Bonita Springs house catches on fire 3 times in less than 24 hoursFeeling warmer for your Friday afternoon plans
BONITA SPRINGS Bonita Springs house catches on fire 3 times in less than 24 hours A house in Bonita Springs has caught on fire three times in less than 24 hours.
SWFL High School Football Scoreboard Week 12 The regular season finale of high school football in SWFL brings district champions crowned and playoff spots fortified. .
Trash pile on San Carlos Island continues to grow Residents of San Carlos Island have grown tired as garbage and debris from hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton piles up.
Law enforcement presence at Alfie Oakes’ North Naples home and Immokalee packing house Several federal and state law enforcement agencies were at Alfie Oakes’ home and packing house for an investigation that remains undisclosed.
MATLACHA Matlacha restaurant Miceli’s reopens after six weeks Popular Matlacha restaurant Miceli’s has reopened just six weeks after enduring damage from back-to-back storms.
NORTH FORT MYERS Caught on Camera: Accused Dollar General thief arrested A man accused of robbing a Dollar General store is behind bars.
FORT MYERS Fort Myers Ward 4 candidate seeks vote recount In the race for Fort Myers city council, Cindy Banyai lost the Ward 4 race to incumbent Liston Bochette by just 77 votes or 1.58% of the vote.
FORT MYERS Lee County considers adding second fixed-base operator to RSW The Lee County Port Authority is officially moving forward with negotiations for a new fixed-base operator at Southwest Florida International Airport (RSW).
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral roofing business owes $2M to IRS after guilty plea The owner of a Cape Coral roofing business owes the Internal Revenue Service over $2 million after pleading guilty to fraud charges.
FDA approves new shoulder implant From high school seniors to senior citizens, more than 100,000 people will need a shoulder replacement each year.
Private Sky sues future competitor at RSW Private Sky Aviation Services will be getting future competition from a company with trillions of dollars in assets.
Taberna Burntwood opens rebranded tavern at Mercato in North Naples The Mercato restaurant’s difference in decor is clearly striking. Taberna is less rustic and more modern.
IONA Iona home catches fire, at least 2 vehicles also ruined A person lost their home and at least two vehicles after a fire engulfed their property.
FORT MYERS LeeTran scheduled to resume trolley system this month LeeTran brings back the popular seasonal River District trolleys and Fort Myers Beach tram later this month.
BONITA SPRINGS Bonita Springs house catches on fire 3 times in less than 24 hours A house in Bonita Springs has caught on fire three times in less than 24 hours.
SWFL High School Football Scoreboard Week 12 The regular season finale of high school football in SWFL brings district champions crowned and playoff spots fortified. .
Trash pile on San Carlos Island continues to grow Residents of San Carlos Island have grown tired as garbage and debris from hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton piles up.
Law enforcement presence at Alfie Oakes’ North Naples home and Immokalee packing house Several federal and state law enforcement agencies were at Alfie Oakes’ home and packing house for an investigation that remains undisclosed.
MATLACHA Matlacha restaurant Miceli’s reopens after six weeks Popular Matlacha restaurant Miceli’s has reopened just six weeks after enduring damage from back-to-back storms.
NORTH FORT MYERS Caught on Camera: Accused Dollar General thief arrested A man accused of robbing a Dollar General store is behind bars.
FORT MYERS Fort Myers Ward 4 candidate seeks vote recount In the race for Fort Myers city council, Cindy Banyai lost the Ward 4 race to incumbent Liston Bochette by just 77 votes or 1.58% of the vote.
FORT MYERS Lee County considers adding second fixed-base operator to RSW The Lee County Port Authority is officially moving forward with negotiations for a new fixed-base operator at Southwest Florida International Airport (RSW).
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral roofing business owes $2M to IRS after guilty plea The owner of a Cape Coral roofing business owes the Internal Revenue Service over $2 million after pleading guilty to fraud charges.
FDA approves new shoulder implant From high school seniors to senior citizens, more than 100,000 people will need a shoulder replacement each year.
Private Sky sues future competitor at RSW Private Sky Aviation Services will be getting future competition from a company with trillions of dollars in assets.
Taberna Burntwood opens rebranded tavern at Mercato in North Naples The Mercato restaurant’s difference in decor is clearly striking. Taberna is less rustic and more modern.
IONA Iona home catches fire, at least 2 vehicles also ruined A person lost their home and at least two vehicles after a fire engulfed their property.
FORT MYERS LeeTran scheduled to resume trolley system this month LeeTran brings back the popular seasonal River District trolleys and Fort Myers Beach tram later this month.
FILE – Activists demonstrate as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on a pair of cases that could decide the future of affirmative action in college admissions, in Washington, Oct. 31, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action in college admissions, forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies. The court’s conservative majority overturned admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges, respectively. Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.” “This is going to change the way that most colleges and universities in the country handle their admissions process,” said Pamella Seay, a constitutional law expert at FGCU. The decision won’t change much at Florida Gulf Coast University. In a statement to WINK News, the university said it “follows the standards defined by the Florida Board of Governors and FGCU Board of Trustees regulations regarding undergraduate and graduate student admissions. It has not been our practice to make race-conscious admissions decisions of our students, and FGCU will continue to follow the mandates of the State University System.” Seay said the decision is written in a way that provides colleges and universities options on how to continue to diversify their student populations. “It can include the socio-economic factors that have impacted a person. So what it’s looking to is not what color is your skin, but what have you gone through to get here,” Seay said. “It’s looking at the experiences. So I think from that perspective, the justices were trying to balance what they have done, which is exclude race as a factor for admissions into colleges and universities..” Seay said many universities have already begun to do this. “One problem with that is that it’s costly, it takes more time to do that kind of analysis,” she said. “It means that the actual process for evaluation of an applicant is going to take more time and effort. So instead of just checking a box, they’re going to have to demonstrate how their experiences would impact their ability to create more diversity within the university.” Justice Clarence Thomas, the nation’s second Black justice who had long called for an end to affirmative action, wrote separately that the decision “sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” Both Thomas and Sotomayor took the unusual step of reading a summary of their opinions aloud in the courtroom. In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the court’s first Black female justice — called the decision “truly a tragedy for us all.” The vote was 6-3 in the North Carolina case and 6-2 in the Harvard case. Jackson sat out the Harvard case because she had been a member of an advisory governing board there. The Supreme Court had twice upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past 20 years, including as recently as 2016. But that was before the three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined the court. At arguments in late October, all six conservative justices expressed doubts about the practice, which had been upheld under Supreme Court decisions reaching back to 1978. Lower courts also had upheld the programs at both UNC and Harvard, rejecting claims that the schools discriminated against white and Asian American applicants. The college admissions disputes are among several high-profile cases focused on race in America, and were weighed by the conservative-dominated, but most diverse court ever. Among the nine justices are four women, two Black people and a Latina. The justices earlier in June decided a voting rights case in favor of Black voters in Alabama and rejected a race-based challenge to a Native American child protection law. The affirmative action cases were brought by conservative activist Edward Blum, who also was behind an earlier affirmative action challenge against the University of Texas as well as the case that led the court in 2013 to end use of a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Blum formed Students for Fair Admissions, which filed the lawsuits against both schools in 2014. The group argued that the Constitution forbids the use of race in college admissions and called for overturning earlier Supreme Court decisions that said otherwise. Blum’s group also contended that colleges and universities can use other, race-neutral ways to assemble a diverse student body, including by focusing on socioeconomic status and eliminating the preference for children of alumni and major donors. The schools said that they use race in a limited way, but that eliminating it as a factor altogether would make it much harder to achieve a student body that looks like America. At the eight Ivy League universities, the number of nonwhite students increased by 55% from 2010 to 2021, according to federal data. That group, which includes Native American, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and biracial students, accounted for 35% of students on those campuses in 2021, up from 27% in 2010. The end of affirmative action in higher education in California, Michigan, Washington state and elsewhere led to a steep drop in minority enrollment in the states’ leading public universities. They are among nine states that already prohibit any consideration of race in admissions to their public colleges and universities. The others are: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Oklahoma. In 2020, California voters easily rejected a ballot measure to bring back affirmative action. A poll last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed 63% of U.S. adults say the court should allow colleges to consider race as part of the admissions process, yet few believe students’ race should ultimately play a major role in decisions. A Pew Research Center survey released last week found that half of Americans disapprove of considerations of applicants’ race, while a third approve. The chief justice and Jackson received their undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. Two other justices, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, went to law school there, and Kagan was the first woman to serve as the law school’s dean. Every U.S. college and university the justices attended, save one, urged the court to preserve race-conscious admissions. Those schools — Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Notre Dame and Holy Cross — joined briefs in defense of Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions plans. Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s undergraduate alma mater, Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tennessee, was not involved in the cases. WINK News contributed to this report.