Jacksonville, Florida | featured news

More than a dozen sailboats careened down the Intracoastal Waterway with flared sails Sunday afternoon; every single helm handled by women wearing concentrated expressions.
The wind – in the most temperamental of manners – bullied sailboat sterns and churned the water under the hulls. Spray decorated the air and misted the ladies’ faces. Sails, like unruly clouds, puckered and strained every which way.
And a couple of times during it all, Madalin Keeble was a little unsure of herself.

In 2006 Rabbi Shmuli Novack and his wife, Chana Novack, founded what they hoped would become a cultural and religious center for Jacksonville’s Southside Jewish community and a “home away from home” for Jewish students at the University of North Florida and other area colleges.
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The new chief executive of the Wounded Warrior Project, one of the nation’s largest veterans charities, said he anticipates laying off an undisclosed number of employees and cutting the amount of financing it provides smaller veterans groups amid a restructuring that follows scrutiny of the nonprofit organization’s spending.
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Mayor Lenny Curry doesn’t go out much in public anymore without plugging his pension-tax plan. Not even a Donald Trump rally will stop him.
He doesn’t put on a Ross Perot-style show with graphs and pie charts. There is no PowerPoint presentation. It’s more like a detailed stump speech that Curry can recite with remarkable consistency.
He doesn’t shy away from taking questions, though he rarely moves off familiar talking points.

Duval’s School Board split down the middle on a vote Tuesday night, barely approving Superintendent Nikolai Vitti’s newest literacy plan.
One of three board members voting against it, Constance Hall, said she couldn’t approve it because she was “heartbroken” and losing sleep over a lack of progress in closing achievement gaps. She said black and Hispanic students remain far behind their white and Asian peers, especially in reading.
“We’re in the emergency room and we need help,” she said.

Mayor Lenny Curry says a half-cent sales tax on the Aug. 30 ballot will clear the path for solving Jacksonville’s pension crisis “once and for all” so the city can finally move forward after years of being held back by exploding pension costs.
“If we get a ‘yes’ vote on Aug. 30, it is a brand new day for the city of Jacksonville,” he said at a recent news conference.
Will his plan work?
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The “Class Action” has seen better days but none appear recent.
The modified Alaskan-style trawler epitomizes the definition of a vessel at risk of becoming derelict, its weather-beaten deck is scant inches above the lapping waves of the Ortega River and the wood of its cabin rots away like some maritime corpse in an atmosphere of decay.
The partially sunken wooden-hull vessel isn’t the only one deteriorating on Jacksonville waterways.

A former Jacksonville Transportation Authority manager directed public funds during a real estate purchase to a company that had his initials by communicating with a personal email address, listing the address of a UPS store, and giving a contact with an uncommon name and a Yahoo email address.
And none of that apparently raised a red flag among those overseeing the transactions for JTA.
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The “Class Action” has seen better days but none appear recent.
The modified Alaskan-style trawler epitomizes the definition of a vessel at risk of becoming derelict, its weather-beaten deck is scant inches above the lapping waves of the Ortega River and the wood of its cabin rots away like some maritime corpse in an atmosphere of decay.
The partially sunken wooden-hull vessel isn’t the only one deteriorating on Jacksonville waterways.

A former Jacksonville Transportation Authority manager directed public funds during a real estate purchase to a company that had his initials by communicating with a personal email address, listing the address of a UPS store, and giving a contact with an uncommon name and a Yahoo email address.
And none of that apparently raised a red flag among those overseeing the transactions for JTA.
read more