By Vivienne Serret/Fresh Take Florida

An Ohio prison inmate already convicted of rape and kidnapping pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to threatening to kill a Florida judge and sexually assault the judge’s wife and daughter.Inside the courtroom at his plea hearing, Wayne A. Miller, 41, of Alliance, Ohio, sat slumped in shackles with prominent tattoos across his throat visible at the defense table near his public defender.

University of Florida’s president, Ben Sasse, unexpectedly announced his resignation late Thursday after just 17 months at the helm of the state’s flagship university, citing his wife’s health issues and a need to spend more time with his family.In a short statement emailed across campus, Sasse — the former Republican U.S. senator for Nebraska — said he would leave his job on July 31, less than two weeks away. The surprise announcement comes during a period of a fraught relationship between Sasse and the longtime chairman of UF’s board of trustees, developer Mori Hosseini, chairman of Daytona Beach-based ICI Homes Inc.

In secretive hearings, the University of Florida set aside recommendations to lightly punish some of the college students arrested after pro-Palestinian protests on campus and kicked them all out of school for three to four years.The decisions by the new dean of students, Chris Summerlin, overruled what were effectively sentencing recommendations by the juries, known as hearing bodies, who heard testimony and watched police video of the protests and arrests during the disciplinary cases.

A judge released eight of nine pro-Palestinian protesters from jail early Tuesday after their arrest on the University of Florida campus on Monday. A ninth protester, identified as a UF student, remained jailed facing a felony battery charge related to his arrest.Allan Hektor Frasheri, 20, a philosophy major from Dunedin, Florida, was accused of spitting on a campus police officer during the arrests Monday night. He was being held in lieu of a $5,000 bond. Police and state troopers arrested the nine in a move coordinated with the university administration.

Police supported by state troopers arrested nine pro-Palestinian protesters late Monday who had occupied a plaza on the University of Florida for days. They were among the first college arrests in Florida.University police Sgt. Courtney Marie Burgoyne said officers arrested nine protesters, who were led away in handcuffs. At least seven of the nine were current or former UF students, according to university records. One was facing a felony charge. It followed the arrest of three other protesters at the University of South Florida in Tampa hours earlier.

A Florida appeals court has effectively opened a loophole in the state's long-standing law against recording telephone conversations without the permission of both sides of the call, ruling that law enforcement officers performing their official duties can be secretly recorded because they have no expectation of privacy.The court's decision — involving a citizen who accused the Citrus County Sheriff's Office of misconduct — is the latest to provide new mechanisms for civilian oversight of law enforcement, even as others were curtailed in recent days by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature.

Hackers broke into the computer network of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice in Tallahassee, which runs the state's juvenile detention centers and programs to steer troubled kids away from crime. It led to a continuing shutdown of the digital backbone the agency uses to manage cases statewide.The department took some of its computer systems offline as early as March 29 due to what spokeswoman Amanda Slama described as an unspecified security concern, she confirmed in a statement Thursday afternoon, two days after a reporter’s initial inquiries about the matter.