Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is running for St. Petersburg mayor.

“Well, it’s official. I’m now a candidate for mayor of St. Pete. God bless you all,” he said in a video posted to X on Monday.

His post includes the message, “I’m in! #stpete.”

RON DESANTIS UNVEILS NEW FLORIDA CONGRESSIONAL MAP THAT WOULD GIVE THE GOP AN EXTRA FOUR SEATS

“I’ve fought for the City of St. Petersburg in the Legislature, as Education Commissioner, Attorney General, and Governor, and as a United States Representative. Now I’m taking that fight back home, to City Hall, where the city government is failing to address issues that matter most to YOU, my neighbors,” Crist declared on his campaign website.

Crist served as governor of the Sunshine State from early 2007 until early 2011. He was elected to the governorship as a Republican, but lost a 2010 U.S. Senate race while running as an independent. 

DESANTIS TAUNTS JEFFRIES WITH FLORIDA INVITE — DEM LEADER RESPONDS WITH $20M WARNING SHOT

He lost the state’s 2014 gubernatorial contest while running as a Democrat.

Crist went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from early 2017 through August 2022.

DESANTIS UNDER PRESSURE AS FLORIDA REDRAW COULD TIP HOUSE BALANCE IN GOP MAP FIGHT

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Crist unsuccessfully sought the governorship again, but incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis shellacked him in the state’s 2022 gubernatorial contest.

Spring’s budding trees, blooming flowers and warmer temperatures beckon the winter weary back outdoors. But a tiny danger lurks in the season’s celebratory greenery: ticks.

These eight-legged, bacteria-carrying parasites are the No. 1 Lyme disease-spreader for humans. Scientists are working on a vaccine series to guard against the disease. Until then, people are vulnerable to this potentially serious tick-borne illness — and the risk of exposure is growing. Some antivaccine sentiment is propelling an online conspiracy theory linking the tick population with the vaccine. 

So before you set out on that hike, picnic or beach day, know the facts about ticks, Lyme disease and the vaccine in development to prevent it.

What is Lyme disease?

Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne infectious disease in the United States. Named for the Connecticut town where it was first reported in the 1970s, Lyme is prevalent in the northeast and upper midwest. Its geographic distribution also includes the west coast and regions such as Canada, Europe and Asia — and it’s spreading.

Humans usually contract Lyme after they’re bitten by a deer tick carrying the borrelia bacteria that causes Lyme. 

Untreated Lyme disease infections typically begin with a rash, fever, headache, fatigue, swollen lymph nodes or muscle and joint aches and stiffness. Infections progress in stages, moving to other parts of your body such as the heart, brain or spinal cord. Months after the tick bite, untreated infections can cause arthritis, brain fog, nerve damage and mental health issues. 

Lyme disease can be treated with a complete round of antibiotics. Many people see improvement, but some people report long-lasting symptoms for months or years. 

 

An informational card about ticks distributed by the Maine Medical Center Research Institute is seen in the woods in Freeport, Maine, May 9, 2014. (AP)

Why is Lyme spreading to new geographic areas?

Ticks are expanding their geographic range at the same time climate change’s warmer temperatures and higher humidity are prolonging tick season. 

Suburban development broke up woodland areas and put large numbers of people right at the edge of ticks’ favored habitats, said Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease specialist and a Stanford University School of Medicine professor. 

The result is more ticks, a longer tick season and more people living near tick habitats — and more Lyme disease cases.  

In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, state health departments reported more than 89,000 cases of Lyme disease. Lyme disease is likely even more prevalent, though. Using insurance claims data, researchers estimate that about 476,000 people annually are diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease. 

How does the latest proposed vaccine work?

Pfizer began researching a new Lyme disease vaccine because of the illness’ growing prevalence, its status as a global public health concern, and its potential for serious complications, the company said in a statement to PolitiFact. 

Pfizer and Valneva, a European vaccine company, are working on a vaccine that would cause a person’s body to create protective antibodies against a protein found on the borrelia bacteria’s surface. If a tick bites a vaccinated person, it ingests blood that contains the antibodies that fight the Lyme disease by attaching themselves to the bacteria’s surface. This renders the bacteria inactive and unable to infect a human host. 

The vaccine was tested in a large-scale clinical trial in which participants were randomly selected to receive either a placebo or an actual vaccine. The trial was conducted in areas of the U.S., Canada and Europe with high numbers of Lyme disease cases. It involved about 9,400 people, ages 5 and older. Participants received an initial three-dose vaccine series and then a booster shot about a year after completing the series, which was timed to fall just before peak Lyme disease season. 

Compared with the placebo, early trial results show that four doses of the vaccine were about  75% effective at reducing the rate of confirmed Lyme disease cases on the day after the last dose and 73% effective in reducing the rate of confirmed Lyme disease cases 28 days later.

Pfizer said the trial saw fewer cases of Lyme disease than expected. 

That means the results weren’t as statistically meaningful as the study’s goal. Still, 73% efficacy against a disease with no other vaccine is significant, Scott said. 

Pfizer said the trial results established “clinically meaningful efficacy” and said the company plans to pursue regulatory approval. 

If it were approved by the Food and Drug Administration, traditionally a CDC vaccine committee would establish recommendations for who should be vaccinated. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to fight for Lyme treatment and prevention. 

It’s unclear if U.S. public health agencies — led by Kennedy, a longtime antivaccine activist — would approve the vaccine.

Robert Terwilliger, right, of Williamsburg, Pa., who is participating in a Lyme disease vaccine trial at the Altoona Center for Clinical Research, is injected with either the new vaccine or a placebo, by registered nurse Janae Roland, Aug. 5, 2022. (AP)

Wasn’t there another Lyme disease vaccine years ago?

Yes. The FDA approved a Lyme disease vaccine called LYMErix in 1998. LYMErix worked similarly to Pfizer and Valneva’s vaccine and showed about 75% efficacy in clinical trials. But where LYMErix targeted only one strain of bacteria, the vaccine currently in development targets six strains of Lyme bacteria.

LYMErix’s manufacturer withdrew the vaccine in 2002, citing low demand and poor sales following health officials’ lukewarm recommendations and amid antivaccine sentiment.

What’s behind social media posts about boxes of ticks being delivered to farms?

Both vaccines and Lyme disease have long been fodder for conspiracy theories. 

Pfizer’s recent vaccine clinical trial results sparked social media posts promoting unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that boxes of ticks were being mailed to farmers throughout the U.S. and that the government would soon release “plague like levels of ticks” to incentivize people to get vaccinated. 

Snopes investigated Missouri-specific tick rumors, and found no health or law enforcement officials in the state who’d received any reports of boxes of ticks being left on farms. 

A woman walks a dog at Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach Park in Alameda, Calif., Jan. 1, 2026. Conduct regular tick checks on pets that spend time outside. (AP)

Without a vaccine, what’s the best way to avoid Lyme disease?

Avoid tick bites. Use insect repellent and wear long, protective clothing when spending time outdoors. It also helps if that clothing is treated with permethrin, an insecticide that kills ticks. (Note: You can apply permethrin to clothes and outdoor gear, but you cannot apply it directly to the skin and it’s toxic to cats.)

These measures can protect you from other tick-borne diseases, too. 

A tick has more time it has to transmit the bacteria that causes Lyme disease the longer it remains attached, so it’s best to remove ticks quickly if you’re bitten. 

Conduct thorough tick checks regularly for yourself, your children and outdoor pets such as the family dog. 

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird and Senior Digital Research Analyst Jeff Cercone contributed to this report.

RELATED FACT-CHECK: Was Lyme disease spread as a bioweapon? No, that theory is Pants on Fire!

Even a glance at Shy’tyra Burton’s life reveals her need for the sort of federal government assistance that helps disabled Americans stay in their homes. Born two months prematurely into a poor family in Philadelphia, unable to breathe or swallow without tubes and largely confined to medical facilities until age 4, Burton was diagnosed with a litany of developmental and intellectual disabilities that left her with an IQ below 70.

She persevered and graduated from a high school special education program, then attempted community college. But she struggled to grasp basic tasks and information. She couldn’t get hired, including at McDonald’s. After multiple medical and psychological evaluations and a hearing before a judge, the federal government approved her for the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides a basic income to those with severe disabilities and to indigent older people.

For Burton, now 22, the $994 monthly benefit is lifesaving but not enough to completely support herself on her own. So, like many SSI recipients, she has continued to live with her father, who makes around $2,000 a month as a Philadelphia sanitation worker.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is poised to penalize people like Burton simply for living in the same home as their families, according to four federal officials, internal emails and a federal regulatory listing. The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third — about $330 a month in Burton’s case — or ending their support altogether.

The effort to cut SSI for families who also rely on food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was initiated by top White House and Department of Government Efficiency officials last year, multiple Social Security officials said. It marks a second attempt by the Trump administration to quietly but dramatically downsize disability benefit programs overseen by the Social Security Administration, despite those programs’ strict eligibility standards and minimal instances of fraud. White House Budget Director Russell Vought and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano abandoned a different proposed regulation involving disability payments last year after ProPublica and other news outlets reported on the harm that the plan would cause to hundreds of thousands of largely blue-collar workers in red states. (The disability programs are administered by the Social Security Administration but separate from the retirement program for which the agency is named. The Trump administration has promised not to cut Social Security retirement payments.)

The likely SSI cut will affect not just younger adults with disabilities such as Down syndrome and severe autism who are still living at home with their low-income parents, but also older people with health or financial problems who have had to move in with their adult children on tight budgets. All told, as many as 400,000 poor and disabled people and indigent older people across the United States could have their support cut or eliminated, according to a ProPublica analysis of actuarial figures from the Social Security Administration.

Protecting the SSI program from such a fate is “about how the faithful will be judged, and our care for the most vulnerable,” said Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals and himself the father of a 35-year-old son with Down syndrome who lives at home and receives SSI. Carey said it’s wrong to reduce a disabled person’s SSI benefits for choosing or needing to live with loved ones. “Knowing that they are contributing and not a burden to the family can be a source of great pride,” he said. (Some 40 Down syndrome organizations recently sent a letter to Bisignano expressing their opposition to the planned change.)

The reason this will especially affect SNAP families is complicated. Essentially, under a long-standing federal policy that was updated during the Biden administration, if a household has already demonstrated its poverty via SNAP or other public assistance programs’ own extensive income-reporting requirements, then the family is officially deemed unable to financially support a disabled loved one living at home. (The typical SNAP household that is also supporting a person who receives SSI has an annual total income of just $17,000, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

The Trump rule will undo this approach. It won’t matter if the SNAP program has already determined a family is poor enough to receive aid; anyone living at home beyond age 18 without paying full rent will be treated as if they have a benefactor. The value of their bedroom as well as any income and assets their family may have will be calculated and recalculated as often as every month and deducted from their SSI check.

The SSI rule change is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, a process that involves editing the draft regulation and considering where it falls on the list of the president’s priorities. Once it’s returned to the Social Security Administration for initial publication, there will be an opportunity for public comment; it could take until next year to be finalized, depending on the amount of opposition it faces.

Presented with a detailed list of this article’s findings, Rachel Cauley, the OMB’s communications director, asserted that “this story is false because it speculates about policies that have not yet been decided.” Asked to specify what was false, Cauley did not identify anything, instead reiterating that the story is “trash.” A Social Security Administration spokesperson said “Commissioner Bisignano remains committed to protecting and strengthening Social Security and serving America’s most vulnerable populations.”

ProPublica interviewed families who rely on the SSI program in Philadelphia and across the country. We talked to a young couple struggling to support not just their kids but also a parent with Alzheimer’s. We heard from a mother, Opal Foster, whose 18-year-old son has Down syndrome and lives at home as he strives to become a chef. And we spoke with a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia and panic disorder who lives with her brother’s family because she can’t hold down a job and fears being left alone in a nursing home.

All of these people could have their SSI benefits cut because they live with family, even though disability advocates, evangelicals and budget experts agree that it’s more humane and less expensive for adults with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional facilities. The potential cut to Burton’s SSI benefit, for example, would save taxpayers about $11 a day. But if her dad as a result of the reduced support can’t afford to provide for her anymore, then it could cost taxpayers many hundreds of dollars a day or more to house her at a residential facility, according to the state of Pennsylvania’s fee schedules.

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Supplemental Security Income, which serves 7.5 million Americans who are unable to make a living because of severe disabilities or destitution in old age, has never been easy to qualify for. Fewer than a third of applicants are approved, and the process often takes years. Recipients of these benefits in turn regularly have their finances reevaluated, and are also intermittently examined by medical and vocational experts, to determine whether their payments will continue.

This paperwork-and-review-heavy process generates hefty overhead. The SSI program distributes just 5% of all Social Security Administration benefits yet accounts for nearly 35% of the agency’s administrative budget. Month after month, staffers have to pore over microscopic changes to SSI beneficiaries’ living arrangements and family members’ incomes and assets.

Current and former Social Security officials have told ProPublica over the past year that the SSI program’s complexities and absurdities remain perhaps the agency’s biggest bureaucratic headache. As ProPublica reported last summer, DOGE did nothing to address this, mostly ignoring SSI despite its obvious inefficiencies. In fact, DOGE and the White House pushed out roughly 7,000 Social Security employees, many of whom had been working on SSI reforms and backlogs.

The Biden administration had tried to do something about SSI’s excessive red tape. Under existing law, disabled people whose families have already established themselves to be poor by qualifying for certain other public assistance programs, such as veterans’ benefits or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, don’t have to do all of the same check-ins, over and over again, to receive SSI. In 2024, Biden added SNAP — which is more widely used now than when these SSI rules were created — to the list of such programs.

This was ultimately an act of government efficiency, said Marianna LaCanfora, who was for years the deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy at the Social Security Administration, including during Trump’s first term. Safety net programs like SSI don’t have to be so complicated and thus expensive, LaCanfora and others at the agency said. But they often are that way because of all the effort spent triple-checking that the poor are actually poor.

Nevertheless, conservative think tanks opposed the Biden SNAP policy, with some claiming that paying these low-income SSI beneficiaries less could save the federal government $20 billion over the next decade. And the White House included the rule change as one of its agenda items for the SSA heading into 2025. It was part of a broader push by the administration and DOGE to undo anything that the Biden administration had touched.

If enacted, the change will require intellectually disabled young people like Burton as well as very elderly people to file extensive monthly reports if they want to continue their benefits even at the reduced level. They’ll have to provide details about the property where they live: whether it’s leased or owned, as well as the names of anyone in the home, and whether any of these people has any new income or assets. They’ll also have to include documentation of all household bills and expenses, showing how much they do or don’t contribute personally, as well as financial documents such as bank statements and any pay stubs.

Burton will likely have to make an appointment and report in person at a Social Security field office any time her father’s hours or wages change even slightly; any time she and he switch up how they split utility bills; and any time an adult sibling spends even a few nights at the house and helps her with living expenses. If she doesn’t, she could later receive bills accusing her of having been overpaid by Social Security.

For his part, Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, wants to be seen as a leader who’s making the agency more businesslike and efficient, according to interviews with agency staff and recordings of him speaking in private executive meetings. But the SSI rule change, by all accounts, will increase the administrative burden not just on families like Burton’s but also on the staff who’ll have to constantly assess the living arrangements and family incomes of her and millions of other people.

Given the tension between what the rule will do and the sense of efficiency that Bisignano says he wants to instill at Social Security, some agency insiders told ProPublica that he could still push the White House to drop the plan.

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Shy’tyra Burton’s monthly SSI support check is what allows her to contribute to her household, by paying her own phone and internet bills and buying many of her own meals, according to her father, Rondell. “I’m still barely managing, though,” he said. He has largely been a single parent to Shy’tyra and her siblings, who need some support too, although they’re more self-sufficient. Groceries and gas have only gotten more expensive.

Burton is calmer and better at managing her disabilities when she can sense that her family’s economic circumstances are relatively stable, her father said. When he blew out his shoulder last year trying to hurl a heavy recycling bin onto a garbage truck, and had to have surgery and take time off work, the loss of income soon manifested in her behavior, he said. “It’s a trickle-down effect,” he explained. “My daughter absorbs money stress in her body.”

One recent 75-degree afternoon, sitting on the front stoop of the rowhouse where she lives with her dad, Burton was rubbing her hands together vigorously, as if it were cold out. When asked why, she claimed it reminded her of being a baby in the neonatal intensive care unit and touching her parents’ hands through the small opening in her incubator.

Burton still has some childlike ways. She grips her stuffed animals when she’s nervous, which is often. She talks to imaginary friends out loud, the same ones she talked to when she was a girl. What she likes about living at home is in part that she can be herself, and her family will still be there to care for her. She doesn’t like the lack of freedom and that she can’t truly be “out there” like her adult siblings.

Burton wanted to go into the child development field, to help kids growing up with disabilities like hers, but some of the concepts were a bit too difficult. Now, she’s excited by cosmetology and intends to support herself one day as a hair stylist. She spends much of her time practicing on mannequin heads in her childhood room.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is drawing scrutiny for cozying up to Chinese AI governance officials while championing policies that critics say would hamper America’s ability to compete with Beijing in the global artificial intelligence arms race.

Sanders is expected to be speaking at a panel discussion on Capitol Hill Wednesday alongside Xue Lan, a professor at the CCP-funded Tsinghua University and chairman of the Ministry of Science and Technology-backed New Generation Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional Committee. 

In attendance will also be Zeng Yi, who is the Dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance and is also tied to the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional Committee chaired by Lan. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Max Tegmark, who will also be speaking at the event, indicated the event will focus on “AI existential risk and international cooperation.”

Critics from the White House, the data center industry, and major tech-policy think tanks have argued Sanders is proposing policies that would slow the construction of the very infrastructure needed to keep the United States ahead in the race for AI dominance. Now, Sanders is facing more heat for holding an event on Capitol Hill with two Chinese Ministry of Science-linked officials who support China’s preferred AI governance model.

CHINA RACES AHEAD ON AI —TRUMP WARNS AMERICA CAN’T REGULATE ITSELF INTO DEFEAT

“I think Senator Sanders’ concerns about AI are overstated, but I respect them. We should be asking questions about child safety, community impact, and economic displacement,” China policy expert at the Hudson Institute, Michael Sobolik, said. “What we shouldn’t do is partner with foreign adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party in those discussions.”

Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., pointed out that Tsinghua University is “one of China’s top universities with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”

“This is the same China that just blocked Meta’s $2 billion deal to acquire Manus AI, a startup whose founders had already moved to Singapore and whose deal was already done and closed. Beijing decided it did not matter. They stepped in, killed the deal, and restricted the founders from leaving the country while it was under review,” Harrigan wrote in a Monday post on X ahead of the slated panel discussion on Capitol Hill. 

“China is aggressively locking down their most powerful AI assets and shutting American companies out,” he continued. “Bernie Sanders wants to hand them a seat at the table to help decide how America handles the same technology.”

“Holy sh–,” Ruthless Podcast co-host Comfortably Smug posted on X.

“It’s a bit on the nose that communist Bernie Sanders is looking to the Chinese Communist Party for their ‘leadership’ on AI,” conservative commentator Steve Guest posted on X.

Fox News Digital reached out to Sanders’ office but did not receive a response in time for publication.

AI TECHNOLOGY RACE IS NEW ‘COLD WAR’ BETWEEN US AND CHINA THAT COULD HAVE DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES: REPORT

In March, Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, which would impose an immediate federal ban on the construction or upgrading of new AI data centers until Congress passes a broader regulatory framework. Sanders’ own office said the bill is designed to “slow down the development of AI,” and Sanders has separately argued that AI threatens jobs, privacy, democracy, the environment and “maybe the human race.”

Even Democrats have balked at the policy proposal with Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., calling the moratorium “idiocy” at an artificial intelligence summit in D.C. last month, warning it would give China an edge in the AI race.

Cy McNeill, the senior director of federal affairs at the Data Center Coalition, a pro-industry group, said a freeze would risk “rationing access to digital services,” impair U.S. competitiveness and hit Americans’ daily lives. The Center for Data Innovation, a tech-policy think tank, similarly argued the bill relies on “well-worn anxieties” and does not justify halting data-center construction.

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Lan, as chair of China’s national expert committee for AI governance, and Li, who told TIME last year that he is “highly involved in policymaking through national governance committees” in China, both have championed governance models that would expand China’s role in writing global AI rules that clash with a freer, more competition-driven U.S. strategy.

Yi has argued that China and the world need mandatory safety and ethics frameworks and more international cooperation, according to comments he made to TIME. He helped develop UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, the first-ever global standard on AI ethics.

Lan, meanwhile, helped establish a CCP-backed national AI safety body to help “bridge” the gap between technical experts and policymakers, according to TIME.

“China has chosen the path of top-down government control to drive its AI industry. While this strategy affords the CCP some advantages, the American model of bottom-up, free-market capitalism has long been the engine of innovation for the world, and it is more efficient in the long run,” House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie wrote in a February policy review for the Hatch Center.

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“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Guthrie continues. “China already deploys next-generation technologies to advance many of the regime’s most sinister goals focused on enhancing the power of its Orwellian surveillance state utilizing advanced computing. Even more concerning to the American public is the threat of an adversary’s technology stack serving as the building blocks for future advancements or as a strategic chokehold.”

“The way to beat China in the AI race is to outrace them in innovation, not saddle AI developers with European-style regulations,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has also said. Growth and development of new AI technologies will bolster our national security, create new jobs, and stimulate economic growth”

Florida is experiencing one of its worst droughts in decades, causing widespread wildfires and evacuation orders in large swaths of the state.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently offered a possible silver lining.

“They do say, that when you have droughts, that the hurricane seasons tend to be less active,” DeSantis said at an April 22 event in Jacksonville. “I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if that’s an old wives’ tale. I don’t know if there’s data to back it up, but people do say that, and so I guess we shall see what that means for this season coming up.”

Over half of Florida is in an “extreme drought,” as classified by the U.S. Drought Monitor, and about 22% of the state is in an “exceptional drought,” the system’s highest level.

Meteorologists and climate experts told PolitiFact that droughts do not directly affect hurricane season, but people sometimes conflate the two as they can occur at the same time under certain conditions.

“There actually isn’t any basis for that,” Andy Hazleton, an associate scientist at the University of Miami Cooperative Institute for Marine & Atmospheric Studies, said. “Sometimes, drought can be associated with La Niña winters, which we just had, and La Niña tends to favor more hurricanes. We’re heading into an El Niño, which will likely mean fewer hurricanes but a wetter winter in Florida.”

La Niña is a climate pattern characterized by unusually cold ocean surface temperatures with less wind shear, while El Niño refers to a pattern of unusually warm ocean temperatures with higher wind shear.

Hurricane seasons are driven primarily by the Atlantic basin’s sea surface temperatures and wind shear, Hazleton said. (The basin includes the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.) Warm waters act as a fuel source, providing tropical systems with heat energy, and low wind shear acts as a stabilizer, allowing storms to build without being torn apart.

But drought doesn’t always lead to fewer hurricanes, experts said. Sometimes La Niña causes drought in the winter then lingers to create an active hurricane season because it keeps high wind shear away.

The 1998 hurricane season is one example of drought and fewer hurricanes not aligning, meteorologists said.

That year, Florida, Texas and Louisiana had record-low rainfall and record-high temperatures, leading to wildfires. The Atlantic hurricane season was particularly active, producing 14 named storms, including 10 hurricanes. Experts noted the drought was initially fueled by a strong El Niño, but as the hurricane season progressed, the transition to La Niña reduced wind shear, allowing for more hurricane activity.

For the coming hurricane season that begins June 1, Florida is heading into a strong El Niño weather pattern, which could mean a quieter season.

“Big El Niño’s make a big difference!” Jeff Berardelli, WFLA Tampa Bay’s chief meteorologist and climate specialist wrote April 24 on X, explaining that weaker El Ninos have led to major hurricanes. “This #hurricane season may defy the odds, but odds are for a ‘relatively’ quieter season. Nevertheless, we always say, ‘it only takes one,’ so be prepared!”

Berardelli said the strongest El Niño episodes dating back to 1972 have correlated with a substantial decrease in hurricane activity — about 40% fewer storms than average.

There’s more of a connection between droughts and hurricanes when dry weather occurs in Africa, Hazleton said, because it inhibits thunderstorm clusters that move off the country’s coast from forming into Atlantic tropical cyclones. “That can have an impact on the hurricane seasons,” he said, “but it’s not an easy one-to-one connection.”

A persistent drought could bring more problems if a hurricane makes landfall. 

Dry conditions can weaken tree roots, making them more prone to falling or breaking in strong winds. Dry soil makes water absorption difficult, which can lead to erosion and a higher risk of flooding.

RELATED: Ron DeSantis dismisses climate change link to stronger hurricanes. Here’s what the science says.

Connecticut legislators overhauled the state’s towing law last year to make it more fair for low-income residents who couldn’t afford the fees to get their cars back. Those residents sometimes saw their cars sold after being towed for breaking one of their landlord’s parking rules.

The new law, which took effect in October, requires tow truck companies to give owners notice before hauling away a car for minor issues like failing to display an apartment complex’s parking permit or parking in the wrong space. They also now have to be available after hours to allow people to retrieve their vehicles. They have to accept credit cards and provide change when people pay in cash.

But when Elias Natal went to work one evening in December, he discovered his Buick had been towed from his home at Sunset Ridge Apartments in New Haven. And the towing company seemed to ignore the new rules.

The law requires apartment complexes to post signs warning of towing, but interviews with tenants and visits to Sunset Ridge show there were none at the complex, where many people receive state or federal rental aid. The towing company, Lombard Motors, told Natal he was towed for not having a parking permit, even though Natal has photos showing the sticker was displayed on the windshield, as he said the apartment manager instructed him.

When Natal and his partner, Jasmin Flores, discovered where the car was and went to pick it up, Lombard was already closed, and no one was available to return their car, triggering additional storage fees.

By the time they got the money together to pay the fees, it had only been four days, and the tow didn’t require excessive mileage charges since Lombard’s lot was a few blocks away. But Lombard’s fees stacked up to nearly $500. The company demanded cash, which the couple paid. They got their car back but had to argue to get any change.

“Especially after the copious amounts of money that they asked of us, to then not give us back like our minuscule change is just, it’s dehumanizing,” Natal said.

Over the past year and a half, the Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica have investigated towing practices in Connecticut, revealing how state laws favored towing companies, particularly at the expense of people with low incomes. The stories led to a new law, but reporting shows that some towing companies aren’t following it. While the legislature required most involuntary tows from apartments to be triggered by specific complaints, residents said towing companies are continuing to patrol public housing and low-income apartment complexes and tow cars for minor violations.

Few landlords had more tows in New Haven from 2022 to 2024 than the company that owns Sunset Ridge. And residents say the frequency of towing has picked up even more in recent months after the owner, Capital Realty Group, became more aggressive in response to the formation of a tenants union. In the five months since the new law took effect, Sunset Ridge has had 64 tows, compared with 146 from 2022 to 2024, according to police data. Capital Realty did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

Whether landlords and towers are following the law matters because towing in Connecticut has disproportionately occurred in low-income areas. In many cities, public housing complexes and low-income apartments were some of the biggest hot spots for towing before the reforms passed, according to a new CT Mirror and ProPublica analysis of police department tow logs.

The analysis of data from nine of the largest Connecticut cities showed that census tracts where the most tows occurred from 2022 to 2024 tended to have larger populations of renters, larger Black and Hispanic populations and much higher rates of poverty than the state as a whole. The census tract where Natal and Flores live had the second-most tows in the city and a high population of Hispanic and Black residents. In Norwalk, the top seven property parcels for tows belong to the public housing authority.

“It’s such a fish-in-a-barrel situation where people have to put their car somewhere,” said Luke Melonakos, vice president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, about the difficulty finding parking in some of these housing complexes. “They have no choice but to try to abide by these often very arduous, confusing, often-changing-frequently parking rules.”

Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles spokesperson Shaun Formica said that the agency hasn’t received any complaints of towing companies not following the law, but that complaints about towing overall have gone down. Since the law went into effect in October, there have been seven complaints, compared with 32 from October 2024 to March 2025, records show. Natal did not file a complaint.

Lombard Motors and another company owned by the same group, Anthony’s Hightech Auto Center, were the subject of nine complaints that resulted in fines between 2023 and 2025 before the law took effect, records show. In two cases, the DMV fined them a total of $5,000 for overcharging people to get their vehicles after a tow and ordered Lombard to return more than $1,000 to the vehicle owners. Lombard did not attend the hearings to offer a defense in either case, records show.

The owners of Lombard and Anthony’s did not respond to multiple calls for comment.

The Biggest Towing Hot Spots

Like at Sunset Ridge, the effects of towing have been felt most by people of color and poor families in Connecticut, in part because they are more likely to rent than own their home.

Statewide, about a third of people are renters. In census tracts where the most tows occurred, more than three-quarters are renters. The 50 census tracts where tows occurred most were about 27% Black and 38% Hispanic, compared with 10% and 18% statewide. Connecticut’s overall poverty rate is 10%, but it’s 26% in these census tracts.

Residents of these areas say they face higher levels of towing because public housing authorities and landlords of low-income apartment complexes often have towing companies on contract to patrol their areas. Though the intent might be to deal with abandoned cars or a lack of parking for residents, they say it’s led to overly aggressive towing for minor mistakes that people in wealthier neighborhoods don’t have to worry about.

One of the most common towing spots in Waterbury from 2022 to 2024 was the Berkeley Heights public housing complex with 318 tows — more than one tow for each of the 254 apartments there.

Dyshawn Key was visiting his mother there in April 2024 when shortly after 11 p.m. he noticed a tow truck lifting his car, which was parked outside his mother’s apartment.

He had forgotten to move his car from his mother’s spot, which required a parking permit, and rushed out and begged the driver to stop, but it was too late. Key’s car has been towed at least eight times from Berkeley Heights since 2022, mostly for parking without a sticker.

“They make sure that people are sleeping and there’s nobody around, and they just tiptoe through here and take your vehicle,” Key said. Data shows that almost 90% of tows there happened between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., when apartment offices are typically closed and it’s unlikely that property managers would complain about parking.

Fewer tows have happened at Berkeley Heights since the law passed, according to Waterbury tow logs.

Waterbury Housing Authority executive director Chris D’Orso said there is a public road that runs between two of the buildings at Berkeley Heights, and the city monitors it carefully to ensure that people don’t block emergency vehicle or bus access. He said there have also been problems with people leaving stolen cars in the parking lot.

“We were turned into a dumping ground for stolen cars for a while,” D’Orso said.

Still, there isn’t enough parking, he conceded. Though he said most of the tows are driven by complaints, the agency contracts with a towing company.

Like Capital Realty in New Haven, several other landlords showed up multiple times in the data. Zvi Horowitz, a New Jersey-based landlord, through several companies, owns three of the biggest towing locations in Waterbury — Diamond Court Apartments, Wyndham Court Apartments and Bunker Hill Apartments. The three locations, which have 256 apartments combined, had 522 tows over two years.

Horowitz also owns Seramonte Estates in Hamden, a large town north of New Haven, where a tenants union held protests after residents said they were frequently towed for small infractions. The complex accounted for more than half the city’s tows from January 2022 to June 2024.

Paul Boudreau, one of the tenants union’s founders, said it had negotiated for towing to stop at all of Horowitz’s apartments. But since then, he’s gotten calls from tenants who say the towing hasn’t stopped despite the new law.

Horowitz didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Boudreau said that in his work as an organizer around the state, he often hears of people getting towed soon after asking for repairs or reporting problems with housing conditions at their properties.

“They’re still using these tow trucks like hired hitmen to go after tenants, to take their stuff when they complain,” Boudreau said.

“It’s So Retaliatory”

Natal and Flores said they believe they were targeted by their landlord in retaliation for joining a tenants union that is trying to improve conditions at Sunset Ridge.

The day before their car was towed they had canvassed the complex with neighbors and outside organizers as part of the Sunset Ridge Tenants Union, a group of renters calling on Capital Realty to make changes at the apartment complex. In addition to requesting repairs at the complex, tenants said they have been towed unfairly.

“Everyone has had an issue with management or with parking or with the towing company, because it’s so retaliatory,” Flores said.

Tawana Galberth, a union leader, said one of the top complaints about the apartment complex when the union polled residents was towing. Many people reported being towed for small reasons, like being parked over the line. A tow truck driver often patrols the complex at night to look for vehicles, she said.

“When I moved in, I never received clarification. How do we park? Where do we park? Where do we have visitors?” Galberth asked.

Kristy Kaik said the use of parking stickers at the Rockview public housing complex in New Haven hadn’t been enforced for more than a decade. But when her son came home from college for Christmas after the new law took effect, he discovered his car had been towed for not having a sticker.

“I live there for a reason,” she said, describing the assistance including the public health insurance she receives. “I have food stamp benefits, Husky medical, my son is in school. I’m struggling.”

Kaik said there were no signs about parking rules at the complex, which a visit to the site confirmed. So Kaik asked the housing authority to reimburse her for what she says was a wrongful tow. It refused.

The New Haven housing authority, Elm City Communities, did not respond to requests for comment.

Like Flores and Natal, Kaik found that the company, York Service & Towing, would only take cash, telling her that sometimes, people would pay with a credit card then cancel the card before payment went through. She said she also had to argue to get them to hand over her change.

Cheryl Maselli, owner of York, said her company follows all the new laws, although something like what happened to Kaik could occur if the person working doesn’t know how to use the credit card machine. She said some of the drivers “are not capable of learning new things.” They also don’t keep much cash on hand in case of robbery, she said, which could have led to the issue with change.

Maselli said her company is “one of the nicest towing companies out there.”

But she said she has to respond to her clients. “My client is a property manager. They want their property neat, clean,” Maselli said. “They don’t want people hanging out. They don’t want cars with faulty equipment, and these are some of the rules that we enforce. So when we do tow a car, the people are obviously angry.”

King Charles III will head to the White House Tuesday afternoon to meet with President Trump after a man opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) on Saturday evening.

“Following discussions on both sides of the Atlantic through the day, and acting on advice of Government, we can confirm the State Visit by Their Majesties will proceed as planned,” said a Buckingham Palace spokesperson on Sunday.

Secret Service chief of communications Anthony Guglielmi told Fox News Digital that “the protective model for [Saturday] night’s event proved effective, the key takeaway for future events is that enhancements should be expected at every level, as that is how the model is designed to function.”

“Every protective decision is driven by intelligence amid a dynamic and currently elevated threat environment. We are actively focused on identifying the trigger for this incident and fully understanding the factors that led to it,” he added.

President Donald Trump, the first lady, and administration officials were evacuated from the Washington Hilton ballroom shortly after the WCHD began when a suspect rushed a security checkpoint and opened fire on Secret Service agents. The investigation is ongoing, and the agent is expected to recover.

PRINCE HARRY, MEGHAN MARKLE EXCLUDED FROM TROOPING THE COLOUR AS ROYALS PREPARE TO SHOW UNITED FRONT: EXPERT

King Charles’ first U.S. visit remains on track, officials close to the matter told Fox News Digital.

“It’s been 87 years since King George VI became the first king to ever step foot on American soil, and next week King Charles III will become the second British king to ever visit the Land of the Free,” former advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson Thomas Corbett-Dillon told Fox News Digital.

The four-day trip aims to mark America’s 250th birthday—which celebrates the nation’s freedom from British rule. Charles’ visit comes against the backdrop of the war with Iran and criticism from Trump of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The visit will kick off Monday morning with a formal ceremony at the White House and a ceremonial military review. The King and Queen will participate in several events, including a private tea.

“This is a monumental occasion, coming 250 years since the revolutionaries declared themselves free from the rule of the British crown. They now welcome that same crown with love, adoration, and open arms,” said Corbett-Dillon.

Charles will deliver an address to Congress after his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, first delivered a speech at the Capitol during a state visit to the U.S. in 1991.

The last king to visit the U.S. was King George VI in 1939, when he traveled with Queen Elizabeth to strengthen ties prior to World War II.

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“The King is making one of the most politically sensitive trips of his life, visiting a White House that has publicly denounced his own Prime Minister on multiple occasions,” said Corbett-Dillon.

While the visit will celebrate the U.S.-U.K. alliance, it also unfolds at a politically sensitive moment, with tensions lingering over Iran and Trump’s public criticism of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

“This is not Winston Churchill we are dealing with,” said Trump on March 3. “By the way, I’m not happy with the U.K. either,” the president continued, referring to Starmer blocking the United States’ use of U.K. bases to launch attacks on Iran. 

Trump’s frustration with Starmer stems from Britain’s refusal to fully join the U.S. campaign against Iran, and has urged U.S. allies to get involved militarily or operationally, particularly around protecting oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz.

KING CHARLES WON’T MEET PRINCE HARRY DURING MONARCH’S US STATE VISIT: EXPERTS

“The President may be tempted to push the King to back him in Iran,” Corbett-Dillon said.

The monarch’s visit follows Trump’s state visit to the U.K. in September.

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“The special relationship remains above the day-to-day politics of our two nations and is cemented in our shared heritage and history,” said Corbett-Dillon.

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman, Stephanie Nolasco, and Ashley Papa contributed to this repor