Six months after Florida became the butt of late-night jokes for a chaotic voting process that bedeviled the 2012 presidential election, the State Legislature passed a bill on Friday to remedy many of those problems.
The Legislature’s inability to agree means that more than a million low-income Floridians will remain without insurance, at least in the short term. Florida has one of the nation’s highest rates of uninsured people. Public hospitals also will suffer because they will continue to have to care for those one million uninsured who seek treatment in their emergency rooms.
… [T]he interests of an avaricious elite have consistently taken precedence over the well-being of the vast majority of the state’s residents. The consequences of this injustice go well beyond traffic jams: over more than 500 pages Allman shows how slavery, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, white supremacist government and egregious corporate welfare took root in Florida. Allman, an accomplished magazine journalist and the author of “Miami: City of the Future,” asserts that such inequities have persisted in part because myths about the region’s past whitewash — and in some cases factually contradict — what actually occurred. “Finding Florida” is a cross between a corrective history and a passionate jeremiad, offered up as a call to arms.
On Monday 29 April, the Guardian will begin Road Trips USA, a series of reader-guided road trips across America. Guardian journalists will pitch up in a part of the country, with no plans, no accommodation and no firm route. For the first trip, I will be driving the length of Florida. The one thing I will be armed with is my mobile phone, Twitter and GuardianWitness, our new tool that features reader stories in text, photo or video. Until next Friday, I will rely on Twitter tips sent in from you to me (@AdamGabbatt) or through @GuardianUS.
Florida’s music scene is swamped with styles: sleazy Miami vibes, funk and latin fusion, and folky pop. Sweat Records’ Lauren Reskin is your guide - listen to her picks on Spotify
O, come all ye faithful. The latest must-see Florida attraction to compete for your tourist dollars is The Holy Land Experience. It is comfortably situated in the Greater Orlando-Kissimmee theme park district chock-a-block with hotels and “family dining” style restaurants. Owned by mega-giant Christian broadcasting network TBN (the T is for Trinity), this biblical theme park features a recreation of the Garden of Eden, wax figures depicting the Resurrection, and a LIVE dramatization of the Crucifixion (performed daily at 4 p.m. sharp).
Hungry for manna? Steaming foot-long hotdogs are available at Simeon’s Corner café, while Chik-Fil-A appears on the menu of several other on-site dining areas.
If someone had told me this was the plot of a Carl Hiaassen book, I would have raced to the bookstore, no questions asked.
In state legislatures around the country, lawmakers are debating important subjects — education reform, election laws, gun control and abortion. But in Florida, one of the hottest issues to come before the Legislature this term involves cats. There, lawmakers are considering a contentious bill that would offer legal protection to groups that trap, neuter and return feral cats to their colonies.
THIS week is the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Juan Ponce de León’s purported discovery of Florida. Commemorations include the unveiling of “The First Landing,” a larger-than-life statue of Ponce in Melbourne Beach, as well as the introduction by the Postal Service of “La Florida,” a four-stamp series timed to honor what is being presented as the founding moment in our country’s history.
These celebrations are a fiesta of illusion. As Spain’s conquistadors discovered, and we too often forget, Florida is like Play-Doh. Take the goo; mold it to your dream. Then watch the dream ooze back into goo. Contrary to what our school books taught us, Ponce did not discover Florida. He never did much of anything here except get himself killed.
Herald employees will move into a renovated building in Doral, a small city on the west side of Miami-Dade County best known for its tangle of traffic, its proximity to the airport, affordable warehouses and an annual golf tournament. The building was the home of the military’s United States Southern Command.
But the demise of The Herald’s longtime home and the newspaper’s gallop away from the heart of the city are symptoms of a much larger problem: the retreat and retrenchment of newspapers in the digital age and their waning influence.
