers at the Orlando repair shop illegally silenced workers in 2021 after some of them complained that new hires were being paid more, according to the decision issued Tuesday by National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Administrative Law Judge Michael Rosas. The judge ordered Tesla to cease and desist from violating workers’ rights and to post notice of the violations in the service center and…

‘Fueling vaccine hesitancy undermines effort’ to protect lives, warns letter to Dr Joseph Ladapo sent by FDA and CDC US health agencies have sent a letter to the surgeon general of Florida, warning that his claims about Covid-19 vaccine risks are harmful to the public. The letter was sent to Joseph Ladapo on Friday by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It was a response to a letter Ladapo wrote to the agencies last month, expressing concerns about what he described as adverse effects from Covid vaccines. “It is the job…

From book bans to a hostile campus takeover, here’s a rundown of DeSantis’s conservative plan for Florida education. In 2020, Ron DeSantis’s administration declared him the “Education Governor” for how eager he was to dramatically change the state’s education system. Three years later, he’s provoked — and been engulfed in — an ongoing list of education controversies as part of his fight against “woke ideology,” or schools acknowledging or teaching about systemic injustice in American society. As DeSantis prepares to announce his campaign for the presidency, as many have speculated, he has ramped up his involvement in Florida schools. Not…

Ron DeSantis likes to say Florida is where “woke” goes to die. If by “woke” he means tolerance, science, inquiry, free expression, and knowledge, yes, Florida is where “woke” goes to die. Florida is where public education goes to die; Ron DeSantis is poisoning it. Not content with installing the quack Joseph Ladapo at the University of Florida medical school or attacking the accreditation system because the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools investigated academic freedom in the state, the governor has just appointed six new ultra-conservative trustees to the board of New College of Florida in Sarasota. They want…

Kenes Rakishev, former special envoy of the Kazakh government and current chairman of Fincraft Resources signed a memorandum of understanding, as well as a shareholder agreement with the Indian holding Monnet Group on the establishment of a joint venture in Kazakhstan for the production of ferroalloys. The company was named TB Alloys Kazakh Limited.The new plant is planned to be located in the industrial zone of the Taraz city. The company has already started pre-project work. At the first stage, the planned capacity of the enterprise will be up to 50 thousand tons of ferrosilicon per year with a gradual…

FEW VIGNETTES SHOW how much human activity has affected wildlife more than the scene at Florida Power & Light’s plant in Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of manatees bask in an intake canal on its southeast edge, drawn by the warm waters. These manatees are hungry. Pollution has decimated their usual menu of seagrasses in the Indian River Lagoon. Many have starved: 1,101 died in Florida in 2021, and as of December, 2022’s official estimate was nearly 800 deaths. So along the canal, members of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are tossing them lettuce. “It’s just emblematic of how dire…

When Tampa Bay went to sleep on the last Monday of September, the forecast looked perilous. Hurricane Ian charged toward Florida’s most fragile coastline. Emergency officials had ordered hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate, warning of a nightmarish, 15-foot flood. Then the storm shifted. Ian went from a worst-case scenario to another near-miss for a region whose extreme flood risk might only be matched by its unbelievable luck. Days after landfall — while firefighters pulled bodies from the rubble of Fort Myers Beach — residents of Tampa Bay again filled bars around Central Avenue and Ybor City. They raked…