Haitian community activist and founder of Haitian Neighborhood Center Sant La Gepsie Metellus (Photo courtesy of Facebook)

By David L. Snelling

MIAMI – The Miami Foundation’s 11th annual State of the Black Philanthropy honors the contributions of Miami Black diaspora while building a thriving future for African American communities and leadership.

But the May 21 event at Miami’s Little Haiti Culture Complex took on a much deeper meaning, as a rallying cry for equality amid the uproar caused by the anti-Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, (DEI), policy imposed by President Trump.

And Florida’s new law which bans governments and officials from promoting and funding DEI-related initiatives including Haitian Heritage Month and Black History Month.

In words that effectively served as a speech of hope, Miami Foundation’s President and CEO Rebecca Fishman Lipsey said the message is to make a correction.

By not only honoring and celebrating the achievements of trailblazers such as Gepsie Metellus, Roise Gordon Wallace and the late Thelma Gibson.

But to push back on the anti-DEI policy that’s erasing Black diaspora history and depriving the Black community of learning about their culture and heritage.

“We are living in a time of confusion,” she said. “We started the State of Black Philanthropy 11 years ago, started out as a celebration. But the last couple of years, it’s been a rallying cry. Tonight, I hope it’s a correction.”

Lipsey said the event honorees have extraordinary gifts they have given the community and the Foundation will give a Black history lesson on their accomplishments and helped build the city of Miami.

The night was filled with speeches, singing, dancing and storytelling that reflect Miami diaspora and Caribbean culture.

It got emotional when Thamara Labrousse, Executive Director of the Haitian Neighborhood Center Sant La., paid tribute to Metellus, a prominent advocate for the Haitian community for over two decades.

Labrousse, a Haitian American, said she first met Metellus, a teacher at the time, when she was a 14-year-old student at Miami Edison High School.

Labrousse said she pulled the bottom of her T-shirt and tucked into the collar to expose her belly button.
“She saw me in the hallway and took me by the arm,” she said. “I knew I was in trouble.”

Labrousse said Metellus asked her what’s wrong with her shirt?
“And I said nothing,” Labrousse said. “She was graceful, she didn’t embarrass me. She always took the time to teach you a lesson.”

Metellus is a prominent advocate for the Haitian community in South Florida, serving as the co-founder and Executive Director of the Haitian Neighborhood Center Sant La.

Labrousse said Metellus has dedicated over two decades to serving the Haitian immigrant population in South Florida.

She founded Sant La, a neighborhood resource center which provides essential services including social services, education, housing opportunities and access to healthcare and legal services.

Metellus is actively involved in various community organizations and councils, including the Miami-Dade Public Schools Superintendent’s Business Advisory Council and the Miami-Dade School Bond Oversight Committee.

She is also a founding member of the Haitian Women of Miami and the Haitian American Grassroots Coalition.

“Her leadership has been instrumental in advocating for the rights and needs of Haitian-Americans and political refugees,” said Labrousse, who fought back tears while Metellus briefly stepped away on stage after sharing tears as well.”

Roise Gordon Wallace, founder of the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator in Miami, was also honored for her contributions of helping develop and promote diverse talents of emerging artists from the Caribbean and Latin Diaspora.

She showcased their artwork through exhibitions, artists-in-residence, international cultural exchange, education and outreach activities that celebrate Miami-Dade’s rich cultural and social fabric.

DVCAI is an immigrant-facing, afro-descendant organization whose DNA is rooted in a mission-based quest to turn up and operate in the community.

Gordon-Wallace, a Jamaican-American curator, collector, and businesswoman, has spent over 30 years nurturing Caribbean artists and creative communities.

She has created key relationships with international art organizations such as Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Ready Tex Art Gallery, and has served on multiple nonprofit boards.

Gordon-Wallace is also recognized as an arts advocate and community leader, with awards including the Calabash Amadlozi Visual Arts Award and being named one of South Florida’s 50 Most Powerful Black Professionals.

She continues to guide DVCAI’s mission of promoting, nurturing, and cultivating the vision and diverse talents of emerging artists from the Caribbean and Latin diaspora.

The State of Black Philanthropy also paid tribute to longtime Coconut Grove resident and community activist Thelma Gibson who broke racial barriers.

Gibson died in February, 2026 at the age of 99.

She is remembered as a trailblazer and activist who incessantly fought to preserve the Bahamian cultural backbone of the Coconut Grove community.

Bahamian settlers arrived in Coconut Grove, a section in the city of Miami before it incorporated in 1896.

Born to Bahamian immigrants, Gibson advocated for affordable housing and preserving some of the buildings as historic landmarks after developers purchased homes and land in the section of West Coconut Grove.

They initially had planned to build large scale developments such as condos, office buildings and shops, but they listened to Gibson who was heralded for her efforts.

Gibson, who was born on December 17, 1926 in Coconut Grove, where she grew up in a segregated neighborhood known as “Colored Town.”

Despite challenges during segregation, Gibson pursued her education at Columbia University and became a registered nurse specializing in operating techniques.

But during segregation, she was not permitted to work in the operating rooms at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.

Instead, she served in what was then called the “colored wards,” caring for patients with skill and compassion.

In 1964, she made history as the first Black supervisor of nursing at the Dade County Health Department.

Gibson’s career spanned over three decades, during which she served in various health organizations and became a key community leader.

She was instrumental in founding the Women’s Chamber of Commerce of Dade County and the Thelma Gibson Health Initiative, which was designed to improve the lives of people living in low income areas.

Gibson was appointed to the city of Miami Commission on an interim basis in 1997.

Her husband, Theodore Gibson, served on the city commission from 1972 to 1981 and advocated for desegregation and improvements to historically black neighborhoods in Miami-Dade County.

Photo courtesy Getty Images

MIAMI – Can the everyday use of smartphones be linked to a decline in birth rates?

According to researchers, fewer babies are being born and said people spending more time on smartphones affects their relationships including lack of sex.

Previous studies attributed lower birth rates across the globe including the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia to financial, with rising housing costs, childcare fees, healthcare access, and wider economic uncertainty all regularly cited as major barriers to starting a family.

But according to Tyla, a news source that focuses on women’s lifestyle, health and inspirational stories, a recent study took a closer look at the issue and pointed to the use of smartphones as the reason for declining birth rates since 2012.

The analysis said the steady decline began in 2007 the first year iPhone and smartphones debuted.

In the US, the fertility rate is currently said to be around 1.6 births per woman, while dozens of other countries have fallen even lower.

On the other hand, researchers are now examining whether another part of modern life could also be playing a role in the trend.

The study also claimed declines began in France and Poland in 2009, followed by Mexico, Morocco and Indonesia in 2012, and Iran, Egypt and Senegal in 2015.

It said each of those years coincided with smartphones first becoming popular in local markets.

The theory is not that one device alone has caused global fertility rates to drop, but that changes in how people socialize, date, and form relationships may be influencing when, or whether, they choose to have children.

Some researchers have suggested people are spending more time socializing online than in person, which could affect relationship formation among younger generations.

Meucine Jean and her children with Lisa Ryans, Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Communications for AutoNation and Habitat for Humanity Board Member (Photo courtesy of Habitat for Humanity)

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla – Meucine Jean and her children have a home thanks to Habitat for Humanity of Broward County and AutoNation.

Habitat and AutoNation presented Jean with a key to a brand-new home they helped build together.

In addition to associates completing 300 hours of sweat equity with Jean and her family, the total dollar amount of AutoNation’s home sponsorship was $100,000.

The dedication ceremony took place recently at BBI Village, 1900 Northwest 10th Avenue, in Fort Lauderdale, a community that AutoNation helped build during Habitat for Humanity of Broward’s CEO Build in 2025 and 2026.

A single mother of five children, Jean has been working hard as a registered nurse for Aetna/CVS since 2014, bringing compassion and excellence to patient care while raising five children with the same positive values and commitment to education her mother modeled in Little Haiti.

“Family means everything to me, and I have dreamed of owning a home in a safe neighborhood where my children could play outside,” Jean said. This dream has proved to be an uphill battle for Jean whose rent is more than half her income, leaving little for savings.“

“On behalf of AutoNation, I congratulate Meucine for her determination and unwavering dedication to her family,” said Lisa Ryans, Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Communications for AutoNation and Habitat for Humanity Board Member. “We’re honored to partner with Habitat for Humanity and proud to have played a role in helping make her dream of owning a home a reality.”

With homeownership finally a reality, Jean can carry forward her mother’s legacy of resilience and hope, building a foundation where her five children can thrive and where the principle of never giving up becomes the inheritance she passes to the next generation.

As a bonus, the AutoNation Mobile Service Team also donated complimentary car care for her vehicle, to be performed at the Jean family’s new residence.

“AutoNation’s longstanding commitment to Habitat Broward continues to change lives and strengthen local communities in meaningful ways,” said Nancy Robin, CEO and Executive Director of Habitat for Humanity of Broward. “Through their generosity, volunteerism and partnership over the past 25 years, families like Meucine Jean’s are able to achieve the stability, security and hope that affordable homeownership makes possible.”

AutoNation has partnered with Habitat for Humanity of Broward for more than 25 years, sponsoring six home builds and volunteering on many more. In the past year alone, AutoNation associates contributed more than 450 volunteer hours to help future homeowners and families transition from housing insecurity to homeownership.

Photo courtesy of Pixels.com

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Anticipating a substantial increase in voter turnouts for the upcoming midterm elections, Broward County is expanding in-person early voting locations.

Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott announced he’s planning to open 30 more early voting sites for the August Primary and November’s general election.

He said the expansion is about a 43 percent increase from the 21 current locations.

The expansion also includes longer operating hours.

For the November election, each site will be open for 14 days of early voting, operating 12 hours per day.

The August primary will have nine days of early voting at nine hours per day.

“We realize that fewer people are going to vote by mail because of the efforts that the state has made to make it harder for people to vote by mail,” Scott said. “But we can make it easier for people to vote early, in person, by adding more (locations). We’ll have even more early voting sites than we’ve ever had before, more communication to make sure that the public is aware that these early voting sites are there and they can vote anywhere in the county.”

Some Democrats and voters raised concerns that ICE agents might be hanging around the voting places.

But during a local Democratic event, Scott assured that access is restricted within 150 feet of the polling site entrances.

PHOTO COURTESY OF FACEBOOK
Bam Adebayo Renovated a basketball court at Camillus House Homeless Shelter.
By BEN JEALOUS
By TIM REYNOLDS
AP Basketball Writer
MIAMI (AP) — Bam Adebayo knows what it’s like to grow up with very little. He’s determined to help kids who are facing similar predicaments.
And the NBA has noticed his work. The Miami Heat star — who had an 83-
point game this season, the second high-est-scoring game in NBA history — was honored Friday night with the league’s Social Justice Champion award. Adebayo will receive the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Trophy, and the NBA will make a
$100,000 charitable donation on his be-half.
“It’s not something I look to do or want
to do for attention,” Adebayo said Friday night in a video conference. “It’s some-thing I do because I really want to help people. I’ve always said this: I never had anybody in my community that would come in and make impact. And my mom’s always been one of those people who’s always giving back, so I’m just car-rying that torch.”
The award, the NBA said, “honors a current NBA player for pursuing social justice and … for advancing Abdul-Jab-bar’s life mission to engage, empower and drive equality for individuals and groups who have been historically dis-advantaged.” The Bam Adebayo Foundation in-vested more than $563,000 across 18 initiatives this season, all promoting either educational equity, food secu-rity or youth development in under-served communities across South Florida and his native North Carolina.
Among the highlights of his work:
He provided mattresses, uniforms and school supplies for students at The SEED School of Miami.
Funded transportation for more than 19,000 students to attend the Miami Book Fair.
Addressed food insecurity through holiday meal distributions.
Hosted a holiday toy drive serving more than 2,000 children, and the left-over toys — which covered the play-ing court at the Heat’s home Kaseya Center — were then shared with other organizations.
Supported youth development pro-grams.
Renovated a basketball court at Camillus House Homeless Shelter.

PHOTO COURTESY OF FACEBOOK
The other finalists for the award this season were San Antonio’s Harrison Barnes, Boston’s Jaylen Brown, De-troit’s Tobias Harris and Cleveland’s Larry Nance Jr.
Adebayo is the sixth recipient, join-ing Jrue Holiday (2025), Karl-Anthony Towns (2024), Stephen Curry (2023), Reggie Bullock (2022) and Carmelo Anthony (2021).
“I’m the first one in Heat history to get it,” said Adebayo, Miami’s captain. “It feels good to be the first at some-thing in franchise history — but it just shows the work that I put into the com-munity.”
The award was decided by a commit-tee that includes Abdul-Jabbar, Tatum, Realize The Dream co-founders Martin Luther King III and Arndrea Waters King, GirlTREK Co-Founder and Pres-ident Vanessa Garrison, National Mu-seum of African American History & Culture Acting Director Shanita Brack-ett, Civic Nation CEO Kyle Lierman, NBA President of Social Responsibility & Player Programs Kathy Behrens, Na-tional Basketball Players Association Foundation Executive Director Erika Swilley and youth representative Cay-den Daughtry from the Jr. NBA and Jr. WNBA Court of Leaders.

By BEN JEALOUS

My grandmother was born in 1916 on the same red Virginia ground where her grandfather was born en-slaved. She lived to one hundred and five. She carried the weight of what her family had been to my family, and what her family had been to itself, the way you carry a stone you cannot put down. When she died, the stone passed to me.
I went looking.
What I found was a paradox written in blood.
The man Thomas Jefferson called “the most learned and logical” of the founding generation was my fifth
great-grandfather. In 1766 he wrote that Parliament’s fleets and armies might give it power, but not right. He wrote that shackles, however nicely polished, would never sit easy on free men. He was Jefferson’s cousin and political mentor. He helped in-vent the American argument.
He owned thirty human beings.
In 1769, in Jefferson’s first session in the House of Burgesses, the young man asked his old mentor to do one brave thing: introduce a bill making it easier for masters to free the people they enslaved.
Bland did as Jefferson asked. He was denounced as an enemy to his coun-try. In Jefferson’s words, he was “treated with the grossest indecorum.” He kept his thirty slaves. He died still holding them.
That is the strange courage of the founding. A man who understood that government without consent is tyranny could not break the shackles in his own house. He indicted himself with his own argument. So did Jeffer-son. So did every Virginia patriot who signed his name to natural rights while holding the title to another human being.
They wrote the creed anyway. They knew it would destabilize them. And the argument they could not finish was picked up by the people they would not free.
A hundred years later, the great-great-grandson of the man they would not free left the place of his enslave-ment as a teenager and never looked back. He cobbled shoes. He preached. He kept a lighthouse on the same point of land where the patriot’s plantation once stood. In 1879 the people of Prince George and Surry Counties elected him to the Virginia House of Delegates as part of the most success-ful biracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South.
They abolished the poll tax. They tore down the public whipping post. They founded what is now Virginia State University. They rebuilt the col-leges the war had broken. They funded free public schools for every Virginia child, Black and white. They built, for one bright moment, the Vir-ginia the patriot could have written into law and would not.
The Danville Massacre of 1883 ended that coalition with bullets. The argument went unfinished again.
It is unfinished still.
Read the grievances in the Declaration of Independence one more time. Standing armies in our streets without the consent of our legislatures. The military rendered superior to the civil power.
In a message posted Sunday on X,
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreye-sus said so far, 12 hantavirus cases and three deaths have been reported to the organization, with no deaths reported since May 2.
All passengers and crew remain in quarantine and under close monitor-ing to ensure they receive care if needed. The situation is stable for now. We continue to remain vigilant and in close contact with all relevant governments,” he added.
Hantaviruses usually spread when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings. But the hantavirus that has caused the current outbreak, called the Andes virus, may be able to spread between people in rare cases. The risk to the general public from the cruise ship outbreak is low, according to public health officials.
Oceanwide Expeditions had previ-ously said it didn’t foresee any changes to the Hondius’ operations. The ship had an Arctic cruise setting sail from Keflavik, Iceland, on May 29. But in Tuesday’s statement, the com-pany said that “all voyages from 13 June onwards will proceed as sched-uled. No further disruption to the sail-ing schedule of m/v Hondius is expected.”12.
Quartering armed troops among us. The protection of armed men, by mock trial, from punishment for murders committed against us.
Last June the President federalized California National Guardsmen and active-duty Marines and sent them into Los Angeles over the governor’s objection. A federal judge ruled it vi-olated the Posse Comitatus Act. Patrick Henry warned of exactly this in 1788. He used almost the same words. The Fourth Amendment was written because British officers used general warrants — blank checks to search any home, any paper, any person. In 2024 the Fifth Circuit ruled that ge-ofence warrants, which sweep up the data of everyone near a crime scene, are “modern-day general warrants” forbidden by the Constitution. The court named the colonial writs of assis-
tance.
Section 702 of FISA lets the govern-ment query Americans’ communica-tions — swept up in surveillance of foreign targets — without a warrant. The 1033 Program has poured seven billion dollars of military gear into ten thousand local police departments. Breonna Taylor was killed in her bed. Amir Locke was killed in his sleep. Both by officers serving no-knock war-rants. Both, in the language of 1776, victims of armed troops quartered among us, protected from punish-ment by a mock trial.
This is not a Left issue. It is not a Right issue. Ron Wyden and Rand Paul wrote the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act together. The ACLU and Cato agree. The grievances are not partisan because the grievances are not new. They are the same grievances written in the same hand against the same kind of power.
The patriot understood the princi-ple and could not live by it. His de-scendant lived it and was outvoted by force. My grandmother carried the weight of that unfinished busi-ness her whole life and never put it down.
It was unfinished in 1776. Unfin-ished in 1865. Unfinished in 1965.
It is unfinished now. And it is ours to finish.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former President & CEO of the NAACP.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF WWW.CATHSTAN.ORG

Associated Press
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV
made a historic apology on Monday for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vati-can’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”
Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-
Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sov-ereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”
History’s first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Mon-day.
The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of in-creasing reliance on artificial intelli-gence. Leo raised the slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling.
Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings, beyond generic apologies for the in-volvement of individual Christians.
“It is impossible not to feel deep sor-row when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their im-measurable dignity as persons infi-nitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon. Shannen Dee Williams, historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, “Subversive Habits,” welcomed the apology as a “monumental step to-ward the kind of essential truth-telling and reparation that many Catholics have prayed and worked to witness.”
“The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy,” said Williams. “Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church’s leading roles in the trans-At-lantic slave trade and chattel slavery–and thus by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today.”
Centuries of legitimizing slavery for European colonizers
The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican au-thorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.
In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all posses-sions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and ene-mies of the name of Christ” anywhere.
The bull also gave the Portuguese per-mission “to reduce their persons to per-petual slavery.”
That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.
Nicholas V’s permissions to the Por-tuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514, accord-ing to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppres-sion Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”
Spanish kings received the rights for the Americas.
In 2023, the Vatican formally repudi-ated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vati-can insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peo-ples shouldn’t be deprived of their lib-erty or the possession of their property, and weren’t to be enslaved.
Holy See late to condemn slavery, Leo says
In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, long after many countries had abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, church institutions and even popes — Gregory the Great — had
slaves, Kellerman said.
In acknowledging the 15th century papal bulls, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened sev-eral times in order to regulate and legit-imize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’”
Leo said it wasn’t possible to judge the morality of the decisions with today’s standards.
“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he said.
The pope said that the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full in-compatibility with slavery to be explic-itly recognized.”
“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot con-sider ourselves detached,” he said.
Leo said that the church must firmly condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution “if we want to avoid the need to ask for par-don again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith.”
Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the church’s complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological en-slavement.”
“For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apol-ogy from the pope,” said Butler, who is Black.
Leo’s own family history and past apologies
Kellerman, the scholar, welcomed Leo’s apology but said more needs to be done to further acknowledge how the Catholic Church legitimized and ex-panded slavery.
“Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admis-sion and apology today,” he told The As-sociated Press. “Hopefully a future document will explain in more detail the church’s involvement with slaveholding. As a scholar I have some quibbles with the wording, but this is a truly remark-able moment.”
During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it, but not the popes. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, which was the largest slave-trading cen-ter in West Africa, he denounced the in-justice of slavery and called it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Chris-tian.”
According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or a free person of color. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates wrote in The New York Times.
The SEED School of Miami

(Photo courtesy of iStock)

The U.S. Food ‌and Drug Administration is set to discuss which variants the updated COVID-19 vaccine will target.

According to the Daily Express, advisers are deciding which of the latest subvariants, NB.1.8.1 or XFG, the 2027-27 vaccine will target.

The World Health Organization notes that the new variants emerged last year.

Recently, the WHO urged vaccine manufacturers to target the monvarient LP.8.1 strain over other circulating variants, such as XFG or NB.1.8.1.

The FDA has not yet decided which route to take ahead of a scheduled meeting on Thursday.

It marks the first discussions of COVID vaccines after the departure of Commissioner Marty Makary.

His replacement, Deputy Commissioner for Food Kyle Diamantas, assumed Makary’s duties on May 12.

For the 2025-26 season, the FDA recommended that COVID shots target LP.8.1, a subvariant of the JN.1 strain.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports showed the XFG subvariant was ⁠estimated to account for the majority of cases in the United States.

Vaccine manufacturers Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Novavax shared that they are ready to produce an XFG vaccine for the 2026-27 vaccination season.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi (Photo courtesy of Learnspira.com)

MIAMI – Former Attorney General Pam Bondi is battling cancer, according to the New York Post.

Bondi was diagnosed with thyroid cancer shortly after leaving the Department of Justice.

The Post said Bondi, 60, has since undergone treatment and is recovering, according to Axios.

Most thyroid cancers are highly treatable, with the Cleveland Clinic reporting a five-year survival rate of more than 98 percent.

Following her exit from the Department of Justice, Trump appointed Bondi to the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST, a committee chaired by former White House AI adviser David Sacks and White House science adviser Michael Kratsios.

Bondi was removed as attorney general last month, with Trump naming Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as interim attorney general while he considers a permanent replacement.

Despite her departure, Bondi vowed to continue supporting the president and his agenda.

U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson (Photo courtesy of Facebook)

By David L. Snelling

MIAMI – U.S. Rep. Federica Wilson (D-Miami) has decided not to run for reelection this year, a week after she denied rumors she was retiring from political office.

According to several sources, Wilson is stepping down after 16 years in Congress and a political career spanning over 30 years.

Wilson recently came under scrutiny for missing a month long of votes in Washington while recovering from major eye surgery.

She called the rumors of her retirement “crazy rumors” but now sources indicate she’s not seeking a reelection bid.

Wilson, 83, couldn’t be reached for comments and calls to her offices in Miami Gardens, North Miami and Washington D.C. went straight to voicemail.

Wilson represents Florida’s 24th Congressional District which covers portions of North Miami-Dade and southern Broward counties.

It is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse Congressional districts in the United States, according to the U.S. Census report.

With the seat possibly open, rumors suggest State Senator Shervin Jones and Miami-Dade County Commission Oliver Gilbert, both Democrats, might run for the seat.

Other candidates include Andy Ortiz (NPA), Democrat Christine Alexandria and Republican Michael Carbonara.

Jones, a close ally of Wilson, told the South Florida Times he hasn’t spoken to Wilson about her plans but supports any decision that she makes.
“At the end of the day, our communities deserve bold leadership with the energy and urgency to tackle problems,” Jones said. “Especially at this moment as our rights and representation are under attack here in Florida and across the country.”

Jones said he’s humbled by the encouragement of possibly running for Wilson’s seat if she doesn’t run for reelection.
“I will continue to serve in whatever capacity I can to do the most good for our people,” Jone said.

Gilbert couldn’t be reached for comments.

Wilson, known for her trademark colorful cowboy hats, launched her political career in the mid 1990s serving on the Miami Dade County School Board.

Wilson then served in the Florida House of Representatives from 1998 to 2002 and the Florida Senate from 2002 to 2010, holding leadership roles such as Minority Leader Pro Tempore and Minority.

In 2010, Wilson was elected to U.S. Congress where she’s currently serving her 9th consecutive term.

Wilson is the founder of 5000 Role Models of Excellence Project, a mentoring program which pairs professional men with at-risk youths to deter them from a life of crime and get them to focus on career choices.

Before her political career, Wilson was a longtime principal for Skyway Elementary School in Miami Gardens, which was renamed Dr. Frederica S. Wilson/Skyway Elementary School in her honor.

The city of Miami Gardens is honoring Wilson this week for her years of public service and dedication to her community.

The city is planning to rename a street after Wilson during a ceremony set for Friday, May 29, 2026 at 4555 N.W. 206th Terrace.

The Primary election is scheduled for August and the general election in November.