Local News

Thursday night, Florida executed Mark Asay, who was declared dead at 6:22 p.m. He broke Florida’s year-and-a-half hiatus for the death penalty as the first person executed since January 2016.

Drug overdose deaths are going up in Broward County.

Deaths from opioid overdoses topped 520 in 2016, according to the county Medical Examiner's Office. That’s about 10 a week.

Cocaine overdose deaths were up more than 60 percent in Broward in 2016 — to 230 people.

It’s part of an overall trend that’s wreaking havoc around the country: poly-substance abuse.

“There are no normal drugs anymore,” said Broward County Medical Examiner Dr. Craig Mallak. “Everything’s a combination.”

Climate change is a local issue.

Twenty-five years ago, in those harrowing days and weeks after Hurricane Andrew, people were trying to figure out how to cope with the destruction and trauma that the storm left behind. One of the ways they did that was by recording songs and sending them to TV meteorologist Bryan Norcross.

While the state of Florida is set to execute the first person in more than a year and a half, 150 other Death Row inmates await new sentences.

The death penalty was put on hold in the state after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case of Hurst v. Florida that the process applied for sentencing someone to death was unconstitutional. 

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence came to the Venezuelan enclave of Doral on Wednesday promising that  the Trump administration would “bring the full measure of American economic and diplomatic power to bear until democracy is restored in Venezuela.”