Category Archives: Ron DeSantis

Record 12th execution set in Florida this year for man convicted of killing family

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David Pittman to get lethal injection under DeSantis-signed warrant for killing estranged wife’s sister and parents

A Florida man convicted of killing his estranged wife’s sister and parents and setting their house on fire was scheduled to be put to death on Wednesday evening, which would be a record 12th execution in the state in 2025.

David Pittman, 63, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection starting at 6pm at Florida state prison near Starke under a death warrant signed by Governor Ron DeSantis. The Republican governor has signed more death warrants this year than any of his predecessors.

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Florida to end vaccine mandates for children as surgeon general likens them to ‘slavery’

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Joseph Ladapo, a long-time vaccine skeptic, says that every state vaccine requirement would be repealed

Children in Florida will no longer be required to receive vaccines against preventable diseases including measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio and hepatitis said Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general, on Wednesday in a speech during which he likened vaccine mandates to “slavery”.

Ladapo, hand-picked for the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, is a long-time skeptic of the benefit of vaccines, and has previously been accused of peddling “scientific nonsense” by public health advocates.

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Florida to execute man convicted of killing three people in 1992

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The killing of Curtis Windom, 59, by lethal injection will be a record 11th execution in the state this year

A man convicted of killing his girlfriend, her mother and a man he claimed owed him $2,000 is scheduled to receive a lethal injection on Thursday in what would be a record 11th execution in the state of Florida this year.

Curtis Windom, 59, would become the 30th person executed this year in the US, with Florida leading the way behind a flurry of death warrants signed by the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. A 12th man, David Joseph Pittman, 63, is scheduled to be put to death in Florida on 17 September.

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Trump celebrates harsh conditions for detainees on visit to ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

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President says immigration jail in Florida Everglades is a ‘little controversial, but I couldn’t care less’

Donald Trump on Tuesday toured Alligator Alcatraz, a controversial new migrant detention jail in the remote Florida Everglades, and celebrated the harsh conditions that people sent there would experience.

The president was chaperoned by Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, who hailed the tented camp on mosquito-infested land 50 miles west of Miami as an example for other states that supported Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

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Florida Republicans racially gerrymandered two state senate districts, court hears

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GOP officials had previously manipulated districts as well to wrest voting power from Black electorate

Republicans in Florida racially gerrymandered two key state senate districts to disenfranchise Black voters and skew results in the Tampa Bay area, a panel of judges has heard.

In one district, they took a small chunk of St Petersburg heavy with minority voters and added it to an area of Tampa in a different county, and across a 10-mile waterway, leaving the remainder of its electorate “artificially white”, the court was told.

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Florida students lobby to keep 2018 gun control law in wake of recent shooting

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Students traumatized by Parkland and Florida university shootings urge lawmakers not to roll back restrictions

Florida students who were traumatized by the 2018 Parkland school shooting – and last week’s deadly shooting at Florida State University – are urging lawmakers in the Republican-controlled statehouse not to roll back gun restrictions they passed in the wake of the killing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school.

Gun rights activists have been fighting to unravel the 2018 law since it was passed, including a provision that raised the state’s minimum age to buy a gun to 21. Governor Ron DeSantis and some Republican lawmakers have argued that if an 18-year-old Floridian can serve in the military, they should be able to purchase a firearm.

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Protest planned after Florida student deported following traffic stop

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Politicians and student activists decry ‘outlandish’ deportation of Felipe Zapata Velázquez to Colombia

A campus protest is planned at the University of Florida on Wednesday in support of a Colombian student deported by the Trump administration following his arrest for alleged traffic violations.

The family of Felipe Zapata Velázquez, 27, said on Tuesday he was “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his home country after police arrested him in Gainesville on 28 March for offenses including having an expired tag and suspended driver’s license, then turned him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).

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DeSantis urged to declare emergency over toxic red tide algae off Florida coast

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Harmful algae bloom off south-west coast blamed for deaths of marine life and poses threat to beaches

Environmentalists in Florida are calling on the governor, Ron DeSantis, to declare an emergency as a worsening “red tide” algae bloom off the state’s south-west coast threatens popular tourist beaches and is being blamed for the deaths of wildlife including fish and dolphins.

Several counties have issued health alerts in response to the outbreak, which scientists say began in the Gulf of Mexico last year when Hurricanes Helene and Milton tore up nutrient-rich waters that feed the algae.

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Scientists brace ‘for the worst’ as Trump purges climate mentions from websites

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Trump administration pulling references online ‘won’t make crisis’ stop affecting Americans’ lives, say experts

Donald Trump’s administration has started to remove or downgrade mentions of the climate crisis across the US government, with the websites of several major departments pulling down references to anything related to the climate crisis. Climate scientists said they were braced “for the worst”.

A major climate portal on the Department of Defense’s website has been scrapped, as has the main climate change section on the site of the Department of State. A climate change page on the White House’s website no longer exists, nor does climate content provided by the US agriculture department, including information that provides vulnerability assessments for wildfires.

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Florida liberal arts college reinstates ‘wokeness’ course amid furore

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Course set to be taught by controversial British ‘anti-woke’ media commentator Andrew Doyle

New College of Florida reinstated a course on “wokeness” taught by controversial British media personality and culture warrior Andrew Doyle to its catalog, after appearing to remove it from an earlier version, amid an ongoing furore over the university’s transformation into a more conservative institution.

The course was also restored to an internal enrollment system but without Doyle’s name attached, according to students with access to the system. The moves followed criticism of the course online and local media reports on Tuesday night.

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Florida begins long road to recovery after double hurricane strike

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The twin blow from Milton and Helene has left the state reeling – and the act of rebuilding will be lengthy and costly

More than just clouds were swirling when a tropical disturbance that would become Hurricane Milton formed in the south-western Gulf of Mexico, beginning its inexorable march towards a midweek strike on Florida’s west coast.

As its winds picked up, so did familiar feelings of anxiety and dread across a state still reeling from the impact of another monster storm, Hurricane Helene, barely a week earlier. Ultimately, the densely populated cities of Tampa and St Petersburg were spared the apocalyptic scenario some had forecast. But places elsewhere along the Gulf coast saw unprecedented levels of destruction and devastation.

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Biden says Hurricane Milton caused staggering $50bn in estimated damage

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Sixteen people killed by storm but state spared ‘worst-case scenario’ as accusations fly between political candidates

Joe Biden said on Friday that experts estimate that Hurricane Milton caused a staggering $50bn in damage. The US president is scheduled to travel to Florida on Sunday to visit areas where the huge storm roared across the state after making landfall late on Wednesday.

Authorities were urgently assessing the aftermath of the deadly storm, which spawned tornadoes before slamming into central Florida and then tearing about 175 miles (280km) across land, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, killing people, destroying homes and blocking streets with downed power lines, fallen trees and debris.

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Deaths expected to rise as Florida begins to assess Hurricane Milton destruction

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State battered by category 3 storm overnight, leaving more than 3.4m homes and businesses without power

The death toll from Hurricane Milton rose to at least nine on Thursday as Florida began to assess the damage from the category 3 storm that caused extensive property damage across the state and left more than 3.4m homes and businesses without power.

Authorities said four fatalities were in a senior community in St Lucie county that was struck by a tornado formed in Milton’s outer bands. The tornado happened before the hurricane made landfall near Sarasota on Florida’s western coast on Wednesday evening.

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Hurricane Milton: tropical storm-force winds reach Florida before ‘storm of the century’

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Storm weakens to category 3 ahead of expected landfall late on Wednesday or early on Thursday

Officials urged residents of Florida’s western coast to shelter in place if they had not already evacuated on Wednesday evening as Hurricane Milton prepared to make landfall in the next few hours.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) urged Floridians to prepare for a storm surge of over 10ft, flooding and devastating hurricane-force winds as the state prepares for what Joe Biden has called the “storm of the century”.

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Hurricane Milton intensifies to category 5 as Florida braces for ‘major impacts’

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Storm could make landfall on Wednesday as state prepares what could be biggest evacuation since 2017

Hurricane Milton has rapidly intensified into a category 5 hurricane, just two days before it is due to make landfall in Florida.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami issued the updated forecast on Monday after saying the storm had become a category 4 hurricane more quickly than initially expected.

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Ron DeSantis accused of ‘intimidation campaign’ against abortion rights

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Florida voters report law enforcement personnel visits that appear to be part of drive to block passage of Amendment 4

Ron DeSantis is making a concerted effort to maintain draconian limits on abortion access in Florida that have led to accusations the rightwing Republican governor is conducting a “state-sponsored intimidation campaign” against abortion rights and trampling on civil liberties in the state.

A near total ban on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy took effect in Florida in May after the state supreme court ruled that the right to an abortion was no longer covered by the privacy clause in the Florida constitution.

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Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to right

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Next month, New College of Florida will welcome activist and writer Steve Sailer, a ‘proponent of scientific racism’

New College of Florida (NCF) will host the extremist writer Steve Sailer, who has been described as a “white supremacist” and a “proponent of scientific racism”, at a college-branded public event next month.

New College has made headlines since January 2023, when the rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, vowed to transform it from a university known for liberal values into a conservative institution, and installed a new board of trustees including the rightwing culture warrior Christopher Rufo. That board in turn appointed DeSantis’s “close ally” Richard Corcoran as the new college president, in which role he makes a $699,000 salary.

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Activist with far-right ties fronts Marco Rubio-linked anti-immigration effort

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Nate Hochman recorded several videos for America 2100, a thinktank linked to the Republican Florida senator

The rightwing activist Nate Hochman, who was fired last year by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for employing neo-Nazi imagery in a campaign video, is now the face of a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank’s efforts to spread anti-immigrant panic from Ohio to Pennsylvania.

Videos featuring Hochman recorded in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, have been boosted on X by a range of rightwing figures including the platform’s owner, the tech billionaire Elon Musk.

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Ron DeSantis strips more than $32m in Florida arts funding

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Political allies are also surprised at move, which cancels nearly entirety of state’s funding and will affect economy

Ron DeSantis stripped more than $32m in arts and culture funding from Florida’s state budget over his hatred of a popular fringe festival that he accused of being “a sexual event”, critics of the rightwing governor say.

DeSantis justified his unprecedented, wide-ranging veto of grants to almost 700 groups and organizations by saying it was “inappropriate” for $7,369 of state money to be allocated to Tampa fringe, a 10-day festival that took place earlier this month with a strong message of inclusivity, and its sister event in Orlando.

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Weather tracker: State of emergency in Florida as heavy rain causes flooding

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Emergency services conduct at least 40 rescues and schools, courts and railways closed in some counties

Significant amounts of rain in the past two days have led the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to declare a state of emergency for the counties of Broward, Collier, Lee, Miami-Dade and Sarasota, while the mayors of Miami-Dade, Miami and Fort Lauderdale also declared a state of emergency.

This has resulted in a number of closures for public schools, courts and Dania Beach’s city hall, where there were at least 40 rescues by emergency services. Rail routes across Miami and the surrounding area were also suspended. The flooding occurred after more than 380mm (15in) of rain fell on several southern Florida cities in just two days.

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