Jacksonville, Florida | featured news

U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown and attorneys hoping to not defend her are scheduled to tell a federal judge Tuesday about Brown’s attempts to get counsel for her upcoming fraud trial.
The hearing follows up on a request last week by attorneys David Haas and Mark NeJame to be removed from Brown’s defense just two days after they signed on as her attorneys of record.
U.S. Magistrate James D. Klindt would need to approve that, but six weeks have already passed since Brown’s indictment was unsealed.

A new Harvard Law School report and The New York Times Magazine feature released Tuesday focus on Duval County’s role as a leading place where convicted criminals are sent to death.
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Crowley Maritime Corporation executive Eric Evans was promoted to vice president of strategy.
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The law firm of Rogers Towers added Joseph P. Kincart to the Jacksonville office.
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Elizabeth McCague was named the newest member of the Ameris Bancorp Corporate Board of Directors.
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In a show of force as the clock winds down to a high-stakes voter referendum Aug. 30, Mayor Lenny Curry and dozens of political and community leaders Monday gave a home-stretch pitch for voters to approve a plan they say will forever solve Jacksonville’s runaway pension debt.
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A commercial semi-truck collided with a pickup truck on Interstate 95 at the St. Augustine Outlets Monday night, shutting down all southbound lanes of the interstate and killing one person, authorities told Times-Union news partner First Coast News.The crash happened about 9:20 p.m. on the exit ramp of I-95 at State Road 16 and when fire crews arrived they saw the trailer to the semi ablaze, a post on the St. Johns County Fire Rescue's Facebook page said.

Evan Robbins, 11, was not the least bit impressed by the new high-tech imaging software that guided the hands of two Wolfson Children’s Hospital neurosurgeons who recently removed a mass from his brain.
The Yulee Primary School second-grader was still more enamored by his favorite character, Indiana Jones, than something called “functional magnetic resonance imaging.”
“I don’t care how they did it. I only care that I’m alive,” he said.

ST. AUGUSTINE | In the midst of its most successful year of operation, the St. Augustine Amphitheatre is about to enter a new era with serious competition just up the interstate.
But the opening of Daily’s Place in Jacksonville — currently planned for May — shouldn’t do much to slow down the momentum of the Amphitheatre, according to Ryan Murphy, manager of the Amphitheatre and Ponte Vedra Concert Hall.
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Angela Phillips can thank President Obama and the National Science Foundation for $10,000.
That’s the cash award the Chets Creek Elementary math teacher will receive as one of two Florida winners of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching this year.
The other winner is Janet Acerra, a Science teacher at Forest Lakes Elementary School in Miramar.
The winners are selected by a panel of scientists, mathematicians, and educators after an initial selection at the state level.

Angela Phillips can thank President Obama and the National Science Foundation for $10,000.
That’s the cash award the Chets Creek Elementary math teacher will receive as one of two Florida winners of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching this year.
The other winner is Janet Acerra, a Science teacher at Forest Lakes Elementary School in Miramar.
The winners are selected by a panel of scientists, mathematicians, and educators after an initial selection at the state level.

FERNANDINA BEACH | Matt Shirk bounced out of a white luxury car and marched up to a red truck.
With a stack of flyers and a list of voters, Shirk and his friend scoured Nassau County, hoping to retrace his 2008 march to victory. He guessed he’d hit 2,000 homes already, and by the weekend, he wanted to have visited every likely voter’s home in Clay and Nassau and at the Beaches and Mandarin. Almost every encounter was the same: Hi, I’m Public Defender Matt Shirk, and I’d really like your vote, he’d say. Sure thing, they’d say.