News Service of Florida

Siding with Florida and three other states, a federal appeals court Wednesday temporarily halted a new federal rule about sex-based discrimination in education programs.The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved a motion by Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina and four other plaintiffs for an “administrative injunction” against the rule, which deals with Title IX, a landmark 1972 law that bars discrimination in education programs based on sex.

As the Atlantic Ocean shows signs of heating up, potentially fueling damaging hurricanes, a former state and national disaster chief warned Tuesday of working-class Floridians being priced out of communities in post-storm rebuilding.Craig Fugate, a disaster-planning consultant who previously served as director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management and administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said financing and the availability of insurance will continue to be issues for some people trying to rebuild.

Near the Lesser and Greater Antilles there is an area of disturbed weather moving over the central tropical Atlantic Ocean that is expected to interact with an approaching tropical wave during the next several days.

A federal judge Friday permanently blocked restrictions that Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers placed on addressing race-related issues in workplace training — part of a controversial 2022 law that DeSantis dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act.” Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a two-page order granting a permanent injunction against the workplace-training part of the law.

An appeals court Wednesday rejected a request by abortion-rights supporters to allow a circuit judge to rule on the legality of a revised “financial impact statement” that would appear on the November ballot with a proposed constitutional amendment on abortion.The 1st District Court of Appeal quickly denied a request filed Wednesday by Floridians Protecting Freedom, a political committee sponsoring the proposed constitutional amendment. The request came two days after a state panel issued a revised financial impact statement that Floridians Protecting Freedom contended was “highly politicized and unlawfully inaccurate.”

More than three months after a computer system serving as a backbone of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice was hacked, many contractors providing services to at-risk and troubled youths remain unable to access the network.Efforts to bring the network back online were still ongoing as the state was hit with a second cyberattack that resulted in outages of the Florida Department of Health’s Vital Statistics System. The statewide system is used to process birth and death certificates, among other records.

A day after deadly Hurricane Beryl pounded Texas, experts at Colorado State University on Tuesday increased their storm forecast for what was already expected to be an above-average hurricane season.The university’s Department of Atmospheric Science added two named storms and a major hurricane to its outlook for the 2024 season, which started June 1 and will run through November.

With a law taking effect May 1 that prevents abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, a new report gives an initial picture of the reduced number of abortions being performed in Florida.The report, posted online by the state Agency for Health Care Administration, is dated July 1 and said 36,221 abortions had been performed in Florida in 2024. That was up from a total of 32,081 abortions included in a monthly report dated June 3.

The number of Florida resident deaths this year linked to COVID-19 is nearing 3,000, according to data posted on the state Department of Health website. The data Monday showed 2,972 reported deaths related to COVID-19, up from 2,740 in early June.

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday signed bills that will honor the late singer Jimmy Buffett, designating Florida A1A as “Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway” and creating a “Margaritaville” specialty license plate.The highway bill (HB 91), which lawmakers passed unanimously during the legislative session that ended in March, will attach Buffett’s name to A1A from Key West to the Georgia border.