Miami Herald Staff Report

Roberto Gonzalez, a lawyer and former Republican candidate for the Florida House, was named a Miami-Dade County commissioner on Wednesday by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, two months after the governor suspended fellow Republican Joe Martinez from the District 11 seat over the commissioner’s felony arrest.

Tony Patterson was one of 20 people accused by Governor Ron DeSantis in a high-profile news conference in August of voting illegally. As someone convicted of a felony sexual offense, Patterson was not allowed to vote under state law. But in a new court filing, prosecutors wrote that they were dropping charges against him.

NewsGuard, an organization created by journalists to monitor disinformation and assess the credibility of news and information websites, launched a Venezuela misinformation tracker to debunk what it says are widely shared conspiracies in the Americas. Analysts found that Russian disinformation often starts by gaining popularity in Venezuela before moving to the rest of Latin America.

Since October, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has had 662 encounters with unaccompanied Cuban children at the southern border, compared to 32 encounters in the fiscal year 2021 and 57 encounters in 2020. That’s a 1,969% increase between the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years alone.

More than 1,200 people have been confirmed dead after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti Saturday.