Bachelor Recap Sean's Sister Provides Perspective on Tierra

Apparently there is one girl whose words have weight enough to sway The Bachelor from his affections for Tierra, and that's his sister Shay.

One week prior to the all-important hometown dates, Sean flies his sister to St. Croix to help him work out his feelings for the remaining six. Harking back to her sage, sisterly advice before he embarked on his Bachelor adventure, Shay tells Sean not to "end up with a girl no one likes." The words strike a painful chord with him seeing as Tierra's alienation from the other ladies is no longer a secret.

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Inspired to test his sister's intuition, Sean decides to introduce Tierra to his sibling, but when he arrives to the ladies' hotel, the resident mean girl is found weeping after an all-out war of words with AshLee. At first dismayed by her pain, Sean comes to realize the humane thing to do would be to send Tierra home, fearing she won't be able to handle the more stressful weeks ahead.

"I can't believe they did this to me!" are Tierra's departing words as she is sent packing. "I hope the girls got what they wanted."

During the final rose ceremony in St. Croix, Lesley is cut loose from the remaining five. Despite their incredible connection and friendship, Sean worries that the relationship had gone stagnant.

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A confused, crying Catherine takes Lesley's elimination especially hard as she believed that Sean and Les, in her opinion, were better suited for eachother than she will ever be with Mr. Lowe.

Next Monday on ABC, Desiree, Lindsay, Catherine and AshLee will get to introduce their maybe-husband-to-be to the family, but it seems the hometown dates don't go over as well for Des in particular, whose protective brother appears unwilling to accept her "playboy" boyfriend.

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Cops pop gun-toting teen after rooftop firefight

Cops shot an armed teenager and apprehended another man after a gunfight erupted on a Brooklyn rooftop last night, sources said.

Police said a 16-year-old male opened fire on a Brownsville rooftop at 10:13 last night. When the officers returned fire they shot him three times.

The teenager was shot once in each arm and once in the leg.

“They were just shooting blanks,” said Hennesy Mark. “They were just shooting up in the air. It’s like a cap gun.”

Cops said the gun, which was retrieved at the scene, was real. Two men were arrested.

“They took a Spanish kid out on a stretcher,” said Tina Brown, 30. “ He was alive, but he didn’t look happy.”

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Green cards for sale at a South Beach hotel: Competition is on for EB5 investment visas

If David Hart gets his way, South Beach’s 42-room Astor Hotel will be on a hiring spree this year as it adds concierge service, a roof-top pool, an all-night diner, spa and private-car service available 24 hours a day.

New hires will be crucial to Hart’s business plan, since foreign investors have agreed to pay about $50,000 for each job created by the Art Deco boutique.

The Miami immigration lawyer specializes in arranging visas for wealthy foreign citizens under a special program that trades green cards for investment dollars. Businesses get the money and must use it to boost payroll. The minimum investment is $500,000 to add at least 10 jobs to the economy. That puts the pressure on Hart and his partners at the Astor to beef up payroll dramatically, with plans to take a hotel with roughly 20 employees to one with as many as 100 workers.

“My primary responsibility is to make something happen here over the next two years that will create the jobs we need,’’ Hart said a few steps away from a nearly empty restaurant on a recent weekday morning. “It’s all going to be transformed.”

Though established in the 1990s, the “EB5” visas soared in popularity during the recession as developers sought foreign cash to replace dried-up credit markets in the United States.

Chinese investors dominate the transactions, accounting for about 65 percent of the nearly 9,000 EB5 visas granted since 2006. South Korea finishes a distant second at 12 percent and the United Kingdom holds the third-place slot at 3 percent. If Latin America and the Caribbean were one country, they would rank No. 4 on the list, with 231 EB5 visas granted, or about 3 percent of the total.

Competition has gotten stiffer for the deep-pocketed foreign investors willing to pay for green cards. The University of Miami’s bio-science research park near the Jackson hospital system raised $20 million from 40 foreign investors under the EB5 program, most of them from Asia. The money went into the park’s first building; visa brokers are waiting to see if the second building will proceed so they can offer a new pool of potential green-card sales.

In Hollywood, the stalled $131 million Margaritaville resort had hoped to raise about $75 million from EB5 investors before ditching that plan last year to pursue more traditional financing. A retail complex by developer Jeff Berkowitz in Coral Gables also launched a program to raise $50 million in EB5 money for the project, Gables Station. Hart worked with other EB5 investors to back pizza restaurants in Miami and South Beach. A limestone mine in Martin County also was backed by EB5 dollars.

This year, the city of Miami itself is expected to get into the business by setting up an EB5 program to raise foreign cash for a range of city businesses and developments. The first would be the tallest building in the city — developer Tibor Hollo’s planned 85-story apartment tower, the Panorama, in downtown Miami.

With a construction cost of about $700 million, Miami’s debut EB5 venture hopes to raise about $100 million from foreign investors, said Laura Reiff, the Greenberg Traurig lawyer in Virginia working with Miami on the EB5 effort. “This is a marquis project,’’ she said.

The arrangement is a novel one for Miami, with the city planning to help a private developer raise funds overseas for a new high-rise. And it would allow Hollo and future participants to tout the city of Miami’s endorsement when competing with other Miami-area projects for EB5 dollars. “We will have the benefit of the brand of the city of Miami,’’ said Mikki Canton, the $6,000-a-month city consultant heading Miami’s EB5 effort. “A lot of these others are privately owned and they won’t have that brand.”

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With millions at stake, tutoring lobby goes into action

Second of two parts

Every year for nearly a decade, private tutoring companies have made millions in Florida because the federal government required school districts to hire them.

That was in danger of changing last February, when the state won freedom from mandated private instruction for poor children in the state's worst schools.

But the tutoring industry wasn't letting go without a fight.

At the end of last year's legislative session, Florida became a key target as the tutoring lobby battled to retain funding.

The effort paid off in March, when state lawmakers quietly voted to keep the money flowing.

The moment marked a major victory for the tutoring industry, but, as the Tampa Bay Times reported on Sunday, it also ensured the survival of a program that is shot through with cheating, opportunism and fraud.

In tracing the new law from the agenda books of a special interest group to the pages of state statutes, the Times reviewed public records and interviewed legislators, lobbyists, education officials and advocates.

It found that the push to fund tutoring in Florida was part of a national campaign by the industry, an undertaking that failed in other places but succeeded in Tallahassee.

To save tutoring, the industry formed a nonprofit group that sold the effort as a civil rights struggle, spent $2.4 million on campaign contributions and lobbying fees and pushed legislation in states across the country.

In New York and Maryland, tutoring companies and their lobbyists battled fiercely for a law requiring funding and still made no headway.

In Florida, all it took was a phone call.

Rallying support

By the summer of 2010, midway through President Barack Obama's second year in office, tutoring companies that had thrived on government contracts knew they were in trouble.

Industry groups were expecting the administration to gut requirements for private tutoring, known as supplemental educational services, that made up a key part of President George W. Bush's education reform act, No Child Left Behind.

What the industry needed was a campaign to rally people who otherwise might not show support. The solution? Defend subsidized tutoring as a civil rights cause.

Steve Pines, head of the Education Industry Association, previewed the strategy in a PowerPoint presentation for tutoring companies in June 2010. His organization, a trade group for for-profit education businesses, would spend $1.5 million to help launch a nonprofit called Tutor Our Children.

The new organization would hire lobbyists, create a pro-tutoring website and encourage parents to flood public officials with support for mandated tutoring, all while positioning the campaign as a fight for civil rights.

It cultivated ties to the Urban League of Greater Miami and the United Farm Workers of America. In April 2011, it organized a panel discussion in Washington called "Waiving Away Education Civil Rights."

In October 2011, Tutor Our Children announced it had hired a spokeswoman, Stephanie Monroe, a Washington lobbyist who formerly served as assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the Bush administration.

About a week later, Monroe testified in a Senate hearing on the organization's behalf.

The same day, the group posted on its website a photo of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. It showed an inscription — a quote from King — that reads in part: "Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights."

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Grammy Awards Fashion Video

The Grammy Awards are always full of eye-popping looks, and this year was no exception.

Pics: Hit or Miss -- The 2013 Grammy Awards!

From Jennifer Lopez's leg-exposing Tom Ford creation to Kelly Rowland's scandalously sheer Georges Chakra Couture creation, click the video for the the night's must-see fashion!

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Quinn: Squeeze on city’s middle class

The new millennium has been a bust for the middle class in New York City, according to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

Quinn, a Democratic candidate for mayor, today will unveil a today that will highlight the increased costs for middle-class New Yorkers since 2001, a time frame that overlaps Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure.

But she was careful yesterday not to criticize Bloomberg, her political ally, whose third term she helped orchestrate in 2008 after he insisted his fiscal know-how could shepherd the city through the national recession.

The report makes clear that middle-class unemployment tripled to 6.2 percent since 2008; rental costs went up by 6.2 percent and condo prices increased by 47 percent since 2001; and median income for the middle class.

The report was compiled by Quinn’s finance officials.

“This is a national trend, which New York City is impacted by,” Quinn said in an attempt to avoid laying any blame at Bloomberg’s feet.

Still, she said, there are ways the city can raise employment and wages within the middle class, which the study defines as a family of four making between $66,000 and $198,000.

She declined to offer specifics, which she will release today in the speech — her final State of the City address as council speaker.

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Green cards for sale at a South Beach hotel: Competition is on for EB5 investment visas

If David Hart gets his way, South Beach’s 42-room Astor Hotel will be on a hiring spree this year as it adds concierge service, a roof-top pool, an all-night diner, spa and private-car service available 24 hours a day.

New hires will be crucial to Hart’s business plan, since foreign investors have agreed to pay about $50,000 for each job created by the Art Deco boutique.

The Miami immigration lawyer specializes in arranging visas for wealthy foreign citizens under a special program that trades green cards for investment dollars. Businesses get the money and must use it to boost payroll. The minimum investment is $500,000 to add at least 10 jobs to the economy. That puts the pressure on Hart and his partners at the Astor to beef up payroll dramatically, with plans to take a hotel with roughly 20 employees to one with as many as 100 workers.

“My primary responsibility is to make something happen here over the next two years that will create the jobs we need,’’ Hart said a few steps away from a nearly empty restaurant on a recent weekday morning. “It’s all going to be transformed.”

Though established in the 1990s, the “EB5” visas soared in popularity during the recession as developers sought foreign cash to replace dried-up credit markets in the United States.

Chinese investors dominate the transactions, accounting for about 65 percent of the nearly 9,000 EB5 visas granted since 2006. South Korea finishes a distant second at 12 percent and the United Kingdom holds the third-place slot at 3 percent. If Latin America and the Caribbean were one country, they would rank No. 4 on the list, with 231 EB5 visas granted, or about 3 percent of the total.

Competition has gotten stiffer for the deep-pocketed foreign investors willing to pay for green cards. The University of Miami’s bio-science research park near the Jackson hospital system raised $20 million from 40 foreign investors under the EB5 program, most of them from Asia. The money went into the park’s first building; visa brokers are waiting to see if the second building will proceed so they can offer a new pool of potential green-card sales.

In Hollywood, the stalled $131 million Margaritaville resort had hoped to raise about $75 million from EB5 investors before ditching that plan last year to pursue more traditional financing. A retail complex by developer Jeff Berkowitz in Coral Gables also launched a program to raise $50 million in EB5 money for the project, Gables Station. Hart worked with other EB5 investors to back pizza restaurants in Miami and South Beach. A limestone mine in Martin County also was backed by EB5 dollars.

This year, the city of Miami itself is expected to get into the business by setting up an EB5 program to raise foreign cash for a range of city businesses and developments. The first would be the tallest building in the city — developer Tibor Hollo’s planned 85-story apartment tower, the Panorama, in downtown Miami.

With a construction cost of about $700 million, Miami’s debut EB5 venture hopes to raise about $100 million from foreign investors, said Laura Reiff, the Greenberg Traurig lawyer in Virginia working with Miami on the EB5 effort. “This is a marquis project,’’ she said.

The arrangement is a novel one for Miami, with the city planning to help a private developer raise funds overseas for a new high-rise. And it would allow Hollo and future participants to tout the city of Miami’s endorsement when competing with other Miami-area projects for EB5 dollars. “We will have the benefit of the brand of the city of Miami,’’ said Mikki Canton, the $6,000-a-month city consultant heading Miami’s EB5 effort. “A lot of these others are privately owned and they won’t have that brand.”

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Miami-Dade mayor disappointed at Major League Baseball over All-Star Game

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez was swept into office in part because of his opposition to the public financing for the Marlins’ new baseball stadium.

But that doesn’t mean he was happy when Major League Baseball awarded the 2015 All-Star Game to Cincinnati. Marlins President David Samson said last year he hoped to host the game, continuing a streak of All-Star games at new ballparks. That was before the team decimated its roster and chopped its payroll after last season.

After MLB Commissioner Bud Selig made the Cincinnati announcement last month, Gimenez sent him a letter expressing his disappointment. And the mayor phoned Selig last week, according to Gimenez’s calendar.

“[N]ow that the facility is built and operating, it is my responsibility to ensure its greatest benefit to our residents,” Gimenez wrote.

“Public sentiment regarding the Stadium is at an all-time low, and now we are further disappointed by the recent announcement...[I]t is clear that Miami has been benched once again, this time by Major League Baseball.”

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Chris Brown Car Collision

ET has learned that Chris Brown was involved in a solo, non-injury traffic collision in Beverly Hills at noon today, blaming the paparazzi for losing control of his Porsche and colliding with a wall.

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A statement from Lieutenant Lincoln Hoshino of the Beverly Hills police details the incident: "On February 9, 2013 at approximately 12:03 p.m., entertainer Chris Brown was involved in a solo, non-injury traffic collision in the 600 Block Bedford Drive/Camden Drive alley. Mr. Brown was the driver of the vehicle and collided with a wall. Brown stated that he was being chased by paparazzi causing him to lose control of his vehicle. Brown's Black Porsche was towed from the scene at his request."

Related: Rihanna Accompanies Chris Brown to Court

Earlier this week, Brown visited an L.A. courthouse with girlfriend Rihanna on to oppose a motion to revoke his probation stemming from his 2009 assault on Rihanna. Prosecutors claim Brown did not show sufficient evidence that he completed his required community labor sentence. 

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Police: 3 wounded in shooting on Bourbon Street in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — Police say three people have been shot on crowded Bourbon Street in New Orleans as revelers were partying during Mardi Gras.

New Orleans police spokesman Frank B. Robertson said two males and a female were shot just before 9:30 p.m. local time. He says one person is in critical condition and the other two are in stable condition. He did not release their ages.

Robertson says detectives are working vigorously to identify a suspect and determine a motive. He did not have any other details.

The streets were crawling with bar-hopping revelers as they celebrate the weekend before Fat Tuesday.

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