WLRN News - South Florida

Lake Worth Beach voters are weighing two city charter amendments that could reshape some of the city’s most treasured public spaces.

Hialeah, a majority-Cuban city of 235,000, sees the stars aligned for a generation-defining moment. The clear conduit for that change, as they see it: President Trump. But his efforts to maximize pressure on Cuba has deepened a humanitarian crisis, dividing opinion even among residents.

Cuban officials accuse former political prisoner and now Miami resident Maritza Lugo Fernandez of organizing the alleged Cuban expat boat raid – though she apparently did not take part in it.

Shot and left paralyzed as a teenager, Aaron Willis died last month by suicide following a long struggle with health issues, according to family. WLRN first told his story in 2017 and is republishing the original story that was part of a series on victims of gun violence.

According to medical staff with the ICE Health Service Corps, Garcia-Hernandez had a long history of severe medical complications and was in poor health when he entered ICE custody. Officials said he was “immunocompromised.”

Cuba says two of the ten Cuban expats captured after a shootout with its coast guard were already on the regime's terrorist list — and in a recent video, one of them urged "cowardly" exiles to die to free the communist island. Meanwhile, it emerged that the boat used by the expats may have been stolen from a home in the Florida Keys.

Miami Police Chief Manny Morales had announced he is retiring in October amid claims he plans to run for a city commission seat. Meanwhile, a proposal to bring the city's upcoming mayoral election forward by a year was kicked down the road.

The petition to change the makeup of Miami's government recently reached 20,000 signatures, but a large portion of those were not certified by the Supervisor of Elections.

A home in Southwest Ranches, in Broward, was searched by federal agents as part of a probe into Alberto Carvalho, the former Miami-Dade County district superintendent. It is the home of Debra Kerr, a former sales representative for AllHere Education, a failed artificial intelligence company that received a $6 million contract by Carvalho's new school district in Los Angeles.

COMMENTARY The U.S. is great at designating criminal groups as terrorists — but it's a hypocritical failure at preventing the trafficking of guns that aids those terrorists, including Mexico's narco-cartels.

Cuban entrepreneurs like Aldo Alvarez hope Secretary of State Marco Rubio's pitch for economic as well as political rights will move Havana's communists — and Miami's exiles — to take the private sector more seriously amid the island's humanitarian emergency.

Cuban state media said the Florida-registered boat was approached for identification a mile off the coast of the Villa Clara province when the people aboard opened fire.