Rick Stone has been a journalist in Florida for most of his career. He's worked in newspapers and television but believes that nothing works as well as public radio. He and his wife, Mary Jane Stone, live in Broward County.
A determined Palm Beach County teenager is gaining ground on a big goal -- stopping people from smoking at Florida's beaches and public parks.
Caitlyn Johnston's campaign caught the eye of State. Rep. Bill Hager, R-Boca Raton, who filed a bill (HB 439) giving cities and counties the power to ban smoking on their own public lands.
HOW MUCH OF A RAISE? Gov. Scott wants an immediate $2,500 for every Florida teacher. Democrats want state teacher pay linked to national averages for even bigger raises.
Florida voters may be asked to raise the salary of a rookie teacher by $10,000 starting two years from now. If they approve, the pay increase would be part of a constitutional amendment that ties Florida teacher pay scales at all career levels to national averages.
The average Florida teacher salary now is $46,000, about $10,000 less than the national average.
OK, show of hands: How many of you Miamians have ever heard of Argentine tech guru and entrepreneur Martín Varsavsky and his based-in-Spain "public wi-fi" company, Fon?
Well, he has certainly heard of you. So impressed is he with Miami -- and so dismayed by the South Florida brain drain he attributes to the lack of a significant tech sector in our economy -- that he's planning to launch his North American operations here.
Florida's system for the mentally ill is an underfunded shambles that leaves most people untreated and settles for locking up many of the rest.
Officials and experts told a House committee in Tallahassee on Thursday that system funding levels, in real terms, are below what they were in the 1980s and that the crisis is "deepening."
TEAM LOYALTY: Miami-Dade is OK with helping the Dolphins renovate Sun Life Stadium. What does that mean for the team's relationship with Broward County?
Miami-Dade commissioners on Thursday voted to get behind state legislation that would provide nearly $200 million in public funding to Sun Life Stadium renovations sought by the Miami Dolphins.
If all goes as planned, the Florida Legislature will approve a package of sales tax and hotel bed tax revenue that the team will match to proceed with their $400 million stadium-improvement project.
With fewer and fewer tourists ringing its cash registers and encroaching pollution clouding its trademark crystalline waters, Florida's oldest tourist draw, Silver Springs, is going out of business.
But it will not disappear. On Wednesday, Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Cabinet agreed to release the Marion County attraction's operators from its lease so that Silver Springs can become a state park.
Florida's gambling future won’t be settled in the 2013 session of the Florida Legislature -- and maybe not even in the one after that.
The divide between competing stakeholder visions remains very wide. And, at a hearing before the Florida Senate Gaming Committee on Tuesday, chairman Garrett Richter, R-Naples, said it could be 18 months before the work on developing legislation even begins.
"I want to do something deliberative and thoughtful," Richter told reporters after the meeting.
MARKETPLACE FROM MIAMI -- Through the glass at WLRN, Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson is seen kicking off a week of broadcasts about Miami as a product of immigration and diversity.
Marketplace Morning Report will spend the first week of President Obama's second term broadcasting from Miami and demonstrating what some of the president's inaugural themes mean in real life.
The raw materials for show host Jeremy Hobson and his production team of three are Miami's huge immigrant population, its great wealth and crushing poverty, and the enormous empty space between those economic extremes.
SUNDAY AT ST. JOHNS: The Rev. Luis León greets the President and Mrs. Obama at the door of his church near the White House. Leon will give the inaugural benediction when the president is sworn in for his second term.
President Obama and his inaugural guests will receive their blessing from a Cuba-born minister who came to Miami as a child and now pastors a church just blocks from the White House.
The Rev. Luis León, an Episcopal priest, is the rector at St. John's Church where every president since James Madison has attended services at one time or another. His relationship with the White House is well-established: In 2005, he became the first Hispanic clergyman to deliver an inaugural benediction when President George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term.
BECOMING LAW: Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill requiring employee contributions to the pension plan on June 23, 2011. The Florida Supreme Court upheld it Thursday.
Florida teachers and other public employees are shocked and angry today, now that the state Supreme Court has upheld a two-year-old state law that requires them for the first time to contribute to their own retirement plans.
Under the law, passed by the 2011 Legislature, three percent of most pension-eligible paychecks are deducted for the state pension system, which the state alone has funded since 1974. Most state employees have received no pay raises since 2006.
RETHINKING: Gov. Scott signed the bill that reduced the early voting period and caused problems for voters such as these in Pembroke Pines. Now he says he favors returning to the original 14 days.
The state's election bureaucracy and local elections officials have already agreed that more early voting days would shorten the lines that kept voters waiting for hours on Nov. 6.
Now, Gov. Rick Scott -- who promoted and then signed the 2011 bill that reduced the early voting period -- has joined the chorus. He said Thursday county elections supervisors should have the option to conduct early voting on as many as 14 days, the number there was before the Legislature reduced it to eight.
If you’re a judge and you’re Facebook friends with a lawyer and that lawyer winds up in your courtroom to try a case, does that mean you have a conflict of interests?
That's what the state appeals court based in West Palm Beach wants the Florida Supreme Court to decide. It's the same court that took Broward County Circuit Judge Andrew Siegel off of a case because, it decided, his Facebook friendship with the prosecutor made it impossible for him to be impartial.
WATCHFUL EYES: The Palm Beach Sheriff's Office says citizen suspicions quickly reported may reduce acts of violence such as the school attack in Newtown.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office is seeking funding for teams of social workers and deputies who can respond 24/7 to anonymous citizen complaints of suspicious behavior by others.
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw's second-in-command, Chief Deputy Michael Gauger, announced the program at a community forum on Wednesday. He said early vigilance and quick response might have prevented the school shootings in Newtown. The Palm Beach Post was there:
South Florida gun dealers are warning that a ban on assault weapons, as President Obama is asking from Congress, will result only in a new flood of higher-priced weapons on American streets.
Hialeah gun factory owner Antonio "Tony" Vega says fundamental economic principles kick in every time gun owners feel their rights are under threat.
Gov. Rick Scott's 2010 campaign dog, Reagan, has been located -- safe, but probably a little bitter -- on a horse ranch somewhere in southwest Florida. Tampa's WTSP Ch. 10 reports he's now known as Pluto.
This should close out a week of speculation about whatever happened to the rescued Labrador that Scott acquired, named through a Facebook contest and campaigned with...
In an unusual case of pre-emptive historic designation, Miami Beach preservationists are trying to protect a decrepit Star Island mansion from being torn down by its new owner.
That would be plastic surgeon Leonard Hochstein, who bought the waterfront place at 42 Star Island Drive for $7.6 million and then found it too far gone to be renovated.
Gov. Rick Scott's hour-long sit-down with the Legislative Black Caucus on Tuesday was frostily correct and almost completely nonproductive for the black lawmakers, according to two accounts of Tuesday's session in Tallahassee.
The Tampa Bay Times and the Palm Beach Post described the governor as almost completely unyielding on voting rules, ex-felon rights and appointments to the judiciary and other state positions.
As to the 2011 voting law that many say turned the 2012 election into a Florida disaster, the governor said he should not be blamed for that.
SPEADING THE WORD: Amber Alerts the old way, left, and the new smart phone way which relies on software that government ordered installed on all post-2011 phones.
Indications are growing that the gun lobby might face unusual difficulties in the Florida Legislature this year.
In Tallahassee on Monday, the Republican chairman of the Senate Education Committee announced his opposition to arming Florida school teachers as a defense against school shooters and a Democratic senator filed a bill to repeal one of the National Rifle Association's trophy bills from 2011, the law forbidding doctors to ask patients whether they have guns at home.
Florida Senate President Don Gaetz (R-Niceville) is ready to toughen ethics laws, reform campaign finance, streamline the Florida ballot...just about every issue of timely significance, he told the Orlando Sentinel editorial board, except for gun control.
$400 MILLION STADIUM PLAN: Modular seating is one of the features of the Sun Life Stadium renovation plan. The team wants public funding for half of that.
New seating, new scoreboards and shelter for the fans from the sun and rain.
That's how Miami Dolphins majority owner Stephen Ross envisions Sun Life Stadium after a $400 million renovation for which he hopes the taxpayers will pay half.
Holdouts against amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants in the U. S. are bracing for the lobbying pressure they are certain to experience as President Obama, grassroots groups and converts in Congress prepare for the Big Immigration Bill.
NEEDS WORK: Dolphins owner Stephen Ross wants a partial roof and reconfigured seating at Sun Life Stadium and he wants taxpayers to fund some of the renovations.
Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross has an appointment with reporters today to discuss his plans to go after public funding to renovate Sun Life Stadium.
The cost estimate is $400 million, says the Miami Herald, some of which Ross apparently hopes to raise from state and local government sources.
THE WAIT: Progress seemed illusory as Florida voters waited in line on Nov. 6. Country elections supervisors say a longer early voting period and a shorter ballot could help.
Florida's county elections supervisors are preparing to approach the Legislature with their own fixes for the voting problems that worsened the state's already-sketchy reputation for competence last year.
Their plan: Require at least eight day of early voting with an option for 14 in counties that need it, and hold lawmakers to the same 75-word limit on ballot questions for constitutional amendments that citizens must observe with their own ballot initiatives
The big Everglades python hunt starts Saturday and, so far, 670 people have signed up for the fun and a chance at cash prizes.
Among them is our intrepid U. S. Senator, Bill Nelson. He and a companion -- described in the Tampa Bay Times as a "rancher from Davie" -- will strap on pistols and machetes on Thursday to go after the huge Burmese pythons that Nelson has worried so much about, occasionally to the amusement of his Senate colleagues.
Most of the victims of the Newtown school massacre were just like Florida Atlantic University professor James Tracy's daughter: seven-year-old first graders at a public school.
"If a similar tragedy were visited upon me and my family, I would be beside myself," he says. "But I think one of my ways of healing would be attempting to find out what went wrong, where was the failure."
But trying to start a public discussion of the public's small hope of ever finding out what went wrong has been costly.
GOT THE MESSAGE: Sen. Marco Rubio wants to strengthen the middle class with education opportunities, good jobs and a healthy Social Security/Medicare system.
Florida U. S. Sen. Marco Rubio plans to begin the new year with proposals to strengthen the middle class with education opportunities, jobs that will be worth their new degrees and solvent Social Security and Medicare systems to await their retirement.
Motorists who notice radar-equipped police cars hiding behind bushes and under overpasses, and then flash their high-beams to warn other drivers, haven’t always been rewarded for their concern.
On the contrary. A lot of them have gotten tickets for those little acts of kindness and roadway solidarity. But, just maybe, no more.
STILL WORKING: PortMiami is the nation's 11th largest shipper of containers. It's estimated a longshoremen's strike would cost the Miami-Dade County economy tens of millions of dollars a day.
Longshoremen and East Coast and Gulf Coast port operators have agreed to a 30-day extension on labor negotiations, averting a potentially crippling strike that would have halted container traffic at many of the nation's largest seaports, according to a federal mediator.
The strike would also have idled cargo but not cruise ship operations at PortMiami and Port Everglades. PortMiami is the nation's 11th largest container port and a lengthy strike would be costly to the regional economy.
