Florida

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The oldest historically Black collegiate fraternity in the U.S. says it is relocating a planned convention in two years from Florida because of what it described as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration’s “harmful, racist and insensitive” policies towards African Americans.

Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity said this week that it would move its 2025 convention from Orlando to another location that is yet undecided. The convention draws between 4,000 and 6,000 people and has an economic impact of $4.6 million, the fraternity said.

Florida  (AP) — New charges — and a new defendant — added to the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump underscore how the Mar-a-Lago investigation is still very much ongoing, even as the focus has been on an expected indictment in a separate case related to the 2020 election.

In an updated indictment handed down Thursday, prosecutors allege that Trump asked a staffer to delete camera footage at his Florida estate in an effort to obstruct the federal investigation into his possession of classified documents.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA power outage disrupted communication between Mission Control and the International Space Station on Tuesday.

Mission Control couldn’t send commands to the station and talk with the seven astronauts in orbit. The power outage hit as upgrade work was underway in the building at Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

July 25 (Reuters) - Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, was involved in a car accident in Tennessee on Tuesday but is uninjured, his spokesperson said.

"This morning, the governor was in a car accident while traveling to an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee," the spokesperson, Bryan Griffin, said in a statement. "He and his team are uninjured."

The campaign did not release additional information.

DeSantis, 44, is considered former President Donald Trump's main challenger in the 2024 Republican contest.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Some Florida Keys coral reefs are losing their color weeks earlier than normal this summer because of record-high water temperatures, meaning they are under stress and their health is potentially endangered, federal scientists said.

The corals should be vibrant and colorful this time of year, but are swiftly going white, said Katey Lesneski, research and monitoring coordinator for Mission: Iconic Reefs, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched to protect Florida coral reefs.

MIAMI (AP) — Several civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit on Monday challenging Florida’s new immigration law.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, Americans for Immigrant Justice and the American Immigration Council filed the lawsuit in Miami federal court against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody and Statewide Prosecutor Nicholas B. Cox on behalf of the Farmworker Association of Florida and others, according to court records.

FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida judge who issued a court ruling last year that critics said was unduly favorable to Donald Trump is set to preside Tuesday over the first pretrial conference in his landmark criminal case concerning the mishandling of classified documents.

MIAMI (AP) — A month after former President Donald Trump was charged with mishandling classified documents, the judge presiding over the case is set to take on a more visible role as she weighs competing requests on a trial date and hears arguments this week on a procedural, but potentially crucial, area of the law.

MIAMI (AP) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump are asking a judge to postpone his criminal trial without setting a new date as he stands accused of illegally hoarding classifed documents at his Florida estate.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronomers have discovered the most distant black hole yet using the Webb Space Telescope, but that record isn’t expected to last.

The black hole is at the center of a galaxy dating to within a mere 570 million years of the Big Bang. That’s 100 million years closer to the beginning of the cosmos than a black hole observed in 2021 with a telescope in Chile led by a Chinese team.