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I could hardly believe what I was looking at. There it was, star­ing right at me. I could no longer ignore, deny, or post-rationalize what I already knew as the dig­i­tal evi­dence stared me down and waved its mer­ci­less accusatory fin­ger at me. This marked the end of the line for me, three months ago to the day.

Disabled by bungled repair work more tan three years ago, Duke Energy's Crystal River nuclear power plant will not be reactivated, company officials have concluded.

The plant in Citrus County on Florida's west coast will become he first in the Southeastern U. S. to close.

Four coal-fired generators will remain in place at the Crystal River site and the company is considering whether to build a new natural gas generator to replace the energy that the 900-megawatt CR3 nuke has produced since it opened in 1977.

TALLAHASSEE -- An annual effort to collect taxes on Internet sales began again in the Legislature on Tuesday, with a Senate committee agreeing to offset any new money collected with other tax breaks in a bid to appease anti-tax lawmakers.

The Senate Commerce and Tourism Committee approved a measure (SB 316) by committee chairwoman Sen. Nancy Detert, R-Venice, that would require Internet vendors who sell to Florida residents to pay state sales tax.

Since his arrival in 2004, Brazilian native Augusto Soledade has been trailblazing and opening paths for dance in Miami at an unprecedented pace and efficacy. 

Like his signature ASIWAJU educational project (asiwaju is the Yoruban term for “he who opens the path”), Soledade is committed to creating new spaces and platforms for dance and ensuring that Miami becomes a global and sustainable player of the genre.

  “I call this my magic window.” -Captain Nemo from the 1916 version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Florida Power and Light is the state's largest utility serving roughly 4.6 million customers.

Since 2006, FPL customers have been paying what's called a "Nuclear Cost Recovery Fee," which enables the utility to charge in advance for future costs of building and improving nuclear power plants.

Since then, about $320 million has been raised to add 525 megawatts of new power to Turkey Point in South Miami-Dade.  

The price of property insurance in Florida keeps going up --  such that some homeowners are getting second mortgages or dropping coverage all together.  The state created Citizens Property Insurance to be the insurer of last resort for Florida homeowners. But plans to shrink Citizens by loaning money to private insurance companies and allegations of corporate misconduct have sparked outcries by some state officials and the public alike. 

The other day I got an e-mail that was signed “Brgrds.” Brgrds?? What does that mean? Oh. Right. “Best Regards.” So, why on earth the author didn't just take the extra three (?) seconds and five key strokes to actually write the words “Best Regards,” I have no idea, but it was a big “aha!” moment for me. 

In Tallahassee, a series of proposals to repair the state election system is finding broad support in the Legislature that many say broke the voting process two years ago.

A Senate bill instituting one of the reforms proposed by Secretary of State  Ken Detzner has already been filed and there are clear signals from a House elections subcommittee that it will prepare a bill to launch the rest of them.

Researchers at the Texas Transportation Institute have quantified what most South Florida drivers already know deep in their guts: they are wasting more time, money and gasoline than ever sitting in worsening traffic.

The bottom line for the average commuter in 2011: 47 hours standing still behind the wheel, an increase of an hour over the previous year.

TALLAHASSEE -- Federal health officials have approved a key part of Florida's effort to transform its Medicaid program, clearing the way for tens of thousands of seniors across the state to move into managed-care plans.

The World AIDS Museum is in search of a permanent home and it's hoping to set up shop in the Fort Lauderdale area. Organizers have their eye specifically on Wilton Manors, a neighborhood with an active LGBT community.   

Knight Foundation and its Knight Arts Challenge grants have lubricated the city's arts community for the past five years, funding projects great and small that benefit the greater cultural good.

Those free projections on the side of the New World Symphony building and events in the Soundscape park? Knight money. The sculpture garden at the Bass Museum? Knight money. Those off-beat Weird Miami bus tours? Yep, also Knight money.

Airing Sunday, February 10 and February 17 at 2:00pm on WLRN channel 17

Filmmaker and author Karin Muller had always heard the argument over Cuba, but was never satisfied with what she learned.

According to some it is a tropical paradise, and according to others it is a police state that people are dying to escape from.

Ten days, 117 feature-length films.

That’s right, the Miami International Film Festival has released the lineup for the much-anticipated event at the end of the month.

And, in its 30th year, it’s denser than ever.

The Miami Herald noted a few bound-to-be favorites:

They can’t charge you late fees for this service.

The Miami-Dade Public Library System now allows card holders to download up to three free songs a week, and keep them indefinitely.

The music service, Freegal, features a collection of about 285,000 artists and 3 million songs. It tracks each user’s downloads and resets every Monday.

Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International will increase its capacity for yearly takeoffs and landings by more than 50 percent once its new runway goes live 20 months from now.

But it's going to be tricky in the meantime. Building the new runway will require closing one of the airport's two existing runways and that will expose flights and travelers to the risk of unforeseen -- and possibly lengthy -- delays.

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Rick Scott's push to keep tuition low includes a new twist: tuition should be the same when students graduate as when they start.

Scott has offered legislation that would hold tuition steady for four years for students entering a state university this fall or afterward. The proposal is in the package he's sending to the Legislature.

And it sticks closely to something that Scott has pounded on for months: his belief that an era of nearly-annual tuition increases needs to end.

Somewhere around the age of 30, I went from "miss" to "ma'am" in stores and restaurants. Maybe it was the wrinkles, the suits or the sensible purchasing decisions I was making, but I hated it. It was a massive leap from youth into some downward slope of old age.

It didn’t help that the first time I heard the dreaded “ma’am” I was standing in an Abercrombie & Fitch looking confused, staring through the dim light at an item of clothing, trying to make out if it was a shirt or a skirt.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

Will stopping Mexican tomatoes at the border raise tomato prices prohibitively for American consumers?

An importers group predicted recently that if the 1996 tomato agreement with Mexico is terminated, tomatoes could rise to $5 a pound in American supermarkets. Florida growers now say that's a scare tactic by interest groups who favor Mexican imports. "Under no circumstances will this be true," said Edward Beckman, president of Certified Greenhouse Farmers.

Number crunching by a Florida university professor has led to an odd conspiracy theory about the Florida House of Representatives.

Not that Prof. Mark Soskin actually subscribes to the theory himself. As you hear on TV a lot, he's just sayin'.

A decade ago, speculators in Florida were pumping up a huge housing bubble.

"You couldn't go wrong," Tampa real estate attorney Charlie Hounchell says. In that overheated period from 2001 to 2006, "you could buy a house and make $100,000 a year later by selling it," he says.

But the party ended in 2007 and the hangover persists. The state now has the highest foreclosure rate in the country, beating out Nevada for the first time in five years.

When Miami native Aaron Lebos was a kid, his parents told him to choose between violin and piano. "I chose piano," he says, "obviously." But his big brother played electric guitar, and he wanted to too. He thought it was "cooler." Eventually, he got his hands on a guitar of his own and made his way through jazz studies programs at Miami Dade College, University of Miami and FIU. 

Now that a group of key senators and the president have proposed their plans for immigration reform, what would some of the proposed changes mean to South Florida's unique immigrant communities? We hear from  University of Miami immigration law specialist David Abraham.

On the Florida Roundup: New immigration reform proposals are put on the table in Washington. How could a path to citizenship be traveled in immigrant-rich South Florida?   Plus we get the latest update on the FBI raid of a West Palm Beach eye doctor with connections with U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, a sponsor of a bipartisan immigration reform plan.