Florida

In this election season, Florida politicians are making an unusually strong effort to bond with Latino voters. But those good intentions led one prominent Florida politico to do something he’d now like to take back.

President Trump astonished people across the country last week when he denied 3,000 Puerto Ricans died as a result of Hurricane Maria. He insisted (falsely) that Democrats inflated the death toll to make him “look bad.”

For Ernesto Morales, Trump’s tweets exacerbated his awful memories of the storm, which demolished Puerto Rico a year ago this Thursday.

Florida governor Rick Scott, who is running for U.S. Senate, said during a campaign rally Friday that the country should be firmer in its relations with Cuba, before acknowledging the existence of climate change. 

In a new study from the University of Florida, Florida Hospital and the Obesity Action Coalition, researchers looked at the health data of 9 million Floridians and found that 37 percent of Floridians are considered obese. That is 10 percent higher than the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Ariana Colón’s 1-year-old son Sebastian shows off his first word – “Mamá” – as she speaks with me over the phone from the hotel room in Kissimmee, Florida, where they’ve been living this year.

Along with Sebastian’s father, they arrived there shortly after Hurricane Maria devastated their home island, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, last September.

The family has benefited from a federal program for disaster victims called Transitional Sheltering Assistance. It pays their hotel tab while they find gainful employment and permanent housing.

But meeting landlord conditions for that housing has proven as difficult for Puerto Ricans like Colón as it so often does for longtime Florida residents.

In the next 30 years — about the length of a mortgage cycle — more than 300,000 U.S. homes could experience chronic flooding due to rising seas, according to a report released this week by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Florida voters have a chance to evaluate the Democratic candidates for governor tonight during a debate in Miramar.

All but one, that is.

Billionaire real estate investor and candidate Jeff Greene said there's a reason he won't be there.

"I wasn't invited," Greene said, laughing.

Greene entered the race for governor on June 4, too late to be included in tonight's debate. So, he'll watch this one from his home in Palm Beach with his wife and three sons.

Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent of the PBS Newshour, grew up in South Florida. She remembers living through hurricane Andrew and debating at Fort Lauderdale and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Andrew Pollack is a school safety activist, a founder of Americans for Children’s Lives and School Safety and father of Meadow Pollack, one of the 17 victims from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Dr. Sandra Calvert is the Director of the Children’s Digital Media Center and a child psychologist at Georgetown University. She was part of the American Psychological Association in 2015 where she explored the impact of violent video games on children’s brains.

Jaye Abbate is the CEO of ArtServe, a non-profit arts incubator that supports artists and cultural organizations in Broward County. Beth Clark is the CEO of Young Singers of the Palm Beaches.