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Demolish building over drywall?

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

In 2015, two brothers replaced a piece of drywall in an apartment they own. Seven years later, the city sent them a notice that ended with the order to demolish the property. Is that legal? It’s why they called Help Me Howard with Patrick Fraser.Forty years ago, the Browns’ parents bought this property in Liberty City. It’s seen some changes.Hernando Brown Jr.: “Previously, it’s been a cleaners on one side, a restaurant on the other side.”Today, it houses a church and four apartments, if its allowed to stand.Hernando Brown Jr.: “The building is to be apparently demolished because it is unsafe.”The trouble began back in 2015 when water from a second floor air conditioner started running inside the wall instead of outside. A wet piece of drywall on the first floor ceiling fell.Barry Brown: “So I’m with the my truck. Got a piece of drywall, put it back up.”In 2015, the city posted a notice that the Browns needed to pull ...

Police arrest 50-year-old man accused of driving onto sidewalk to argue with kids in Homestead

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

A man is in custody after going on a dangerous drive in a South Florida neighborhood.Cellphone video captured on Thursday showed a man in a pickup truck driving up on the sidewalk and grass in the Leeward Isles Community after, police said, he got into an argument with a group of kids on bikes.No one was hit and the driver took off.Authorities later arrested 50-year-old Rafael Fernandez and was charged with aggravated assault with a motor vehicle.Fernandez Monday evening bonded out of jail.

Debbie Gibson shares experience at FOX’s Celebrity ‘Name that Tune’

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

Guessing the names of songs from the 80’s and 90’s is a piece of cake, especially if they’re one of Debbie Gibson’s songs.Speaking of Debbie, the 80’s icon is taking her chance on FOX’s “Name That Tune” and now she’s opening up about her time on the show.Debbie Gibson on “Name that Tune”: “I can name that tune.”It’s a celebrity face-off between Debbie Gibson and Belinda Carlisle on “Name That Tune.”Debbie Gibson: “We both love the competitive spirit, but we’re friends. So it was really just a whole joyful experience.”Debbie hopes to use any prize money for the actors’ fund home, a charity near to her heart.Debbie Gibson: “My late, great mama, Diane, who managed my career for 25 years, and I lost her a little over a year ago, about a year and a half ago now. She spent her final months to a year. It was like, I don’t know, something like eight months at t...

Rishi Sunak’s rebellious army

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

MANCHESTER, England — Rishi Sunak is trying to convince the British public the Tories have a clear and unified plan to stay in power. His less-than-loyal troops have their own ideas.With an election due next year, the U.K. prime minister — who faces a pivotal moment with his first conference speech as party leader Wednesday — might have hoped a shared fear of annihilation at the polls might encourage his fractious party to unite behind a common cause.“I have a good sense of what the British people’s priorities are. I’m going to set about delivering for them,” Sunak optimistically told the BBC on Sunday as his party conference kicked off.But singing from the same hymn sheet as the leader is not high on the agenda for a significant number of Tory MPs.In every corner of the cavernous conference center in Manchester, senior Tories were popping up on Monday to tout their own ideas about the best direction of the party.Such clear signs of division are not good news for the prime minister....

Germany bewildered about how to halt the rise of the AfD

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

Markus Ziener is a senior visiting fellow with the German Marshal Fund in Berlin.In Germany, news regarding the seemingly unstoppable rise of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) appears on an almost weekly basis. But nowadays this isn’t just true of the notoriously AfD-friendly states in east Germany, it’s also spreading further west.In Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, the AfD is currently running well above 30 percent. The party is gaining ground in the former West German states of Hesse and Bavaria as well, where it is expected to land at around 15 percent in this weekend’s elections.Once labeled as only appealing to the marginal far right, today the AfD has become acceptable to significantly more voters. And although polls aren’t election results, they are sending shock waves through the German political landscape.At regional and local levels, it is now becoming increasingly difficult to successfully form coalitions against AfD candidates. In Sonneberg, a district in s...

Ukraine puts on brave face as West goes wobbly

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

The West’s united front on Ukraine is showing more cracks than ever — and Kyiv has little choice but to grin and bear it.More than 500 days into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Republican lawmakers in Washington DC on Saturday derailed an effort to unleash a major tranche of aid for the war-torn country.Coming just nine days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Washington to plead for continued support, the blockage underscored a hardening of attitudes among congressional Republicans who want to end Washington’s assistance for Kyiv.At the same time as Republicans were voting ‘no’ on Capitol Hill, voters in Slovakia elected a pro-Russian prime minister, Robert Fico, who vows not to send a “single round” of ammunition to Ukraine, and looks set to team up with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn to oppose further European support for Kyiv. Poland, once the most dependable of Kyiv’s allies, made the shock announcement on S...

Sweden’s new normal: Bombs in the suburbs on a weeknight 

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

STOCKHOLM — When the blast ran through the Stockholm suburb of Hässelby Villastad on a weekday night last week, I was sitting in my living room about to send a text.The front windows rattled so hard I thought they might shatter and I broke off typing mid-word.As I went upstairs to check if my daughter was OK, she came out of her bedroom looking confused. “I’m pretty sure that was a bomb,” I said as the wail of sirens from emergency services vehicles filled the evening air. I’m no expert on how bombs sound but we already have had two bomb attacks in this part of the city this year, so the odds were that this was number three. The first bombing, in January, blew a football-sized hole in an apartment block near where I often cycle. Four arrests were made following the attack, local media reported at the time.The second, in March, knocked a whole row of wooden terraced houses off their foundations behind my son’s secondary school. Six people were...

Boston Celtics Media Day

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

Kansas police chief who led raid on small weekly newspaper has resigned, official says

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The police chief who led an August raid on a small weekly newspaper in central Kansas resigned Monday, just days after he was suspended from his post and following the release of body camera video of the raid showing an officer searching the desk of a reporter investigating the chief’s past. Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody’s resignation was confirmed to The Associated Press both by Mayor Dave Mayfield and City Council member Ruth Herbel, following an announcement by Mayfield at Monday’s council meeting. Mayfield had suspended Cody on Thursday for reasons that have not been made public. In a text message Monday night to the AP, he said he couldn’t answer questions about the chief’s resignation “as it is a personnel matter.”Cody stepped down weeks after a local prosecutor said that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to justify the search of the Marion County Record or searches at the same time of the publisher’s home and HerbelR...

Generations of students remember 1968 massacre in march through Mexico City

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:34:50 GMT

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Chanting in unison, students marched through downtown Mexico City on Monday evening, marking 55 years since the military massacred hundreds of students in Tlatelolco plaza.Enrique Treviño Taudres survived the massacre and now marches every year with the Pro Democratic Freedoms 68 Committee. “People know a lot and forget easily,” he said, adding that the memory of Tlatelolco holds important lessons for modern Mexico.As many as 300 people were massacred at a student protest in Tlatelolco plaza on Oct. 2, 1968, in what the Mexican government initially reported as the lawful suppression of a violent riot just 10 days before the Summer Olympics’ Opening Ceremony in Mexico City.Since then military reports have revealed at least 360 government snipers were stationed on rooftops around the square. They opened fire and, in the ensuing chaos, the military members posted round the square began shooting peaceful protesters and students.“Look, it’s a commemoration of that day ...