Tag: florida

Florida Teacher Facing Federal Charges After Making at Least 28 Sex Tapes With 8th-Grade Student

A teacher in Orange County, Florida, is facing federal charges after the parents of an 8th-grade student found 28 sex videos of them together on his phone.

The teacher, Marie-Jo Gordo, was indicted on three counts of sexually exploiting a minor on Wednesday. The jury determined that she “(enticed) a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct” and then “(produced) a visual depiction of such conduct.”

The Orlando Sentinel reports, “Federal investigators said the student’s parents found video of Marie-Jo Gordo and their underage son, whom she taught in 2019, having sex in what appeared to be vehicles and hotel rooms throughout Central Florida. The videos were taken between June and September of 2023 and three were described in court filings.”

At least one of the videos was over 13 minutes long.

According to court records obtained by WESH, the sex crimes happened in hotel rooms “throughout Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties.”

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Florida GOP Lawmaker Files Bill To Cap Marijuana At 10% THC If Voters Approve Legalization Ballot Measure

Ahead of a potential Florida marijuana legalization vote on the ballot this November, a Republican lawmaker has preemptively filed a bill that would impose strict limitations on THC potency if the reform is approved by voters.

Rep. Ralph Massullo (R) introduced the legislation on Friday, proposing a THC cap that is significantly lower than what’s available in most state markets. It would take effect 30 days after voters pass any future constitutional amendment to enact legalization.

The bill would set a 10 percent THC limit for cannabis products that are meant for smoking and a 60 percent limit for other forms of marijuana such as extracts. Edibles could not contain more than 200 milligrams of THC, and individual servings could only have up to 10 milligrams.

This would create serious logistical and commercial problems for any adult-use market, and it’d likely be met with significant pushback from consumers, advocates and stakeholders if enacted. Cannabis flower that’s sold at the average recreational retailer or medical dispensary typically hovers around 20-30 percent THC.

That’s true of Florida’s existing medical cannabis market, too. And because Massullo’s bill only addresses “potency limits for adult personal use,” the proposal could create further complications by having two different sets of THC rules for patients and consumers.

Florida’s medical cannabis dosage limits—which were revised under controversial rules adopted in 2022, despite pushback from then-Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried (D)—are not based on the percentage of THC in a given product.

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Florida dive team claims it’s finally solved mystery of Orlando woman, 47, who vanished 11 YEARS AGO while driving home from McDonald’s date with a man she met on SpeedDate.com – as they discover van at the bottom of a pond near Disney World

A Florida-based search team claims to have found the body of a mother of three who went missing over a decade years ago after meeting up with a man she met online.

Sunshine State Sonar announced the discovery of Sandra Lemire’s remains in a van that sunken into a pond near Disney World.

In a Facebook post, the group claimed to have found the 47-year-old’s body as well as her personal belongings.

Lemire was last seen in May 2012. She hailed from Michigan but moved to Florida to care for her grandmother, Pauline Varner.

‘If she said she was going shopping and would be back in an hour, she would be back in an hour,’ Varner told the Orlando Sentinel after Lemire’s disappearance.

Police said the mother of three was heading to Kissimmee to link up with a man she met on a now-defunct dating website, SpeedDate.com.

Lemire’s son, Tim Lemire, Jr. told WXYZ that he had discouraged her from meeting up with strangers.

‘I told her from day one just quit it, just meet the guy the old-fashioned way, not online,’ he said.

Lemire’s loved ones feared the worst when she did not return home, not even to pick up insulin for her diabetes.

Video surveillance showed that Lemire did meet with the man, a manager at a local McDonald’s, for about two hours. Police ultimately ruled out the man as a suspect.

The 47-year-old was last seen driving her grandmother’s 2004 red Ford Freestyle van.

Sunshine State Sonar claimed the car was a match to the one they found in the lake, including the license plate.

They revealed that the search had taken place across 17 months as they combed 63 bodies of water with detectives from the Orlando Police Department.

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Florida Officials Arrest Two People Accused Of Falsifying Signatures For Marijuana Legalization Ballot Initiative

Florida officials say they’ve arrested two paid canvassers charged with allegedly falsifying signatures on petitions to put a marijuana legalization initiative on the state’s 2024 ballot.

As the state Supreme Court weighs a legal challenge to the ballot measure that was brought by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R), the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) said in a news release last week that two individuals are facing multiple felony counts of submitting falsified petitions.

FDLE said that three canvassers are being prosecuted on fraud charges, including one person who was involved in petitioning for an unrelated gambling-related initiative. The department said that “circulators submitted dozens of falsified marijuana and gambling initiatives petitions,” without specifying how many signatures may have been impacted.

“The Florida Constitution is a sacred document by which Florida’s government, voters and citizens are adjudicated,” Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd said. “Florida Law lays out a detailed process by which issues can be submitted to Florida’s voters for consideration before they are added to Florida’s Constitution.”

“To fraudulently misappropriate this process for personal gain is not only illegal but also violates the trust of law-abiding Floridians across the state,” he said.

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Mormon church now owns $2BILLION of US farmland, with more acreage than Bill Gates and China combined: Huge land grabs in Nebraska and Florida spark backlash from local farmers

The Mormon church has sparked a fierce backlash from local farmers after snapping up around 370,000 acres of prime ranch land in Nebraska, with the Utah-based religion now owning at least $2billion of agricultural terrain across the country, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), commonly known as the Mormon church, has bought more land than anyone else in the state over the past five years, according to The Flatwater Free Press.

It now owns an estimated $134million worth of agricultural land in Nebraska and is on track to surpass CNN founder Ted Turner as the single largest landowner in the state if it continues its spree at the current rate.

But the church has provoked the ire of the Nebraska Farmers Union, whose president John Hansen told DailyMail.com that its land grab was driving up prices and forcing out local farmers.

‘It’s not fair competition when folks bring in that much outside money and bid against local farmers and ranchers,’ he said.

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This Company Is Running a High-Speed Train in Florida—Without Subsidies

It comes as no surprise that President Joe Biden—who has reportedly ridden Amtrak trains over 8,000 times—supports pouring endless amounts of taxpayer money into the outdated, slow-moving system. In 2021, as part of the massive federal infrastructure law, the Biden administration gave Amtrak $66 billion, the largest government subsidy for passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak in 1971. But private companies, like Brightline in Florida, are trying to find profitable ways to bring passenger rail to the United States.

On September 22, Brightline opened service between Orlando and Miami. Topping out at 125 mph, it completes the trip in about three hours. For comparison, Amtrak takes roughly 6.5 hours to complete the same route, depending on the direction.

Brightline is the first privately funded intercity rail line in the U.S. in over 100 years, as well as the second-fastest train in the country (after Amtrak’s Acela line in the Northeast). It may not be truly high-speed rail by the global definition, but it’s certainly better than the region’s 80 mph Amtrak alternative.

Michael Reininger, CEO of Brightline, says that passenger rail can make commercial sense under certain conditions—such as in Florida, where it connects two populous, tourist-friendly cities that are over 230 miles apart. At that distance, Reininger says, “it is too far to drive and too short to fly. You can approximate the time of flying significantly, improve the time of driving, and you can offer it at a price point that makes it an economic proposition.”

In order to get the most out of $5 billion in private investments, Brightline had to be mindful of its bottom line—but others attempting to build high-speed rail in the U.S. don’t seem to care how much they spend and have no shame in asking for more taxpayer money.

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DeSantis vs. Disney: Florida’s Fight Over Private Governance

On April 22, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District, ending perhaps the most successful experiment in private governance in U.S. history. The bill ended an arrangement that turned a swamp on the edges of Orlando into the home of Walt Disney World, one of the busiest tourist destinations on Earth. The governor’s victory is not yet final—while the district was formally dissolved earlier this year, Disney attorneys quickly outfoxed DeSantis, delegating many of the district’s powers back to the company. The company is now suing to reverse the change altogether.

For all the media sound and fury over the duel between the would-be president and the Mouse, experts seem to agree that Disney will retain most of its longstanding autonomy when all the lawsuits are through.

Whatever your views of the “Don’t Say Gay” law that kicked off the DeSantis-Disney feud, or of the increasingly regrettable quality of the live-action Disney feature film reboots of its animated classics, DeSantis’ attempt to dissolve the district is a blatant effort to bully a private company because he disapproved of its constitutionally protected speech. At best, it reveals DeSantis as a culture warrior rather than a small-government conservative. At worst, it exposes DeSantis as a politician willing to toss out the rule of law and free markets to score cheap political points, in the lead-up to a Republican presidential primary in which he’s struggling to meet expectations.

For the most frivolous reasons imaginable, the fate of “the happiest place on Earth” now hangs in the balance.

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Florida school is slammed for forcing a TWO-year-old black girl to take part in a Rosa Parks reenactment that involved white toddler ‘handcuffing her and taking her fingerprints’

A two-year-old black girl has been subjected to a ‘horrific’ Rosa Parks reenactment involving a lighter-skinned child ‘handcuffing’ her in front of her peers in a Florida preschool classroom.

Civil rights group the NAACP shared shocking photographs of the incident online as it is called on the Florida Department of Children and Families to investigate Building Brains Daycare in Saint Cloud, Osceola County. 

In a letter to the department, the NAACP said the black pupil was ‘subject to an alarming act of simulation, where she was handcuffed and fingerprinted by a white peer’ in early December. 

The NAACP’s National Director of Education, Dr Ivory Toldson, shared the photographs on Facebook with the pupils’ faces blurred. In unedited versions of the images seen by DailyMail.com, the children appear visibly disturbed and upset. 

The toddler’s outraged parents described the lesson as ‘horrific’ and immediately pulled her from the school. The female teacher involved has not been named and continues to work at the daycare. 

Building Brains Daycare told DailyMail.com the reenactment was a spontaneous incident rather than a planned part of their curriculum, and that the teacher involved felt ‘horrible’ and has ‘apologized profusely’ to the child’s parents. 

They said there were ‘no physical restraints’ in the classroom. 

The toddler’s parents, who did not want to be identified, said they first became aware of the incident after seeing the photographs of their daughter through the school app. 

‘Her hands (were) restrained behind her back as if she was being taken into custody,’ they told FOX 35. 

‘Then the next image was her hands being placed on a table as if she was being booked, and the look on her face alone, it was horrific.’ 

They added that ‘there’s so many ways to teach the Rosa Parks story’ and that they saw a change in their daughter after the incident. 

‘As we were approaching the school where the incident happened, she got very quiet and very, very reserved,’ they said. ‘But then we passed it, we had our daughter back. She was bubbly.’ 

The NAACP voiced ‘deep concern and profound disappointment regarding the disturbing incident’ which it said would cause the student ‘psychological harm’ by reliving a ‘traumatic moment in American history’.

It also said in the letter it would be ‘exploring all legal avenues to address this grave matter and ensure such incidents are not repeated.’ 

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Mystery over ‘inexplicable’ death of ‘very happy chap’ student, 21, who accidentally drowned in a Florida swimming pool after travelling to the US to work at a tortoise sanctuary

The death of a British university student who accidentally drowned in a swimming pool in the US remains a mystery after a coroner described the incident as ‘inexplicable’.

Jack Chisholm, 21, was found unresponsive at the home of a friend in Bokeelia, Florida, where he had been staying for a month while he was working at a tortoise sanctuary during the university holidays.

Jack, who was described as a ‘very happy chap’ and a strong swimmer, was a student at Newcastle University and lived with his family in Burford, Oxfordshire. 

Oxfordshire coroner Darren Salter heard that an investigation by US detectives concluded Jack had drowned but that there was no third party involvement.

Mr Salter said: ‘There was uncertainty as to how and why Jack entered the water. It is to an extent inexplicable how he ended up in the water and how he could not get himself out.’ 

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Florida Medical Marijuana Company Asks Court To Block Legalization Initiative That Would ‘Significantly Impact’ Its Business And Patients

A Florida medical marijuana certification company is seeking to block an adult-use cannabis legalization ballot initiative in the state Supreme Court, arguing that the reform “disproportionately prioritizes” profits from recreational sales and that it would “significantly impact our business operations and the well-being of our clients.”

My Florida Green, a service that connects patients seeking medical cannabis cards to doctors who can certify them, is asking the court to allow it to submit an amicus curiae brief in the case contesting the Smart & Safe Florida legalization measure that was brought by state Attorney General Ashley Moody (R).

The company says that it’s not opposed to adult-use legalization in principle, but it’s arguing that there are “potential consequences” of the 2024 constitutional amendment that could impact “patient care and public health.”

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