*By J.D. Durkin*
When I arrived in southern Florida two weeks ago to cover several days of campaign trail events, I had no way of guessing that a separate national storyline — about packages, postal codes, and pipe bombs — would unfold with the same aggressive timeline just miles away.
As news was breaking across the country about a flurry of pipe bombs directed at high-profile, Democratic targets, my colleague Sam Tadelman and I were meeting with specialty crop growers, off the grid on the edge of the Everglades. News of the suspicious packages felt a world away as I talked to farmers who had suffered under NAFTA because they couldn’t compete with Mexico. Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Carlos Curbelo, both local Republicans, were in attendance at a roundtable at S&L Beans, a three-generation farm in the town of Homestead. At its peak, the farm spanned 7,000 acres. Today, it’s only 2,000 acres.
The day of our visit was 85 degrees and sunny — sunburn territory for me. The story of the farmers in this community is an agonizing one; several who had inherited the farms from their fathers and grandfathers told me that they each encouraged their own sons to find other work. Sal Finocchiaro explained the heart-wrenching dilemma like this: “I told my son to go to college and get a different job. I love him, I want him here, but my advice was not to come here because there is no future ... We're gonna try as hard as possible to make it work, though.”
That son, Salvatore Finocchiaro, is currently working on the farm to continue the family legacy, against his father’s wishes.
This is a community in tremendous economic pain: The open markets and opportunities afforded to Mexico in the NAFTA era steadily put farmers like Sal Finocchiaro out of business in this region of pristine farmland between Miami and the Florida Keys. The Trump Administration, at least so far, has not helped matters much here either; the recently-negotiated NAFTA replacement, known as USMCA, did not include provisions for these farmers.
Kern Carpenter, a tomato farmer in Homestead, put it in bleak terms: “We got left out of the NAFTA renegotiation ... they totally left southern Florida out. Fruits and vegetable growers were ignored, thrown under the bus.”
In my remaining days in Florida, I remembered those conversations even as the quieter voices of Florida’s farmers were drowned out by news of a frantic search for a would-be pipe bomber with vendettas against prominent Democratic leaders and Trump critics.
As fate would have it, the coming day and a half would render South Florida of all places as ground zero for the investigation and the pipe bomb story dominated our time on the ground. By Friday afternoon, Sam and I found ourselves — somehow, impossibly — standing in the very AutoZone parking lot in the sleepy community of Plantation, Fla. where suspect Cesar Sayoc has been arrested just hours before, [interviewing the sole eyewitness to the dramatic takedown](https://cheddar.com/videos/bombing-suspect-charged-but-national-nerves-remain-frayed).
Stories like the would-be pipe bomber dominate the national psyche so intensely at such a moment in time that all other narratives just seem to blur. With the news cycle turning at such a frantic pace, I thought: What chance does the story of the farmers in Homestead have of breaking through? Meeting Sal Finocchiaro and his boy reminded me that their struggle also needs attention if we are going to help them and the next generation of Florida’s farmers to survive.
Regulators in Colorado have to keep up with and adapt to a fast-growing, ever-changing industry which consistently introduces new products into the market. "It is a challenge, but the engagement we have with stakeholders has been really valuable in helping us navigate those issues," says Dominique Mendiola, recently-appointed director of marijuana coordination in the state.
President Donald Trump's ambivalence at a joint press conference with President Vladimir Putin gave the Russian leader a "get-out-of-jail-free-card" for future elections, says Joaquin Castro, Democratic Representative from Texas.
The backlash from President Trump's meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin continued well into Tuesday, with politicians from both sides of the aisle condemning Trump. During his meeting with Putin on Monday, Trump seemed to side with the Russian President over U.S. intelligence officials on the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Shares of Netflix tumbled after the company reported lower-than-expected subscriber growth in its quarterly earnings report on Monday. The streaming giant also missed Wall Street estimates on revenue and earnings per share.
And Jonathan Trager, CEO of Group Elephant, joins Cheddar to talk about his organization's mission to stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos in South Africa.
These are the headlines you Need2Know:
Trump Faces Bipartisan Backlash
Russian Woman Charged With Election Meddling
Hawaii's 'Lava Bomb' Injures Tourists
Deadly Fire Near Yosemite National Park Doubles
The New York attorney general candidate, who previously worked on Cynthia Nixon's campaign, plans to tackle corruption in the state. "People are really sick and tired of not having serious, on-going corruption prosecutions in New York State done by the state attorney general."
The show, which features political figures like Bernie Sanders and Trent Lott, premiered last night on Showtime. While it taps into political and social issues like gun control, popular.info’s Editor in Chief Judd Legum doesn’t know if it will significantly affect the public’s attitudes. “I don’t think this is a complete game changer, but I do think that things like this can contribute into some of the changes and attitudes on guns."
Following the president’s refusal to take a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta last week, Morgan criticized the mainstream media and the president for constantly being at each other’s throats. “I wish everyone would just take a chill pill and work a little bit better together with mutually better respect.”
During a joint press conference with Russian President Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Monday, President Trump refused to say whether he believed his own intelligence agencies about whether Russia interfered with the 2016 elections. The press conference drew criticism from Republicans and Democrats back at home.
These are the headlines you Need2Know:
*President Trump meets with Russian President Putin in Helsinki, Finland, days after the indictment of 12 Russian operatives for trying to disrupt the 2016 election.
*A federal judge blasts the HHS giving them one more week to reunite 2,000 families at the border after the administration missed the initial deadline.
*Protests erupted in Chicago over the weekend after a popular barber was shot and killed by the police.
*Novak Djokovic and Angelique Kerber won Wimbledon titles over the weekend. And France took home the World Cup.
Cheddar's Hope King gives us the details.
Before his private meeting with Russian President VladimirPutin, President Trump tweeted that the U.S.-Russia relationship has taken a hit because of the federal investigation into election interference, which Trump says is a "Rigged Witch Hunt!" Trump also labeled the EU as "foes" of the United States over the weekend, further alienating allies that he has been criticizing for the past week. Cheddar's J.D. Durkin brings us the latest from Helsinki, Finland.
