Dara Kam/News Service of Florida

Bill Cotterell, a reporter and columnist who covered Florida government and politics for more than four decades with a blend of doggedness and humor, died Monday as he tried to recover at a rehabilitation center from norovirus and a bleeding ulcer.

Saying “the First Amendment is not absolute,” a federal judge rejected an initial attempt to require state officials to reinstate a biologist who was fired because of a social media post after the murder of conservative leader Charlie Kirk. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker’s ruling Thursday came in a lawsuit filed by biologist Brittney Brown, who worked for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, alleging that her Sept. 15 firing — five days after Kirk was shot during an appearance at a Utah university — violated her First Amendment rights. Brown sought a preliminary injunction to require the commission to reinstate her.

In a closely watched dispute about First Amendment rights, attorneys for a biologist who was fired because of a social media post after the murder of conservative leader Charlie Kirk squared off against lawyers for the state on Monday. Biologist Brittney Brown, who worked for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission studying shorebirds and seabirds in the area of Tyndall Air Force Base in the Panhandle, alleges in the lawsuit that her firing on Sept. 15 — five days after Kirk was shot during an appearance at a Utah university — violated her First Amendment rights.

An appeals-court decision this month striking down the state’s ban on openly carrying firearms has affected another law establishing places where guns are off-limits, according to law-enforcement officials and some gun-rights proponents.Attorney General James Uthmeier quickly embraced the Sept. 10 open-carry decision by a panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal as “the law of the state” and issued guidance for prosecutors, police and sheriffs warning them not to arrest or put on trial “law-abiding citizens carrying a firearm in a manner that is visible to others.”The decision overturned a 1987 law that made it a misdemeanor to visibly display guns. While people were barred for decades from openly carrying guns, they could get concealed-weapons licenses.

Federal officials are complying with a judge’s order and have stopped sending immigrants to a detention center in the Everglades, less than two months after Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration launched the facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” in support of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

Calling it "exactly the kind of disaster that Congress took pains to avoid," attorneys for immigrants held at a detention center in the Everglades filed a lawsuit alleging Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration lacks the authority to run the facility.The lawsuit, filed Friday in the federal court’s Middle District of Florida, is the third major legal challenge to the detention center, erected by the DeSantis’ administration as part of the state’s support of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

Federal officials are “overwhelmed” by the number of undocumented immigrants being locked up as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan because of a detention-bed shortage, according to a key player in Florida’s efforts to assist the White House.The capacity issue is expected to escalate in Florida in the coming weeks as sheriffs and police chiefs ramp up arrests and detention of undocumented immigrants, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Cabinet members, who met Tuesday as the State Board of Immigration Enforcement.

As they continue to fight a legal effort by environmental groups to block an immigrant-detention center in the Everglades, lawyers for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration argued Monday that the lawsuit was filed in the wrong federal-court district.Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity are seeking a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction to stop state and federal officials from adding more detainees and additional construction at the remote facility, which the state built adjacent to an airstrip known as the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.