Free Republic

South Florida is facing gas shortages across the region after it was pummeled with severe storms last week that brought historic rainfall and widespread flooding. About 55 percent of gas stations in Miami and Fort Lauderdale are without fuel as of Thursday morning, according to GasBuddy’s Southeast Florida Live Gas Station Outage Tracker. Another about 34 percent of gas stations are also without fuel in West Palm Beach as demand for gasoline increased after the storms. Intense storms dropped a historic range of 15 inches to 26 inches of rain in the Fort Lauderdale region last week, with much of...

MIAMI – Benito Montes de Oca Cruz, 60, of Miami-Dade County, has pled guilty to abusive sexual contact with a woman serving part of her 51-month prison sentence in home confinement under his authority. Cruz, a site supervisor employed by Riverside House, conducted home visits to monitor compliance of federal inmates on home confinement. Riverside House, pursuant to a contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is responsible for providing custodial, supervisory, and disciplinary oversight to federal inmates on home confinement. As admitted at the change of plea, on December 28, 2020, Cruz conducted a home confinement supervision visit to...

It's a quiet Wednesday evening, and in a nice home in a nice residential area of northwest Homestead, Fla., a neighborhood Crime Watch group is holding its first meeting. "So I look up," Ivy recalled later, "and this plane is coming, and it's low. It's VERY low. Then I see a package come sailing down." And of course the package turns out to be a 75-pound bale of cocaine. Falling out of the sky. During a CRIME WATCH MEETING.

Miami-Dade County swung red this election, making Gov. Ron DeSantis the first Republican gubernatorial candidate to win the county in two decades.

SOUTH FLORIDA — A South Florida Realtor recently lost his drone after an alligator ate it. Rob Rosetto with Rosetto Realty Group in Boca Raton shared a short video of the hungry gator jumping out of the water to snatch the drone mid-air on social media. (Watch the video below.) “Well, there goes my drone,” he wrote in a Sept. 24 Instagram post. “Damn alligator actually just ate it!” In the video, a group watching the gator erupts into laughter and cheers when it chomps down on the drone. A man’s voice can be heard saying, “That’s not funny.”

The U.S. government must release hundreds of immigrants detained in three facilities in South Florida, a federal judge in Miami said Thursday.

Floridians received a surprise on Tuesday when a kangaroo was spotted hopping the streets of Palm Beach County. The 5-year-old kangaroo, named Storm, somehow escaped from an animal sanctuary in Jupiter Farms, The Palm Beach Post reported. Owner Eric Westergard told the news outlet he wasn't sure how Storm — one of six kangaroos he owns — got out, but said "sometimes they get spooked." Florida Fish and Wildlife Conversation Commission (FWC), volunteers from the Busch Wildlife Sanctuary and Florida Highway Patrol are all reportedly searching for the kangaroo, which was first reported missing around 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. FWC spokesperson Tyson...

USF MO #2: Disclosing the Incident to the Public With the undisclosed burglaries that took place at the University of South Florida's Registrar and College of Engineering Offices back in June of 2015, FloridaÂ’s Sunshine law took a major hit. USF was not at all transparent with its most important constituency, its students, but also orchestrated a cover-up to keep the general public from knowing, and to prevent the media from covering a newsworthy story. Surprisingly, it was the ProvostÂ’s office and not President Judy GenshaftÂ’s office, that was first notified of the burglaries. After learning of the burglaries, Provost...

Part II: Missed Opportunities As the investigation continues into the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, we are learning about missed opportunities to save 17 lives. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, accused of "incompetence and neglect of duty", has been asked to step down. Resource Officer Scot Peterson, whose job it was to provide security and crime prevention services to the school, was accused of “hiding” while innocents who did not have his officer training were gunned down. The truth of the matter is that the tragedy at Parkland was facilitated by the omissions of others. This is how we begin...

In the aftermath of 17 students and teachers being gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, schools, colleges, and universities are reevaluating campus safety and taking a closer look at their active-shooter protocols. There are questions about how this could have happened when there were so many signs for earlier detection. In a three-part series, we will examine a local well-publicized case involving the University of South Florida where an incident was detected at the Tampa campus but went unreported by the USF police department and how the failure to take appropriate action could have just...

Faced with ever-increasing traffic jams, South Florida's public officials have come up with a plan: Make it worse. Instead of fixing the problem, government officials are deliberately adding to it in hopes we'll all walk, ride the bus or take the train. "Until you make it so painful that people want to come out of their cars, they're not going to come out of their cars," Anne Castro, chair of the Broward County Planning Council, said during a meeting last year. "We're going to make them suffer first, and then we're going to figure out ways to move them after...

Powered by a record-setting torrent of last-minute early voters in traditional Democratic strongholds, Florida's pre-election turnout reached 6.4 million Monday, by far the largest of any state. That's an all-time Florida record and equivalent to about half of the state's electorate of 12.9 million voters.

The healing powers of a blood-sucking worm: South Florida medical practitioners are using leeches to treat patients suffering from a variety of medical conditions. Hirudotherapy, commonly referred to as Leech Therapy, is a centuries-old practice used to treat a wide range of conditions. Patricia Nardone has uterine fibroids and turned to this alternative therapy after undergoing an ineffective medical procedure. "It affects my daily life because I get tired and I'm anemic," she said. Through an online search and a couple of phone calls, she found Alicja Kolyszko, a naturopathic practitioner who travels around the United States working to heal...

In a tequila-fueled rage, a Sunrise man is accused of killing and disemboweling his girlfriend because she uttered her ex-husband's name twice during sex. lRelated Fidel Lopez called 911 about 3:39 a.m. Sunday and told the operator his girlfriend Maria Nemeth was having trouble breathing and was going to die, according to the arrest report filed in the case.

An op-ed from Matt Chen of the Broward Republican Executive Committee: Early voting will begin next week. By Election Day one would presume the demonized homophobic and racist Rick Scott will end up with 95% of the substantial South Florida Gay vote going to Democrat Charlie Crist. Not so, my friends. Sure that's hard to understand when the Florida Agenda perpetually portrays the GOP as virulently and violently homophobic. But Gay Democrats have routinely been stunned to find out that 25-35% of Gay voters routinely vote Republican, according to exit polling.

FORT LAUDERDALE— The burglary that left philanthropist Elaine Vasquez's home thoroughly ransacked was bad enough. But that was not the worst of it. A blood trail led toward a bedroom closet where the homeowner's dachshund, Papi, was found slain, police said. He was suspended by the neck with a nylon strap, and his throat had been slit, they said. A bloody knife was left in a hallway. On the inside of the front door a message had been scratched into the wood: "YOU NEXT."

Fields' encounter with a 10-foot American crocodile has become a more common experience in Broward and Palm Beach counties, as these light gray cousins of alligators reclaim their historic range. Crocodile numbers have risen from a low of 200 or so in the 1970s to about 2,000 today, with more of them roaming north from their core nesting areas in southern Everglades National Park and the Upper Florida Keys. There have been no documented attacks on people in South Florida, the only part of the United States with crocodiles, although biologists won't rule out the possibility.

"SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!" That was the demand of Jerry Maguire and the demand of your humble correspondent is SHOW ME THE DATA!!!  I make this request because Nick Madigan of the New York Times wrote an article projecting heavy ocean flooding inundating South Florida in this century based on no solid evidence. Here are a few samplings of Madigan's fact free alarmisms:

Every nightly newscast in South Florida, and probably a lot of other television markets around the country, includes what could fittingly be called the “Minority Crimes Report (MCR).” The MCR tells us how many people were shot, killed or maimed in the area’s minority neighborhoods the night before. The cumulative effect of these shootings produces the equivalent of a Sandy Hook massacre every few days, but that doesn’t fit the media’s narrative so that fact is never mentioned. Any objective review of the number of gunshot murders in America tells us they aren’t happening in Hasidic neighborhoods; or Scandinavian enclaves....