Danny Rivero

I'm visiting Cork, Ireland. Every single Saturday there's a march against the intentional starvation of Gaza. They see it very clearly and with no qualms bc as an Irish friend told me, "We were also starved and millions of us died, not too long ago." More of the world should be like Ireland.

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Wired rules. Just an incredible group of journalists who are completely meeting the moment. And you can subscribe for $2 a month, which is insane www.wired.com/story/a-new-...

Brightline told us in 2017 that its goal was 5 million riders once Orlando opened up.

They're expecting just above 3 million this year - two years after starting operations to Orlando.

Listen to full convo about company finances in a bonus episode of our podcast today: www.wlrn.org/podcast/kill...

Bonus Episode: Cracking open Brightline’s books Brightline hasn’t yet turned a profit — and it’s billions of dollars in debt.

We are also releasing a bonus episode of the podcast today, diving deep into Brightline's finances.

A central promise of Brightline is the ability to turn a profit... unlike Amtrak. They said this explicitly.

Folks, the company is definitely not turning a profit.

www.wlrn.org/podcast/kill...

Should tax dollars pay for a private train? Taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of millions in costs related to Brightline, despite the company’s initial claims that the train would be fully funded by private investment.

Listen to episode 2 of our podcast "Killer Train" for more details:

www.wlrn.org/podcast/kill...

Killer Train: Should tax dollars pay for a private train? The public safety money began to flow as politicians and residents raised alarms over the early death toll.

Part two of our investigation into the private train Brightline, the deadliest train in the US.

At least $486 million in taxpayer money has been allocated to Brightline projects, much more than has been reported before.

www.miamiherald.com/news/local/a...

Wenski, the Archbishop of Miami, has been been advocating for immigrant justice for decades. He studied in Haiti and speaks Creole. He used to go to Krome every week in the early 1980s to do mass for detained Haitians there. And he's butted heads with the state several times in recent years.

FYI for those who don't know: NBA players have in their contract that the players (ie LABOR) gets 50% of all basketball related income. WNBA players get ~9%.

Withholding food and then shooting starving people when they come to get food (something you euphemistically call "humanitarian") is high up on the list of most disgusting and obscenely immoral things I have ever seen in my entire life

The owner of Versailles told me the other day that this exact day is what started the tradition of politicians going to Versailles. After Bob Graham worked there for a day on his way to becoming the Democratic governor of Florida you just had to show your face there.

Where Congress’s Cuts Threaten Access to PBS and NPR The loss of federal funding threatens scores of public TV and radio stations across the United States.

Some 78 public radio organizations and 37 TV organizations are at risk of going dark as a result of the cuts Trump pushed through Congress, from major cities to far-flung towns like Unalakleet, Alaska, and Pendleton, Ore. @elenashao.bsky.social @benmullin.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

It's more than 20 percent of their budget! They actually raised it after my initial reporting! People do get off at the hearings tho, if you go.

Our radio station WLRN in Miami just lost 8 percent of our budget. Some stations are losing up to 90 percent.

If you care about not-for-profit media that never ever uses a paywall, please do donate.

Radio and television stations that are the only lifeline of news and information in many rural communities will be shuttered if this passes. Not hyperbole. They will close down and leave whole swaths of this nation disconnected during the next disaster.

Then there's all the foreign aid things.

Why does the NYT style guide make them spell out Mister Rogers instead of writing Mr. Rogers like they annoyingly do for everyone else

Science is cool af

All that extra money only equals 199 extra staff at the sheriff's office... So what is it even going towards?

The budget doesn't really say. But that's a helluva question as we prepare for lifeguardless pools and slashed funding for elderly services, etc..

Looking through the Miami-Dade budget proposal:

County wants to slash staff, merge departments etc.. They're going to remove lifeguards and "transition to a 'Swim at Your Own Risk' model" at public pools.

In the meantime, the proposed budget for sheriff is up $184 million compared to last year.

Axon’s Draft One is Designed to Defy Transparency Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that...

ICYMI: Did you know that police are starting to feed body-worn camera audio into generative AI to write police reports? We investigated Axon's Draft One and found there's no way of knowing which parts of final reports were written by AI and which parts were written by humans.

The federal government now owns the key "golden" stake in US Steel *and* the largest stake in the largest rare earth producer in the US.

The Trump admin is actually doing socialism, but with nationalist characteristics.

States have pretty regularly engaged in boycotts of other states, and this is fine, but for some reason criticism of this one foreign nation's actions is deemed beyond the pale. A majority of states have laws literally banning boycotts against this foreign country. Impossible to logically explain.

Ah man we had to update everything after this happened just before publishing.. the entire project was like this

We mention this one in episode 2 of the podcast - Confusion Corner in Stuart

“Reporters spent a year combing federal rail data, local medical examiner records and police incident reports to count the dead. Brightline officials did not dispute the finding.“

good journalism isn’t free

Today our public radio station - along with our partners at the Miami Herald - published a massive investigation into why 182 people are dead. We look at the company involved and also the government to figure our exactly why this is happening.

Objectivity!

www.miamiherald.com/news/local/a...

Have you considered reading the story

The public cost of not having reporters on the beat -- especially in low coverage, rural areas - is much higher than the cost of giving a dollar and some change *per person per year* to the entire public media network.

The guy to the right of Johnson is Jimmy Patronis. Until a few months ago he was Florida's elected CFO.

Back in 2020 I reported on him wasting taxpayer dollars on a search for Chinese communists that - surprise - failed to find any.

Thanks in part to our fed funding.

www.wlrn.org/2020-09-28/f...

I'm stunned. ICE attorneys not identifying themselves in COURT?

This is happening smack in the middle of the largest ecological restoration effort in US history