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The most expensive home for sale in the U.S. goes up for $295 million in Naples, Florida

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The main house at Gordon Pointe spans 11,500 sq ft.

Dawn McKenna Group / Coldwell Banker Realty

The most expensive home for sale in the U.S. hit the market this week for $295 million.

Gordon Pointe, as it’s called, is a roughly 9-acre compound in Naples, Florida, on the Gulf Coast, in an affluent enclave called Port Royal.

The mega-listing includes a main house that spans about 11,500 square feet, with six bedrooms. Two guest houses, each over 5,000 square feet, bring the estate’s total interior living space to 22,800 square feet. All three homes are on a peninsula that delivers 1,650 feet of waterfront, a private yacht basin and T-shaped dock.

Before you start counting up bedrooms and calculating the price per square foot (which is about $12,900), co-listing agent Leighton Candler of Corcoran told CNBC the value here isn’t so much about the size of the three grand homes on the property, it’s about privacy, beach frontage and a rare opportunity for significant development.

According to a press release that launched the listing, “The property can accommodate more than 200,000 square feet of residential development,” meaning the land has a ton of untapped potential.

“There can be eight waterfront homes on this property,” Candler told CNBC. While the property could be broken apart after purchase, the New York-based broker speculates a potential buyer will more likely maintain it as a private family compound.

Gordon Pointe’s sandy white beach stretches over 700 feet on the Gulf of Mexico.

Dawn McKenna Group / Coldwell Banker Realty

The nine acres are made up of contiguous lots, the first of them purchased in 1985 by John and Rhodora Donahue. John Donahue co-founded a Pittsburgh-based investment management firm, now known as Federated Hermes, with over $758 billion in assets under management, according to the firm’s website.

The waterfront view of the main house and a stretch of beach on Gordon Pointe.

Dawn McKenna Group / Coldwell Banker Realty

After that first purchase in 1985, the Donahues continued to buy up more of the peninsula and didn’t stop until they owned it all. Their buying spree created an exclusive, gated compound almost entirely surrounded by water. A single private drive means no pesky through traffic.

“It gives you all the benefits of being on an island, but on Gordon Pointe your family can be secluded without feeling isolated,” Candler said.

Along with a T-shaped dock that can accommodate six boats, the Donahues also constructed a private yacht basin that’s 231 feet by 50 feet and has a depth of almost 8 feet. Candler told CNBC it’s a rare amenity that had to be approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

A view of Gordon Pointe with the private yacht basin in the lower right corner.

Dawn McKenna Group / Coldwell Banker Realty

Can Gordon Pointe fetch $295 million?

According to Realtor.com the median listing price in Port Royal is $24.1 million.

The highest-priced home, before Gordon Pointe, in the ultra luxe beachfront community hit the market in December at $45 million, or just under $4,300 per square foot. Meanwhile an empty lot of almost 1.5 acres adjacent to Gordon Pointe has been on the market for a year, at an asking price of $63 million.

“We did our best to price [Gordon Pointe] and we can defend that price all day long,” co-listing agent Dawn McKenna of Coldwell Banker Realty told CNBC.

McKenna said the listing is already drawing significant interest since it went live Wednesday and that she’s already booked eight in-person visits with prequalified buyers.

It’s no surprise to hear listing brokers argue an eye-popping price tag is justified, but true comparisons at this level and buyers with enough cash to pay that kind of money are few and far between. And, as is the case with any real estate listing, there can be a big gap between an initial asking price and what a property ultimately sells for.

For some nine-figure context, here’s a closer look at the second- and third-most-expensive listings currently for sale in America.

A view of the Central Park Tower at 217 West 57th St. in New York City.

Source: Cody Boone, SERHANT Studios

The first of the two listings is a penthouse that debuted in New York City in September 2022.

The residence sits high atop 217 West 57th Street, overlooking Central Park, spanning three floors and over 17,500 square feet.

Broker Ryan Serhant made headlines when he listed the mega-apartment at $250 million, which he told CNBC at the time was the appropriate price.

“I know it sounds crazy, but relatively speaking, it’s priced at a great value on a per-square-foot basis,” Serhant said in 2022. “It’s just a very, very big apartment with lots of amenities.”

But naysayers questioned the nosebleed asking price, which amounted to over $14,000 a square foot.

“I consider this a fantasy price,” Manhattan luxury broker Donna Olshan told CNBC in 2022.

The triplex residence sat on the market for 12 months with no takers. After a yearlong run at $250 million, the asking price was slashed by $55 million, or 22%. The pricey pad is still on the market for $195 million.

Inside the $250 million penthouse on ‘Billionaires’ Row’

It was a similar journey in Los Angeles, with the seven-bedroom 20-bath mansion known as Casa Encantada.

The mansion, located at 10644 Bellagio Road in Bel Air, is owned by children’s book author Karen Winnick, the widow of late billionaire and financier Gary Winnick.

The residence hit the market in June for $250 million.

After the sky-high ask failed to lure a buyer, the home was taken off the market only to reappear in November with a $55 million price cut.

Listing agent Kurt Rappaport is still looking for a buyer willing to pay the $195 million.

Nine-figure whisper sales

The reality is nine-figure listings can take months, even years, to sell, and that’s not necessarily a reflection of a broker’s ability.

Real estate consultant Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, looked at 10 U.S. home sales that traded for $150 million or more and found many of them were so-called whisper listings — sales that leveraged hushed word-of-mouth marketing and no public real estate listings or marketing campaigns.

That makes tracking price changes over the life of the listings nearly impossible.

Jeff Bezos gives a thumbs-up as he speaks during an event about Blue Origin’s space exploration plans in Washington, D.C., May 9, 2019.

Clodagh Kilcoyne | Reuters

But perhaps unsurprisingly there are a lot of famous billionaires involved in these sales, including hedge funder Ken Griffin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and mega-investor Marc Andreessen, who each picked up nine-figure compounds in quiet off-market deals.

The Chartwell Estate in Los Angeles

Photograph by Jim Bartsch, courtesy of the Estate of Jerry Perenchio

One notable mega-mansion of the 10 transactions compiled by Miller did officially come to market and has an interesting price history.

In 2017 the mansion at 750 Bel Air Road in Los Angeles, known as the Chartwell Estate, had a $350 million price tag. It sat on the market with no bites, and the oversized asking price took several deep cuts, to $195 million.

In 2019 the estate finally sold for $150 million, purchased by Lachlan Murdoch, executive chair and CEO of Fox Corp. and son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

The Chartwell Estate in Los Angeles

Take a look inside of Lachlan Murdoch’s new $150 million LA mansion

And another interesting mega-transaction made the list: A Malibu mansion located at 27712 Pacific Coast Highway. While it never actually had a public listing, The Wall Street Journal reported its whispered price tag was $295 million.

When it sold in 2023 in an off-market deal to music power couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé, it went for $190 million.

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Sage Investment Advice From Exhausted Real Estate Billionaire Jeff Greene

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Jeff Greene started investing in real estate as a side hustle in college and survived a downturn in the 1990s before making his first billion betting against the housing market in 2008. He spoke with Forbes about how he’s managing his investments ahead of a potential recession.

By Giacomo Tognini, Forbes Staff

As a child growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, Jeff Greene shoveled snow and worked an 86-house paper route for the local newspaper. In college at Johns Hopkins, he worked part-time jobs ranging from teaching Hebrew to checking IDs outside the library. To pay his way through Harvard Business School, he traveled the country as a circus promoter—money that he later invested into three-bedroom houses in a town near Boston, his first foray into real estate.

Disaster struck with the real estate crash in the early 1990s, but Greene managed to scrape by. Then, in 2006, he made an audacious bet against the housing market, buying credit default swaps on subprime mortgage-backed bonds. The ensuing collapse earned him a windfall of $800 million, which he plowed into prime property in Palm Beach. It also made him a billionaire: Forbes now estimates his fortune at $7.5 billion, much of it concentrated in South Florida, Los Angeles and New York.

Forbes spoke with Greene about his knack for surviving crises and his risk-averse approach to investing.

Forbes: How did you get your first start in investing?

Jeff Greene: The way I got into real estate was kind of by accident. I was accepted to Harvard Business School in the spring of 1977, and then I needed a place to live and I wanted to move into Soldiers Field apartments, which was a beautiful modern complex. I’d already been out of college almost three years, I didn’t want to live in a dorm and I didn’t get into that apartment, it was full. So a guy who I’d gone to Johns Hopkins with, I asked him, “what do you do?” He’d gone to Harvard a year before me. He said, “Well, what I did is I bought an old three-family house out in Somerville, the next town to Cambridge. And you can buy one and you can live in one of those, rent out the other two and it’ll probably cover all your costs. You get a mortgage for 80%, so you’ll live rent free for two years and get your money back so you won’t have any rent.”

So I did that. I bought one of these three family houses, and I had worked after college and made $100,000 as a circus promoter. So this house was $37,000 with $7,000 down. I got accepted to the apartment complex, but I thought, “I already bought the house, so maybe I’ll rent out all three.” So I ended up thinking, “Wow, I’m making a 30% return, I’ve got to get more of these.” By the time I finished at Harvard Business School, I had 18 properties in this little town, Somerville, and the markets went way up. And my $100,000 cash was already a $1 million net worth. I was not even 25 and I was suddenly in real estate.

Forbes: How would you say your investment strategy has changed or evolved over the years? What’s your strategy like today?

Greene: Well, it changes as you go through the cycle of life. Starting out, I made my first $100,000 and then my first million. Then you think, “I’d like to make another million or $10 million, then $100 million.” You want to keep buying and building and growing. Now I’m 68 years old, so [my goal is] preservation of capital. The more the better, but I don’t really need to make more money. I was very careful when rates were low to lock in my rates, so I don’t have too much debt. Even the debt I have, it’s 90% locked in at lower rates.

I have five projects going on, but it’s really too much for me. I’m exhausted and I don’t like the workload, even though I know they’re good projects. Where you are in your life, more than anything, dictates how much risk you’re willing to take, how much work you want to have, and everyone’s different. I got married later and I have three young kids, so I want to spend time with my kids while they’re still young enough to enjoy it. Coming out of the financial crisis, honestly, I could have had a net worth three times what I have, because I didn’t leverage myself. I bought all these properties, I didn’t build on them. I just kept the land. I could have gone crazy. And I knew that I was giving up a lot of opportunities, but I just wasn’t that motivated for the workload or to build a bigger organization or to take the financial risk. When I was in my thirties, I wanted to conquer the world. Now I’m in my sixties, and I want to still be active and productive and make money, but I’m not willing to take risks like I was.

I had a big crash in the early ‘90s. My net worth became negative and it was a real eye-opener for me. Truthfully, from my first newspaper delivery route and shoveling snow and mowing lawns to where I was in 1991, it was a straight ride up. And then all of a sudden I wake up and my net worth is negative, and I’m fighting lawsuits. So I learned in that period, don’t be leveraged. Be prepared for slowdowns.

Forbes: We’ve talked about your strategy in the context of real estate. When you’re looking at your stock portfolio, bonds, alternative investments, is your strategy also conservative at the moment?

Greene: I’ve got a fair amount of treasuries. I’ve staggered one month and three month and six months treasuries, and I’m making five percent-ish. We’re in the Giving Pledge with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, and you listen to [Buffett]. I’ve spent some time with him and I like a lot of the things he says. He’s very wise, that’s why he’s considered such a sage. Things like, “I’d rather buy a great company at a fair price than a fair company at a great price.”

And it’s the same thing [with real estate.] What do I want to own? I want to own great buildings, great companies. A great building is one that has stable, predictable cash flow, not a lot of volatility, that has good long-term prospects because of where it’s located, how it’s built, what it is, and it’s the same with stocks. I own some core stocks, Google and Apple and Meta. And they’ve had their ups and downs, but generally I have core holdings that I own, and you don’t pay attention to the noise of the markets. Those are the kinds of long-term assets. It’s the same with some of the properties that we own. We own some amazing properties around the country, some I’ve had for 30-plus years.

Forbes: Are there any investments that you consider your greatest triumphs? And others that were disappointments, or that you would rather have done differently?

Greene: I’m building these two towers that I’m finishing in West Palm Beach, [called] One West Palm. The market exploded out from under me. I never would’ve predicted that South Florida, during the pandemic, would have had this enormous inward migration. Rents doubled in the last five years, and demand for everything has gone through the roof and everyone’s moving here. It’s slowing a little bit now, but it’s been a big boom. That will be a successful project.

One thing I learned long ago is—and I unfortunately have not followed it as well as I could—but whenever you make a decision, if more than 50% of the reason you’re doing it is for your ego, the odds are you’ll regret it. Why did I build the two tallest buildings in Palm Beach County, over a million square feet? I’d say more than 50% for my ego. In the end, I do regret it because at the end of the day, when I’m building 200-unit apartment buildings, I could do it with my eyes closed. They’re easy. Some projects you do for the wrong reasons. So far, it looks like the market’s really going to make it successful, but not because I did such a great job as a developer.

Being a real estate developer, you’re kind of buying lottery tickets on the economic cycles. If you look at some of the big condo kings around, they make a billion dollars, they lose a billion dollars. How do you know, when you’re conceiving a project, what the market’s going to be two years later, three years later, five years later, when you’re really out trying to monetize it? You can guess. And oftentimes people are most aggressive when things are at the peak—when you should probably be pulling in—and the least aggressive when the world’s coming to an end, when you probably want to be in there, gearing up for the next up cycle.

Forbes: What advice would you give to your 20-year-old self?

Greene: Do things that make sense for you and the way you want to live your life, not for what other people will think about what you’re doing. You only have one life and you only have so much time on the planet. Whether you’re trying to build a net worth or a business, keep your eye on the ball and stay focused on the goals, whatever they may be. If your goal is to make as much money as you can, and you don’t care about anything else, then go work real hard and do everything you can.It’s important that whatever age you are, try to step back, take a deep breath and think, “Hey, is this what I wanted in my life?” Most people are just trying to make ends meet. Most people don’t have the luxury. You get a job, you pay your bills, hopefully you can get a little bit ahead and not be behind the eight ball. That’s most people’s life. But if you do have the luxury of choices, then sit back, think carefully, and make the right choices.

Forbes: What are some of the biggest risks you think investors are facing today?

Greene: We’ve had a very unusual time with this extraordinary amount of liquidity pumped into all the advanced economies. We don’t really know where it’s going to end up. We ended the pandemic with $2.1 trillion of excess savings above average levels. It was excess everything. It was excess construction projects because there was so much liquidity. More apartments were built in the last two years than any time in history.

But now I think we’re at the point where the excess savings are gone. The extraordinary amount of new wealth that people got from the liquidity, that caused housing prices to go up, and stock prices to go up and everything else, that’s dropping a little bit, so people don’t have the same wealth and the same savings. Now’s the time where these high rates could really rear their ugly head. I just had lunch with my banker and they said they haven’t made any construction loans in the last year. So everything we see out here is from the extraordinary liquidity period we had.

But now what happens when one of my properties finishes, where are these guys going to go work? Nobody’s starting any new ones. There’s no financing. There’s nobody buying houses, nobody’s buying condos, no one’s building office buildings. It was a long runoff from the excess period, and it’s now coming to an end. That’s why a lot of people are thinking we could have a significant economic downturn, starting now or early next year, as people run out of excess savings and don’t feel as wealthy.

Forbes: Given that environment, what are the particular micro or macro factors that people should pay attention to when they’re deciding how to invest their money?

Greene: If you think that we’re coming into a slowdown, then you certainly want to have as much liquidity as possible because you’ve got to be ready. You’ve got to be prepared to start making less money. If you’re a real estate investor, maybe if things slow down, your rents are not going to go up, they’re going to go down. If you’re a waiter, you’re not going to be making as many tips. If you’re a construction worker who is making $50 an hour plus overtime, maybe you’re going to be making $25 an hour with no overtime.

Be as liquid as possible. On a long-term basis, for most people, it pays to just have a diverse pool of investments because you want to be ready for anything to happen. Have diversity in your investment portfolio, so if one thing goes up, the other thing goes down.

Forbes: You mentioned Warren Buffett as someone you look to for advice. Do you have any investing mentors?

Greene: His investing style works for almost everyone. Spend all the time you have to make sure that you’re making prudent, good investments in great businesses, great real estate, and then keep your eye on them and be patient.

The other thing that he said, which I thought was very good advice, was wait for the big fat pitch. A mistake I made is too many deals. As soon as I feel like I’ve been pitched, I feel like I’m in a batting cage and I’m just swinging at everything just coming at me so fast. But sometimes, [you have to] let them go by, and that’s what he does. He lets his cash get up to billions of dollars. But then when Goldman Sachs needs money in the financial crisis, he steps up and he just waits for that big fat pitch.

All these expressions are very valuable. You want to be greedy when people are fearful, and fearful when people are greedy. And it’s hard when everyone’s greedy, and all your friends are buying and flipping houses, right? But that’s the time when you probably want to sit back and let that crazy, greedy excess pass and wait until things calm down. And then when everybody’s panicked, like is happening now in real estate to some extent, that’s the time when no one wants to touch it because it’s going to go down forever. That’s the time you want to start being greedy.

Forbes: Are there any books that you’d recommend every investor should read?

Greene: I really don’t. I can’t say I’ve got a lot of people’s books, because most books on investing really can be summed up in a couple of pages. You could read all these how to make money in real estate books, and there’ll be 100, 200 pages on it but the general gist of it is: buy quickly, put as much debt on it as possible, use the money to go buy another one, sell it, buy another one, refinance, try to turn your money quickly.

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Mapping Billionaire Wealth: Where The Richest Americans Live Now Vs. Two Decades Ago

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Billionaires love sunshine and low taxes — but not always.

By Monica Hunter-Hart, Contributor

“California used to be the Golden State. Now it’s rusted and destroyed,” says energy drinks magnate Russ Weiner. In a way, the state’s flush with gold; California is a treasure trove of extreme wealth. But some of its most affluent residents, including Weiner (worth an estimated $4.8 billion as of the date of publishing), have also been moving away, Forbes finds in a 20-year analysis of the annual Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.

California has consistently been home to more members of The Forbes 400 than any other state, and now has 87. But that’s six fewer than two decades ago. Plenty of California-based tech tycoons moved on and off the list over the years as their fortunes fluctuated with the stock market, but some disappeared because billionaires just up and left. Over the past 20 years, while gaining new Forbes 400 residents, California lost 19 of them to other states, particularly Texas, Nevada and Florida, where Rockstar Energy drink founder Weiner moved in 2009.

What made him want to skip town? “Crime, homelessness, education, taxes,” he says. Oh, and Democrats.

Weiner is far from the only uber-wealthy entrepreneur who’s been chasing both rays and lower taxes. Florida and Texas, which have neither state income tax nor state capital gains tax, both saw dramatic 20-year upticks in residents who made the 400 list. Texas went from 36 to 45, a 25% jump, while Florida — stunningly — doubled from 23 to 46 members of the list. Most of the increase in Florida came from Forbes 400 members moving there. That includes the likes of hedge fund tycoon Ken Griffin, a former longtime resident of Chicago, who also relocated his firm Citadel to Miami because he said it offered a better corporate environment; Paychex founder Tom Golisano, who said he was escaping New York’s high taxes when he moved to Naples in 2009; Charles B. Johnson, who moved to Palm Beach from California after retiring from money management firm Franklin Resources; and Thomas Peterffy of Interactive Brokers, who left Connecticut around 2015, also for Palm Beach.

An outsized number of the last decade’s Florida transplants came from the northeastern elite enclaves of New York, Connecticut and Illinois, and most made their fortunes in finance and investments. A far smaller amount of the list’s new Floridians created fortunes in the Sunshine State from the start, like Nick Caporella, whose National Beverage makes the popular La Croix bubbly water.

The picture is much dimmer in the Midwest, which has been shedding the extremely wealthy. The number of richest Americans there dropped 42% over the past two decades, from 73 to 42, mostly because Heartland billionaires’ fortunes decreased or didn’t keep pace with the rest of the country. (The cutoff to make the Forbes 400 rose from $600 million in 2003 to $2.9 billion in 2023.) But some just moved to warmer pastures, like movie producer Gigi Pritzker (who changed her permanent address from Chicago to California around 2019) or two heirs to the Walmart fortune (from Missouri to Texas and Nevada).

And about 30% of Midwesterners on the 2003 and 2013 Forbes 400 lists have since dropped off because they passed away. In the last few years, that’s included iconic figures like Berkshire Hathaway’s Walter Scott Jr. (a former Omaha resident who was a close friend of Warren Buffett) and Chicago’s Sam Zell (forefather of the modern real estate investment trust), and a bit before them, William Ford Sr, the last grandchild of Henry Ford, who lived in Michigan. The manufacturing industry saw a particularly high number of drop-offs — paralleling the decades-long manufacturing decline in the Midwest — as did media, real estate and retail.

Minnesota has been hit hardest. It ranked No. 9 among states with the most 400 members in 2003, when there were 11, but has now been completely drained out. A single family had an outsized impact on that decline. The clan behind the world’s biggest agriculture company, Cargill, used to be concentrated in the North Star State, where the business is still based. But Cargill’s old guard has died and the richest family members are now scattered across the country in Montana, Wisconsin, Missouri and California.

This scenario — where a company’s big shareholders live far from the company itself — is actually not unusual. And it may be even more common these days in a place like Minnesota, says the Tax Foundation’s Jared Walczak.

“Minnesota does very well with traditional C corporations,” says Walczak. “It’s high taxes, but those high taxes historically have not fallen very heavily on businesses, so it’s been a very competitive place to operate your Fortune 500 company. But you also have a situation where states like this may be unattractive for the C-suites themselves,” perhaps in part because of those higher individual taxes. And in an increasingly mobile environment, he points out, not even high-level executives need to live where they work.

Although taxes matter, Walczak and other analysts stress that it’s far from the only consideration for billionaires when it comes to planning where to live. It often isn’t even the top factor.

“Many state lawmakers overestimate how sensitive rich people are to a few percentage points’ difference in the state tax rate,” says Carl Davis of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Richard Auxier of the Tax Policy Center agrees: “If you’re in West Virginia or Michigan and you think the taxes are the only thing that’s different about your state and Florida and Texas, I really need you to think a bit harder.”

Instead, the decision of where to live is hyper-personal, they say, noting that being closer to family is a frequent reason why billionaires move. The uber-wealthy also pursue top education systems, keeping in mind both their kids as well as their company workforces. Urban amenities are a big draw. So are safe neighborhoods, good infrastructure and centers of culture.

The culture is what AriZona Iced Tea founder Don Vultaggio, raised in Brooklyn and worth an estimated $5.6 billion, loves about New York City. (Vultaggio now lives outside the city, in the Long Island enclave of Port Washington.) He remembers a conversation he once had with Andrew Cuomo: “‘Governor, businesses don’t mind paying taxes. We like it here. Museums, theater. It’s great.’” Many must agree, as the number of New Yorkers on the 400 shot up 27% over the past two decades, from 49 to 62.

Extreme wealth has been consolidating in the United States. Back in 2003, the 10 states with the most 400 members had 275 of them; today, they have 297. Exactly 60% of the billionaires who made the list this year live in just four states: California, New York, Florida and Texas — the four states with the largest populations, together home to one third of all Americans. “The growing geographic concentration helps explain our populist politics these days,” says Darrell West, author of the 2014 book Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust. “Much of the country is being left behind in terms of economic activity.”

A handful of states — Maine, Delaware, North Dakota, New Mexico and Alaska — haven’t had a resident make The Forbes 400 list in at least two decades. On the other hand, the picture has been getting much rosier in places like Arizona and Georgia, which joined the top 10 states for the first time in 2014 (when the latter was tied with Maryland and Tennessee at 7 list members) and now ranks No. 6 with 10 Forbes 400 residents. Iowa and Kentucky both had no 400 members in 2003 and now each have one: Harry Stine (worth an estimated $8.8 billion, who joined the list in 2014), and Tamara Gustavson ($7.4 billion, 2011), respectively.

This is also a great year for Mississippi, which made the list for only the second time in two decades. Joining the ranks of the richest are Hattiesburg’s Duff brothers, who are behind the holding company Duff Capital Investors, which owns construction, energy and trucking firms.

“Mississippi is a good place to do business, mainly because of our people, who are hard-working, optimistic and dedicated to providing a better future for their families,” says Thomas Duff, who’s worth an estimated $3 billion. “Keeping a Mississippi-based operation for our companies has helped us stay true to our values.”

Sitting at the very bottom of the Forbes wealth ranking is Alaska, which has never had a resident make the 400 list since it was first published in 1982. That does constitute a loss for the Last Frontier.

“You would love to have billionaires living in your state,” says the Tax Policy Center’s Auxier, explaining that the attraction is not just tax revenue but also the companies the wealthy often start or bring. “Someone just sitting on their money, they’ll take them, they don’t want to lose them — but if you talk to someone in these states, what they really want is a billionaire who is participating in the economy and hopefully has businesses in the state.”

Of course, there’s only so much a state can do to court the rich. With great wealth comes great mobility. The Americans with the deepest pockets will go where they want.

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Here’s How Much Ron DeSantis Is Worth

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The Florida governor has spent much of his adult life railing against liberal elites. In 2023, he wrote a book about it — and it made him rich.

By Kyle Mullins, Forbes Staff

Even as his poll numbers stagnate and his political capital wanes, Ron DeSantis has seen one thing go right in 2023: His bank account balance keeps rising. Sitting at around $300,000 in 2021, a lucrative book deal made the Florida governor a millionaire by the end of last year. Today, he’s worth an estimated $1.5 million.

DeSantis has the simplest finances of anyone making a serious run at the presidency. He did not build a sprawling real estate empire (like Donald Trump), nor start a billion-dollar biotech company (like Vivek Ramaswamy), nor sit on corporate boards (like Nikki Haley), nor marry a Wall Street spouse (like Chris Christie), nor give a bunch of high-dollar speeches (like Mike Pence). DeSantis, the 45-year-old once seen as the heir apparent to a Trumpified Republican Party, owns just one equity holding: a recently purchased oil fund worth $15,000 to $50,000, according to his financial disclosure report. Outside of that, two small pensions and a big pile of cash, there’s nothing else. He resides in the Florida governor’s mansion and does not even own a house. On his most recent financial disclosure, he reported two cash accounts that Forbes estimates have roughly $1.4 million between them — most of it book income from the past two years.

He didn’t come from big money. Born to working-class parents from the Midwest, DeSantis spent most of his childhood in Dunedin, Florida, a Gulf Coast city minutes from Tampa Bay. His father installed Nielson television ratings devices, and his mother worked as a nurse. His Little League team represented the South at the Little League World Series in 1991.

DeSantis’ baseball chops took him all the way to Yale University in 1997. In the book that made him his money, titled “The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival,” he says his cultural background made him stick out among the prep-school coastal elites. “I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay,” he writes, “but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio—from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”

The future presidential candidate’s four years at Yale were defined, in his telling, by baseball, working various campus jobs and encounters with “unbridled leftism.” Evidently undeterred, DeSantis moved further north, earned a law degree from Harvard University in 2005, then — in a bold move for someone with sizable student loans — eschewed a Big Law job or judicial clerkship in favor of an officer’s commission and prosecutor position in the Navy. In 2006, he met his future wife, Casey, a Jacksonville-area reporter and television anchor, shortly before deploying to Iraq.

After returning to the States, DeSantis bought a $307,500 home near Jacksonville in 2009. He worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs to take out a $314,000 loan, enough to cover the entire purchase price. Ron married Casey at Disney World in 2010, left active-duty service and joined a Florida-based law firm that finally gave him a six-figure salary. He harbored political ambitions, though: His first book, “Dreams from Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” didn’t make him much money, but it earned him some cachet among conservatives, which came in handy when he launched a run for Congress.

He won an east-coast seat in 2012 and the $174,000 salary that came with it, a major boost for someone who reported holding less than $20,000 in stock and cash just before taking office. DeSantis plowed the extra funds into a savings account and a second, $242,000 home in Palm Coast, Florida that he sold in 2018 for a small gain. His five years in Congress, combined with his military service, provided him a federal pension worth just over $50,000 today.

While in Washington, DeSantis hewed to the right-wing line: Per one measure, he was more conservative than 87% of Republicans in his final two years. Then he turned his sights on statewide office. He reportedly sucked up to Trump on Fox News and Air Force One, winning the president’s endorsement before even declaring a run for governor. In the primary, DeSantis emphasized his Trump ties, running an ad that showed the congressman “building a wall” with his kids and reading them the “Art of the Deal.” He won by a wide margin, then upset Democrat Andrew Gillum to become governor of America’s third-largest state, even as a blue wave crested nationwide.

The victory came with a pay cut: DeSantis’ new salary was 25% lower than his congressional one. Casey had left her reporting job in 2018. But they also had one fewer expense, housing. They ditched their Jacksonville-area home for $460,000 — paying off their mortgage and walking away with an estimated $150,000 — to take up residence in the governor’s mansion. At this point, they were worth less than $300,000.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and national fights over reopening, DeSantis grew his profile, picking culture war battles that kept him on television. He railed — and legislated — against mask and vaccine mandates, “woke” corporations and “critical race theory.” In his 2022 reelection race, he crushed former Florida governor Charlie Crist by nearly 20 points, winning yet more national attention.

The attention offered a business opportunity, which DeSantis seized. He authored a book that provided $1.25 million in 2022 and at least $725,000 in 2023. In “Courage to be Free,” the Yale and Harvard graduate blasts “elites” and the “ruling class,” calling the Democratic Party a “woke dumpster fire.” His net worth quintupled from $300,000 at the end of 2021 to an estimated $1.5 million today.

He also seized a political opportunity, declaring a run for the presidency in May. “Decline is a choice,” he said in an announcement video, promising to lead a “great American comeback.” But his poll numbers have slipped, as the baseball player from Dunedin struggles to gain any support in two debate performances while the criminally indicted real estate mogul from Queens runs away with the race without even showing up.

If DeSantis doesn’t catch up to Trump, he’ll at least be able to keep his job as governor of Florida—and perhaps write another book.

Dan Alexander and Kavya Gupta contributed reporting.

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Hurricane Idalia chases Florida residents from the Gulf Coast as forecasters warn of storm surge

Post By World , , ,

Florida residents living in vulnerable coastal areas were ordered to pack up and leave on August 29 as Hurricane Idalia gained steam in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and threatened to unleash life-threatening storm surges and rainfall.

Idalia also pummeled Cuba with heavy rains on Monday and Tuesday, leaving the tobacco-growing province of Pinar del Rio underwater and many of its residents without power.

Idalia had strengthened to a Category 2 system on Tuesday afternoon with winds of 100 mph (155 kph). The hurricane was projected to come ashore early Wednesday as a Category 3 system with sustained winds of up to 120 mph (193 kph) in the lightly populated Big Bend region, where the Florida Panhandle curves into the peninsula. The result could be a big blow to a state still dealing with lingering damage from last year’s Hurricane Ian.

The National Weather Service in Tallahassee called Idalia “an unprecedented event” since no major hurricanes on record have ever passed through the bay abutting the Big Bend.

On the island of Cedar Key, Commissioner Sue Colson joined other city officials in packing up documents and electronics at City Hall. She had a message for the almost 900 residents who were under mandatory orders to evacuate. More than a dozen state troopers went door to door warning residents that storm surge could rise as high as 15 feet (4.5 meters).

“One word: Leave,” Colson said. “It’s not something to discuss.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis repeated the warning at an afternoon news conference.

“You really gotta go now. Now is the time,” he said. Earlier, the governor stressed that residents didn’t necessarily need to leave the state, but should “get to higher ground in a safe structure.”

“You can ride the storm out there, then go back to your home,” he said.

Not everyone was heeding the warning. Andy Bair, owner of the Island Hotel, said he intended to “babysit” his bed-and-breakfast, which predates the Civil War. The building has not flooded in the almost 20 years he has owned it, not even when Hurricane Hermine flooded the city in 2016.

“Being a caretaker of the oldest building in Cedar Key, I just feel kind of like I need to be here,” Mr. Bair said. “We’ve proven time and again that we’re not going to wash away. We may be a little uncomfortable for a couple of days, but we’ll be OK eventually.”

Tolls were waived on highways out of the danger area, shelters were open and hotels prepared to take in evacuees. More than 30,000 utility workers were gathering to make repairs as quickly as possible in the hurricane’s wake. About 5,500 National Guard troops were activated.

In Tarpon Springs, a coastal community northwest of Tampa, 60 patients were evacuated from a hospital out of concern that the system could bring a 7-foot (2.1-meter) storm surge.

Idalia’s initial squalls were being felt in the Florida Keys and the southwestern coast of Florida on Tuesday afternoon, including at Clearwater Beach. Workers at beachside bars and T-shirt shops boarded up windows, children skim-surfed the waves and hundreds of people watched the increasingly choppy waters from the safety of the sand.

After landing in the Big Bend region, Idalia is forecast to cross the Florida peninsula and then drench southern Georgia and the Carolinas on Thursday. Both Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster announced states of emergency, freeing up state resources and personnel, including hundreds of National Guard troops.

“We’ll be prepared to the best of our abilities,” said Russell Guess, who was topping off the gas tank on his truck in Valdosta, Georgia. His co-workers at Cunningham Tree Service were doing the same. “There will be trees on people’s house, trees across power lines.”

At 5 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Idalia was about 195 miles (310 kilometers) southwest of Tampa, the National Hurricane Center said. It was moving north at 16 mph (26 kph).

In Cuba, meanwhile, Idalia left more than 60% of Pinar del Rio’s residents in the dark, Cuban state media reported.

“The priority is to reestablish power and communications and keep an eye on the agriculture: Harvest whatever can be harvested and prepare for more rainfall,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in a meeting with government officials Tuesday.

More than 10,000 people had been evacuated to shelters or stayed with friends and relatives as up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain fell. More than half of the province was without electricity.

Cuban state media did not report any deaths or major damage.

Idalia will be the first storm to hit Florida this hurricane season, but it’s only the latest in a summer of natural disasters, including wildfires in Hawaii, Canada and Greece; the first tropical storm to hit California in 84 years, and devastating flooding in Vermont.

With a large stretch of Florida’s western coast at risk for storm surges and floods, evacuation notices were issued in 22 counties, with mandatory orders for some people in eight of those counties. Many of the notices were for low-lying and coastal areas and for people living in mobile and manufactured homes, recreational vehicles or boats, and for people who would be vulnerable in a power outage.

Many school districts along the Gulf Coast were to be closed through at least Wednesday. Several colleges and universities also closed, including the University of Florida in Gainesville. Florida State University in Tallahassee said its campus would be closed through Friday.

Two of the region’s largest airports stopped commercial operations, and MacDill Air Force Base on Tampa Bay sent several aircraft to safer locations. The Busch Gardens Tampa Bay theme park also planned to close. On Florida’s Space Coast, on the other side of the peninsula from where Idalia is expected to make landfall, United Launch Alliance said Tuesday that it was delaying the launch of a rocket carrying satellites for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

Asked about the hurricane as he sat down for a meeting with Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves in the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Joe Biden said he had spoken to DeSantis and “provided him with everything that he possibly needs.”

Ian was responsible last year for almost 150 deaths. The Category 5 hurricane damaged 52,000 structures, nearly 20,000 of which were destroyed or severely damaged.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently said the 2023 hurricane season would be far busier than initially forecast, partly because of extremely warm ocean temperatures. The season runs through Nov. 30, with August and September typically the peak.

Floridians viewed Idalia’s name with some concern since 13 Atlantic storm names beginning with “I” have been retired since 1955, according to the National Weather Service. That happens when a storm’s death toll or destruction is so severe that using its name again would be insensitive.

Another concern was the presence of a rare blue supermoon, which can cause higher-than-normal tides.

Cedar Key was expected to be at low tide shortly after sunrise on Wednesday, with Idalia forecast to make landfall a few hours later. That’s a bit of a relief since the water level would be higher if the storm surge arrived during a high tide, said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.

“That definitely plays a role in coastal flooding,” McNoldy said.

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Florida Schools Now Protecting Kids From Smut Like Sexy, Sexy ‘Paradise Lost’

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In exactly the sort of development you’d expect in the midst of a moral panic and censorship campaign, we learn this week that one Florida school district isn’t limiting itself to removing modern-day smut like sex ed or books about gay penguins. The Orlando Sentinel reports that, thanks to a new state law that requires the removal of any school materials for review as soon as someone files a complaint, books like A Room With A View, Madame Bovary, and even John Milton’s 1667 biblical fanfiction epic Paradise Lost have been pulled from Orange County Public Schools, at least until media specialists can check to make sure they’re not porn. Hell, even Ayn Rand has been censored, instead of allowing high schoolers to find out for themselves what a terrible writer and human she was.

The story notes that several works that have regularly been used in classes are on the rejected list, like The Color Purple,Catch-22,Brave New World, and The Kite Runner. Naturally, the district has also removed both The Bluest Eye and Beloved by Toni Morrison, who can’t seem to help herself terrifying white parents with books that are entirely too much about Black women how dare she.

Previously

Virginia Mom Begs Voters Not To Let Toni Morrison Kill More White Children With Words

100 Year Old Lady At Florida School Board Better Patriot Than All Book Banners Put Together

Ask The Gay Penguins How ‘Limited’ Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law Is. YOU CAN’T THEY’RE BANNED

The district hasn’t yet finalized its lists of what books will be permanently banned or restricted to certain grade levels, and which will be allowed back into classrooms; the district’s “media specialists” are spending the whole summer reviewing every single book in classroom libraries to make sure children aren’t corrupted by mentions of sex, gay people, or Black people who don’t smile obligingly enough, we assume.

The Sentinel explains,

Some books rejected earlier this summer, among them “The Scarlet Letter” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” have since been approved, according to the lists shared with the Orlando Sentinel by a district teacher and by an advocacy group that obtained a rejection list through a public records request. Other books have been approved but only for certain grades.

Four plays by William Shakespeare, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” are currently listed as approved for grades 10 through 12 only, as is Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the lists show.

Fans of The Simpsons will recall that Streetcar! is a musical spectacular featuring the sexy, muscular Ned Flanders and the cheery closing number, “You Can Always Depend on the Kindness of Strangers (A Stranger’s Just a Friend you Haven’t Met).”

Many books are being rejected — temporarily or permanently — because for some reason there’s mention of sex, which Great Literature never mentions but smut like Othello does. The explanation listed for many titles on the rejected list is simply “Depicts or describes sexual conduct (not allowed per HB 1069-2023,” which Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed as part of his presidential campaign. Pretty cruel to have a censorship law with 69 in it, if you ask us.

The new law makes book challenges easier and, if the concern is sexual content, requires the books to be removed from the shelves within five days and remain inaccessible to students while being reviewed. Republican lawmakers said they passed it to make sure pornography and books that depict sexual activity are kept from children.

Mind you, there’s really not any porn in schools, and the law includes an apparently useless clause noting that even works with nudity or boinking can only be considered pornographic if they lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Of course, once there’s a complaint, that has to be determined by the school media specialists.

The Sentinel spoke to a teacher who said, “The last thing I would have expected to be rejected is Milton,” what with Paradise Lost being a “cornerstone of Western Literature” and all that. Yr Wonkette hasn’t looked at it since comparative lit in grad school (Dante and Chaucer are way more fun), but yeah, there are indeed sex scenes in Paradise Lost, including Adam and Eve Doing It before the Fall (and unmarried at that, because there’s no sin in the Garden) and after. Hope you’re ready for some hot fuck action:

Handed they went; and eased the putting off
Those troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused

They was NAKED. Then after the Fall they screw again, only lustfully. Yeah, yeah, we know, you’ll be in your bower.

The ninth grade teacher said he believes the new laws imply that “I have horrible intentions for my students,” when he simply wants to get kids excited about reading and understanding literature, and isn’t that always the excuse they give when they’re peddling smut like Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker and Edgar Allen Poe?

“We are in this because we really care about the stuff that we teach and really care about the content we get to introduce our students to,” he said.

If the rejected list doesn’t change, he said, he will have to remove novels like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream” from his classroom bookshelves as they are rejected for all grades, as well as “Crime and Punishment” and “In Cold Blood,” which are now rejected for 9th grade, which he teaches.

Yeah, that Dostoevsky, what a creep. Another teacher said she was “gobsmacked” to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream rejected, even temporarily, and was downright angry at the rejection of works she had used in advanced placement classes, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, which like virtually all the books mentioned here has yet to be adapted into a porno.

She selects novels “to engage my students, to offer them literature that makes them think,” and some books meant to describe “the adolescent experience” contain sexual content. But they are not pornographic or inappropriate and it upset her to see them on the rejected list.

“It’s just so frustrating and disheartening,” she said.

You know, it’s almost as if writers think sex is an important aspect of human life and motivation, an essential part of literature, even. That’s what kids have to be protected from, for sure. Fahrenheit 451 had it right: Books just make people unhappy, so best we get rid of them.

[Orlando Sentinel / Image generated using DreamStudio AI and Photoshop]

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Not Sure Who’s Worse, White Florida Murderess Or This Dipsh*t Sheriff

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Ocala, Florida, a white woman was finally arrested yesterday, several days after she fatally shot a Black mother whose kids the white lady had been yelling at earlier. Prior to the shooting, the white woman, Susan Louise Lorincz, 58, had allegedly been shouting racial slurs at the children of the victim, Ajike “AJ” Owens, 35, because the kids were playing in a field near Lorincz’s apartment and she didn’t like that. Neighbors said that was a fairly common occurrence.

Lorincz allegedly hurled both the racial epithets and a pair of roller skates at the children, hitting one (with a skate). When Owens, a mother of four who lived across the street, went to Lorincz’s door to ask why Lorincz was harassing her kids, Lorincz fired a gun through the locked door, fatally wounding Owens, whose 10-year-old son was with her at the time. She died shortly after being taken to a hospital.

The AP reports that Lorincz has been charged with “manslaughter with a firearm, culpable negligence, battery and two counts of assault.” We are not a lawyer, and yet that sounds like some criminal undercharging to us.

The sheriff’s department “hasn’t confirmed there were slurs uttered or said whether race was a factor in the shooting,” but attorney Ben Crump, who’s representing Owens’s family, said that Lorincz had been yelling slurs at the kids prior to the killing. Following the arrest, Crump issued a statement saying Owens’s family is “relieved” that there was an arrest, but

they remain concerned it has taken this long because “archaic laws like Stand Your Ground exist.”

The delay in arresting Lorincz following the shooting, officials said, was necessary because of Florida’s shoot anyone you want law, also known as “stand your ground,” which they said prevented them from making an arrest until they determined that Lorincz had not, as she claimed, acted in self-defense.

In a statement on Facebook, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office gave this account of the shooting:

The evidence gathered during the investigation established that, over a period of time, Lorincz had become angry at Owens’ children, who were playing in a field close to her home. On June 2, Lorincz engaged in an argument with the children and was overhead yelling at them by a neighbor. During this argument, Lorincz threw a roller skate at Owens’ 10-year-old son, striking the child in the toe. After this, when the child and his 12-year-old brother went to speak to Lorincz, she opened her door and swung at them with an umbrella. The children then went and told their mother, Owens, about what had happened. Owens approached Lorincz’s home, knocked on the door multiple times, and demanded that Lorincz come outside. Lorincz then fired one shot through the door, striking Owens in her upper chest. At the time she was shot, Owens’ 10-year-old son was standing beside her.

The statement noted that Lorincz said she had “acted in self defense” because, she claimed, Owens had been “trying to break down her door”; Lorincz “also claimed that Owens had come after her in the past and had previously attacked her,” so that ought to be enough for rightwing media to insist that Owens had it coming. The statement said that the investigation, including statements from eyewitnesses, determined that “Lorincz’s actions were not justifiable under Florida law.”

In a bizarre video statement accompanying the account of the shooting and investigation, Sheriff Dipshit McGillicuddy Billy Woods decried protesters calling for an immediate arrest as some kind of “mob” action that he’d had to bravely resist, because “here’s the thing about Justice. She’s on her own time. Not my time, not a prosecutor’s time, not even a mob’s time. A mob seeking, well, what they think is justice.” In nearly the same breath, he thanked “all of you that have sent me messages, sent me emails, texted me, and encouraging the arrest because it shows that you care about a fellow human being.”

So: text-based calls for an arrest good citizenship, protests are a mob.

The AP reports that before the arrest Tuesday, about “three dozen mostly Black protesters gathered outside the Marion County Judicial Center to demand that the shooter be arrested,” so that was quite the mob, although maybe it looked bigger because of the complexion of the protesters.

Woods said that all sides of the case needed to be investigated, and that on Friday night all his deputies had to go on was the statement of the shooter. Somehow, that hadn’t stopped him from saying Monday that there was a “neighborhood feud” between Owens and Lorincz (whom he didn’t identify at the time) and that there had been calls to law enforcement from “either one side or the other, either the mother, Ms. Owens has called, or the shooter has called, complaining about the children, just children being children.”

Translation: Lorincz called the sheriff’s office to complain about the children, and it sure as hell sounds like like Owens had called to complain about Lorincz’s treatment of her children, although Woods appeared to frame both women as equally troublesome, saying he wished that the shooter had called instead of taking matters into her own hands, and that Owens should have, too.

A neighbor’s account certainly doesn’t make Owens sound like an equal partner in any “feud,” as the AP reports:

Lauren Smith, 40, lives across the street from where the shooting happened. She was on her porch that day and saw one of Owens’ young sons pacing, and yelling, “They shot my mama, they shot my mama.”

She ran toward the house, and started chest compressions until a rescue crew arrived. She said there wasn’t an altercation and that Owens didn’t have a weapon.

“She was angry all the time that the children were playing out there,” Smith said. “She would say nasty things to them. Just nasty.” Smith, who is white, described the neighborhood is family friendly.

It’s no “feud” if one person is constantly harassing another person’s family and calling the cops, and the victim of the harassment also calls the cops to report the harassment. I’d call that “corroboration,” but then, I’m not a sheriff in Florida.

Also, look at this crap:

“There was a lot of aggressiveness from both of them, back and forth,” the sheriff said Lorincz told investigators. “Whether it be banging on the doors, banging on the walls and threats being made. And then at that moment is when Ms. Owens was shot through the door.”

And what did Ms. Owens say about the “feud”? Oh, right. She’s unavailable for comment. So even if Lorincz doesn’t qualify for a stand your ground defense, her narrative is what we’re hearing, even from the cop who said in the video statement last night that this was “simply a killing.”

[AP/ Facebook / NBC News]

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2001 Anthrax Attacks Fast Facts | CNN

Post By Health , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,



CNN
 — 

Here’s a look at the 2001 anthrax attacks, also referred to as Amerithrax.

There are four types of anthrax infection: cutaneous (through the skin), inhalation (through the lungs; the most deadly), gastrointestinal (through digestion) and injection anthrax. Injection anthrax is common in heroin-injecting users in northern Europe. This has never been reported in the United States.

Anthrax can be contracted by handling products from infected animals or by breathing in anthrax spores and by eating undercooked meat from infected animals.

It has been blamed for several plagues over the ages that killed both humans and livestock. It emerged in World War I as a biological weapon.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention categorizes anthrax as a Category A agent: one that poses the greatest possible threat for a negative impact on public health; one that may spread across a large area or need public awareness and requires planning to protect the public’s health.

Read more: America’s long and frightening history of attacks by mail

Five people died and 17 people were sickened during anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001; outbreak is often referred to as Amerithrax.

Anthrax was sent via anonymous letters to news agencies in Florida and New York and a congressional office building in Washington, DC.

Of the five victims who died of inhalation anthrax, two were postal workers. The other three victims were an elderly woman from rural Connecticut, a Manhattan hospital worker from the Bronx and an employee at a Florida tabloid magazine who may have contracted anthrax through cross-contamination.

The letters were sent to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, Sen. Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Sen. Patrick Leahy, and the New York Post offices. The letters were postmarked Trenton, New Jersey.

No arrests were made in the attacks.

The FBI has interviewed more than 10,000 people and issued more than 6,000 subpoenas in the case.

4.8 million masks and 88 million gloves were purchased by the Postal Service for its employees, and 300 postal facilities were tested for anthrax.

Over 32,000 people took antibiotics after possible exposure to anthrax.

Stevens, Bob – photo editor at American Media Inc, died of inhalation anthrax, October 5, 2001

Morris, Thomas Jr. – DC postal worker, died of inhalation anthrax, October 21, 2001

Curseen, Joseph Jr. – DC area postal worker, died of inhalation anthrax, October 22, 2001

Nguyen, Kathy – employee at Manhattan hospital, died of inhalation anthrax, October 31, 2001

Lundgren, Ottilie – Connecticut woman, died of inhalation anthrax, November 22, 2001

October 5, 2001 – Sun photo editor Stevens dies of inhalation anthrax.

October 12, 2001 – NBC News announces that an employee has contracted anthrax.

October 15, 2001 – A letter postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, opened by an employee of Senate Majority Leader Daschle contains white powdery substance later found to be “weapons grade” strain of anthrax spores. More than two dozen people in Daschle’s office test positive for anthrax after the envelope is discovered.

October 19, 2001 – An unopened letter tainted with anthrax is found in the offices of the New York Post. One Post employee is confirmed to have a cutaneous infection and a second shows symptoms of the same infection.

October 21, 2001 – DC postal worker Morris Jr. dies of inhalation anthrax.

October 22, 2001 – DC postal worker Curseen dies of inhalation anthrax.

October 31, 2001 – Nguyen, a stockroom worker for the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, dies of inhalation anthrax.

November 9, 2001 – The FBI releases a behavioral profile of the suspect, who is probably a male loner and might work in a laboratory.

November 16, 2001 – A letter sent to Senator Leahy is found to contain anthrax. The letter is among those at the Capitol that has been quarantined. The letter contains at least 23,000 anthrax spores and is postmarked October 9, in Trenton, New Jersey.

November 22, 2001 – Lundgren, a 94-year-old Connecticut woman, dies of inhalation anthrax.

January 2002 – FBI agents interview former US Army bioweapons scientist Steven Hatfill as part of the anthrax investigation.

June 2002 – Bioweapons researcher Hatfill is named a “person of interest” by the FBI.

June 25, 2002 – The FBI searches Hatfill’s Maryland apartment and Florida storage locker with his consent.

June 27, 2002 – The FBI says it is focusing on 30 biological weapons experts in its probe.

August 1, 2002 – The FBI uses a criminal search warrant to search Hatfill’s Maryland apartment and Florida storage locker a second time; anthrax swab tests come back negative.

August 6, 2002 – Attorney General John Ashcroft refers to Hatfill as a “person of interest.”

August 11, 2002 – Hatfill holds a press conference declaring his innocence. He holds a second one on August 25, 2002.

September 11, 2002 – The FBI searches Hatfill’s former apartment in Maryland for the third time.

August 26, 2003 – Hatfill files a civil lawsuit against Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department and the FBI claiming his constitutional rights have been violated. The suit alleges violations of Hatfill’s Fifth Amendment rights by preventing him from earning a living, violations of his Fifth Amendment rights by retaliating against him after he sought to have his name cleared in the anthrax probe and the disclosure of information from his FBI file. The suit also seeks an undetermined amount of monetary damages.

July 11, 2004 – The former headquarters of American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida, where Stevens contracted the anthrax is pumped full of chlorine dioxide gas for decontamination. This was the last building exposed to anthrax in the fall of 2001.

June 27, 2008 – The Justice Department reaches a settlement with Hatfill. The settlement requires the Justice Department to pay Hatfill a one-time payment of $2.825 million and to buy a $3 million annuity that will pay Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years. In return, Hatfill drops his lawsuit, and the government admits no wrongdoing.

July 29, 2008 – Bruce Ivins, a former researcher at the Army’s bioweapons laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, dies after overdosing during a suicide attempt on July 27.

August 6, 2008 – Judge unseals and releases hundreds of documents in the 2001 FBI Anthrax investigation that detail Ivins’ role in the attacks.

August 8, 2008 – The Justice Department formally exonerates Hatfill.

September 25, 2008 – The court releases more documents including emails that Ivins sent to himself.

February 19, 2010 – The Justice Department, FBI and US Postal Inspection Service announce its investigation into the 2001 anthrax mailings is at an end.

March 23, 2011 – A report, entitled The Amerithrax Case, is released through the Research Strategies Network, a non-profit think tank based in Virginia. According to the report, old mental health records suggest Ivins should have been prevented from holding a job at a US Army research facility in Maryland. The report was requested by the US Department of Justice.

October 9, 2011 – The New York Times reports indicate there are scientists questioning the FBI assertions regarding Ivins. Possibly Ivins, if he was involved, worked with a partner. Also, the scientists say the presence of tin in the dried anthrax warrants that the investigation be reopened.

November 23, 2011 – The Justice Department settles for $2.5 million with Stevens’ family. The family originally sued for $50 million in 2003, arguing that the military laboratory should have had tighter security.

December 19, 2014 – The Government Accountability Office releases a 77-page report reviewing the genetic testing used by the FBI during the investigation into the anthrax attacks.

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2024 U.S. presidential campaign | Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launches bid to challenge Donald Trump

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Florida Guv. Ron DeSantis entered the 2024 presidential race on May 24, stepping into a crowded Republican primary contest that will test both his national appeal as an outspoken cultural conservative and the GOP’s willingness to move on from former President Donald Trump.

The 44-year-old Republican revealed his decision in a Federal Election Commission filing before an online conversation with Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

It marks a new chapter in his extraordinary rise from little-known congressman to two-term Governor to a leading figure in the nation’s bitter fights over race, gender, abortion and other divisive issues. Mr. DeSantis is considered to be Mr. Trump’s strongest Republican rival even as the Governor faces questions about his readiness for the national stage.

Mr. DeSantis’ audio-only announcement was to be streamed on Twitter Spaces beginning at 6 p.m. EDT. He was following up with prime-time appearances on conservative programs, including Fox News and Mark Levin’s radio show.


Editorial | Second innings hopes: On Biden announcement and repeat U.S. presidential candidates

Mr. DeSantis’ entry into the Republican field has been rumoured for months and he is considered one of the party’s strongest candidates in the quest to retake the White House from Democratic President Joe Biden. The 80-year-old incumbent, Republicans say, has pushed the nation too far left while failing to address inflation, immigration and crime.

The Republican nominee will face Biden on the general election ballot in November 2024.

He joins a field that already includes: Mr. Trump, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Former Vice President Mike Pence is also considered a likely presidential candidate but has not yet announced a bid.

Mr. DeSantis begins his campaign in the top tier of two alongside Mr. Trump based on early public polling, fundraising and campaign infrastructure.

The two GOP powerhouses have much in common.

Mr. DeSantis, who likely would not have become the Florida governor without Mr. Trump’s endorsement, has adopted the former President’s fiery personality, his populist policies and even some of his rhetoric and mannerisms.

Yet Mr. DeSantis has one thing Mr. Trump does not: a credible claim that he may be more electable in a general election than Mr. Trump, who faces multiple legal threats and presided over Republican losses in three consecutive national elections.

Mr. DeSantis, just six months ago, won his reelection in Florida by a stunning 19 percentage points— even as Republicans in many other states struggled. He also scored several major policy victories during the Republican-controlled Legislature’s spring session.

Aware of Mr. DeSantis’ draw, Mr. Trump has been almost singularly focused on undermining Mr. DeSantis’ political appeal for months. Mr. Trump and his team believe that Mr. DeSantis may be Trump’s only legitimate threat for the nomination.

Hours before the announcement, Mr. Trump argued in a social media post that “Ron DeSanctus” cannot win the general election or the GOP primary because of his previous votes in Congress on Social Security and Medicare.

“He was and is, a disciple of horrible RINO Paul Ryan, and others too many to mention,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Also, he desperately needs a personality transplant and, to the best of my knowledge, they are not medically available yet. A disloyal person!” “RINO” stands for Republican In Name Only.

Mr. Trump’s kitchen-sink attacks and nicknames won’t be Mr. DeSantis’s only hurdle.

Mr. DeSantis may be a political heavyweight in Florida and a regular on Fox News, but allies acknowledge that most primary voters in other States don’t know him well.

A Florida native with family roots in the Midwest, Mr. DeSantis studied at Yale University, where he played baseball. He would go on to Harvard Law School and become a Navy Judge Advocate General officer, a position that took him to Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

He ran for Congress in 2012 and won an Orlando-area district, becoming a founding member of the far-right Freedom Caucus on Capitol Hill.

Despite his lengthy resume, friends and foes alike note that Mr. DeSantis struggles to display the campaign-trail charisma and quick-on-your-feet thinking that often defines successful candidates at the national level. He has gone to great lengths to avoid unscripted public appearances and media scrutiny while governor, which is difficult, if not impossible, as a presidential contender.

Would-be supporters also worry that Mr. DeSantis has refused to invest in relationships with party leaders or fellow elected officials, raising questions about his ability to build the coalition he will ultimately need to beat Trump. By contrast, the more personable Mr. Trump has already scooped up an army of endorsements in key states, including Florida.

Beyond the primary, Mr. DeSantis’ greatest longer-term challenge may rest with the far-right policies he enacted as governor as an unapologetic leader in what he calls his war on “woke.”

The Florida Governor sent dozens of immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast to draw attention to the influx of Latin American immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. He signed and then expanded the Parental Rights in Education bill— known by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans instruction or classroom discussion of LGBTQ issues in Florida public schools for all grades.

More recently, he signed a law banning abortions at six weeks, which is before most women realize they’re pregnant. And he single-handedly removed an elected prosecutor who vowed not to charge people under Florida’s new abortion restrictions or doctors who provide gender-affirming care.

Mr. DeSantis also signed a law this year allowing Florida residents to carry a concealed firearm without a permit. He pushed new measures that experts warn would weaken press freedoms. He also took control of a liberal arts college that he believed was indoctrinating students with leftist ideology.

The Governor’s highest-profile political fight, however, has come against the beloved Florida-based entertainment giant Disney, which publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” law. In retaliation, Mr. DeSantis seized control of Disney World’s governing body and installed loyalists who are threatening to take over park planning, among other extraordinary measures.

Mr. DeSantis himself has threatened to build a State prison on park property.

The dispute has drawn condemnation from business leaders and his Republican rivals, who said the moves are at odds with small-government conservatism.

Mr. DeSantis delayed his announcement until Florida’s legislative session was over. But for much of the year, he has been courting primary voters in key States and using an allied super political action committee to build out a large political organization that is essentially a campaign in waiting and already claims at least $30 million in the bank.

More than any of his opponents, except perhaps Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis is positioned to hit the ground running thanks to the super PAC’s months-long efforts to install campaign infrastructure across Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, which will host the first four contests on the GOP’s primary calendar early next year.

The super PAC also established more than 30 Students for Mr. DeSantis chapters across at least 18 States.

Mr. DeSantis gave no hint as to his plans during a meeting of the State clemency board in Tallahassee on Wednesday morning, where he granted several pardons to former prisoners charged mostly with drug-related crimes decades ago.

“You are what the country needs,” one man said after getting his pardon.

A smiling Mr. DeSantis chuckled and thanked him.

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#presidential #campaign #Florida #Governor #Ron #DeSantis #launches #bid #challenge #Donald #Trump

2024 U.S. presidential campaign | Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launches bid to challenge Donald Trump

Post By World , , , , , , , ,

Florida Guv. Ron DeSantis entered the 2024 presidential race on May 24, stepping into a crowded Republican primary contest that will test both his national appeal as an outspoken cultural conservative and the GOP’s willingness to move on from former President Donald Trump.

The 44-year-old Republican revealed his decision in a Federal Election Commission filing before an online conversation with Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

It marks a new chapter in his extraordinary rise from little-known congressman to two-term Governor to a leading figure in the nation’s bitter fights over race, gender, abortion and other divisive issues. Mr. DeSantis is considered to be Mr. Trump’s strongest Republican rival even as the Governor faces questions about his readiness for the national stage.

Mr. DeSantis’ audio-only announcement was to be streamed on Twitter Spaces beginning at 6 p.m. EDT. He was following up with prime-time appearances on conservative programs, including Fox News and Mark Levin’s radio show.

Mr. DeSantis’ entry into the Republican field has been rumoured for months and he is considered one of the party’s strongest candidates in the quest to retake the White House from Democratic President Joe Biden. The 80-year-old incumbent, Republicans say, has pushed the nation too far left while failing to address inflation, immigration and crime.

The Republican nominee will face Biden on the general election ballot in November 2024.

He joins a field that already includes: Mr. Trump, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Former Vice President Mike Pence is also considered a likely presidential candidate but has not yet announced a bid.

Mr. DeSantis begins his campaign in the top tier of two alongside Mr. Trump based on early public polling, fundraising and campaign infrastructure.

The two GOP powerhouses have much in common.

Mr. DeSantis, who likely would not have become the Florida governor without Mr. Trump’s endorsement, has adopted the former President’s fiery personality, his populist policies and even some of his rhetoric and mannerisms.

Yet Mr. DeSantis has one thing Mr. Trump does not: a credible claim that he may be more electable in a general election than Mr. Trump, who faces multiple legal threats and presided over Republican losses in three consecutive national elections.

Mr. DeSantis, just six months ago, won his reelection in Florida by a stunning 19 percentage points— even as Republicans in many other states struggled. He also scored several major policy victories during the Republican-controlled Legislature’s spring session.

Aware of Mr. DeSantis’ draw, Mr. Trump has been almost singularly focused on undermining Mr. DeSantis’ political appeal for months. Mr. Trump and his team believe that Mr. DeSantis may be Trump’s only legitimate threat for the nomination.

Hours before the announcement, Mr. Trump argued in a social media post that “Ron DeSanctus” cannot win the general election or the GOP primary because of his previous votes in Congress on Social Security and Medicare.

“He was and is, a disciple of horrible RINO Paul Ryan, and others too many to mention,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Also, he desperately needs a personality transplant and, to the best of my knowledge, they are not medically available yet. A disloyal person!” “RINO” stands for Republican In Name Only.

Mr. Trump’s kitchen-sink attacks and nicknames won’t be Mr. DeSantis’s only hurdle.

Mr. DeSantis may be a political heavyweight in Florida and a regular on Fox News, but allies acknowledge that most primary voters in other States don’t know him well.

A Florida native with family roots in the Midwest, Mr. DeSantis studied at Yale University, where he played baseball. He would go on to Harvard Law School and become a Navy Judge Advocate General officer, a position that took him to Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

He ran for Congress in 2012 and won an Orlando-area district, becoming a founding member of the far-right Freedom Caucus on Capitol Hill.

Despite his lengthy resume, friends and foes alike note that Mr. DeSantis struggles to display the campaign-trail charisma and quick-on-your-feet thinking that often defines successful candidates at the national level. He has gone to great lengths to avoid unscripted public appearances and media scrutiny while governor, which is difficult, if not impossible, as a presidential contender.

Would-be supporters also worry that Mr. DeSantis has refused to invest in relationships with party leaders or fellow elected officials, raising questions about his ability to build the coalition he will ultimately need to beat Trump. By contrast, the more personable Mr. Trump has already scooped up an army of endorsements in key states, including Florida.

Beyond the primary, Mr. DeSantis’ greatest longer-term challenge may rest with the far-right policies he enacted as governor as an unapologetic leader in what he calls his war on “woke.”

The Florida Governor sent dozens of immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast to draw attention to the influx of Latin American immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. He signed and then expanded the Parental Rights in Education bill— known by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans instruction or classroom discussion of LGBTQ issues in Florida public schools for all grades.

More recently, he signed a law banning abortions at six weeks, which is before most women realize they’re pregnant. And he single-handedly removed an elected prosecutor who vowed not to charge people under Florida’s new abortion restrictions or doctors who provide gender-affirming care.

Mr. DeSantis also signed a law this year allowing Florida residents to carry a concealed firearm without a permit. He pushed new measures that experts warn would weaken press freedoms. He also took control of a liberal arts college that he believed was indoctrinating students with leftist ideology.

The Governor’s highest-profile political fight, however, has come against the beloved Florida-based entertainment giant Disney, which publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” law. In retaliation, Mr. DeSantis seized control of Disney World’s governing body and installed loyalists who are threatening to take over park planning, among other extraordinary measures.

Mr. DeSantis himself has threatened to build a State prison on park property.

The dispute has drawn condemnation from business leaders and his Republican rivals, who said the moves are at odds with small-government conservatism.

Mr. DeSantis delayed his announcement until Florida’s legislative session was over. But for much of the year, he has been courting primary voters in key States and using an allied super political action committee to build out a large political organization that is essentially a campaign in waiting and already claims at least $30 million in the bank.

More than any of his opponents, except perhaps Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis is positioned to hit the ground running thanks to the super PAC’s months-long efforts to install campaign infrastructure across Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, which will host the first four contests on the GOP’s primary calendar early next year.

The super PAC also established more than 30 Students for Mr. DeSantis chapters across at least 18 States.

Mr. DeSantis gave no hint as to his plans during a meeting of the State clemency board in Tallahassee on Wednesday morning, where he granted several pardons to former prisoners charged mostly with drug-related crimes decades ago.

“You are what the country needs,” one man said after getting his pardon.

A smiling Mr. DeSantis chuckled and thanked him.

Source link

#presidential #campaign #Florida #Governor #Ron #DeSantis #launches #bid #challenge #Donald #Trump