DOUBLE JEOPARDY = Florida News Investigation / Public & Government Accountability Reporting

Florida’s minimum wage could be getting a little flexible — like yoga for paychecks.  Representative Ryan Chamberlin has introduced HB 221 , a proposal that would let certain students, apprentices and interns voluntarily earn less than the state’s current $14/hour minimum while they participate in work-study, internship or pre-training programs.  Don’t panic yet: the bill would still guarantee at least the federal floor of $7.25/hour , and workers would have to sign a waiver to opt into the lower pay.  But if you’re picturing unpaid interns fetching artisanal lattes forever, the reality is messier — and a lot funnier, if you like bureaucratic theater. What HB 221 Actually Does Under the proposed law, participants in “ structured learning opportunities ” — think study-and-work programs, apprenticeships, internships and similar on-the-job training — could voluntarily accept wages below Florida’s $14 state minimum by signing a waiver.  The idea is to let employers...

By Oct. 30, 2025, the TikTok sale drama had hit a new act: U.S. officials said China had approved a transfer agreement for TikTok’s U.S. operations during talks tied to President Trump’s recent diplomacy — though Beijing’s public language was more circumspect.  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that China had approved the deal during discussions in Malaysia , but China’s Commerce Ministry only said the two countries would “work with the U.S. to properly resolve issues related to TikTok,” stopping short of a firm, signed-and-sealed confirmation.  In short: the presidents smiled and negotiators kept their pens warm. So what exactly are we talking about?  The framework under discussion would create a U.S.-based company to run TikTok’s American operations, led by a consortium of U.S. investors — prominently Oracle and private-equity firm Silver Lake — with ByteDance reduced to a minority stake (reported at under 20%) to comply with the 2024 U.S. law that ...

Timing is everything in retail, and CandyWarehouse.com Inc. leaned into seasonal suspense by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Oct. 24 — roughly a week before Halloween — in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas .  The Sugar Land, Texas –based national candy distributor told the court it has between $100,000 and $1 million in assets and $1 million to $10 million in liabilities, according to Bankruptcy Observer.  In other words: somebody’s bucket has more IOUs than Snickers! For fans of edible irony, there’s a delicious symmetry here.  A business that built its brand helping hotels, theme parks, hospitals and home-party planners keep candy flowing now faces the trickier business of reorganizing debts just as America ramps up for costume cornucopias and pillowcase pilfering.  Candy Warehouse is asking the court for breathing room to restructure and — if successful — to come back from Chapter 11 with a new plan and hopefully fre...

Picture this: it’s 1947. You’re in a tidy little shoe shop, the clerk offers you a seat, and instead of a tape measure they wheel over a hulking wooden cabinet that looks suspiciously like a wardrobe closet for very judgmental feet.  You would slip your feet with your new shoes still on into a pair of slots, the operator dims the lights, and — voilà — a ghostly yellow-green glow reveals the bones inside your shoes, as if your toes were suddenly posing for a low-budget science fiction film.  Welcome to the fluoroscope era , when “try before you buy” took a decidedly literal turn. The machines — known as fluoroscopes — were marvels of retail modernity.  A customer stepped up, slipped both feet (with shoes on) into the cabinet’s openings, and X-rays beamed upward through the sole.  The rays made the bones fluoresce against the shoe’s interior, and customers and salespeople peered through viewing ports at the top to see whether the shoes were “truly” a fit.  The...

If you’ve ever flinched at the dentist’s drill and vowed vengeance against titanium screws , rejoice: a cadre of scientists is trying to make your vow inconvenient — by replacing implants with actual, living teeth.  The lab-grown tooth race reads like a mash-up of sci-fi and dental school reunion: hydrogels , embryonic mouse cells , pig cameos, and researchers who say things like, “It’s almost like a tripod.” That line comes from Ana Angelova Volponi , director of the postgraduate program in regenerative dentistry at King’s College London , who’s been tinkering with lab-grown teeth for nearly two decades.  Back in 2013 her team famously grew a tooth from human gingival cells combined with mouse progenitor cells — a proof of concept that sounded equal parts miraculous and slightly creepy.  This year Volponi and colleagues took another step forward by improving the scaffold — the biochemical living-room where a tooth’s cellular conversation happens. A scaffold matter...

Venezuela’s latest chapter in international melodrama arrived with the sort of line that makes headline writers do push-ups: Caracas says it captured a group of mercenaries “with direct information of the American intelligence agency” and warned a “false flag” attack was being hatched to provoke war in the region.  The charge — issued by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez — accused Trinidad and Tobago and the U.S. of coordinating a military provocation and claimed the plan was meant “to generate a full military confrontation with our country.”  That’s not a paragraph you want to read while sipping coffee on the beach. To be absolutely clear: Venezuela framed this as an arrest of operatives tied to American intelligence and said the aim was a staged attack that would pin blame on Caracas — a classic “false flag,” which, by definition, is an operation carried out so that another party appears responsible.  Venezuelan officials did not, in the statement aired by the vice pre...

If President Donald Trump wants to make the Panama Canal a campaign prop — waving a flag and declaiming the need to “reclaim” it from imagined foreign hands — he’s not wrong that the waterway is geopolitically important.  But the canal’s real headaches don’t care about campaign rallies or overheated podiums.  They come from drought, climate change , and a practical Mexican railroad that quietly says: “We’ll take 5% — for now.”  As Trump warned at the U.N., Beijing’s role “poses a potential threat to global trade and security.”  That’s a spicy observation for diplomats.  But even the most dramatic geopolitical tug-of-war won’t refill the canal’s reservoirs. Built by the U.S. in the early 1900s and returned to Panama in 1999, the canal still moves the world: roughly $270 billion in cargo annually and 40% of U.S. container traffic flow through its locks.  Yet the canal now faces rivals and realities that no amount of rhetoric can bulldoze away. First: t...

If St. Petersburg or Clearwater actually yank the plug on Duke Energy and try to run their own municipal utilities , they’d better start fundraising for lawyers — and for really heavy extension cords labeled “Legal Fees.”  Winter Park ’s city manager, Randy Knight , who’s been through the divorce dance before, warned straight-faced: “I would tell them to expect a big fight.”   That’s the polite way to say: expect lawsuits, scorched press releases, ballot battles and a 70-page manual from the Edison Electric Institute that reads like a litigant’s cookbook! Duke Energy will fight like an estranged ex who's mantra is "If I can't have you; no one will!" Winter Park’s romance with public power began in 2005 when voters approved the split from Progress Energy (which later merged with Duke). Back then the investor-owned utility dangled a headline number — an estimated price tag of $106 million — and the city braced for a horror film of invoices.  After protracted leg...

If you thought poker night was just chips, bluffs and occasional Cheeto crumbs, prosecutors say welcome to the 21st-century upgrade: stealth magnets , contact-lens clairvoyance and tables that do card reading like a bored X-ray technician.  The federal indictment laying out an alleged multimillion-dollar NBA-and-Mafia linked gambling scheme reads less like a true-crime podcast and more like a prop list for a very illegal sci-fi casino . At center stage is fraud pro Sal Piacente , who showed CNN a gadget so tiny it qualifies as jewelry for a gnat: an earpiece “about the size of a shotgun shot” that can be lodged deep in the ear and — if you believe Piacente — later retrieved with a magnet because “the device is so miniscule that a magnet is even needed to draw the metal ball away from the user’s eardrum to retrieve it.”  His point wasn’t to glamorize cheating; it was to make it painfully obvious that if someone wants to rig a table, modern tech hands them all the tools....