News Service of Florida

Disability-rights advocates are challenging a new state law allowing pregnant women to use parking spaces reserved for people with disabilities, alleging the measure violates federal protections. The “expectant mother parking permit” allows pregnant women to obtain disabled parking placards at any point in their pregnancies. The permit, which women can get with notes from their doctors confirming they are pregnant, costs $15 and lasts for a year.

A House Republican on Tuesday filed a proposal that would re-designate a road at each Florida state university and college to honor conservative leader Charlie Kirk, who was murdered last month in Utah. The main and circular FGCU Boulevard at Florida Gulf Coast University would be re-designated as Charlie James Kirk Boulevard.

Local-government officials Tuesday offered some pushback against state efforts to cut property taxes and question city and county spending.With a Florida House panel finishing a two-day review of property-tax issues, city and county officials defended their financial management amid Gov. Ron DeSantis’ push to ask voters next year to slash taxes on homesteaded properties.

Siding with publishers and authors, a federal judge Wednesday ruled that a key part of a 2023 Florida law that has led to books being removed from school library shelves is “overbroad and unconstitutional.”U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza issued a 50-page decision in a First Amendment lawsuit filed last year against members of the State Board of Education and the school boards in Orange and Volusia counties. He focused primarily on part of the law that seeks to prevent the availability of reading material that “describes sexual conduct.”

A federal judge last week approved ending a Hendry County school-desegregation lawsuit that started in 1970, after the U.S. Department of Justice and the district agreed that “vestiges of the prior de jure segregation” had been eliminated.

Citing “significant concerns about environmental degradation” and threats to “traditional and religious ceremonies,” members of the Miccosukee Tribe are trying to join a lawsuit challenging the immigrant-detention center in the Everglades.The facility, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican leaders, neighbors 10 villages that are home to the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida in the Big Cypress National Preserve — including a village 1,000 feet away from one of the detention center’s boundaries — as well as areas where tribal members work and attend school.

A federal judge Tuesday stood behind a ruling that blocked restrictions the city of Naples tried to place on a drag show as part of an upcoming LGBTQ “Pridefest.”

With another potentially active Atlantic hurricane season on the horizon, Florida is preparing for the possibility the federal government won’t respond like it has in the past.After the state was hit by three hurricanes in 2024, Gov. Ron DeSantis jokes that Florida is due for a “break.” But he also said the state has the emergency-response infrastructure and financial reserves available in case Florida doesn’t catch a break and the Federal Emergency Management Agency scales back.

State budget talks won’t resume until after the Memorial Day holiday weekend, legislative leaders announced Thursday.In a memo to senators, Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, said that he and Senate Appropriations Chairman Ed Hooper, R-Trinity, “have continued to have productive discussions with our partners in the House on joint budget allocations.”Allocations are overall amounts of money that would be divided in different areas of the budget, such as education, health and transportation, and need to be set before conference committees can begin formally negotiating details of the state spending plan.

After asserting the Democratic Party in Florida is “dead,” Sen. Jason Pizzo says he’s running for governor as an independent and will make that official in a couple of months.Orlando attorney John Morgan, describing the Democratic Party as “broken,” believes Pizzo is making a mistake if he runs without party affiliation.